Prophets

The background showed that they couldn’t be more than a third of a light-year off in any direction; right on top of Xi Virginis in interstellar terms.

“What the hell happened?” Wahid muttered. “Did it blow up? Did it fall into a black hole?”

“No remnants of any such event are observable,” Bill’s synthetic voice answered Wahid.

“There was a colony here?” Dr. Dorner had joined the bridge crew around the holo, where data now scrolled by the star field.

Mosasa ignored her and kept shaking his head. “This can’t—”

Dorner grabbed Mosasa’s shoulder and pulled him around to face her. “You said there was a colony here?”

The emotion drained from Mosasa’s face, and he suddenly looked as flat as Bill’s voice. He reached up and removed Dorner’s hand from his shoulder. The dragon tattoo glinted in reflected light from the holo next to them. “Yes,” Mosasa said, “there was a colony here. Kugara and Tsoravitch isolated one hundred forty-seven distinct EM signals from it during our approach. The colony, or its capital city, was named Xanadu.”

Dorner stepped back, as if the enormity of the situation was just beginning to sink in. “How many people—”

“My population estimate was five hundred thousand to one point five million.”

Dorner blinked, staring at Mosasa.

Wahid and Bill were still carrying on a conversation. “We had a damn star here twenty years ago, right?”

“The light sphere from the unknown event had not reached our last position when our course was laid in. That places the unknown event no more than 19.875 standard years ago.”

Mosasa stepped back. “This is completely outside every scenario—”

“One and a half million people?” Dorner shook her head. “One and a half million people?”

Mallory stepped forward; and slowed as he realized that Fitzpatrick, his alter ego, would not have the immediate impulse to comfort someone. When Dorner turned toward him, he had an uneasy feeling reminding him that she was a potential disaster for his cover story if she remembered seeing him before as Father Mallory.

His hesitation allowed Brody to be the one to step forward. The anthropologist took Dorner away from the bridge crew, quietly talking. “We don’t know what happened, Sharon. We don’t know there was anyone here when whatever happened, happened.”

He walked her back to the other two members of the scientific team, who were watching everything in stunned fascination. Mallory looked over at Nickolai to see how the tiger was reacting. He couldn’t tell from the feline expression if Nickolai was frightened, amused, or smelled something odd.

“Kugara,” Mosasa said, his voice still oddly flat. “Power up the tach-comm unit.”

Did Nickolai’s eyes just widen? Mallory could swear something just changed.

“Yes? Transmit where?”

“Earth. We’re going to hit every diplomatic consulate in turn, broad, unencrypted.”

Kugara hesitated, “Okay? Even the Caliph—”

Mosasa turned around and snapped, “Yes! Everyone! If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it’s this. This changes everything. I can’t account for this kind—” He abruptly stopped and stood up straighter. He allowed the emotion to leak out of his voice again. “You need to burst transmit all our telemetry and recon data. Now.”

“I’m packaging the data now.”

Nickolai closed his eyes and looked almost as if he was bracing for something.

“Transmitting,” Kugara said.

Something like a large rifle shot shook the bridge.

“What was that?” Dr. Dorner asked.