“Hello?”
“Father Mallory,” came an unfamiliar voice, “please come in.”
Mallory squinted as he walked into the dark storeroom. He tensed when the door hissed shut behind him. It brought an ugly memory; the smell of burned flesh.
Mallory walked slowly down the aisle between the shelves, toward an open space at one end of the storeroom. He reached the end of the aisle and turned to face the pair of men waiting for him. He said, “So what is this . . . ?”
His voice trailed off as he realized whom he was addressing. Each of the two men wore the black-and-red cassock of a cardinal. The cardinal to the right was very familiar to Mallory; Cardinal Harris, who was normally the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church on Occisis.
At the moment, though, he wasn’t.
To his right was Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Secretary of State of His Holiness the Pope, arguably the highest ranking and most powerful member of the Roman Catholic Church outside of His Holiness Pope Stephen XII himself.
Father Mallory crossed himself and genuflected. “Forgive my outburst, Your Eminence.”
Cardinal Anderson shook his head and gestured for Father Mallory to stand.
“You want to know why you are here. And why I am here.”
Mallory nodded. “I didn’t know you were on this planet.”
“My son, that is because I am not officially here. His Holiness has a favor to ask of you, Father Mallory.”
Cardinal Jacob Anderson explained their purpose here, all the time watching Father Mallory’s reactions.
From the man’s file, he was a perfect recruit for clandestine activity. Despite his age, he had the most sophisticated military training of all the recruits he had seen lately. And, as someone who fought against the Occisian Junta at a time when most of the Occisis Marines had backed the secularist revolutionary movement, Mallory was someone whose loyalty to Mother Church was unquestionable.
That would be important, because what the Church would ask of him would place him on his own, out of contact, for an extended period. There were also indications that what he would face would be spiritually threatening. Cardinal Anderson hoped that the man’s grounding as a Jesuit academic, as well at the practical training of an Occisis Marine, would help him face what might be happening by Xi Virginis, seventy-five light-years past the edge of human space.
He looked at Mallory, who patiently waited for him to continue. He could tell the import of a direct papal request was sinking in. Physics rendered simultaneity meaningless for reference frames separated by light-years, making it impossible to interact with people across such distances. A personal envoy was required for any sort of dialogue, but that envoy didn’t have to be Cardinal Anderson.
The fact that he had come here to personally talk to Father Mallory had made as much of an impression as if the pope himself had come here. Which was the point, as Cardinal Anderson believed that the Church sat at the cusp of a historical change that could shift the balance of power in the human universe over the course of centuries.
“The Church has received disturbing transmissions,” he told Mallory, “originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis.”
Cardinal Anderson saw puzzlement cross Mallory’s face. “But, there’s nothing out toward Virgo,” he said. “There hasn’t been any human expansion past Helminth. Has there?”
“None that has made the official histories.” Cardinal Anderson took a small handheld holo unit out of his robes. He aimed the device at Mallory and a star map about two meters in diameter unfolded between them. Centered in the display, a large and lumpy dumbbell-shaped cluster of stars was outlined in bright yellow, marking the confines of human space.
Yellow marked the systems that humanity colonized, while red marked the systems that were home to alien species. The greatest concentration of those were clustered on the other side of human space from Beta Pictoris and the tiny airless rock named Kathiwar that orbited it.
Kathiwar had been founded at a time when power between the political arms of the Confederacy was measured, at its base, in the number of planets controlled, giving a strong political impetus to colonize new worlds, even when the economics didn’t make sense. One of the arms of the Confederacy, the People’s Protectorate of Epsilon Indi, had been the most aggressive in spreading outward, placing colonies on planets solely as launchpads to reach farther out. Kathiwar was built to serve as one of those way stations, scanning the stars around and sending probes, and eventually, colony ships.
Shortly after Kathiwar was established, its observation platforms found a planet orbiting Tau Puppis. The discovery, Tau Puppis IV, seemed an obvious Dolbrian remnant, as no reasonably habitable planet should have
