Prophets

That left Mallory alone in the common room, wondering exactly what the meaning of all of this was. Even if the tach-drives themselves were undamaged, they were effectively stranded, as isolated from the rest of humanity as these far-flung colonies themselves.

And, deep in his soul, he felt an approaching doom. It wasn’t a fear of death. The doom he felt coming was far from that personal.

Xi Virginis is missing . . .

And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth . . .

He was Catholic, and a Jesuit, so he had always had a pragmatic view of his own faith in the face of the observable universe. He was comfortable with a God that spoke to him in allegory and metaphor, the beauty of the natural world was enough to shore his faith in God, and the wickedness of his fellow man was enough for him to believe in Satan. He believed in the spiritual world, the presence of Christ at the Mass, and in the holiness of the saints. He believed in good and evil.

And, deep in his soul, he felt that the Eclipse had crossed into something whose evil was nearly beyond human comprehension. He could not objectify the feeling, give himself a rational basis for it. A missing star was strange, but across creation there were certainly things stranger. It would be the height of arrogance to presume that man had plumbed the depths of what was possible.

But, to Mallory, the absence of Xi Virginis was worse than unexplained, it was malignant. It represented something abhorrent in the universe: the snake in Eden, Satan tempting Christ in the desert, the Dragon from Revelation.

The more he thought of the magnitude of evil, the more he thought he was a poor instrument to face it. He could draw on his military experience to face the worldly issues posed by the Caliphate. But this? He was a professor. He didn’t even have a parish. When it came to spiritual matters, he was as weak and insignificant a priest as anyone could hope to find.

“God give me the strength to do your will,” he prayed. “And grant me the wisdom to know what that is . . .”

“Amen, brother,” came Wahid’s voice from the doorway.

Mallory turned, startled, to look at his fellow mercenary. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Wahid shrugged. “Who’s expecting an enemy to jump them on their own ship?” He walked over and sat down on the couch across from Mallory. “Professional paranoia or not, it’s natural to let your guard down when you’re on your own ship.”

Mallory didn’t like where this was going, so he changed the subject. “So, you have the course to the next colony plotted in?”

“Yes, if the bastard’s still there.”

“Yeah . . .”

Wahid leaned forward. “You ever hear of a tach-comm failing like that?”

“No.”

“Neither has anyone else, you know. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t happen. Hell, it took Bill to come up with a model of exactly what happened.”

“What happened?”

“You want to take a guess?”

“Huh?”

“Go on Fitz, take a guess.”

“I have no idea what—”

“An Emerson field.”

“What?”

“Apparently, if you do the right math, you can tune an Emerson field to imaginary wavelengths that interact rather interestingly with a coherent beam of tachyons. According to Bill, exactly the massive power sink and