Apocrypha
When you ask if you want to know, you don’t.
The trick to leadership is keep moving forward, even if you’re wrong.
For the first time in a century, Mosasa felt as if he was floundering. The holes in the fabric of his world were growing with each passing moment, opening into unknowns vast, deep, and larger than the sparse data that surrounded them. For the first time in 175 years, he moved without any idea of what the consequences of his actions might be. The data flowing to him now was practically nonexistent, and he was fumbling blindly.
Worse than the missing star, which was completely unexpected, was the sabotage. There was no way he had to make the act comprehensible. He had imprisoned the Vatican agent, Father Mallory, because he couldn’t propose any other logical alternative.
But Mallory hadn’t destroyed the tach-comm. He couldn’t have. The purpose of having him here was as a data conduit back to the Vatican, and through them, to the non-Caliphate powers. Having a communication channel was primary to Mallory’s mission, and their situation now, with the loss of the comm and the power drain, was as dire for him as it was for Mosasa.
But once the crew had discovered Fitzpatrick’s was an alias, Mosasa had to confine him. The dynamics of the crew allowed no other action if he desired to keep a stable equilibrium.
But the very fact that the comm had been sabotaged meant that the equilibrium Mosasa perceived was illusory. And if he couldn’t truly understand the dynamics within the confines of the microscopic universe of the
Even if Kugara and Tsoravitch found EM signals leaking from the colony at HD 101534, those were eight years old. How could he be certain that, when they tached into the system, the world, the star, would still be there?
His isolation from the data streams that fueled the awareness of his machine half allowed uncertainty to grow within him like a cancer. Before leaving Bakunin, he could see the turbulent flow of society, economics, politics as easily as ripples in a pond. . . .
Now he was so blind that it was becoming hard to credit that he had ever seen at all. The longer he was isolated from the flow of information, the larger his blind spots became—infecting scenarios he had already plotted. He could no longer even be sure of decisions he had made before this point.
Mosasa stood, locked inside his own cabin, funneling every data channel on the ship through his internal sensors. He obsessively watched every millimeter of the
Included with the pathetic trickle of data were feeds from every security camera and microphone on the ship. A universe of information so small that even the shell of his human consciousness was aware of the content. He saw the crew working on making the
At first Mosasa was confused at the interaction. The nonhuman now formed the security detail with Kugara, so he was one of four people who could open the seal on Mallory’s cabin. But he didn’t have any reason to interact with the traitor priest. . . .
Then he heard the talk and realized the ritual nature of the discussion. Nickolai had a legitimate fear that they wouldn’t survive the journey and had sought Mallory out because of his status as a priest. It all made sense.
Except, in Mosasa’s analysis, Nickolai wouldn’t be driven toward such a ritual exercise unless he believed he carried some weight of guilt. Guilt beyond the circumstances of his exile, which was largely neutralized by a sense of pride and determination.
Mosasa realized what that guilt had to be before Nickolai actually confirmed it.
Mosasa realized why. Trying to see the tiger’s own personality next to the overwhelming force of belief, tradition, and ritual was like trying to see an asteroid whipping across the surface of a star. His own motives were practically invisible, and if Nickolai’s employer had the sense to use the forms of his culture to direct his action, manipulate him . . .
