Prophets

volume just for life support. The alien design, without markings, almost looked like an unmanned torpedo.

When Mosasa cleared the top of the wreckage, where the bridge should have been, he floated in open space. Stunned as he was, survival training took over; he connected one of his suit’s tethers to a firmly wedged girder. Even a few cm/s velocity in the wrong direction could doom someone in open space without them even being aware of it until it was too late and they had drifted beyond reach of the ship. His suit had small vector jets, but those took power, and he knew, as soon as the unobscured stars revealed themselves above him and the Nomad, he was going to need every joule.

The space that had been the Nomad’s bridge was now dominated by the drive section of the mirrored ship. Its engines had slagged, and the metal/ceramic rear thrusters glowed in the darkness like a dying star.

Around Mosasa, shadows drifted in the blackness, eclipsing the stars. His light picked out fragments of the Nomad floating out into space; a computer console; a chair; a twisted nest of wires . . .

And bodies. He saw bodies tumbling into the void. His family. Most were already too far away for him to make out features, but his younger sister Naja was only fifteen meters away, facing him as she drifted away from the Nomad, the only home she had ever known.

She was close enough for him to see blood frozen, crusted on the gold rings in her lips, nose, and ears. Close enough that his work light reflected dully in her eyes. Her expression wasn’t of shock, or horror, but of somewhat muted surprise. Mosasa lowered his head so that the light left her face.

He thought briefly of trying to retrieve the bodies. But there was no point. The Mosasa clan buried their dead in space anyway. At least his family had a living relative to speak for their souls as they returned to the dark.

He spent a long time floating by the cooling drive section of the assassin spacecraft, and said prayers for twenty-four men, women, and children. When he finished, he looked up and noticed something else in the darkness beyond the Nomad. It eclipsed stars but was far enough away that his helmet light didn’t illuminate it.

He had a stronger lamp on his belt, and he had passed beyond caring about power conservation. He was dead, and had been for an hour. Everything else was delaying the inevitable.

He pulled the lamp from his belt; it had a beam as wide as his fully spread hand, and could pump out lumens an order of magnitude beyond his helmet work lights. He shone it out in the direction of the shadow, and it seemed a universe of floating debris flicked into existence. A spreading galaxy of wreckage of objects ranging in size from tiny bolts and metal shavings to a sphere encased in torn tubing about twenty meters across that must have been wrenched from the drive section.

The distant shadow was much bigger. He was able to pick it out with the lamp. Light splashed its side, dappled with shadows from the Nomad’s wreckage. Distance was hard to judge, but it seemed it could be as far as a klick away. And if that was the case, it was twice the size of the Nomad.

To Mosasa’s eye, the derelict craft was untouched.

The side was painted and Mosasa could see the blue and white of the old United Nations flag on the side. Beyond that, in three-meter-tall letters in a half dozen languages, Mosasa saw the name of the ship.

Luxembourg.

And, after staring a long time, Mosasa realized that the Nomad was still drifting toward it.

The Luxembourg had been a ghost ship from the Genocide War. When the Nomad drifted close enough, Mosasa jumped the gap with an umbilical to anchor the two wrecks together. Even before he attached the cables, he could see that the Luxembourg was largely intact. The mirrored arrowhead that had buried itself into the Nomad and had killed his family had been an old Race-built weapon, AI driven, autonomous so none of the Race would actually be involved in a direct confrontation.

For some reason, it had been guarding the derelict.

When he entered the Luxembourg, he discovered that the attack that had killed the old United Nations ship had been very careful to do very little damage to the machine itself. Each hole in the skin managed to avoid holing vital equipment and ended in a vacuum-desiccated crew member. The Luxembourg had been neutralized in a matter of moments. He even found one corpse strapped to the ship’s toilet.

The backup battery systems still had a charge, and the secondary life support still had an oxy reserve in the tanks. None of the emergency systems had come on-line. About all that was missing was a decent ship’s computer.

It took weeks, but Mosasa revived the late twenty-first-century ship. In that time he discovered two things. The first was that the Luxembourg wasn’t strictly military. It had been run by the United Nations Intelligence Service. The second thing he discovered was deep in the belly of the ship, in the only armored compartment, flanked by incendiary devices that the crew never got the chance to fire.