But this was Mosasa they were talking about. It’s quite possible that she was trapped, again, in some long-term plot created by the AI to manipulate the universe into some form that was more to its liking. The pair here might be just as trapped in the AI’s web.
“Anomalies around Xi Virginis?” Tetsami whispered. “But damn vague about them, I bet.”
“You know Mosasa?” Kugara asked her. “Good lord, how?”
Tetsami laughed. “Mosasa’s why I’m here, why this colony’s here. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was why Xi Virginis disappeared.”
“What?” both said in unison.
“Short version,” Tetsami told them. “I came from that pit Bakunin. I escaped the shitstorm that pretty much collapsed the Terran Confederacy. A shitstorm your friend Mosasa largely took credit for.”
“He’s not our friend,” the tiger said. “He was our employer.”
“Mosasa took credit for the collapse of the Confederacy?” Kugara asked.
“Oh, come on,” Tetsami said. “You just said you knew what he was. Don’t you know what those Race AIs were designed for? The kind of social engineering they’re responsible for? It’s how the Race waged war.” She lowered the shotgun and gestured with her free hand, taking in the whole horizon. “This planet was on a Dolbrian star map buried under the Diderot Mountains on Bakunin. A star map that one of Mosasa’s AIs just happened to find while the old Confederacy was trying a military takeover of the planet. A star map that got handed over to the Seven Worlds and caused enough chaos in the Confederacy’s congress that the whole shebang started collapsing under its own weight.”
The two of them stared at her as if she wasn’t speaking the same language.
“It’s the Fifteen Worlds now,” Tetsami said. “Go thank Mosasa for that. And the Dolbrians.”
“How do you know all this,” Kugara asked. “This planet’s been out of contact since it was founded—”
“I’m older than I look,” Tetsami said. “About a hundred and seventy-five years older.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Destiny
Nothing is so destructive as what we believe to be true.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Nickolai stared at the man with the shotgun and tried to understand what was happening. Something—Mosasa, fate, or divine will—was conspiring to draw these threads around them. If what this man said was true, Mosasa knew of these colonies long ago. He would have known when they had been founded.
All of this, everything that was happening, could be the result of a centuries-old AI attempting to manipulate events.
