Prophets

“Bullshit!”

“Pardon me?”

“You’re grabbing data from me with only a cursory filtering. I’m barely looking at the data, much less processing it into anything useful. My expertise here seems more than a little redundant.”

“I find you useful.”

“Why? Why did you ask me on this expedition?”

“Why did you accept?”

She stood in the doorway staring at him. Mosasa watched expressions play across her face, allowing the flood of data about her internal state to wash over him. He could extrapolate her inner thoughts as she asked herself the same question. In some sense he knew her better than she knew herself, even though his observations of her had been remote until this expedition began.

Like all the science team, she was a personality drawn by the exotic but had been forced by circumstances into using her talents for things prosaic and mundane. In Tsoravitch’s case, she had a job in the Jokul government managing the software monitors that scrubbed the planetwide data network searching for subversive transmissions. Like many stable authoritarian regimes that managed to keep the populace fed and clothed, the vast majority of their subversives weren’t particularly interesting. Not to someone like Tsoravitch.

“I thought I would be working with you.”

“Even though you know what I am?”

“Because I know what you are.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you know what I am?”

She looked him up and down. “You’re a robotic construct camouflaging an AI device, one that was designed by the Race during the Genocide War.”

Very deliberately, Mosasa said, “That is, of course, only part of the answer.”

Of course, Tsoravitch responded by asking, “Then what’s the rest of the answer?”

He explained to Tsoravitch that, three hundred years ago, Tjaele Mosasa had been a human being.

He had lived during the waning years of the Terran Council, before the Centauri Trading Company discovered Bill’s homeworld of Paralia, developed the first tach-drive, and upset the already crumbling balance of the human universe.

At that time, before there was such a thing as faster-than-light travel, the use of static wormholes meant there existed a traffic bottleneck, highways between the heavily guarded wormholes defined by gravity and orbital mechanics.

The Mosasa clan had been a large extended family that lived off the traffic moving on those highways in the Sirius system. It was a rich place for pirates, supporting a hundred clans like the Mosasas. Sirius sat in the heart of human space and was a major transit point in humanity’s wormhole network, having six outgoing wormholes and eight incoming. Even though the dull rocks orbiting the Sirius system were never meant to support life, the colony world Cynos was one of the richest planets aside from Earth itself.

Tjaele Mosasa was the youngest unmarried adult of the pirate clan, a third-generation inhabitant of the lawless void between the wormhole and Cynos. While his brothers and sisters would attack and board a prize, he made sure their patchwork vessel the Nomad didn’t fall apart. He spent the first six years of his adult life in a vacsuit patching holes, rerouting power around fried connections, and repairing the Frankenstein’s monster of a ship’s computer.

When the Nomad found a pair of derelicts off the main route to Cynos, that was where he was, in a narrow unpressurized maintenance tunnel, in a vacsuit making sure that the power system didn’t overheat. He was annoyed that he wasn’t able to watch the approach with the rest of his crew, his family. However, the Nomad was a cranky old ship, older than Cynos itself, and someone had to make sure they didn’t blow the thing up.

He was looking forward to the prize, though. Most of their livelihood came from raiding cargo tugs that rarely gave them anything with which to upgrade the Nomad. Food, fuel, and trade goods were well and good, but a new ship’s computer was high on his own priority list.