The very things that made him a perfect candidate for Mosasa—the nonhuman perspective, the predictability of his indoctrination, his ingrained prejudices—those same things made Nickolai the perfect spy.
When Nickolai told Mallory of Mosasa’s origin, Mosasa began to truly feel fear. He revealed the story he had told Tsoravitch, but he didn’t stop. He told of how the five AIs had helped stabilize Bakunin in the face of the Confederacy, and how they had helped lead to the Confederacy’s downfall, leaving three AIs surviving.
Until then, the data was all what Mosasa would have considered discoverable by some human agency. But the tiger didn’t stop there.
Nickolai’s employer, Mr. Antonio, had revealed things that no human should have known. Mr. Antonio had told Nickolai what had happened at Procyon, when Mosasa had returned to his homeworld.
Long before there had been a Tjaele Mosasa, Race AIs had been used in the covert war the Race waged on Earth. When the intelligence agencies on Earth had discovered the Race’s social manipulation, they had managed to capture the Race’s own devices and had begun understanding how to use them.
By the time the Genocide War with the Race had erupted in full force, the United Nations had intelligence ships like the
The pirate Tjaele Mosasa had revived five of those AI units, including the brain from the drone weapon. Mosasa had used the devices to gain an insurmountable business advantage and amass a considerable fortune. Eventually, the living Mosasa had traded his fleshy body for a cybernetic one, gifting his thoughts and memories to one of those AIs.
The AIs, however, never forgot their purpose. Autonomy alone was not enough to undo the directives the Race had programmed into their being. Free of human constraint, they had worked for their ultimate goal; the fall of the human political hegemony and freedom for the Race who had been confined to their planet by automated battle stations since the end of the Genocide War.
The quintet of AIs had helped stabilize Bakunin, preventing a founding of a state, causing a weak point in the Terran Confederacy. The five of them could mimic humanity enough to interact, infiltrate, and directly implement the kind of social engineering the Race had designed them for. In the end, after centuries of work, they had achieved their goal. The Confederacy had collapsed.
Of the original five, only three had survived to depart for Procyon and the Race homeworld; Mosasa of course; Random Walk, who had once been formed of two AIs and was now half himself and somewhat unstable; and Ambrose, a hybrid of flesh and cybernetics who had smuggled one of the five brains into the heart of the Confederacy.
Only Mosasa survived to depart the Race homeworld and return to Bakunin, the only one to see the truth and remain willing to survive.
The Race was dead.
All of them.
What mankind had done, in trapping them on the surface, was force them to revisit the racial reluctance toward direct physical violence. The taboo that had rendered them so weak against mankind.
But that taboo had existed for a reason: it had been the only thing that had allowed the Race to survive as long as it had. As soon as enough of them had cast aside such reservations, the results had been catastrophic. Cities lay in ruins, entire ecosystems had been devastated, and a planet that had been only marginally habitable to begin with had become sterile.
The surviving half of Random Walk had simply shut himself off. Either the sacrifice had been too much or he couldn’t accept the loss of what had been their reason for existence, their reason for acting at all. Without their creators, there was no purpose left to serve.
Ambrose, on the other hand, went insane. He attacked Mosasa, accusing him of allowing this to happen. His attempt to strangle Mosasa proved fruitless—Mosasa’s neck was completely cybernetic, while Ambrose’s half- human body was still in large part flesh and bone. Failing the attempt to kill Mosasa, he ran off, screaming that he would find someone, some member of the Race still alive.
But their creators no longer existed, and Mosasa returned alone.
Mosasa was speaking though the PA system to Mallory, shouting, before he was quite aware of what he was doing.
He sealed the door to Mallory’s cabin and cut his transmission even as Mallory responded to his interruption.
Mosasa reined in his desperate emotions and contacted Kugara, the only security team he had left. She looked up
