the Caliphate’s somewhat limited resources on Bakunin. By doing so, we’ve ensured the safety of the expedition.”
“I don’t follow,” Wahid said. “What’s to stop the Caliphate from just pouncing on us now?”
“We’re no longer their problem. Their public attacks, combined with my public advertisements for mercenaries to travel toward Xi Virginis, has alerted every intelligence agency with an asset on Bakunin that the Caliphate is hiding something in that region of space. There’s no secret for them to protect anymore. My small expedition means nothing when they need to rally whole fleets to lay claim to this sector of space before a rival does.”
A sick dread slithered into Mallory’s belly. Mosasa had just admitted to engineering the conflagration that the Church had been trying to prevent. Samhain was nothing. Mosasa was engineering an interstellar war to provide cover for his expedition.
“Damn it,” Wahid snapped. “If everyone already knew there were colonies out there, what the fuck is the anomaly you’re talking about?”
“Out here,” Mosasa gestured to the holo, “there’s also something else. Something alien that defies the Race’s modeling capabilities, that radically alters the equations at every point of contact.” He faced his audience with a grin that would not be out of place on a portrait of the Devil. “Out there is something completely unknown.”
PART TWO
Burnt Offerings
The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not
God.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sectarianism
Your friends gain more from your failures than your enemies.
In every case the guilt of war is confined to a few persons, and the many are friends.
Yousef Al-Hamadi walked slowly as befitted his age. He made his way through the gardens outside the Epsilon Eridani consulate, arms folded behind him. His official title was Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations, which meant he was the nominal head of the Eridani Caliphate’s intelligence operations and in charge of the Caliphate’s covert activity outside its claimed borders.
In large part, it boiled down to cleaning up the messes of other segments of the convoluted rat’s nest of agencies and organizations that made up the Caliphate’s intelligence community.
Following him at a respectful distance was the tall dark woman he knew as Ms. Columbia.
“Did you have a long journey to Earth?” Al-Hamadi asked as he stopped in front of a large fountain spilling cascades of water across a plain of mosaic tile that formed intricate interlocking patterns with a stylized Arabic script that quoted verses from the Qur’an. Six hundred years ago, in the time of the last Caliphate, the fountain would have been an extravagance. However, to a species that had made Mars habitable, the arid waste of the Rub’al Khali was almost an afterthought.
“My travel caused me little concern.”
Al-Hamadi smiled to himself. He couldn’t keep, being in the information trade, from trying over and over to pry some scrap of intelligence from the woman herself. However, Ms. Columbia did not reveal a single fact that she wasn’t ready to part with. Not that he expected much. As carefully and flawlessly crafted as Ms. Columbia’s identity was, the person playing the role would not be prone to sophomoric slips of the tongue.
In the pocket of his jacket, Al-Hamadi had a cyberplas chit with a terabyte or two of detailed information on Ms. Columbia’s persona. Data which, he was sure, would bear scrutiny from whatever assets he cared to assign—
