“Was this kind of violence necessary?” Dr. Dorner addressed Mosasa.
“Pardon me, Doctor?” Wahid said, whipping around to face the blonde xenobiologist. “You might not notice from this angle, but it’s our asses in the sand out there, facing a squad of powered armor.”
She gave Wahid a cold, dismissive look. It was a look Mallory knew well. He had seen it often enough back on Occisis, usually from colleagues in the Church or the university, right after they discovered he had once served in the Occisis Marines. He tried to remember if, in her meetings with Professor Mallory, she had discovered his military background. He suspected that, if it had come out, he would have remembered her reaction.
Her words to Wahid were as icy as Mosasa’s were detached. “I was questioning the fact that staging such a confrontation was necessary. I would think, since it was ‘your asses in the sand out there,’ that you’d wonder that as well.”
Mosasa said, “It was quite necessary.”
“Why?” Dorner asked sharply.
The cargo hold of the
“All of you have your own reasons for joining this expedition. And, up to now I’ve been somewhat reserved about revealing its purpose, though I have told you about ‘anomalies’ originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis. I should explain to you all exactly what these ‘anomalies’ might represent.”
The holo changed again, and Mallory saw a star map of a familiar region of human space. He wasn’t particularly surprised to see stars highlighted much as they had been in the holo that Cardinal Anderson had shown him.
“The Race developed social, economic, and political models that map flows of information, political power, trade, people—all the factors that comprise what we define as a society or a culture. The best analogy for a layman would be to picture modeling a turbulent flow of a fluid in an N-dimensional space.”
Mallory heard Wahid whisper, “That’s a layman’s description?”
“When a system is closed, such as a planet without space travel or interstellar communication, a Race AI was designed to accurately model social movements, political and technological change, migration and demographics. Over time, I have scaled up that model until I have been able to accurately map the progress and development of all of human space within an acceptable margin of error.”
An audible “harrumph” came from the science team.
Mosasa smiled. “Did you have a question, Dr. Brody?”
“No questions,” Brody responded. “No questions at all.”
“But you think the advancement of the Race’s social sciences to have been overstated?”
“I have trouble believing in the miraculous,” Brody said.
Mosasa seemed to smile even wider. Mallory wondered why Dr. Brody had agreed to accompany this mission if he didn’t believe Mosasa’s claims.
“Leaving miracles aside,” Mosasa went on, “these models are very finely tuned. Enough so that I can detect when a system stops being closed. When a new source or sink appears, be it information, people, or trade goods, the drift in actual data versus the model will suggest strongly the nature of the new interaction.”
Unlike Dr. Brody, Tsoravitch the data analyst had leaned forward and was hanging on Mosasa’s every word. She nervously brushed a strand of red hair off her face and asked, “Is that’s what’s happening by Xi Virginis?”
“The data points to Xi Virginis as the source—”
“Are there human colonies out there?” Kugara blurted out the question Mallory didn’t dare voice.
“Yes.” Mosasa said. “Several. All founded during the collapse of the Confederacy. Because of their placement and history, the Caliphate has had an ongoing interest in preventing knowledge of them propagating to the rest of human space.”
“High levels of the Caliphate have known of them for quite some time, thus their interest in stopping this expedition. As to Dr. Dorner’s original question; the necessity of violence was required to draw out and neutralize
