Prophets

“I guess so.”

“I’m sure, if you worked at it, you could find something more important to worry about.”

Flynn looked up at the sky. The sun had set and the stars were just coming out. “I suppose I could,” he whispered.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Service

Freedom is often simple ignorance of whom you serve.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

It is easer to meet expectations than to question them.

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Date: 2526.04.22 (Standard) 19.8 ly from Xi Virginis

Nickolai moved through the corridors of the Eclipse alone. The modified cargo ship was deep into its slog toward Xi Virginis. The star was nearly seventy-five light years past Helminth, whose scientific outpost marked what was supposed to be the fringes of human expansion in this direction.

Despite having the most advanced drives Mosasa could buy, the Eclipse was still limited to making tach-jumps twenty light-years at a time. However, Mosasa had retrofitted the Eclipse so that most of its volume was power plant. It could make the round trip without needing to refuel, with two jumps to spare.

Each jump took close to a month, despite being instantaneous as far as the ship and those aboard were concerned. It was the downtime between jumps that ate up time for the crew. For forty-eight hours the Eclipse drifted between jumps.

The Eclipse’s engines were so large that, even with their massive damping systems, it still took four or five times as long as a normal ship for the drives to cool down from being fully active. While having drives active for four hours after a jump was technically dangerous, in those four hours it was far more likely that they’d be struck by a random asteroid than it would be for a tach-ship to suddenly appear close enough to cause so much as an oscillation in the drives’ power levels.

After the cool-down period, when the drives were no longer active, the rest of the time was spent with maintenance checks. This trip was riding on the very edge of the performance specs for those engines. For the crew, they had been traveling for a little over a week, but the rest of the universe had aged 150 days.

The next jump would take them to Xi Virginis.

Mr. Antonio had explained the necessity of the downtime in the dead space between stars, about the maintenance and the observations Mosasa would wish to make. Mr. Antonio had also told him what he needed to do at this particular down period, once they had tached within twenty light-years of their target.

Nickolai pulled himself down one of the rear corridors of the ship, a maintenance area that didn’t bother with the pseudo-gravity maintained in the crew areas, the bridge, and the one open cargo bay where the Paralian stayed.

Nickolai floated between cargo holds that held extra power plants for the Eclipse’s long journey. He was going aft, toward the tach-drives and, more important to him right now, the tach-transmitter.

The ship was on a nighttime cycle, so most of the others who had no job to do were sleeping. He saw no one else before he slipped into the rearmost chamber of the Eclipse. The access corridor to the tach-drives was short, less than ten meters long, and ended at an observation room, little more than a widening of the corridor in front of a massive port set into the rear bulkhead. The effect made it seem that the corridor abruptly ended in empty space.

Several hatches lined the corridor, walls, floor, and ceiling. Several had active displays showing details of what was happening behind them, almost all the graphs and numbers low into the green.

Few meant anything to Nickolai. He wasn’t an engineer. He glanced from panel to panel, until he found a display that was completely quiescent. Along the top, he saw the words Mr. Antonio had told him to look for: “Coherent Tachyon Emitter.”

On the wall above him was the access panel for the business end of the ship’s tach-comm. Without it, the Eclipse was limited to light speed communications, effectively mute to the rest of the universe.

Before he moved, he checked back toward the door. Above the door was a holo pickup that should be providing a