Nickolai caught his breath. With all the information Mr. Antonio provided about the nature of Mosasa, his business, and the type of people he might hire, never was the possibility broached that someone from Dakota might be present.
Dakota was one of the original Seven Worlds, founded when the men of Earth decided that they would no longer live with their damned creations. Having stolen the mantle of God, the naked devil chose to cast his handiwork into exile. It was an exodus of all the sapient products of their genetic engineers.
But more than the chosen were exiled. The Fallen hadn’t only raised lesser creatures to become their warriors. They had twisted themselves, re-creating their own flesh into something that was not chosen and was not fallen. And those of once-human ancestry had settled on only one of the old Seven Worlds.
Nickolai could now see the subtle differences that marked Kugara as not quite human. Her scent was different— fainter and less offensive. Her motions were more fluid—quicker, stronger.
He had never met one of the Angels of Dakota. Of all those here, Kugara was closest to God, someone whose flesh bore the mark of God’s own creation without being marred by the sin of arrogance that damned the rest of the Fallen.
He might have said something, but someone chose that time to announce, “So has everyone been introduced?”
The new voice came from the shadowed perimeter of the hangar. A male voice, which was disconcerting since he had not smelled the speaker, still couldn’t smell him. Nickolai turned his head, and his eyes shifted spectrum until he saw the newcomer in the darkness. A hairless human form, as tall as Kugara and darker than Wahid. The man wore a gray coverall that covered most of his body. His most distinct feature was a massive tattoo of a fantastic creature drawn with luminescent dye; the neck of the beast emerged from the collar of the coverall, wrapped around the man’s neck, and curled around his left ear, leaving the profile of the beast’s face drawn across the side of his own.
At first the lack of scent made him think he watched a holo projection, but when Mosasa moved, Nickolai heard the scrape of his—
Mosasa walked out into the light.
“So this is your job?” Wahid asked Mosasa.
“I am Tjaele Mosasa,” it responded.
“Yeah,” Wahid said. “Your ad didn’t say anything about hiring his kind.” He didn’t point at Nickolai, but he still felt all the human and near-human attention shift toward him. Nickolai also noticed Kugara fold her arms and take a step toward him while still facing Wahid. She didn’t say anything, and Nickolai didn’t know quite what to make of the movement.
Mosasa chuckled. “Mr. Wahid, if you find yourself queasy about heretical technologies, you’d perhaps best leave us now.”
Wahid started to say something, but Fitzpatrick placed a hand on his shoulder. It was Fitzpatrick who asked, “What do you mean?”
“It means Mosasa is no more human than I am,” Nickolai said quietly. Mr. Antonio had told him what Mosasa was, and also told him that Mosasa did little or nothing to conceal his nature. Mosasa would expect his potential employees to research him. That meant that Nickolai didn’t have to hide the fact he knew that the thing standing before them was as much a machine as the floating sphere that had led him to the hangar.
Nickolai and his kin, extending to those like Kugara, represented the first of the three Great Sins of the Fallen— what Mosasa had called heretical technologies. Mosasa represented the second, the creation of nonliving machine intelligence. To the followers of the true faith, it was even more unforgivable. With genetic engineering, humanity had only twisted life that had existed beforehand. With artificial intelligence, the Fallen had the arrogance to create thought without life.
To serve Mr. Antonio was a disgrace. Mosasa was an abomination.
And yet, Nickolai still stood here. He wondered if it was because he had completely lost the faith of his mothers, or if he had fallen so far from grace that it no longer mattered what he did.
Nickolai didn’t know how the others might feel about Mosasa’s true nature, or if they had done enough research to uncover it. In either case, Nickolai couldn’t read their reactions to his comment, and Mosasa himself didn’t
