elaborate or explain.
Mosasa only glanced at Nickolai, then back at Wahid. “Mr. Rajasthan is here because the BMU has scored him better than any of you on just about every combat skill outside piloting and Information Warfare.”
Fitzpatrick shook his head and asked, “Are you expecting a war?”
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Mosasa said. “If I knew what to expect, this expedition would not be necessary.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Acolyte
Everyone worships the God that promises them what they want.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The man Nickolai Rajasthan knew as Mr. Antonio had left the planet shortly after his last meeting with the tiger. Anyone who monitored his departure from Bakunin would have watched the small short-range craft and noted a trajectory that would take the ship toward Banlieue. Even the energy signature of the departure would have matched a small one-man craft taking the sixteen light-year journey. If the observer did the calculations based on energy expenditure and tach-drive capability, they would expect Mr. Antonio to arrive at the 355-year-old Sirius colony within about three months standard.
All of which was a carefully-engineered falsehood.
The craft Mr. Antonio piloted was a rather pedestrian scout ship, a one-hundred-year-old knockoff of a two- hundred-year-old design from the Centauri Trading Company. It had been built in one of the factories orbiting Angkor back when there was a cohesive Indi Protectorate expanding for the sake of expansion. Its construction was functional and ugly, a metallic sheath wrapping the tach-drive that comprised 80 percent of its mass and 98 percent of its volume. The whole ship formed a blocky truncated cone whose outline was defined by the construction of the scout’s drives.That outline was only broken by two protrusions; the command blister on top and the single parasitic drop ship attached to a docking ring underneath.
Thanks to the Indi Protectorate’s explosive expansion during the years of the Confederacy, and its subsequent decay in the years since, these inexpensive Indi craft were ubiquitous in human space and unlikely to attract any attention even when heavily modified.
And Mr. Antonio’s craft was
The original tach-drives had been bulky and inefficient and had been replaced by military-grade drives roughly the same size. Those drives were an order of magnitude more efficient than the ones they replaced and would complete the journey to Banlieue in less than twenty-four days standard, if that had been where Mr. Antonio had been headed.
If he had tached to Banlieue under full power, the hypothetical observer monitoring his departure would have seen a power spike five times what would have been expected from the cranky old ship. Instead, the smaller power surge to the military tach-drives took the scout a little over a light-year away from Bakunin. From Mr. Antonio’s perspective, the journey was instantaneous. From the perspective of the rest of the universe, the journey had taken a little over thirty-four hours.
Mr. Antonio powered down every system but life support, sat in a dark control cabin, and waited.
There was nothing remarkable about the area where the scout drifted. There was nothing of any substantial mass for light-months in any direction. Even the star Bakunin orbited was little more than a bright reddish star at this distance. The small scout and Mr. Antonio were lost in the big empty, more effectively invisible than if the scout had every ECM and counter-surveillance measure known to man.
He waited, and soon, he was not alone.
About an hour after taching in to this unremarkable volume of space, the reddish dot of Kropotkin, Bakunin’s star, vanished. Stars around the missing red dot began winking out in a growing circle. The circular hole in the star field kept growing as something large approached the scout, eclipsing the universe. In a few moments, all of the visible stars vanished.
The scout shook gently from a soft impact. The blackness withdrew from the viewport as if a cloth had been pulled back over the surface of the scout. When the black curtain withdrew, the scout was no longer floating in the void. Mr. Antonio’s ship drifted into a large, well-lit ovoid space. The walls swirled with tendrils that ranged in color and texture from matte black to chrome. Several of the chrome tendrils reached out and grabbed the scout, stopping its drift.
