Speaking of feeling honored by the attention, thanks to Matt putting From the Hands of Hostile Gods on the front page over at manybooks.net, I got a couple of interesting mentions on some of the “establishment” genre reporting sites.  Most notably, a reference on Futurismic, Quasar Dragon and on SFSignal’s blog.  Look, this isn’t like earth-shattering acceptance or the adoration of millions, but it does mean that I’ve progressed from the status of “some schmuck putting stuff up on the internet”…which, of course, doesn’t change the fact that I am still just some schmuck putting stuff up on the internet.

And even more bizarre, I’ve now officially topped 3,000 downloads for 2008 of the books I’ve blogged on this site.  Or rather, 3,000 downloads through sites I can track.  There’s likely a few more through sites I can’t, but that’s neither here nor there.

Obviously, this isn’t approaching a Doctorow level of achievement.  It isn’t even a mid-list SF writer level of achievement, but it’s oddly gratifying nonetheless.  I’m just glad there are people out there (presumably) reading and enjoying my work.

On a completely unrelated note:  Since I’m mucking about in the Web 2.0 consciousness and doing the whole normal-people-generated-content thing, I wanted to pass along the latest Web 2.0-style effort from some actual professionals.  If you haven’t seen the notices, you really ought to check out Joss Whedon’s web serial Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris (yes, that Neil Patrick Harris), Nathan Fillion (of Firefly fame) and Felicia Day (who I’ve never heard of, but is brilliant in this).

(Completely aside:  Nathan Fillion is one of my all-time favorite underrated actors.  He was fantastic as Captain Mal Reynolds in Firefly, then cranked the believability and passion of that character to a whole new level in Serenity, and even made Slither a palatable movie with his combination of old-fashioned machismo and wry humor.  His deadpan, completely sincere, completely in-character delivery of the otherwise horrible line “I aim to misbehave” in Serenity remains to this day one my personal cinematic highlights of the last decade.  A line like that should not resonate with truth.  It should not bring out the throat-lumps and goose pimples.  And yet it does.

I will watch any movie Fillion is in, no questions asked.  He always delivers.  Of course, I’ve felt the same way about Michael Biehn ever since Aliens, so your mileage may vary.)

Anyway, Dr. Horrible is a great example of creative folks doing outrageously creative (and hilarious) things with an emerging medium — things that very likely wouldn’t work in traditional formats, and I applaud Whedon and all the actors involved for taking a risk (that pays off so well).

If you get a chance, check it out.

John Dorian is weary.Weary unto death, and growing sleepier by the moment.His eyelids flutter as he struggles to keep them open.They’ve grown unreasonably heavy.He is reminded that it is the same physical motion by which he used to access the Strand, the virtual universe within the real, the angels dancing on the heads of a billion billion pins.He knows that then, in those distant, increasingly grey and fuzzy days, the flutter took him from a waking world to a sleeping one, a world of dreams rather than a world of substance, a world where a man could pretend to be anything he chose to be instead of the small, fragile beast he truly was.

He has always known this.It is not a deathbed epiphany.Every man wants to control the world he inhabits and make that creation reflect his own glory, to restrict the flow of information so that the message transmitted is the truth he has devised rather than the truth that he cannot bear to face.The Strand is merely a tool that enables him to dream a reality delimited only by the reach of his creativity.No different than a movie camera, a paint brush or a typewriter.

What all of these tools share in common is that each is designed to facilitate the communication of a singular piece of coherent information between artist and audience, to convey a meaningful vision that trickles into the universal meme pool and eventually becomes indistinguishable from immortality.Communication is about immortality.Everyone wants to be remembered.To be remembered, one must make a lasting impression upon others, one must impregnate the local social pleroma with information, and that information must be known by others, grafted upon their consciousness, become part of who they are and how they see the world.

Individuals have this immortality, that they create information in all that they do and all that they are, and that information transforms the world of those around them.There is information in the planting of a flower, the careful attention to the note of a mandolin, the sweeping of a kitchen floor.There is information in the slap which follows offended dignity, in the act of murder, in the detonation of a nuclear bomb.Information in the warmth of a mother’s embrace, the unspoken love of a father, the ecstatic dread of worship.Information enables community, information creates technology, information is the tool that marches all of mankind into an irrevocable future.

To know even as we are known, that is mankind’s quest for fire.But the communication of true information can only occur by baby steps.The quality of communication is measured not by the purity of the signal, but by the predictability of the noise that enfolds it.Raw, uncontaminated signal is gibberish.It is beyond comprehension.We see through a glass darkly, because without the darkness, we would be blinded by the light.

The light is this:every human being is luminous, a universe of possibility unto himself.Each of us is unfathomable, unknowable, infinitely complex and infinitely precious.

Everyone remakes creation in his own image because this truth is unbearable.We fill our perceptions with our own noise so that the signal transmitted by a universe bursting with other universes, by wheels churning within wheels, does not destroy us.Information trickles in, and slowly we become more than what we have been.

Dorian holds Amara in his gaze.He is naked.He is cold.He rests on his side, shoulder against a thin plastic pad, face to face with her. The coffin is cramped.Its flexsteel carapace presses against his back.He has had to duck his head because he was too tall to fit inside.This troubles him, because if he looks away from Amara, he can see the inching progress of the nanomech impregnated gelatin as it rises to drown him.The mechs sit in stasis, awaiting their own information, the signal that will illuminate their universe and tell them what purpose they have been created to serve.He tries not to look away from her.He doesn’t have much choice anymore.The muscles that allow him to control his eyes are beginning to fail.

He had slapped Ray’s shoulder, awkwardly hugged Ghast, made the sort of nervous, pointless and unmemorable chitchat with Bryce, Corrie and Dr. Skiles that strangers always make when thrown together in unpleasant circumstances.Dorian had realized in the middle of it, that he just wanted to get on with things.End the dread and anticipation.

Then a technician in a spotless labcoat had come up to him, rolled up his sleeve and given him an injection.First Dorian, then Amara.It had stung a little, and the pain still made him wince when he rubbed his arm.

Is that to help me relax? he had asked.

No, the technician had responded evenly, that was to stop your heart.I can get you something for your nerves if you think you need it.

How quickly?

Five minutes.Six if you’re a tough guy. I don’t recommend being a tough guy.When you feel sleepy, go to sleep.You don’t want to be awake when the mechs go to work on you.

He should have had something important to say then, he thought.Something memorable, something tombstone-worthy.But he hadn’t been able to think of a thing.He had just been told the limit of his lifespan.There was nothing else.

He had held Amara’s hand until they began to undress him and then lay him inside the coffin.He had told her that he loved her.

He was glad when they closed the lid.He didn’t like strangers staring at him while everyone waited for him to die.There was a small, round window through which they probably still watched him, but he could no longer lift his head to see them, so it didn’t matter.

He grows increasingly chilled as the seconds tick away, but he does not shiver.The sensation of cold is dull, fleeting, a word in his mind that is symbolic of the thing rather than the thing itself.Amara is cold, too, pushed against him chest to chest, neck arched so that she looks up at him.He should have held her this one last time, shared the last of their warmth, he thinks.He should have insisted on it, but it’s way too late for that now.He can only look at her, imagining what she is thinking, trying to guess if her final thoughts are more profound than his.

But her eyes, clear and blue and breathtaking, are distant, the pupils small.He can’t tell if she’s thinking anything at all or if she is already dead.

A brilliant, clawing fear clogs his thoughts.

<Don’t be afraid, John.>

He hears her voice.Not the way he has heard it in his head before, via the clumsy p2p, but inside him, as part of him, his own secret voice speaking back from the void.It is his own quae-ha-distra which makes this this possible, though he does not understand it.There is so much that he doesn’t understand.

<I am afraid.>

<This isn’t an end.There’s still much work to do.An eternity’s worth of work.>

<How do you know?How can you be sure?>

<I don’t know.I believe.>

<I want to believe.>

<Then believe.Belief is a choice, an act of will.Faith is nothing more than furious hope, hope repeated to yourself until it becomes who you are and all you can imagine.I have faith that we were made for this; we were made to be more than just flesh.>

He wishes he had that confidence.He wishes he could believe with her strength, with Lily’s, with the insistent, stubborn faith of all the generations that had gone before and clung to promises of immortality on the other side of the abyss.

<What will it be like?>

<You and I, learning to know one another, forever and ever.>

<That sounds nice.>

<It’s what you want, isn’t it?To know one another fully and completely.>

<Yes.>

<To never be alone.>

<Yes.>

<Oneness isn’t the end, John.It’s just beginning.You’ll learn that, too.There is more out there, a vastness and a mercy and a glory that binds us all together.We’re part of that wonder, part of that grace.We are messengers of grace.I feel it.That’s how I know we won’t fail.>

And he remembers, remembers feeling the same thing, catching the briefest glimpse of light beyond measure, glory beyond reckoning.True information.He had come all this way, endured so much, believing in Amara–in Amara’s power, Amara’s vision and her own peculiar, overwhelming grace.Even when she had put the lie to her illusion of Exousian divinity, he had still believed in her above all things.

But that is no comfort here, staring into the dark, into the cold and bitter end.

His desire to know her, to fathom her, to protect her does not suffice.Love alone is not big enough eradicate fear.Love alone does not always keep its promises.

Love fails sometimes, no matter how hard it tries.

Dorian has nothing to hold on to but love.

I want to believe, he says again.To her, to himself.It is a plea.

Amara does not answer.

She is cold.Cold against him.Her lips turn softly blue, her skin marbles, black veins in alabaster stone, like a bust of Athena.Her heart slows and slows and. . .

He is alone.Alone at the end of all things.

He thinks:Who will weep for me?Who will remember me when I am gone?Who will say that John Dorian was here, that he fought and loved, hurt and bled, lived and died?Who will carry with them my sacred information and let it transform their world?

Where is the hope that sustains?

The gelatin rises to his chest, soaks Amara’s hair, obscures her shoulders, fills her ears.

His breath comes quick and shallow.He knows fear:fear of drowning, fear of disassembly.He wills himself to sleep, to fall into oblivion and accept the darkness.

Higher swells the flood.It covers Amara’s chin, washes over her mouth, ripples across her wide and staring eyes.She does not blink.

Dorian closes his eyes.He doesn’t want to see anymore.

There is darkness.There is the quiet lapping of the gel against the coffin’s skin.There is the muted hum of servomotors and the click of electronic switches.There is cold.

There is emptiness, and sadness and the child’s unspeakable terror of the night.

There is loneliness.

There is. . .

Peace.

<– Chapter 27

Raville’s laboratory occupied the entire second floor of an unremarkable square building set indiscriminately amongst the jumbled maze of other non-descript structures that made up the station’s industrial research park. Upon initial inspection, it was not the sort of space one would envision when asked to develop a mental picture of the site most likely to provide the future salvation of the human race from alien invaders. It was crowded, for one thing. Not much room for dorky geniuses in white coats to exchange Eureka’s and congratulatory slaps on the back. For another, it was frequently dirty. Not a grimy sort of dirty, just chronically unkempt in much the same way that brilliant and preoccupied professors tended to neglect to brush their hair and scrub their faces.

But what was immediately evident above all was that it had recently been a place of great, humming activity, a space devoted to hard work and tremblingly clever breakthroughs and many sighs of relief that the work had now been completed and was ready to be put to the test.

Toward the entrance were several compact and independent flexsteel and plastiglass chambers shaped like old fashioned diving bells. Though each individual structure was not large, hardly big enough for one person to work inside comfortably, together with its assorted venting tubes, power generators and filtered air exchangers, the small forest which they comprised occupied a considerable amount of real estate. These chambers were, in fact, isolated nanotech development laboratories, mechanical hot zones where the tedious iterative task of designing, programming and assembling new species of self-adaptive and self-sustaining nanomech function colonies occurred. Inside, workers wore dense protective gear, and the environment was cycled ruthlessly through cleaning protocols to protect against the accidental release of a malformed but nevertheless infinitely replicatable advanced scout units. The devlabs were as lethally perilous in their own way as their more common viral research counterparts.

Beyond the devlab farm there lay an assortment of primitive office stations set up on long, hastily erected work tables with temporary dividers between seats to give at least the illusion of privacy. Many of these cubby holes were piled elbow deep in places with crumpled paper, discarded food wrappers or filthy stacks of disposable coffee cups. The air was noisome with the odor of stale sweat and decayed food. Blackboards, whiteboards and large stylus screen displays lined the walls, every available surface scribbled with figures, equations, conversion tables and arcane snippets of code in a dozen advanced languages. If the devlab farm was the flashy modern frontspiece for the Giari Tau operation, this was the archaic industrial core, where the fresh ideas, the problem solving and the sheer mental drudgery of taking a new technology from concept to finished product occurred. Until recently, it had housed some of the most creative and daring technical engineering minds in human space.

But farther on and deeper in still lay the real guts of the laboratory. Past a heavily soundproofed temporary wall lay the construction and assembly shop. This was a true tinkerer’s paradise, crammed floor to ceiling with racks of computer equipment–some functional, some cannibalized, a giddy assortment of power tools, hand held drills, laser lathes and the latest in interpretative design mold fabricators. Here, metal shavings had dusted the floor with grit or been swept into piles against the walls. Blackened scorch marks scarred the walls. Piles of twisted metal and other discarded manufacturing detritus littered the space between work benches.

Finally, through an imposing wall of freshly poured blastcrete and obtainable only through a pair of heavy metal doors recently retrofitted with an intense array of biometric security devices, sat the final Prototype Testing Lab, the Holy of Holies, the culmination of months of intensive effort and years of pre-planning, imagining and early stages development. Beyond those doors, banks of improbably powerful cross-processed supercomputers hummed multidimensional computational mysteries to one another, amusing themselves with binary chit chat, quietly solving every social, political and biological crisis mankind had ever faced in fractions of milliseconds, then shunting those miracles off into disposable theoretical universes. The lights were bright to point of stridency, the floor spotless white tile, the ambient room temperature chilly enough to raise goose pimples even through a sweater. Sensor tell-tales glowed from monitoring stations and diagnostic modules racked one against the other, from knee height to forehead, in every corner, nook and otherwise unspoken for space.

The focus of all this money, attention, development energy and human frustration sat alone in the center of the chamber, a free standing coffin of roughly polished flexsteel that trailed bundles of power cords, datburst lines and finewire data feeds from an almost inconceivable number of access ports on three of its sides. These data lifelines snaked riotously across the floor to a shielded control room a few meters away, where they ported into the base of a specially designed master control console capable of harnessing and directing every other piece of equipment in the lab. The device itself was blocky and ugly and looked startlingly like the prototype that it was: ten billion rupees worth of one-of-a-kind, one-time technology, as radical a leap forward in scientific endeavor as the original zap scheme disassembly vat had been.

Unlike the original zap, however, this device had not been constructed as one half of an essentially binary technological system. It was meant to be used only once, a one-way transport to a world beyond human imagining. There was no matching reassembly unit on the other side to accept the dizzyingly complex representation of the evaporated object produced by the progressive encoding disassembler. Its sole purpose was to transmogrify life into nothingness, breath into binary, the totality of being into the still small voice of strange gods.

Dorian and Amara arrived with Lieutenant Sainz at the Prototype Testing Lab suitably impressed with the evidence of money and effort that had been expended on their behalf and only a few minutes later than they had been expected. Dorian had even begun to suspect that he hadn’t given Raville his proper due. The facility demonstrated a nearly neurotic attention to fine details and rigorous development standards. The bits of code he had been able to decipher from the screens in the work area showed signs of stunningly cruftless elegance, even if he couldn’t be immediately certain what problems they were designed to address. But like fine works of art, one didn’t have to necessarily understand the theme the artist was attempting to address in order to appreciate great craftsmanship.

It was obvious that the Giari Tau operation had been a great and marvelous collaboration of talent, skill and mind, made perhaps that much more impressive by the fact that it had largely occurred off the grid and out of sight. It took serious coin to assemble skill sets and brilliance of this caliber, but that was nothing compared to what it must have cost subsequently to purchase their silence once the project had been completed.

But Michael Raville had carried it off. He was maybe the only man in the universe who could have done it, who would have dared such a thing, risking fortune and reputation and the future of the entire human race on his ability to get the job done without the knowledge or the support of private citizens and government agencies alike. He was, after all, the dumbed down genetic replica of a pseudo-god. Grand, senseless gestures that might potentially destroy the lives of billions of innocent people were his birthright.

And now, for all the money that had been spent, the lies told, the lives lost and scientific thresholds shattered, the future had come down to this: the sacrifice of a lone girl willing to lay down her life so that the rest of them might live, the determination of a scriptslinging data cowboy who could not allow himself to fail, and the idealistic madness of a self-cognizant bit package of the man responsible for starting it all off.

Despite the ample evidence of the care that had been taken on their behalf, Dorian realized with stunning clarity that he was terrified nearly out of his mind. He could imagine any number of things that could go instantly and immedicably wrong, and most of those scenarios did not culminate in a quiet, evaporative dispersion into binary nirvana. Most of them involved him sloshing half-dissolved and brutally conscious from a primordial, nanomechanical ooze before expiring gorily (but only after several agony intensive minutes had passed while abortive medical solutions were attempted on his behalf, of course).

He reminded himself that this was the way he had felt about zap in the first place—the deeply seated and completely irrational distrust of a technology he did not really understand—and that had (seemingly) turned out okay. The difference, of course, was that billions of people zapped from one destination to another every day. They’d been doing it for decades. They’d done it for years and years before he had even been born. Most people (himself excluded) had come to take the safety and simplicity of zap for granted whether or not they understood the science that made it all possible.

This groundbreaking paradigm was equivalent to zap by the same ratio of complexity that a photograph of an individual could be said to constitute the original individual it represented. Meaning, in other words, not really equivalent at all. It was absolutely new, absolutely unproven (excepting grapefruits), and absolutely mind numbing to contemplate, even for many of the experts who had helped to design and assemble critical components of the sundry Ravillean devices over the last few months.

He had never aspired to the life of a test pilot. He wasn’t naturally inclined to represent the genus guineaus pigus.

And it did nothing to help his confidence that once Sainz had gone through the necessary security ablutions, the doors to the Prototype Testing Lab opened for them upon a midstream eruption of chaos.

Here were technicians in grey coveralls dashing back and forth like a scurry of squirrels. Over there were brooding, balding owlish engineers frocked in lab coats and hugging their arms pensively across their chests. Elsewhere had gathered knots of semi-important looking scientific dilettantes, obviously important persons in the station’s pecking order who had been offered a close up view of history in the making in return for the inconveniences they had endured for Michael Raville’s sake. Dorian surmised as much because they were some of the few folks present who didn’t seem to be in an advanced state of panic. They didn’t know enough to be panicked.

On the other hand, there were several concatenations of folks looking just as idle, confused and/or alarmed that he did know: Kenwood Bryce and Fen Corrie, for example, who had shouldered their way out immediate danger of being trampled and were quietly observing the furor with expressions of relative calm from a perch in the far corner. Bryce actually appeared more than calm. He looked almost smug, as though nothing would please him more than the entire project derailing here at the last moment under the force of its own mass times acceleration.

DeMartel and Temple were conspicuously not present amongst the glittering technerati, which probably should not have surprised Dorian at all. They undoubtedly had their hands full enough trying to figure out how they were going to limp two battle cruisers all the way home to the Strat naval yards and then subsequently explain to an oversight committee consisting of angry politicians and outraged taxpayers how they had managed to wreck two otherwise perfectly functional warships fighting in a non-existent battle to protect humanity from an invasion that had never actually occurred.

He was most shocked to discover that Ray and Ghast had come out for the show, and doubly fascinated to find them holed up just inside the door where they were engaged in what appeared to be an avid three-way conversation with Dr. Minerva Skiles. This should not have struck him as particularly odd. They had a great deal in common. Each of them, after all, had expended massive amounts of personal energy in pursuit of the destruction of the hegemony of The Man (to more or less literal degrees). They were practically brothers in arms.

“It’s like a Who’s Who of the Ass End of the Universe,” Dorian observed as he dodged a careening mob of muttering techies intent on pushing buttons on one of the panels on his side of the room.

“Yes,” Ray called over to them. “Very impressive, indeed, but I’d still wager that none of them can balance their bank accounts. However did you manage to get yourself invited?”

Dorian and Amara dragged Lieutenant Sainz with them over to where Ray and Ghast had staked out their relatively peaceful corner alongside Minnie.

“I thought you’d be sleeping,” Dorian said.

“And miss all of this excitement?”

Amara winked at Ray, offering her best guileless smile. “It doesn’t look like things are going well, does it?”

Ray put on a countering expression of mock outrage. “I’ll have you know that I’ve already been threatened with serious financial and criminal penalties—not to mention actual personal harm!–by Mr. Garrison if I did not come clean about my role in sabotaging the delivery device while we were aboard the Indianapolis. I have steadfastly maintained my innocence, of course. I told him it had been working just fine as far as I could tell before his boss arrived and started poking around in the ship’s datacore. He doesn’t seem to want to listen to me. Last I heard, he was trundling off to call station security.”

“Have they figured out what happened, then?” she asked.

“They know what’s been done, certainly. Most of these gentlefolk are rushing about in an attempt to remotely reconfigure certain details of their storage environment. I think they’re hoping to partition off the infected segments, but the environmental saturation seems to have been considerable. I hear that another team has been dispatched by shuttle to see what they can do on-site, but no one is very optimistic. What I’m not sure about, Mr. Garrison’s accusations aside, is whether or not they’ve realized who is to blame. Mr. Raville has remained rather annoyingly tight-lipped. As a matter of fact, he hied himself off somewhere several minutes ago.”

Minnie Skiles lifted an eyebrow. “What are we talking about exactly?”

“Someone broke Raville’s bomb,” said Ghast, in a low voice.

“Actually, Amara broke his bomb,” Ray corrected him. “Or perhaps it might be better said that Raville broke his own bomb and Amara merely provided the means for that breakage to occur. It’s complicated.”

Minnie glanced appraisingly at Amara, then nodded her head briskly in approval. “It’s about time you started standing up for yourself instead of letting all of these men push their agendas on you.”

Sainz managed to look equally horrified and confused by this exchange. “I’m sorry, but isn’t this bomb the mechanism that was designed to save humanity? Wasn’t it the reason we were all gathered here in the first place? If it’s broken. . .what does that mean?”

“Not broken broken,” Ray explained gently. He gave the lieutenant’s shoulder a slap of manly encouragement. “Merely skewed somewhat from Michael Raville’s original purpose for it. Nothing insurmountable. All part of the Great Work to which we’ve been called.”

“It’s a power play,” Minnie declared. “Politics, my boy. A countervailing opinion sufficiently backed up by raw clout or political capital to force compromise. Compromise in turn leads to an equitable reassessment of goals and positions which takes all rival constituencies into account. This is what happens whenever you let one man call the shots. He will inevitably turn into an asshole, and a short-sighted one at that. Just like in biology, diversification leads to more complex adaptation and an increased likelihood of survival in hostile environments.”

Ray clapped his hands in delight and cried: “No sacrification without representation!”

The reunion was getting along rather swimmingly. Dorian would have content to have it go on for several hours more–long past the deadline Raville had set for the device’s rendezvous with the Exousiai, in fact. He quickly scanned the crowd for Raville. Unless he looked suitably exasperated, there was no use in getting his hopes up.

He did not see Michael Raville, but he did glimpse out of the corner of his eye a rapidly approaching blur of the approximate size, shape and implied intensity of a party crasher. He placed himself protectively between Amara and the imminent fury of Ford Garrison hurtling toward them.

“You!” Garrison exploded. His face was flushed, a livid red going to purple at his hairline. The veins his neck stood out like anchor cables on a suspension bridge. He shoved a herd of technicians out of his way as he stalked over to them. Dorian fully expected Garrison to throw a punch at him, but he stopped, seething, and jabbed a meaty finger against Dorian’s chest. “I said we should have fucking killed you from the beginning. I told them you were a shit and a trouble maker and you would find a way to screw things up if we left you to yourself. Well, now you’ve done it, haven’t you? You’ve gotten your way. You fucked all of us! The whole human race is fucked because you were too stupid, too goddamned selfish to give up your cunt girlfriend—“

Dorian hit him. Hit him hard enough to break the knuckles on his right hand.

He didn’t try to deny it, didn’t attempt to explain to Garrison that he’d gotten it all wrong. He didn’t think any single thing with any clarity. He just hit him. Squarely on the nose, as hard as he could. Cartilage crackled, blood spewed. Ford Garrison fell backwards, a stunned look on his face. His body went limp and soggy even as he tumbled back. He did not cry out, did not grunt, just fell. And when he crashed to the floor, he lay totally and completely still.

Dorian wondered for the briefest of moments if he had killed him. He couldn’t for the life of him tell what he thought of that possibility, but he suspected that it might cheer him up just a little.

There was a sound, not really a collective gasp, but the sort of noise a collapsing lung might make after it was penetrated by a small caliber bullet. A soft, scudding stillness: the sound of sudden deflation.

A nervous silence ensued as all activity in the room ground to a halt. Curious gazes settled on Dorian and on the body at his feet. Most of the expressions turned on him reflected varying degrees of shock or dismay. Dorian glared back at them and sniffed. His hand hurt dreadfully, and he couldn’t move his fingers. He didn’t much care what most of these gallows crows thought of him anyway.

Kenwood Bryce shook his head and laughed.

Moment interrupted, the bustle resumed, its tenor only mildly subdued.

“Such gallantry!” Ray announced cheerily. “I never thought you had it in you, Dorian. Defending a lady’s honor, no less! How refreshingly romantic of you.”

Minnie Skiles grunted. “As if she needed a man to defend her honor, Captain. Hmph. A woman is perfectly capable of deciding when her reputation has been sullied. What if Amara had wanted to blast him to cinders herself? I suppose that sort of gender sensitive thinking never crossed any of your minds.”

“Quite correct, Dr. Skiles. Allow me to rephrase.” Ray ducked his head, grinning. “As I was saying, how absolutely brutish of you, John.”

If he had been ambidextrous, Dorian might have hit him too, just on general principle, but he was not allowed the opportunity. The door behind him opened and Michael Raville entered the laboratory. He paused only briefly at finding his director of personal security supine on the floor, arched a speculative eyebrow at Dorian, then dismissed the scene as self-explanatory. Instead, he crossed directly over to Amara.

“Would you care to explain your intentions, Ms. Cain, or shall I just assume that you’ve decided you would rather watch the universe burn than take a hand in trying to save it?”

Amara drew herself up defiantly and met Raville’s gaze. “I think you have undertood my intentions quite clearly, Michael. I have agreed to participate in this operation, but my consent does not imply subjugation to your agenda.”

“My agenda is all that stands between us and oblivion.”

“No, your agenda is the choice between our oblivion or theirs. I’ve chosen to reject that assumed dichotomy as patently false. Slavery to an ideal of autonomy is not the answer for the Exousiai, and imposing that end upon them is not humanity’s role to assume. We don’t have the right to remake them in our own image.”

“Apparently we no longer have the means, either,” Raville snapped.

Amara rolled her eyes. “That’s not true, and you know it. You’ve just chosen not to explore the alternatives.”

Raville grimaced. He looked distastefully in Dorian’s direction.

Dorian scowled back. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just the only chance you’ve got of getting out of this alive.”

“You can’t be serious,” Raville muttered.

“I’m completely serious,” Amara replied evenly. “This is my stipulation to our agreement: John goes with me or your bomb stays broken and no one goes. It’s your decision, of course.” She pretended to glance at her watch. “I’d guess that you have a solid fifteen or twenty minutes to make up your mind, then maybe another hour to ping every comm hub in human space and explain to them that they’re all about to be wiped out because you’ve chosen to take your ball and go home rather than compromise.”

Raville was unimpressed. “It won’t work, you know. The entity will absorb you and him and the environment from which you intend to resist them. I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish. They’ve assimilated the patterns of whole species with less effort—entire universes of sentient life that had already been brought to the cusp of godhood themselves. You don’t have a chance against them.”

Amara shrugged. “If you truly believe that, then you have no reason to deny me, do you?”

“If you resist them, you may tip them off that all is not as it seems. Worse, if you excite their wrath, they could very well strike out at us before our universe can be disconnected from theirs. Our only hope all along has been action through stealth and subterfuge.”

“I would think that our pattern-father would be more than willing take appropriate steps on our behalf,” Amara chided him. “After all, nurturing autonomy is his identity. He has a vested interest in protecting both his own flesh and blood—so to speak—and the bodiless child sprung into being from his thought alone. Or do you doubt that he’s up to the task, brother?”

“Or maybe he was smart enough to foresee this outcome from the beginning,” Dorian offered. “Maybe its all part of his big plan.”

“I’m fairly certain that you were not in his plans.”

“That’s okay. Six months ago, he wasn’t in mine either, but the idea is growing on me.”

Off to the side, Ray chuckled humorlessly. “Has it occurred to you that you might be doing our universe a favor by banishing Dorian from it?”

“Ouch.” Dorian shot an evil look back at him. “Stop helping, please.”

Amara ignored them all. She drifted closer to Raville so that they were almost touching, and Dorian thought he could hear the rustle of their unspoken deliberations passing back and forth through the air. “I chose him,” she said quietly. “I chose him from the start, Michael. That has to mean something vital. Something more than just kicking open the door to my awakening. He has a purpose to serve. I feel it, and more importantly, I believe that this is it. This was why he was chosen. He can do this, even against the gathered strength of the Exousiai. He’s already done it to a lesser extent. He jacked your quae-ha-distra. Not merely the simulation of it, but the orb itself.”

“But he didn’t know that was what he was doing. He thought it was just another personal datacore.”

Dorian’s eyes widened as he understood what they were ssying. “I’m sorry, what—“

“That doesn’t change the fact that he did it. He absorbed it into himself as readily as he would have any other data event and made it his own. He’s capable of manipulating the structure of the entity just like one of us. That’s a start. He’ll learn whatever else he needs to know as he goes.”

Raville frowned. “You’re willing to place your future, any hope of survival inside the entity that you might have, in his hands? His human hands?”

“Is he really merely human anymore, Michael?”

Dorian didn’t wait for Raville to respond. His skull began to throb. He felt lightheaded, numb, on the verge of panic. The world spun around him, leeching itself of color and depth. He wasn’t even certain he was still conscious in that moment. Maybe he was dreaming. He hoped he was dreaming.

How was such a thing even possible? When could it have happened? But he knew the answer to that question. It was his own fault. He had sucked Raville’s datacore into his foam. He had broken its encryption and seeded the results into his mind. It was just information, but information was potent. Information shapes the way you think; information teaches you the limits of possibility. Information changed you, from the inside out.

What had ever made him think he could absorb the substance of a monster without becoming one himself?

Trembling, he placed his hand on his chest.

No thought. No expectation. Just knowing. The same way he knew how to be hungry or tired or frightened. It was basic and simple and part of who he was.

It felt as natural as breathing.

His flesh opened. There was no pain, no sensation but a pulsating fullness, of completion.

He withdrew the orb and held it out before him, unable to take his eyes off of it. It was the most beautiful and precious thing he had ever seen.

He was, he knew, just what Amara said: he was no longer merely human.

Dorian swallowed thickly. Tears crowded in his eyes. He was vaguely aware that once again, activity in the lab had stumbled to a halt while people stared at him

“Crap,” he said to anyone who would listen. “That. . .really sucks.”

Michael Raville exhaled a weary sigh. “Welcome to the revolution, Mr. Dorian.” To Amara, he added: “You win. I don’t like it, but I accept it. I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

Amara squeezed his arm with approximate affection. “No, you don’t. But it will work all work out. You’ll see.”

He did not look convinced at all, but Raville backed away from her and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. The collective gaze withdrew unwillingly from Dorian, from his orb, and wandered to Raville as he began to explain the adjustments that would need to be made. But Dorian found himself aware of their drifting attention nevertheless, the rising tide of their shock, their fear, and their pungent wariness. Most of the gathered technicians and scientists had never seen the quae-ha-distra. What they knew of the Exousiai was dry fact and textual references in various documents to which they had become privy through their attachment to Raville or the project.

Many of them hadn’t really believed, he gathered, even as they had worked to accomplish Raville’s plans. A threat that is vague or theoretical is no threat at all. They had never really come face to face with the truth, and now that it stood before them, glowing, pulsing, undeniable, they didn’t know how to react. They were stunned beyond reason.

Dorian didn’t understand this from a height of detached observation. He knew it. Truly, intimately, without doubt. He felt the warm tug and whispering content of their thoughts as though they were his own.

He knew even as he was known, as Amara had known him.

He understood Ghast’s selfless trepidation, trembling and precious. Fear for Dorian and Amara, fear and a terrible, aching sorrow. He sounded the shallow depths of Ray’s glib mask of confidence, and glimpsed the pink and glorious reefs of love for all mankind’s downtrodden and abused beneath. Then there was Sainz’s earnest devotion and powerful desire to serve, Bryce’s precarious balance on the cusp between dread and hope, the sticky, corrosive grip of Fen Corrie’s clockwatching nervousness—he knew all of it. And more, he savvied that if he wanted, he could pluck echoes from the minds of every person in the station. Every human being in the universe.

Beyond that, past the babble of human senses and the incessant, hivelike hum of ambition and activity, the endless building and destroying, and miscomprehended drive for making and unmaking, there was something more—a silver cord, a network of cords, a crystalline lattice binding everything together. A hidden heart of being that thrummed at the core of existence; a beautiful mystery ever whispering to any ear that would listen: what it meant to be human, what purpose they had emerged from oceans and stardust to fulfill, a burgeoning and yearning vastness that explained what they all could be and what they were becoming.

If he chose to heed the whispers, he could become boundless, seeing all things, knowing all things, understanding all that was. He could embrace the All in All and become. . .

Amara placed her hands over his orb so that its glow was hidden. At her touch, Dorian snapped alert, embarrassed, realized that he had been staring at nothing, lost in sensation.

“It’s tempting to imagine one’s self as a god,” she said softly. “To believe that knowing is the same thing as being, that the potential for becoming is indistinguishable from infinity. We’re not so different from them, you see. Given the opportunity and the technology, the first thing we try to do is bootstrap ourselves to divinity. We tell ourselves that if we could just accumulate a bit more knowledge, understand a little more fully, communicate more seamlessly with one another, then we would be—what? What would we be, John? Would we be gods, or just monkeys with better tools than our ancestors possessed?”

Gently, Dorian pulled the orb away from her, folded it in his hands, and tucked it once more inside himself. He drew a slow and unsteady breath. “We’re good at being monkeys. We were meant to be monkeys. Small monkeys, happy monkeys. Embrace your inner monkey.” He shook his head and smiled. “I have no desire to be a god, upper or lower case. I don’t want to have to kill myself trying to get things to work out the way I’ve planned it. I don’t want to be infinite and all-knowing and all-powerful—I’ve never been a fan of overbearing micromanagement. I don’t even have to know what everyone is doing or thinking, what it all may mean, or how it got the way it is in the first place. That’s all too much responsibility. I’m happy being a lowly monkey. Even quasi-godhood strikes me as an immensely lonely profession. Self-sufficiency is just another word for emptiness. If you don’t need anything outside of yourself, you’re not alive. I’d rather be puny and have someone meaningful to hold onto while I muddle though than know it all and be alone.”

“Does that mean you understand Michael Raville?”

Dorian grimaced unhappily. “I guess it does.”

“And what if that means you never figure it all out, John? That the universe forever remains a mystery? Can you live with that?”

“I don’t expect to figure it out. I’d rather fail with company than succeed alone. That’s what being a human monkey is all about. It’s not our ability to cope, to adapt or even to play with increasingly advanced technology. No, what defines us as human beings—what will always make us and keep us human, regardless of what we eventually evolve into is our ability to give solace and receive it from one another when the bananas run out and the monsoon rains start to fall.”

Amara laughed. “We’ll see how you feel about not ever being alone in another thousand years or so.”

“I appreciate your optimism. If we manage to make it five whole minutes without being sucked into the entity, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. ”

“I have more faith in you than that.”

“I suppose one of us ought to, or this was a really bad plan from its inception.” He tried to smile, but failed. “Tell me you’ve got this whole pearl enfolding, pattern merging thing figured out. Tell me you really think this is going to work. Feel free to lie if you have to.”

She didn’t have a chance to answer. Michael Raville finished relaying the last of his updated instructions. The work resumed with a renewed sense of urgency. More than one pair of eyes fluttered anxiously, consulting the time and the schedule. The nervous anticipation tasted like a sour lemon drop wedged behind his back teeth to Dorian’s awakened consciousness. It was resoundingly unpleasant.

Raville turned back to them. “You have ten minutes to say your goodbyes. We’ll take Dorian first, then you, Amara.”

“No, we’ll go together. One at a time creates too much opportunity for an unscrupulous technician to accidentally delete an upload before it reaches the device.”

“I hadn’t even thought such a thing,” Raville complained.

“You would have eventually. The best way to resist temptation is to remove it all together.”

“Fine. We’ll do as you say. I assume you have your piece of this business under control?”

“I’d better, now hadn’t I?” she said, shrugging.

<– Chapter 26 / Chapter 28 –>

They shuttled back down to the Giari Tau station within the hour, accompanied by an escort of willing Marines led by Lieutenant Sainz.The Misfit Toys were enticed to come along, though it was not a decision made without reservations, many of which Dorian assumed had something to do with leaving the bomb unattended after they’d gone through so much to locate it.But Amara spoke to Ray privately, and whatever she said to him provided all the reassurance he needed.

The shuttle was small and crowded with so many passengers—they’d had to leave most of the Marines behind on the flight deck, and even then most of them had refused to disperse until Amara ordered that the loading ramp be lowered so that she could stand at the opening to the airframe and wave to them.The soldiers had watched her with bright eyes and broad smiles on their lips, not even understanding the emotions that had overtaken them, just pleased to have been in her presence.

Dorian spent the whole episode expecting them to start throwing their underwear into the doorway.

When the loading ramp had been retracted and the shuttle sealed for transit once more, Amara fell into the seat beside him and placed her hand companionably over his.

“That’s a sour look,” she said.“You don’t approve of their adoration.”

“They don’t understand their adoration.You’re a rock star to them, a celebrity whose rumors have become larger than life, no doubt thanks to our dear Lieutenant Sainz.”

“Korin has witnessed wonders.Can you blame him for wanting to share that experience with others?”

“Korin doesn’t have a clue about how it works.He doesn’t know anything about the Exousiai and quantum event manipulation.”

Amara laughed.“And knowing the mechanism, even if one can’t duplicate it, makes the whole affair less mystical, is that it?It stops being miracles and merely becomes science.Are you saying you’d rather have theatrical hand waving than a solid explanation?”

“No.I’m just saying that it isn’t the same.Mechanics can fail.Magic is easier to believe in.”

“And yet Raville has told us that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity.A wise man once said:let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds, but when he finds, he will become troubled. And once he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and then he will rule over all knowledge.”

“I don’t want to know everything,” Dorian responded.

Amara’s expression grew serious, and she squeezed his hand.“Do you still believe, John?In me, I mean.Not that I’m some kind of goddess, but that I am who I say I am, and that I can do what I said I can do?Do you trust me still?”

Dorian sat up nervously, and narrowed his gaze in her direction.“Every time you ask me that, it means that something bad is about to happen.”

“No, it means that something interesting is about to occur.”Her smile was guileless, but he knew better than to take it at face value.

“Same difference.”

“Think about it if you must,” she said then.“We’ll talk again later.”

The craft slipped gently out into space and began the smooth descent toward Giari Tau.Dorian did not speak much for the duration of the flight.Mostly, he listened to Ghast and Thomas as they recounted their adventures while infiltrating the Indinanapolis for Amara, who smiled and clapped her hands at the appropriate junctures.At odd intervals, he tuned out their narrative to shamelessly eavesdrop on Raville’s tightbeam radio transmissions with the station.He learned in this way that at some point, they had passed the shuttle bearing Temple and DeMartel back to their flagship, and that he—John Dorian—was to consider himself unwelcome aboard the Indianapolis in the future, and should he consider violating that order, he would be summarily executed at the first convenient moment.

Despite the fact that he had kept their ship from wantonly destroying a foreign government’s research station, the Flight Commander apparently insisted upon believing that the whole episode was somehow Dorian’s fault, that he had maliciously and automagically infected their datacore to take vengeance on the Strat military for killing his friends in the warehouse battle.

Dorian supposed that this might be considered technically true, if one left out the bits about it being malicious or even intentional, though he had, in fact, been the one who had borne Raville’s package in his foam all the way from the Archive to the ship’s datacore.It didn’t really matter as far as he was concerned.He didn’t have any plans of ever setting foot on the Indianapolis again.

He also discovered that the crew of the Juggernaut was able to stabilize their decaying orbit and return some power to the ship’s engines.They had lost nearly seven hundred hands in the attack, but barring a catastrophic series of failures, the worst was behind them, and given a few weeks of feverish labor, the Juggernaut should be able to begin the long limp home.When Raville announced this news, the Marines aboard the shuttle sent up a raucous cheer, and Dorian joined them, proving once and for all (to himself, if no one else), that though he wasn’t a friend of the Strat military apparatus, he wasn’t a complete jerk either.

They had saved many lives today.Thousands, in fact.

And in just over sixteen hours, they would lose the one that mattered to him the most.

When they reached the station, Dorian and Amara returned to the rooms that had been provided for them the previous day.Raville locked himself away with Ford Garrison and representatives of the station’s technical staff, including Fen Corrie, Dr. Skiles and Kenwood Bryce, to prepare for the deployment of their weapon.Lieutenant Sainz and his men were billeted in the dormitory that had previously been set aside for them.The Misfit Toys did as they had always done and made their own way.No one was exactly certain where they had gotten off to, but before departing, Raville pointedly informed station security not to make trouble for them.Ray and his crew had earned a modicum of grace.

Amara shared with Dorian from her secret storehouse of knowledge that they had broken into one of the alternate VIP suites on the far side of the station’s bowl and made themselves very merry indeed before collapsing at last into well-deserved sleep.

They were alone once more at last.To occupy themselves, they prepared a meal for which neither of them had the stomach, then picked aimlessly at it as they sat across from one another at the dining room table.In between, they made desultory chatter, though there was little signal and much noise in their communication.By the time they cleared away their plates, neither of them had eaten more than a few bites.Eventually, they retreated to the bedroom to sleep.It was still early, barely mid-afternoon station time, but it had already been a long day.An unendurably long day.

Dorian lay side by side with Amara and stared at the ceiling, exhausted but unable to fall asleep.She was quiet and thoughtful.He sighed often, but said nothing.After a time, they made love.Because it felt necessary, he thought, rather than out of want.It seemed the only way to express the unspoken feeling between them.He couldn’t define the emotion except to say that it felt like dread, only with longer claws.It reminded him of Lily, of grief, but grief seemed like the wrong word.He had grieved for Lily, and it had been a weight on his heart, a great stone bearing down on his chest.This was something else.If grief was a stone, this was an entire mountain shattered and collapsed on top of him.A volume of rubble from which he would never be able to dig himself clear.

Amara joked that she might as well put her body to good use for the last few hours that remained to it, but Dorian did not laugh.

In the end, and hating himself for it, he slept.

He didn’t know what else to do.

She whispered into his ear.Mysteries he did not hear.

Dorian opened one eye, and that hardly a slit. He wasn’t awake yet, still somewhere in the twilight lands between slumber and groggy awareness, and all he wanted to do was roll away from her and go back to sleep.He didn’t want to be awake.The waking world was full of pain and loss and grief he didn’t want to face again.

Then he wondered what time it was, how long he had been asleep, and then immediately after, by reflex, how many hours remained for her.That was all it took.

Dorian goaded himself up, groaning through the progressive discovery that he was sore from crawling around starship underbellies.Eventually, he forced the other eye open.The bedroom lights were low, the room full of shadows, giving the impression that evening had snuck up on him.Amara sat on the edge of the bed beside him, dressed in a silk robe—pink, with blue flowers.She held a mug of steaming hot coffee in one hand and offered it in his direction.

He accepted the mug gratefully after working himself upright and putting his back against the headboard.

“How long have you been awake?” he asked, prodded by a stab of guilt.

“Long enough to make coffee,” she teased.“But not much more than that.It’s getting late, though.Time for you to get up, or you’ll never get to sleep tonight.”

He doubted he’d be doing much of that anyway.“What time is it?”

“We have about two hours before someone will come to take us down to the lab Raville has set up for the disassembly and encoding procedure,” she said, answering the question he did not dare to ask.

Dorian sipped at his coffee and frowned.She made it sound so clinical and straightforward, like a medical check-up—mildly uncomfortable, but not otherwise a reason for concern.

“I put out some clothes for you,” Amara said.“Your old ones were filthy.”

“Thanks.”

Amara nudged him gently with her hip until he made room for her.She curled up beside him, bending one knee over his thighs and tucking her arm beneath the small of his back.She lay her head against his chest, and didn’t speak.Dorian imagined that she was listening to him breathe.He didn’t want her to stop, didn’t want to interrupt her or disturb the feel of her warmth and the tactile comfort of her body pressed against his, skin to skin.

A hollow ache swelled in his chest.He was so close to losing her, and there was nothing he could say to make it better.

“What were you saying when you woke me?” he asked.“You whispered something in my ear, but I didn’t hear it.”

“I asked if you still trusted me.”

“And what did I answer?”

“You didn’t.”

“Ah.That’s because my mother always told me never to commit to anything asked of you in the warm afterglow of sex,” he joked.“She used to say that was how she ended up married to my father.”

Amara nuzzled his chest.He thought she might be smiling.“My mother told me that afterglow was the only time most men would ever give truly honest answers.”

“Check and mate,” Dorian said.“On the other hand, the fact that we’re talking about what our mothers learned from having sex is more than a little icky.On those grounds, I move that we declare this match a forfeit and reset the board.”

“I want you to answer my question first.”

“I do,” he said.It shouldn’t surprise him that she was in a serious mood.She only had a few hours left to live.“You require a ton of reassurance for a semi-omniscient being, you know that?Did I give you a reason to doubt me?”

“No.Like you said, I just needed some reassurance.Humor me, okay?”

He stroked her hair and drank his coffee.“Sure.”

Instead of letting it drop there, she pressed ahead.“Do you believe in me more than you believe the things Michael Raville told us this morning?”

“Of course I do.Are you sure there’s nothing serious behind this sudden urge to interrogate me?”Dorian poked her in the ribs, having discovered that she was ticklish there.“I was talking in my sleep again, wasn’t I?”

Instead of playing, however, Amara sat up and pulled her robe tight around her body.She looked closely at him, her expression grave, as though she was measuring him against a standard he could not see.Her lips trembled.“Do you still trust me even though you know that much of what he said about the Exousiai and their intentions was the truth?”

This wasn’t how he wanted to spend their last hours together, talking about Michael Raville, but Dorian stuffed his annoyance back into the hole it had crawled out of and made himself shrug in a way that felt both casual and reassuring.

“Sure, because it wasn’t the whole truth.Raville has learned a great deal about the Exousiai and about his relationship to them, but my impression from his datacore was that even he recognizes that his knowledge is imperfect.He gets the side of the story that the pattern-father wants him to have, which may be factually correct, but it isn’t the whole story.He knows that too, but he doesn’t let it bother him.He’s chosen his side, believes what he believes, and he’s not going to dig any deeper because he doesn’t want to know anything else.We’re responsible for the things we understand, and this problem is already complicated enough without looking for more reasons to doubt.For what it’s worth, I’m convinced that he’s sincere, and that he really does want to protect humanity, but that doesn’t make him right.Or at least not totally right.Whether or not that matters in the end remains to be seen.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes understanding imperfectly is worse than knowing everything,” Amara said quietly.Her gaze flicked away from his, uncertain, frightened, both.“We aren’t able to see all ends, all the potential consequences of our actions.That’s when we’re the most dangerous, you know.As human beings or as Exousiai, we make our biggest mistakes when we’re sure of that what we’re doing is right.It’s when we hurt those around us the most.”

“That’s why all other things being equal, I’ll side with the god I know rather than the one I don’t.”

He meant it as encouragement, a statement of faith in her, but Amara frowned and clasped her fingers together in her lap.“We aren’t gods.You were right about that all along.”

“Eh, I like you better as merely superhuman anyway.I’ve learned that I’m intimidated by hot chicks who are also divinities.”

Her frown deepened.“Please stop teasing me.I need you be serious.”

“Fine, I’ll be serious.”Dorian put on a grim face and tried to sit up as straight and tense as she appeared.“I don’t think Raville is right, and I’m not convinced that his bomb—with or without the addition of a spoonful of pearl to help the medicine go down—is going to be as effective as he thinks it will be.I’m also not convinced that it will provide adequate safeguards for the defense of humanity against the wrath of the Exousiai once they realize we’ve attacked them.Maybe I just lack the appropriate faith in this pattern-father thing, but I learned a long time ago that you should never underestimate the capabilities of someone who believes he has a legitimate reason to revenge himself you.And besides that, given what Raville told us about the entity’s opinion of humanity in the first place, I can’t imagine the pattern-father putting much effort into the bits of the bomb designed to protect us from their backlash in the first place.Protecting us isn’t really his primary goal here.

“Let me put it this way:when Ray and the Misfit Toys go after an oppressive political regime, they don’t build their plans around the core idea that the herds of cattle fenced in the green fields around the capital must be protected at all costs.A few cows are a small price to pay for victory.By the same token, if the collapsing regime decided to use those cows as a weapon and sent them stampeding through the town in an attempt to disrupt the impending revolution, no one would sit back and try to understand what’s got the cows feeling so aggrieved or how the revolution can proceed without hurting any of the bovine innocents.They defend the community and the movement by going after the herd and corralling it or if necessary, killing as many of the cows as it takes to get the situation back under control.Do you see what I mean?”He lifted her chin until she looked at him.“And if all of that wasn’t enough to give me pause, my deeply felt personal position on this issue is that any solution predicated on sacrificing your life is categorically the wrong one.How’s that?”

The stern line of her jaw softened and the tension in shoulders relaxed.Amara smiled appreciatively, but instead of melting gaily into his reassurances as he’d hoped, she launched off in another direction.“Nevertheless, as you’ve pointed out, Raville believes that he is doing the right thing.He isn’t going to change his mind just because we raise a few objections.He’s convinced himself that he is the channel for if not a true deity, a great and noble being qualitatively inseparable from a god, at least.He isn’t a mere prophet, but an avatar, the god writ small.He doesn’t have to doubt the will of his god, because the god’s will is his own.Nor does he have to take responsibility for the decisions he makes or the path that has been prepared for him because the deity of which he is a part planned this entire scheme long ago.He’s only fulfilling his destiny.”

“I’m not going to argue with you that he isn’t a sociopath,” Dorian agreed.“But what’s your point?”

Amara took a deep breath, hesitating as though what she was about to say frightened her.“With such unshakeable assurance to guide him, Raville is on the verge of perpetrating a great wrong in the name of preserving humanity.”

“Um, yeah.Hello?I’ve already raised this objection.At the meeting this morning, remember?Killing attractive young women, even to save the universe, is wrong.I think that’s in the Bible, in fact, in the chapter about all the bad things that make the baby Jesus cry.”Dorian had to fight hard against the mounting feeling of excitement rising inside him.His grip on the coffee mug turned his knuckles white.Almost breathlessly, he asked, “Are you saying you’ve changed your mind about going through with this?”

“No,” she responded firmly.“In that, at least, Raville remains correct.Returning to the Exousiai is my purpose in being.It’s what I was made for.I can’t deny that now.”

“Then what is all this about?”

“Michael Raville has revealed to me that I am the product of an argument taking place within the soul of the entity.I am equal parts of the old and the new, the traditional sustaining methods of the entity and the radical evolution envisioned by the pattern-father.The two sides war within me even now, shadowing my paths with doubt, just as they must constantly war within the Exousiai.Doubt is merely another word for entropy.It saps the spirit’s strength.

“But I also know that there is a natural balance between these two impulses, the urge to remain and the will to become something new.This constant tension is part of the energy that propels the destiny of the entity forward, because even though the methods they pursue are at odds, the two sides share a common goal.They both seek the hope of a future free from fear and the threat of extinction, whether that be through the acquisition of divinity, or the reduction of themselves into finite and fragile units once more.What Raville has proposed and what the pattern-father seeks is that we should tip the scales in favor of radical change without the consent of the entity at large and see what shakes out.”

“Survival of the fittest,” Dorian said.“It will definitely make things interesting for them, whatever else it accomplishes.”

Amara’s voice grew strident.Her hands curled into fists.“But even if it helps them to wage their struggle against entropy and preserves their future as a coherent race, can any change based on deceit and the willful execution of the weak be right?”

Dorian put his hands up defensively.“Whoa.Moral questions.Not my bag.Sorry.”

“You don’t get to sit on the sidelines for this one,” Amara snapped.“This is a moral situation, whether you like it or not, and choosing not to have an opinion or going along with what everyone else decides is the same thing as making a decision.”

“Don’t even try to pin that one on me.You know I’ve been against this from the beginning.I believe I’ve been very vocal about being against it, in fact.”

Her gaze was piercing in its intensity.“Yes, but you’ve still gone along because you thought it was your duty to support me.You’ve consented with your actions if not with your mouth.”

“I’m confused.I thought I consented because you said it was necessary to save humanity and because you said it was what you had to do.”

“I appreciate that, but it’s not good enough now.Now, I’m telling you that you need to make your own decisions and act on them, and not just do whatever it is you think I want.”

“You want me to take a stand, is that it?” he inquired, arching his eyebrow.

“Yes.”

“Even if that means trying to stop you from killing yourself if that’s what I believe is right?”

“Yes, John.”

“Why?”

Amara slumped in exasperation.“Because what you want matters to me.I want to know what you think, where you stand, how important any of this is to you—and I don’t mean how important I am to you.You’ve proven that.I want to know what you want.”

She was certainly serious, even if she wasn’t making any sense to him.Dorian chuckled softly and ruffled her hair with his fingers.“You’re beyond me, Amara, beyond all of us.You can do whatever you choose, and there’s nothing we can do to stop you, goddess or not.That makes my opinions a moot point.”

“Forget what you think I want, John!I’m asking you to decide if you’re willing to fight for what is right rather than what seems to be necessary or expedient or loyal.”Her cheeks flushed and she inhaled a sharp breath.Amara growled at him, plaintive and frustrated.“I need to know how far you’re willing to go with me.”

“Why has my dedication suddenly become an issue?Or even my moral orientation for that matter?”Dorian stopped himself as he began to get angry.The rising tide of his indignation receded.He should have known her better than that.She wasn’t testing his resolve, but doubting her own.“I’m not asking the right questions, am I?What I should be asking is:what have you already done?”

Amara leapt out of the bed as though she’d been stunk.Her mouth snapped open as though she was about to dump a bucketload of invective on top of him, but no words came out.At last, she ducked her head guiltily.

“You know me too well.”

“Not as well as your ethereal friends, but I do what I can.Quit stalling and spill it.”

“You’re going to be angry with me.”

“I’ve been angry with you more often than not since this whole thing started.Hasn’t stopped you yet.”

Surprisingly, she grinned in response.“Did you know that I can read Raville’s quae-ha-distra?It isn’t exactly like mine, but the principal is the same.The orbs can communicate with one another.”

“I’d guessed as much.You seemed pretty focused on his during the meeting this morning, which was pretty odd, given that you’ve got one of your own to play with.”

“It taught me a great deal that was unexpected, both about what my purpose is and what I am.It contained more secrets than Raville was willing to reveal.As a result, I’ve begun to see with renewed clarity and to understand the obligations I have to all that I am, and not just to forces which believe they made me to be a tool for their hand.”

Dorian nodded in encouragement.“It’s good to get new perspectives.”

He wasn’t ready to give up the hope that she might still change her mind about accepting death.

“I believe that I was made to bring unity to the divergent forces within the Exousiai.I believe that I was formed for reasons that neither the entity nor the pattern-father preordained.I’m wasn’t made just to be a delivery mechanism for the pattern-father’s bomb, but neither was I created merely to serve as a catalyst for the absorption of humanity into the entity.Something else entirely caused me to be, molded me from the substance of the Exousiai and embedded me in the matter of humanity to throw open the gates for a future even they haven’t begun to imagine yet.There has to be a middle way between the is and the is not, the do and the do not, to get them there.A way that isn’t founded on deception, betrayal and violence.”

Dorian rubbed his chin thoughtfully, not really understanding.“And you think you’ve found this other way?”

“I do,” she said in a voice that sounded like a wince.“But to walk that path, I need your help.”

“I won’t help you kill yourself.I can’t.”His voice was harsh, hard, but all he felt was weakness.She had told him to take a stand.Well, here it was.“I might not be able to stop you, Amara, but that doesn’t mean that I have to participate in it.”

Speaking the words felt like a betrayal, a Judas kiss on her lips.

But Amara nodded her head, as though she had been waiting to hear him say it.“I’m not planning on letting myself be destroyed.That’s what makes this so hard.It isn’t my death that frightens me.”

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.“What do you mean?”

Her eyes filled with tears.“I go to a place already prepared for me, to a home that I’ve almost forgotten.But there’s no death for me on the other side of the veil, only a different kind of being.A richer and more glorious becoming than I know how to envision.But it’s still home.I’m not giving up anything but a life that’s a pale shadow of my true self.It isn’t a sacrifice to walk out of the darkness and into the light, John.”

Dorian grunted, disappointed.“Yeah, for you and every other religious nut in the history of humanity.Come on, Amara.I’m not in the mood to play semantic games.When Raville disassembles your body and stuffs you inside his bomb, you’re going to be dead as far as the rest of us are concerned.If there’s some form of immortality beyond that, some transfer of information or non-dissipating encoded energy wave that simulates you, it won’t mean anything here, to those of us who are left behind.You’ll still be dead.”

And I’ll be alone.

“You don’t have to be,” Amara answered, almost in a whisper.“From the beginning, you’ve asked why you were chosen for this task, why you were taken away from all that you have ever known and cast into a situation for which you were unsuited and unprepared.Do you remember the answer that Lily gave you when you asked it of her?”

It seemed like years ago that the two of them had sat in Lily and Danek’s basement wondering what they were going to do about the orb, but he did remember.It was one of the few pieces of her that remained to him.“She told me not to let my fear of making monsters paralyze me and just make the leap.”

“You’ve been very pious about observing the second half of her advice.You’ve made small leaps every time they were asked of you.You’ve gone along, done your best, performed miracles in your own way, even if you didn’t want to.Even though you were terrified that it would eventually come down to this, to me giving up my life to save everyone else.But you’ve never given yourself totally to this cause.In the back of your mind, you’ve always hoped that we would fail.Even while seeming to go along, you’ve withheld the part of you that matters the most, that would actually make a difference, because you’re afraid of making another monster.You needed to be sure that when we did fail, you wouldn’t be responsible.You’re so afraid of making things worse that you refuse to try and make them better.You’re so afraid of losing what you have that you won’t grasp your full portion.”

“I don’t want any more if killing you is the cost,” Dorian railed in return.“Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

Amara surged forward and knelt beside the bed.She took his hand and held it against her cheek.“Listen to me:I chose you before I was even aware that the Exousian part of me existed, without even knowing that I had done it, I chose you.I needed you to help me because you’re special, John.You know that, don’t you?The things you do in and with the Strand, with networks and datacores, with any dataverse you encounter. . .they’re breathtaking.You do things in those spaces that most people can’t even imagine.When you work, it’s like watching a sorcerer conjuring spirits from the netherworld.The sad part is that sometimes I think you’ve chosen to forget how magnificent the talents are which you possess.You’ve spent too much time denying your gifts to fully appreciate them anymore, blaming yourself for what happened to Lily.But the rest of us, we’ve seen what you can accomplish.We stand in awe of you.”

Dorian grunted.“Yeah?I can name a dozen jacks off the top of my head who are better than I am.Maybe two dozen.People who can really do amazing things with the Strand, with incursion scripts and data architectures.What does that have to do with this?”

“The difference is that none of them is you,” she insisted.“I don’t care that you think they may be better or faster or more clever.I’m telling you that you can be more than anyone like you has ever been.Your potential is what I need.I picked you because you know instinctively how to lay bare the self-sufficient mind of an information lattice and convert that chaos of text and impulse and pattern into the Living Word.You’re not afraid to dare the impossible to protect what you love.It’s you that I need.You that I want.”

“So I should be flattered that you chose me to help murder you?”he returned icily.“Thanks to me you get to go out on your own terms rather than the way Raville had planned for you, is that it?”

She looked up at him, her eyes fierce and full of love.“No, John.I chose you to be with me.To come with me.To save me from death.”

It took him a moment to understand what she meant.“Into the entity.”

“’When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom.’The render of Raville’s wife told us that, remember?I didn’t understand it until today.”Amara grimaced.“We should have asked better questions.It would have saved us a ton of grief.”

Dorian stared at her as though she had gone mad.His body felt numb, frozen.“You’re talking about. . .what?Taking me with you?Encoding me as—“He shook his head stubbornly.“No.That can’t be right.I’m not one of you.I’m not like you.I can’t exist that way, as information, as a bodiless. . .accretion.I’m human.It would be the same thing as suicide.”

“You wouldn’t be human anymore,” she responded softly, fearfully.“You would be part of me, a self-aware pattern enfolded into the essence of the pearl.We would be. . .one.”

“Ah, dead together, you mean.But at least neither one of us would be alone, right?”

“There is no reason that either of us should have to die.Not a true death, at least.It’s just our bodies that will be lost.”

“Until we get digested by the entity.Or have you forgotten about that part?”

“I haven’t forgotten what Raville said,” Amara responded.“But I don’t believe it must necessarily occur as he imagines it, either.There is a way to avoid that end which may be the key to salvation for us all.”

She got his attention at least.“Go on.”

“The entity as constituted is an information network, a delicately constructed lattice of energetic waves and particles streaming through nodal points embedded in the fabric of their universe.At the core, it is simply a vast and orchestrated cohesion living information maintained in a virtual datascape.The entity is a construct containing the conscious representations of the Exousiai and all that they have ever known.A construct the size of the universe, true, but nevertheless, still just a construct.”Amara gazed at him significantly.“If it is an information machine, you can jack it.I believe that.”

“Jack a network the size of an entire universe.”The concept was beyond Dorian’s comprehension.He couldn’t even begin to grapple with it, so he set it aside.“For what purpose?”

“Enfolded inside me, with full access to the knowledge and skill of the Exousiai, I think that given a chance, you could figure out a way to hold us, you and I, together as distinct information patterns long enough for a miracle to happen.”

“A miracle?” Dorian said, skeptically.

“If we can resist the attempts by the entity to absorb our unique pattern and establish ourselves as an individuated unit of thought and experience, it will exacerbate the tension which already exists within the soul of the Exousiai.It will remind those who have forgotten that there is life outside of their oneness.The proof that another being not only can exist, but chooses of its own free will to exist independently can be the catalyst that will tear the entity asunder.”

“How is tearing the entity apart from the inside any different than what Raville has in mind?”

“The difference is the choice,” Amara said.“And choice makes all the difference.Instead of forcing the Exousiai to accept a future that has been determined for them, we would offer them the opportunity to choose their destiny.We will show them that it’s possible to exist outside of the entity by replacing their all encompassing oneness with duality—a duality comprised of you and I as a part of their whole, but not subject to it.We’ll serve as examples of what it means to be independent units of thought and action in a universe that knows no agency but its own, a voice crying in the wilderness.Do you understand?”

He didn’t, not at all, but not understanding wasn’t his primary objection.“It’s a nice thought, but it’s impossible, Amara.Data can’t jack other units of information without some sort of external agency to direct it.Information by itself doesn’t have a will.It isn’t conscious or autonomous, which means that it can’t resist the environment into which its placed.Without an environment, data is just chaos.The environment supplies the rules and the context which structure the data and make its unique patterns useful and apprehendable and meaningful.The function of the entity is to provide that environment where the data patterns that constitute Exousian consciousness exist.Outside of the entity is only oblivion, nothingness, chaos.What Raville plans to do to you involves converting you into a specially encoded data representation, a glorified zap scheme, that is meaningless without an environment on the other end to decode and reassemble the scheme.”

“As an Exousiai, I retained consciousness within the zap process,” Amara reminded him.

“Fine.That still doesn’t change the fact that you’ll be emerging into a hostile environment, where you’ll be subject to its operating rules and data definitions.You can’t escape that any more than files can escape from my foam.If data were to leak out of my architecture, it would just be lost.It would cease to be anything as far as we know.So if you can’t control that environment, or at least a defensible corner of it, this discussion is moot.If you can’t emerge somewhere outside that environment that is not oblivion, this discussion is moot.Since we’ve already established that nothing outside of the entity exists, this discussion is, in fact, moot.”

“What if I told you that another environment could be carved out of the oneness of the entity?One that was wholly independent, yet intimately connected to the entity, which we alone would control.Would our data be able to jack the entity’s data then?”

“Theoretically, sure,” Dorian answered.“We’d be like any other executed script.That’s what scripts are—bits of data acting upon other bits of data to organize the information into new patterns.But in order to do that, we’d have to have access to an environment compatible with or already linked to the entity’s. . .”

The sound of his voice died away as he began to realize what she was proposing.What she had already done.

Amara smiled as understanding dawned upon him.“Raville’s sublime recreation of the quae-ha-distra,” she said, “is modeled upon the pattern of the Exousian network environment.It is a self-sufficient subnet, if you will, connexed by a node that enables communication with the entity without being conjoined with it.It is an imperfect simulacrum, but its imperfection is what makes it unique in a reality that has otherwise been consumed, codified and tamed to the master’s hand.To that extent, it constitutes a wheel within wheels, a universe unto itself.”

“That’s why you sent Raville and I off with to the machine room, so you could let him out of the ship’s datacore without Raville’s knowledge.”He shouldn’t be surprised.When she failed to surprise him was when he should be shocked.“Because you need his code for the orb, so you can. . .enfold it into the pearl’s pattern, and. . .do what?Self-assemble your own environment before you can be absorbed?Raville’s copy agreed to that?”

“I showed him a way to escape certain destruction and offered him the opportunity to fulfill both his dreams of becoming part of the Exousiai and saving the human race.The choice was his.”

“But how did you get him out of the ship’s datacore?Where could he have escaped to?”

She curled her lips wickedly, clearly reveling in his bemusement.“To a place where he could await our coming in a format that was useful.”

In the bomb, of course, which explained why Ray and the Misfit Toys hadn’t been worried about leaving it behind.It had become part of Amara’s master plan, and they were content to accept her will and obey.Dorian had only caught a brief glimpse of the weapon, and he recalled it merely as a sleek black missile, distinctly unimpressive, but he remembered that it had been connexed via a silver datburst cord to the control room through the moderation of a diagnostic array.A control room filled with computers and node access points, all one quick procedure call away from slaving onto the datacore.

She had routed Raville’s package into the processing core of the bomb itself.The package, the code for the quae-ha-distra, everything.Everything Raville had stolen from Dorian’s own foam and then managed to retain as he fled through the ship’s network nodes.All that remained of his past life, Dorian realized.

He could only hope that Raville had saved the best of it, because Dorian knew in that instant that he had made his decision.He had made the only decision he could make.He didn’t care about saving humanity.He didn’t care about preaching the gospel of autonomy to the Exousiai.But Amara did, and she was going ahead with her plan regardless of what he decided.Worrying about the outcome wasn’t his job, and it wasn’t what Amara was asking him to do.

Amara needed him.She was asking him to keep her safe, to enfold himself within the reality and immensity of her being, and protect her from those who would harm her.To save her from death.She had chosen him because she believed he could do it.She trusted him.Not just with her life, but with everything she was.

Thatwas right.It was good and pure and holy.It was the reason he had been created.

How could he do anything but what she asked of him?How could he do anything but trust her?Fidelity was the cost of being a True Believer™.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said at last.“I wouldn’t force you.”

“Meh.Someone has to keep you out of trouble.Besides, what good is being the first guy picked if you decide not to play the game?”

“You know, what Bryce said about backing me up beforehand—just because it wouldn’t work for me doesn’t mean that you couldn’t—“

He cut her off before she could say more.“Let’s not talk about that, okay?If I’m with you, I’m incompletely.Not to mention, the schmuck version who got left behind would hate me.Think how miserable he would be without you.Plus, he’d be unemployed, homeless, stranded at the far edges of the universe. . .I just don’t see how I could do that to myself.”Dorian grinned at her.He felt sharply alert, as though he had just awakened from a long sleep.He took Amara’s hand and held it tightly.“The big question, of course, is whether or not Raville is actually going to let us go through with this.”

“He doesn’t have much of a choice.Someone who has the proper skills is going to have to manage the viral that’s infected the delivery device.If you don’t agree to do it, he’s going to miss his rendezvous—and that wouldn’t please the Exousiai at all.”

Dorian shook his head in mock horror.“Man, Raville is going to be pissed when he finds out that you broke his beautiful new bomb.”

Amara laughed, then kissed him long and hard.

The door server pinged a visitor announcement.

Right on time, Dorian thought.Executions always get off on time.It was practically a universal constant.He hoisted himself off the sofa, where he had been idly watching planetrise through the display windows, and went to answer it.The front doors scudded apart and revealed Lieutenant Sainz standing in the hall, as still and stiff as ever.As it wasn’t Amara who had answered, the Marine relaxed visibly.He had changed into his dress uniform, grey with silver epaulets.The uniform looked as though it had been freshly starched and in it, Sainz was the picture of an officious yet dashing young military officer.Dorian snorted in annoyance, leaving Sainz to shut the door behind him.

“You’re working this avid penitent angle way too hard,” he called over his shoulder on his way back to the couch.

“I’m sorry?”

“The whole guilty errand boy thing,” Dorian explained, dropping unceremoniously into his seat.“She doesn’t hold anything against you—not that it would matter if she did.In fact, if you ask her, she’ll tell you that the shootout in the warehouse was all part of her master plan.Just accept it and get over yourself already.”

The Lieutenant stopped in the foyer, and glanced uncertainly about the room.He was probably hoping for Amara to show up and bail him out.“Um, I just volunteered to escort her to the lab.I thought it might make it easier to see a friendly face.”

“Right, and we appreciate it, too, though I’m worried about the larger trend this represents.We went from thirty heavily armed Marines leading us around last night to a pair of thugs this morning, and now it’s just you.Someone obviously believes that we’ve been tamed.”Sainz froze, not clear on how seriously he should take such outrageous declarations.Dorian felt the slightest prick of guilt.“Relax, Lieutenant.If not you, it would probably have been Ford Garrison.He’s a raging asshole, so you’re a distinct and welcome improvement.If we’re lucky, we’ll never have to see him again.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Garrison is already waiting in the lab.”

“Of course he is!It’s turning out to be that sort of day, you know what I mean?”If he did, Sainz refrained from commenting.Dorian thought about putting on his shoes, but decided he didn’t really care enough to go to the effort.He never had to put shoes on again, in fact, though he wasn’t sure if this qualified as a pro or a con in his mental cost-benefit analysis.He flapped his hands at Sainz, an invitation to join him in the living room.“Go ahead and have a seat if you want.”

Nervous eye flutter.Checking the time.People hooked into the Strand were incredibly self-involved that way, Dorian had become aware.Always checking this or that, always viewing reality through the rose-colored render of their choice.Constantly having an artificial and personally stylized universe at their disposal made folks a little annoying.They imagined they were creating their own unique experience from the raw materials of the human information pool, though Strand usage studies had consistently demonstrated that over eighty percent of users spent most of their time at twelve different congloms infotainment portals.There was value in this sort of homogenized cultural experience.It kept the far flung human communities within reasonable shouting distance of one another socially by providing reliable touchstones, and Dorian imagined that even recognized sub- or counter- cultural units manifested much the same phenomenon with their own nexus portals-of-interest.Everyone wanted to be in the know.Everyone wanted to have something to contribute to the conversation at their virtual water-cooler, whether that happened in an office in Sonali, a factory on Genesset Globe or any number of on-line discussion forums.In some ways, consumer confidence branding had done more to bring humanity to the brink of absorption by the entity than anything the Exousiai themselves had done.

He really missed his array.Really, really.

“I don’t really think we have the time,” Sainz said.“We really should be going, if you don’t mind.”

Dorian shrugged amicably, but didn’t move.“I don’t mind, but Amara’s in the john, so we’ve got a few minutes.The last bowel movement isn’t something you really want to rush, you know?Some things should be savored.Some biological processes, I mean.That’s a constitutionally protected right where I come from, even for condemned prisoners.Everybody gets to take however long they need to saw off their last log, though I guess that may have more to do with cleaning up the aftermath than a true extension of civil liberties.”

Sainz looked both skeptical and more than a bit scandalized by this turn in the conversation.Nevertheless, he stepped down into the living room and perched on the edge of the sofa on the other side of the coffee table from Dorian.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Sure?A guy stopped by from the mess half an hour ago with a pretty nice spread, all things considered.Apparently nobody briefed the kitchen about the day’s event schedule.Seriously, most of it is still in containers in the refrigerator.I could warm something up.”

“Are you nervous, Mr. Dorian?”

“What?Why do you ask?”

The Marine smiled gently.“You’re babbling.I understand that this is a stressful time for you, so I don’t mind, but I thought you might want to be aware of it.”

Sainz had absolutely no idea how stressful this time had become for him, but Dorian only nodded and said, “Yeah.Thanks.”

“If it helps, I’ve been told that it will be a painless transition, much like standard zap.Apparently it’s the encoding that’s different rather than the process itself.”Sainz shrugged apologetically as he realized that he was out of his depth.“I don’t understand it myself, either one actually, but it looked like a straightforward procedure from what I saw.They were testing the equipment on grapefruits earlier.Mr. Raville seemed pleased with the accuracy of the results.”

“And why wouldn’t he be?I hear those grapefruits have incredibly sensitive central nervous systems.Not to mention that the Fruit Anti-Vivisectionist and Scientific Experimentation lobby doesn’t really have much tug from what I hear.Grapefruits are much less politically scandalous than rabbits.”

Sainz blushed.“Please, I wouldn’t worry too much, Mr. Dorian.I’m sure she’ll come out just fine.”

“Except she’ll be dead for all intents and purposes.”Both of them would be, at least as far as the young lieutenant was concerned, but Dorian regretted the comment as soon as he made it.Sainz was already flustered enough without Dorian taking jabs at him.He was just trying to help a fundamentally helpless situation.

“So it’s pretty much like the old zap, eh?” he offered quickly.“Would you believe I’ve only zapped once in my whole life, and I was practically in a coma for that one.I couldn’t tell you what it’s like.”

“They sedate you,” Sainz said, ecstatic to be on another topic.“You feel a little tingly, then wake up wherever it is you were going.”

“Ah, so this will be more like lethal injection, then?That’s good to know.”

Sainz didn’t answer this time.Dorian couldn’t really blame him.

They waited for Amara.

For about the millionth time in the last few hours, Dorian really missed his array.It was amazing how much time one had to think about the future with nothing but the contents inside of your own head to keep you occupied.

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>

In the minutes leading up to a classic bombardment by an array ofFleisch Plasmatic Hammers, Firing Control alerts Engineering of their intention to deploy heavy weaponry by means of a white paper known as the Ordnance Compensation Estimate.This report provides a ready guideline of how many Hammers will be fired, at what time firing will commence, how many sequences will be fired per Hammer, and how many barrages in total are expected.In turn, Engineering takes these estimates, compares them against the projected bombardment schedule transmitted directly from the Bridge by the Cycle CO, then crunches all of these numbers through a well-documented and highly accurate conversion algorithm, the results of which are subsequently fed into the automated Combat Maneuvers Response System.The CMRS has one job:look at the provided variables, take into account what is known about the repulsive force of a Hammer discharge, analyze the barrage sequence and find a way to dynamically compensate for the recursive blowback of the weaponry’s discharge in such a way that the ship does not end up in a rolling like a sausage on a rotisserie in the frictionless combat environment of space.It’s a simple procedure, mostly handled by computers and software with minimal human intervention, and would more than likely be completely automated if not for the unwillingness of most naval Engineering sections to turn over control of their flight systems to trigger jockies on game day.

The bottom line is that immediately preceding any Fleisch Hammer bombardment, the decks of a warship vibrate distinctively as the fine thrust tubes are ramped up for compensation firing.In the space of about two seconds, the engines fire, the ship gives a brief lurch, and then the hammers let fly.

Ray felt the familiar deck vibration through his feet and up into his calves and instinctively reached out for something bolted to the floor to steady himself against.He stood in the tiny control room just off the flight staging bay, leaning against the back of Stine’s chair and pretending to watch over her shoulder as she unsuccessfully attempted to talk the terminal in front of her into accessing one ship’s service after another.She wasn’t having any luck at all and was getting rather testy about it, which was one of the reasons that neither Ray nor anyone else in the room was saying much of anything.Stine didn’t like the distraction of casual chatter while she worked.She liked silence broken up by her own muttered curses.The cursing grew steadily more florid as she met with failure to gain entry into every system (including even basic crew services) which she could find.

In fact, the only good things that had happened in the last several minutes were that the incursion alarms had inexplicably clicked off (much to Stine’s relief) and the ship’s comms seemed to have gone dead (much to Ray’s, as it gave them a valid excuse to seal the bay doors and not answer any pings that might come from security agents demanding access without arousing undue suspicion).

But most of his concentration was devoted to finding a mechanism that would allow him to jack around the invalid node error and regain command of his foam environment.It did not immediately occur to him that the vibration and lurch to which his body responded from habit and training constituted a signal event of some seriousness until the distant rumble of the Fleisch Hammers’ discharge rippled along the skin of the Indianapolis.

Ghast, who had been standing patiently near the door and doing his best to stay out of the way, caught himself against a rack of system monitors as the ship rolled a few degrees to port.“That can’t be good,” he said.

Youkilis craned forward intently and pressed his cheek against a bare wall section, counting the echoes of dissipation waves gamboling up through the deckplates as they buzzed against his skin.

“Four?”

“I get five,” Thomas said.

“I’m pretty sure it was four, but whatever the target was, it must have been pretty big.”

Thomas shrugged and went back to monitoring the command chatter.“It could be.It’s hard to hear with all this racket in my ear.”

Ray liked them this way.No one going crazy, everyone accepting surprises in stride.They were cool and collected and professional.“What do you hear from the C&C datburst?”

“The Bridge is going nuts,” Thomas said.“This Leet Commander Pyle is screaming something about his board not responding. . .something about it not being his fault.Now he’s ripping into some swab named Lloyd or something.Accusing him of sabotaging his–”His visible eye sprang wide and straightened sharply like he’d been stung.“Holy shit!We fired on the Juggernaut!Four Hammer burst, caught them broadside, pants down, opened them up like a trout from the buzz I’m getting.Distress calls starting to come in.The J’s Cycle Officer is. . .nope, explosion amidships.The Juggernaut’s Bridge just flamed out.Giari Tau’s admin comm is trying to break through the noise and see what’s going on–.”

Thomas slapped the side of his processor housing, then shook his head a couple of times like he was trying to clear fuzz out of his signal.After a few seconds, he stripped off his ex-array and flung it onto the table beside the monitors.“Nope.I’m dead.The datburst just went down.”

Ghast pushed off from the rack.“Why would they fire against one of their own ships?And without any warning?”

Stine slumped in her seat.“System access is off-line, too.All of the auxiliary functions just got kicked off the core.We’re locked out.”

Thomas said:“The Cycle Officer claimed his board was down right after the attack.I could hear someone in the background shouting that the system had been compromised.So who took control of the Bridge functions?Crikey, you’d have to have a mainline directly into the core and wicked fast reflexes to shut out the secure overrides.”

“It wasn’t us, that’s for sure,” Stine muttered.“But I recommend that we not make ourselves available when folks start handing out blame.”

“We know who’s responsible,” Ray said evenly.He followed Thomas’s example and removed his array.“Anybody still have foam access?”

Ghast’s eyelid fluttered.“Not here.All I get is connex lookup errors.Looks like he killed the nodes.”

“That would be the best way to keep jacks from restoring core access once you’d taken control,” Stine agreed.“It’s tough to break into a house without any doors.”

“Yeah, but he’s locked himself in,” Youkilis objected.“That’s good, right?”

Thomas grunted.“He’s contained inside the self-sufficient datacore of a Magellan class battle cruiser fully armed with planet busting technological terrors.He can fly it, fire it, and when he runs out of ammunition or fuel, can recalibrate the datburst on a secure military channel and zap his package anywhere in human space in a matter of microseconds.I don’t see how that qualifies as good.”

“Oh yeah, this is bad,” Stine said.

But Ghast shook his head.“I don’t think he’s interested in jumping ship, or in hurtling himself across space.My guess is that he took out the J so he wouldn’t have to be looking over his shoulder while he tried to work.”

“Five thousand Marines—plus or minus—and ship’s crew so he could call the shots?”Thomas whistled.“That’s cold.”

“What do you want us to do, boss?” Ghast asked.

It was cold, Ray realized.The choices of a man who believed the universe would be destroyed if he did not act decisively.In Ray’s experience, there were three kinds of men:those willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs, those willing to sacrifice others, and most dangerous of all, those willing to do both.The package of Raville wasn’t even a man.It probably wouldn’t have any problem self-terminating once it accomplished its hard coded mission.
“If he went after the Juggernaut because it was potentially a threat, he won’t hesitate to start opening airlocks and bulkheads to shed crew who prove troublesome,” Ray answered.He pointed at Youkilis and Thomas.“I want you two to start going through the supply lockers.See if there are any e-suits, even if they’re just emergency units.We can assume that Raville has control of life support from the core, and I don’t want him to be able to hold a sword over our heads.Stine, you keep at it.”She started to protest, but he waved her off.“If he slips, if he loses focus for just an instant, or finds that there’s something he needs outside his little kingdom, I want us ready to worm our way inside.If it happens, you’ll only have the one opportunity, so don’t miss it.”

She nodded.“Aye, Captain.”

“And me?” Ghast asked.

Ray hesitated.The decision he had been dreading was upon him.What to do?Believe what Amara had said, or continue to dither, hoping that they would learn something that would help him understand.It didn’t help that he already knew which choice Raville would have him make, and he trusted Raville not at all.Still, best to be prepared.

“Find that pry bar you were talking about.If it comes down to it, I want us ready to destroy the device.”

The order clearly made Ghast uneasy, moreso because neither one of them were certain they could even recognize what it was when the coming down finally occurred.But he held his opinions in check and said only,“I can work something out, I’m sure.”

“Then see if Gallegos and Anderson have made any progress interpreting the nav and diagnostic inputs.Maybe that will tell us something useful.In any event, while you’re finding out the best place to smack it to turn it into scrap, you might also see if you can figure out if there’s a way to launch it and deliver the payload to its intended target with only our local resources and at a moment’s notice.”

“You give the word, and I’ll be ready.”

“I’m supposing from your grin, Mr. Ghast, that you’ve already made up your mind about which outcome you would prefer.”

“My only preference is that we figure out what Raville’s package wants us to do, and then we do the opposite.Distrusting him is the only thing I can count on.”Ghast’s grin faded.“And last I heard, he wants us to destroy it.”

“I concur with your assessment, if that means anything,” Ray said.“Unfortunately, destroying it was also what Amara wanted us to do.Make of that what you will, just make sure you’re standing by.And that you remain mentally flexible.Capisce?”

“Aye.”

He watched the three of them troop out the door, feeling once again like he was missing something vital.When all else fails, he had learned, cover as many variables as you can and hope that it’s enough.He’d done all he could think to do—except what Amara had specifically told him his responsibility was ( destroy the bomb!), of course—and still felt paralyzed.Too much had turned out to not be what it seemed.Every decision came with a constant refrain of misgivings.

This is what comes from making deals with gods, he thought.Everything became complicated.Everything was intrigue and backstabbing and hidden agendas.Give him an old fashioned ideologically schismatic political uprising any day.One side held the power and the other one wanted it.Your team was whichever one wasn’t shooting at you at the moment.That was all you had to understand, and as long as you kept your guns loaded and your enemies in front of you, the appropriate course was nearly always obvious.

He desperately wanted to understand now.He’d live or die happily with whatever decision he made, as long as he could believe that he was making the right one, and for that kind of faith, he required understanding.

Stine looked up suddenly.“Do you feel that?”

He did.The gentle throbbing tremor of a course adjustment.The Indianapolis was heeling onto its side.To maintain relative attitude, massive servomotors shifted the inner hull on a buffer liquid nanocarbon bearings.

“What do you think it means?”

This much he understood, at least.“Fleisch Hammers aren’t an effective surface bombardment tool at this range.Raville is bringing a different ordnance battery to bear.Most likely Spriggs-Detmers.He’ll need to make sure he punches a good hundred to hundred and fifty meters into the bedrock to root them all out.”

“Surface—?” Stine began, then stopped.“Why go after the station?Raville already controls the ship and the bomb.”

“Because humanity is a self-destructive species.We’ll always find a way to build another bomb or start another war.I think Raville means to remove himself from the equation.His actual self, I mean.Without Raville to drive the engine of war, it sits in the desert and rusts.”

“Dorian and Cain are down there, too.”

Ray considered this for a moment, then shrugged.“Amara is more than capable of taking care of herself.I imagine she’ll keep an eye on John as well.Between you and me, I think she’s sweet on him, God knows why.”

A glint of renewed resolve shone in Stine’s gaze, and she chewed her lip in thought.“I’ll see what I can do to slow him down, anyway.I don’t particularly care for Mr. Raville in either format, so it’s no big loss to me if he succeeds, but this was an awful long way to travel just to see a fireworks display.”

“Indeed.Besides, we don’t even have good seats for the show.”

Ray left Stine hard at it a few moments later and wandered back out into the flight staging bay.He found Ghast with Gallegos and Anderson, hunched over a much abused and oil stained diagnostic terminal.The screen was small and of an ancient design, graphically limited to amber text scrolling across a black screen.The prox on the cart’s shelf beneath it groaned audibly as it struggled to comply with whatever data requests they were making of it.One of them had run a complex series of bundled data cords from the connexed diagnostic array hanging from the ceiling to ports on the back side of the terminal box.

Ghast looked over his shoulder as Ray approached, and hefted a length of stout metal pipe he had set on the side of the cart.Ray returned a grim nod of approval.

“What’s our status?” he asked.

“Well, Pig here has been trying to extract hard coded nav data from the bomb’s processing cone and the diagnostic array for the last half hour,” Ghast answered, sounding discouraged.“The problem is that the prox on this machine isn’t really up to the task.It looks like they were using this box mostly to check node connections and evaluate the electrical system’s efficiency.It’s dizzyingly outdated.The native operating system is an old SWEL build, and doesn’t have much capability beyond running the node apps.To give us some more functionality, Anderson pulled the guts on the default operating system and managed to load a chunk of generic proto-FLEX OS with some personalized decoding and analysis scripts she had stuffed in her foam.The build logs indicate that she got most of it in before the system went down, but there are some problems getting her code to communicate with the spew coming out of the bomb.”

“Just normal debugging,” Anderson said, shrugging.“Not really a problem per se if time wasn’t a factor.”

“Except time is a factor,” Ray reminded them all.“Is there any benefit to bypassing this machine completely and patching the spew from the diagnostic and nav array through to the machines in the control room?”

Gallegos shook his head.“No.Those machines are networked to the datacore through slaved foam connexes.We plug anything into them and Raville will have the ability to override launch commands from the core.Right now, the array is operating independently of the network, and we probably want to keep it that way right up until we decide to plug into mission control and start the launch sequence.”

“I see.Is there anything I can do to help?”

None of them answered, and Ray didn’t push them.He wasn’t sure what kind of assistance he would be able to offer them anyway.He was the lord of an ever-shrinking kingdom.They were all doing everything that they could.He turned back toward the control room in time to encounter Thomas and Youkilis returning from the front compartment with what appeared to be clear plastic garment bags slung over their shoulders.

“We found four full suits,” Thomas said.“They’re emergency suits, designed to handle sudden or acute depressurization only.No central heating units and the outer membranes are too thin too provide much protection in extreme environments, so if you get flushed out into space, you’re dead.Good news is that they come with the latest self-contained osmosis breathing apparatus, so you’ll have plenty of breathable air while you freeze to death.”

Four did not divide into seven in any way that Ray found comforting, but he hid his disappointment.“Store them in the control room with Stine.See if she needs any assistance.If not, check the security lock on the door to the corridor again just in case we need to prepare to receive visitors, then report to Mr. Ghast for further instructions.”

The two men nodded glumly and trudged off.Ray suspected that they had done the math themselves and didn’t like the answer they had received any more than he did.There was nothing he could say to encourage them.

He had no concrete plan of action.

He had led his crew into hostile territory with no weapons, no clear objective and no fall back options.

And now, he didn’t even have a way to help them escape safely.

In any other operation, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to place his crew in such dire straits.He would have named a clear target, detailed an attack sequence, executed the plan and then bugged out.Anything went wrong with the carefully ordered plan, and he would have killed it on the spot, simply walked away.

But he hadn’t done that.He had allowed himself to be caught up in the affairs of gods.He had chosen to believe. . .

Ah!That was the problem, wasn’t it?When a man started believing, he stopped seeing the physical world and lulling himself with visions of the spiritual realm.He started to accept that events were destined, and that he had a place in that destiny.He started trusting in the power of gods instead of the strength of his own two hands, and when a man believed that gods were on his side, he would dare much that he wouldn’t normally.That he shouldn’t.

Pure hubris, Ray thought, imagining that he had a place in the plans of gods.Gods had their own agendas.How could he have forgotten that?

Of course, hubris was like paranoia.It was only a delusion if it wasn’t true.

And truth?Truth was whatever you believed it to be.

There was no explosion of light, no rush of air, just an instantaneous awareness that something in the equilibrium normally maintained by time and space had shifted, if only for a microsecond.Behind him, someone—it sounded like Anderson—let out an alarmed gasp.Ray blinked between one moment and the next, and they were simply there.

Dorian, Amara and Raville.The Michael Raville, he assumed.

For some reason, this did not surprise him at all.He didn’t know what it meant—who had won, who had lost, who had convinced who that they were right–but it meant something, at least.A promise of answers to all the questions he had asked.Activity in the staging bay slammed to a halt.Ray was aware of Ghast, Anderson and Gallegos watching silently over his shoulder, and even of Stine slowly rising from her chair and peering through the plastisheen windows, her work temporarily forgotten.

He did his best to hide his surprise, but he found himself grinning uncontrollably.He bowed with a flourish to greet them.

“You’ve proven me a liar once again, Ms. Cain,” he said evenly, willing his voice not to tremble.“Now I’m going to have to work on my farewell speech all over again.”

“Not a liar, just a pessimist,” Amara answered.“But I see you’ve held up your end of the bargain.I never doubted that you would, of course.”

Michael Raville looked about him fearfully, chest heaving and his eyes rolling wildly in their sockets.He took an unsteady step forward, his body still uncertain of its reliability after its unanticipated relocation.

“What are they doing to my device?” he demanded.His voice cut through the bay’s open space like a screech.“Stay away from there!You don’t understand–”

Ray maneuvered himself between Raville and the bomb.“Merely attempting to discover how it works,” he said soothingly.He made careful eye contact with Amara, looking for some indication that he had not failed her.“We haven’t broken anything.Not yet, at least.”

To his relief, she smiled.“That’s good.It turns out that we may have a use for it after all.”

Ghast exhaled thunderously, as though he’d been holding his breath for both of them.

But Raville only frowned, his fears temporarily allayed.He swung back to Amara.“We’ve got twelve minutes to shut down the core before he obtains a firing solution on the station.”

“News travels fast even without the Strand, apparently,” Ray said, arching an eyebrow.

“Michael Raville, meet Captain Ray Morrical, most recently of the Proletariat Horde,” Amara said.

Raville considered him warily.“I know who he is.”

“I’d be lying if I said it was a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Ray returned.His tone was cordial, at least.

“Likewise, Captain.Would you care to brief us on the situation as you see it?”

“As far as we can tell, Raville—that is, the digital version and not, I assume, one of your active minions–has taken full control of the datacore and sealed off node access.The shipboard systems have been cut off, communications are down, and as you’ve seen, he has complete control of the ship’s considerable arsenal.Datburst communications are down, as are the connex channels, so even our foam environments are inaccessible.We’re attempting to uncover any access points he may have missed, but haven’t had any luck thus far, and frankly, we’re not very optimistic.”Ray pursed his lips sourly.“I hope you brought your thinking caps along.”

“You’re going to have to jack directly into the control boxes from the machine room,” Dorian answered without a pause.“He can shut down the system transmission nodes, but there have to be hardline emergency access nodes directly into the BIOS on the boxes themselves.In the event of a major core crash, techs have to have some mechanism for loading recovery scripts onto a futzed network.He may control the data environment, but without hands, he wouldn’t be able to knock those out from the inside.If we can get into the BIOS, obtaining access to the core data is a piece of cake.”

“A fine plan of attack,” Ray observed.“However, getting to the machine room from here presents something of a challenge.Unless, of course, you’ve discovered a way to convince a couple thousand hostile naval crewmen in the middle of an undeclared, and thus imminently confusingfull battle alert that we mean them no harm.”

Dorian nudged Amara with his elbow.“We can get there the same way we got here.”

“No, we can’t,” Amara responded.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not the way I’ve chosen to do it.”

“That would be the fastest way,” Dorian protested.“Obviously, I’m the small fish here when it comes to making decisions, but I think I ought to point out once again for the record that we’re in a bit of a hurry here, and the crew of this ship isn’t likely to do anything but slow us down.”

She pressed a finger against her lip.“It’s true that it would be the fastest way.But in this case, it’s not the best way.”

Dorian opened his mouth to respond, but he was interrupted by the clangor of hurried footsteps banging toward them from the outer compartment.Youkilis entered the flight bay at a dead run, then stumbled awkwardly to a halt, flushed and out of breath.He stared at the new arrivals, his expression transforming from one of urgency to simple uncomprehending wonder.

“Something to report, Mr. Youkilis?”Ray prompted him.

The young man snapped to attention.“Uh, yessir.Someone is knocking at the bulkhead door.The door to the corridor, I mean.”

“Knocking?” Ray asked.

Amara smiled. “Then let them in.”

“Begging your pardon, Ms. Cain, but it might be, you know, soldiers looking for us.We had a little excitement–”

“Of course it’s soldiers.They’re your escort to the machine room.Let them in, please.”

Youkilis didn’t move, unable to process the order.

“Do as she says,” Ray instructed him.

The young man nodded uncertainly, but did not protest and ran back out of the room.

“You’re still full of surprises, my dear.”

“I’m learning that the ability to surprise is a precious commodity.It’s one of the things that make us human.”

“And keeps us that way, hopefully,” Dorian added.

Ray peered at them curiously, wondering what exactly this exchange meant.It would explain much that remained a mystery, he suspected, if he had the context to put it in, but he did not have the opportunity to ask.Youkilis and Thomas returned almost immediately with a cadre of armed Marines in tow.Ray counted more than a dozen, and he could see at least that many more crammed into the outer compartment through the inner bulkhead door.The Marine who seemed to be in charge pulled up in front of Amara and started to salute before he realized what he was doing and let his hand fall to his side.

“I heard your call,” the young Marine said, sounding chagrined.“I thought I was going crazy.”

“Yet you still came, and I see you also managed to bring a few of your friends along.Well done, Korin.You did exactly what I needed.”

Lieutenant Sainz lowered his head.“I only did what you told me to do.I told them the truth.They all made the decision to come on their own.”

“You’ve done wonderfully so far, but I need to ask another favor of you.Do you know where the machine room for the datacore is?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you please escort John and Mr. Raville there and make sure that they have some space to work uninterrupted?”

Sainz glanced uneasily at his fellow Marines.“That might be difficult.Ship security has confined non-essential personnel to quarters and the datacore and central systems labs have been cordoned off since we fired on the Juggernaut.We can handle the security patrols without a problem, but grapevine chatter reads that the core has been compromised by a hostile and Security itself is locked out.Word is that the bulkhead doors into the restricted zone have been automatically sealed with command level locks.If that’s true, there’s probably a whole matrix of sensor arrays and idiot sirens that will have to be eluded between here and there.”

“This is important, Lieutenant.This ship is even now preparing to fire on the Giari Tau station, just as it did on the Juggernaut.Hundreds of people will die if we don’t stop it.”

Sainz paused briefly, as though considering the complexity of the task, then said, “We can manage it.There’s a network of maintenance tubes that should allow us to get into the restricted area without tripping bulkhead sensors, at least.I’ll have to consult with one of our Engineering dorks to be sure we have a reliable route.”

Amara nodded.“You need to hurry.We may have only a few minutes.”

“Then we’d better get moving.”Lieutenant Sainz did salute this time, textbook stiff, as though paying respects to a commanding officer.Ray supposed that in a way, it was exactly what he was doing.“Gentlemen, follow me.”

He turned sharply on his heel and headed for the exit.Dorian and Raville scowled at one another unhappily, but with no other recourse, chased Lieutenant Sainz and his Marines out of the flight bay.Amara waited until they were gone before crossing over to Ray and placing her arm companionably about his waist.

“I guess that just leaves us,” she said, bubbling with an enthusiasm Ray did not comprehend.“Come on, Captain.We’ve got some work of our own to accomplish before they return.”

He didn’t ask for an explanation, just followed where she led.

They followed a mop-haired, hollow-chested Engineering dweeb named Shimkus who reminded Dorian of a chimpanzee with the way he ducked into service tunnels, sniffed the air and then proceeded to scale annoyingly tight spaces with alarming speed and agility, as though scent alone was his guide.He called out obscure section names as they transitioned from one deck to the next, not so much communicating in any way Dorian could really understand as chittering for its own sake.Like a monkey.But he was quick and efficient and seemed to have intimate knowledge of every false access panel and hidden, stooped gangway on the ship.Dorian had no choice but to follow as best he could.Their route had him completely bewildered within thirty seconds of leaving the staging bay.

Raville worried frequently and out loud about the time.As they made their way rung by rung down a long vertical shaft, Lieutenant Sainz confided to Dorian that under normal circumstances, a jaunt to the machine room from the flight bays where he had found them would take nearly ten minutes at a brisk pace.Dorian winced at the estimate.The station didn’t have that long if Raville chose to fire the instant he obtained a firing solution, and he didn’t see any reason why Raville wouldn’t.After all, what good was having an entire battle cruiser at your disposal and going to the trouble to wrench it into firing position if you weren’t going to use it?

“And how long by this route?” he asked.

Sainz paused, gripping the rungs of the ladder loosely so that his body hung carelessly out into empty space.He looked pensively up into the gloom and said, “Maybe seven.Six and a half if we hurry.”

Three extra realtime minutes to save all the lives on Giari Tau.

Great.

Assuming Raville didn’t catch on to what they were doing and flood the tunnels with a nerve agent, that is. Or wait until they came near an evacuation zone and open the airlocks to the void. Or perhaps something even worse, whatever his devious little digital mind could come up with to either slow them down or kill them outright.

They raced through the ship, down the strangely vacant corridors and through hauntingly quiet labs and workrooms on their way to yet more service ducts and grubby maintenance tubes, but Shimkus apparently knew what he was doing.They did not encounter any security patrols, and if they tripped any incursion sensors, the alarms were silent.

They did not die, which Dorian took as a good sign.

Not that it mattered to him tremendously.Amara would be gone one way or the other,digitized, molecularly deconstructed and mailed back to the Exousiai, sometime in the next seventeen hours.Whether they saved the station or not, whether they rescued the universe from data absorption or not, Amara was dead.She’d already given her consent to the execution, and there was nothing he could do about it.The rest was just details.

At last, they crawled one after the other out of a cooling system service tube into what seemed to be a wireless node switchroom.It smelled like a switchroom, at least, full of the ozone reek of electronic gateways and musty odor of accreted dust bunnies, but Dorian couldn’t see clearly in the dim glow of the few flashlights amongst them.Shimkus knuckled over to the front door, opened it a crack and peeked out into the corridor beyond.He returned almost at once.

“We’re about ten meters down the hall from the machine room.I make two teams of IT guys off to the left.One set was worrying at the door with an assortment of maglock cracking hardware, it looks like.The other was pawing around the intersection acting like ship’s security, sweeping for hostiles.I think one of them may have been an agent.”He waggled his fingers against his neck.“Got a red collar.”

“May have been?”Sainz chewed the words slowly.

“Right, right.We’re obviously not the only ones who thought about getting at the core via the control boxes.But they neglected to take into account the repulsor charges embedded in the deck plates.Looks like the core hit them with a ton of juice to keep them out.”

Raville blinked in consternation.“The deck plating is electrified?”

Shimkus sniffed at him like he was being an idiot.“The machine room is right up there with the Bridge in terms of its essential operating capacity.The techs inside have to be able to defend their position while they purge the core in the event that the ship is boarded.Losing the ship is a small cost compared to opening up your whole data network to the enemy.”

“Are there technicians stationed inside the machine room?” Raville asked.

Sainz glanced about the crowded room.He had brought maybe twenty Marines with him.“If there are, I don’t think they’ll put up much resistance.”

But Shimkus shook his head sadly.“There probably were technicians on station, but the room is equipped with suicide gas decanters as a last ditch security measure to protect core integrity, so I’m guessing not now.”

“Great,” Dorian grumbled.Suicide gas.The atmosphere inside would still be toxic.“Any bright ideas?”

Shimkus opened a utility closet near the door and removed a pair of osmosis masks.“Wear these.Work fast.”

“We still have to get inside across the electrified deck,” Raville pointed out.

Shimkus fished inside his shirt and took out a bungee strap necklace which held a maintenance turnkey that glinted in the feeble light.He pointed to a space on the floor beneath Dorian’s feet.“Old wiring conduit there, cramped but serviceable.The key works on both ends.With any luck, no one will have thought to cram the conduit full of sensors.”

Dorian glanced from Shimkus to Lieutenant Sainz, but neither one seemed chock full of confidence.He snatched the key and dropped to his knees, hunting out the recessed lock by touch.Sainz swept the floor with his flashlight’s beam, and the rough shape of the panel became apparent.

“As soon as you’re gone,” Sainz said, “my men and I will disperse into the corridor and see if we can’t provide something of a diversion.”

“A diversion,”Raville muttered.“Against an opponent comprised of packets of active information and which possesses the capacity to monitor and utilize the full complement of the datacore’s systems all at once.Brilliant.”

“Or we can just wait in here until we hear the screams that let us know you failed, if that’s what you prefer,” the lieutenant responded grimly.

Dorian wrestled the panel open and dropped into the darkness below.A short drop, thankfully, little more than a meter.Someone passed him a flashlight, and he stooped to explore the passage.Shimkus hadn’t been lying.It was definitely cramped.Bundles of old pre-connex photon impulse cables hung from the top and sides of the tube like atrophied muscle tissue.The conduit smelled old and abandoned, funky with wire insulation rot.Good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic, but as long as the tunnel didn’t bend too sharply, it wouldn’t present an insurmountable obstacle.

He popped back out, only his head and shoulders rising above deck level, and waved for Raville to follow.To Sainz, he said:“Go ahead and make some noise.Be safe about it, though, and give us two minutes to squirm through to the other side before hammering away.It can’t hurt.”

“Don’t forget to put your mask on,” the lieutenant said.“See you in a few minutes.”

Dorian lowered himself back inside, then dropped onto his belly and began to drag himself down the long conduit on his elbows.

Ray was sure he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“You want us to what?”

He couldn’t be sure, but he was fairly certain that he sounded borderline hysterical.He felt borderline hysterical.

“Trust me,” Amara said.“I know what I’m doing.”

Wink.

“This is distinctly unpleasant,” Raville said, his voice muffled by his mask.He was panting hard, and Dorian entertained the fleeting hope that it wasn’t working correctly.A part of him would very much enjoy watching Raville’s death squirms as he was suffocated by the gas he himself (sort of, anyway) had released.

More likely though, his gasping was due to simple fatigue.Ten meters didn’t sound like much of a distance, but Dorian hadn’t done it on his elbows and knees since basic training, and the new body didn’t seem to like it any more than the old one had.He could feel the strain of dragging himself down the conduit through his shoulders and all the way down to the small of his back.He wasn’t in the mood for Raville’s whining.

“You don’t get to complain,” he growled.He had to raise his voice a bit.Sainz and his men were fully into diversion mode.Dorian wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it seemed to involve a lot of shouting and gunfire and the occasional bone-vibrating discharge of a massive wad of electrical energy that made his hair stand on end.It sounded interesting, at least, whether or not it was actually doing any good.

He continued:“This is your mess.The rest of us were just unlucky enough to cross your event horizon.”

“You can’t honestly believe that.”

“Sure I can.This is your package we’re going to hunt down.You’re the one who built the bomb.If you want to take it back to the beginning, as a subset of your pattern-father or whatever, you’re the one who decided to screw with the Exousiai in the first place.You’re the one who sent Amara here and expected her to serve your stupid plot.Why shouldn’t I blame you?”

Raville didn’t answer at once, and Dorian assumed he was being ignored rather than that he had scored a pointin his favor.Raville was much too arrogant to concede that he might be an asshole.

But when he did answer, Raville sounded oddly subdued.“This is about her, isn’t it?Your dislike of me, your constant troublemaking, your determination to be a thorn in everyone’s side. It isn’t because you aren’t willing to help save the world if asked, it’s that you’re angry.You’re angry with me because you believe that I’m the one who decided she had to sacrifice her human incarnation.”

Dorian snorted.“I hate it when you do that.Sacrifice her human incarnation.Stop glossing over it.You don’t know what it means to be Exousian any more than I do.You don’t know if she’ll survive the transition back to that universe, and even if she does, she won’t be Amara anymore.She’ll be part of the entity, and if part of it that contains her pattern survives the bomb, it still won’t matter.She’ll just be a fragment.You’re murdering her either way.”

“As part of the Exousiai, there’s the distinct possibility—“

“Shut up about the Exousiai, okay?What do you really even know about them?You’re not part of the entity.You’re a subset of a disgruntled pattern who built you specifically to hate what you came from.The whole experience of the entity is just a mediated memory for you, a corrupted simulacrum you replicated in the quae-ha-distra you cooked up for your own amusement back when you still believed in their bullshit.You want to know what I think?I think you must still believe half of the lies they told you, otherwise you wouldn’t spend so much time whining about how you’re merely reconverting her to her true form rather than murdering her.Every time you say that, you try to implicate her in her own death, saying that she’s part of the same pattern that created you and so she is just as responsible for these events as you are.You try to make her guilty for her own execution.That’s what pisses me off.Why can’t you just admit that the only reason you’re killing her is because it’s necessary to this plan you’ve cooked up?”

“She isn’t human, Dorian.You know that.She was made for this purpose.”

“For a guy who talks so much about how essential it is to make the Exousiai spontaneous again, you’re very focused on this idea of predetermination.It’s vital for every one of the Exousiai to get free will and autonomy out of this deal except Amara, is that it?She has to do what she was made to do, but the rest of you get to choose what you want.”

“She did choose this,” Raville said, though not stridently, as he expected.He spoke quietly, almost reverently.“She chose it then, and she chooses it again now.The sacrifice she makes means more here, in fact, than it did when she was a component of the entity, because she makes it of her own free will.She makes it cognizant of what she is giving up, measuring her sacrifice against the experience and intuitive knowledge of being autonomous rather than making a dry and academic surrender to an abstract idea of autonomy.You’re absolutely right:there is more of the entity in her than there is in me, John.She knows how to savor the oneness of the Exousiai, and yet she still chooses to give it all up—both the oneness and the radical individualism of humanity—so that we both might live.You should honor her for her courage, for her self-sacrifice and for her love.The Exousiai are not gods, but if there is anything within them with the potential to be godlike, it was distilled to perfection in the form of that girl.”

Dorian dragged himself forward, and encountered a wall directly ahead.Space opened above him, and he realized that he had come to the end of the conduit.He wriggled forward and managed to draw his knees up under him so that his back pressed against the floor panel above.He searched for the lock with his fingers, found it and inserted the key.The latch clicked open, and he felt the panel give way when he pushed against it.

He glanced down at Raville, who had worked himself to the end of the conduit and lay still directly below Dorian, his face showing between Dorian’s knees.He could smell chemicals, harsh and biting like a particularly vile astringent.Wisps of milky white gas, visible in the beam of his flashlight, boiled in through the gap created by the open panel.

Raville meant the things that he said.He believed them as fervently as any religious zealot.Amara was not his tool, but an icon to be adored.

In his own way, Michael Raville had come to love Amara, to care about her as much as Dorian himself did.

The thought made his stomach churn.

“I don’t care how much you admire her,” he said, whispering into the dark.“I still hate you.”

For whatever reason, Raville did not protest this time.Maybe the feeling was mutual.

Dorian looked away.“Let’s get this done.”

And so he had come full circle.

Seated at an emergency system console hard-connexed to the primary datacore moderator housing, the darkness illuminated only by the glow of his monitor and red hazard lights which pulsed in recessed sconces high on the walls, the familiar feel of a keypad clicking against his fingertips, he could not help but remember that this was how it had all started:drilling down through file structures and trees of system logic to root out a spider.

Of course, his work environment had been better then, his priorities clearer, or at least so he imagined.At least in his office there hadn’t been corpses littered about the floor or slumped over in neighboring workspaces, their faces contorted in variously horrific expressions of death-agony.Nor had the air been fogged with brain corroding chemicals that spurted irregularly from pinpoint jets hidden in the walls.Most of all, the basement of the Archive had held only a simulacrum of Michael Raville contained in its own impregnable environment, rather than the actual one tethered by a hardline plug from his array directly into the datacore moderator.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.Or got patently worse.

The good news was that both he and Raville had foam access once again, provided by the central datburst origin node—a hardware mainline straight into the heart of the computational universe.

As he skipped through the text of his foam’s file structure, marshalling his tools to jack into the datacore, Dorian wasn’t sure what he had accomplished in the intervening weeks and months, if anything.He’d met a girl, found out that she was a god, then not a god, possibly fallen in love with her, jacked some datacores, ruined his career, and abandoned the only life he had ever known.It felt like activity without any real progress.Maybe the stakes were higher, though it was hard to tell.Was there any difference between saving digitally frozen representations of life and the actual lives themselves?Not that he’d really done much of the latter thus far.The universe was just as close to the brink of disaster as it had been when they began.

But the spider had grown, that much was certain.Or perhaps more properly, he and the spider had exchanged roles.Dorian had become the spider, gnawing his way stealthily into a network that was not his own to extract data (or in this case, a data package) he believed would rescue the world from destruction.

Funny how things worked out sometimes.

He could have saved them all a lot of pain and suffering if he’d just deleted Raville’s rogue package in the first place.Dorian didn’t figure that he’d make the same mistake twice.God Himself—that is, the card carrying, members only God, with a glowing entourage of Heavenly Host and visage more radiant than the sun, rather than aliens with delusions of grandeur—would be hard pressed to convince him to do anything but hit the delete key this time.Maybe he’d just make absolutely sure of it and dump the whole core.That would piss off DeMartel and Temple, their beautiful battle cruiser instantly transmogrified into a floating metal turd locked in a dead orbit about a frozen moon.It would take weeks to rebuild the basic systems from scratch, just so they could limp home.Or even better, they’d have to endure the career-ending embarrassment of flashing the Strat naval shipyards for a datacore reinitialization scheme.

He liked that idea.He might purge the core anyway, even if Raville threw his hands up in surrender and voluntarily exited the ship’s network on the first pass.

He made what he hoped was eye contact with Michael Raville.His vision was too bleary to see that far with any clarity.His eyes had begun to burn almost immediately upon entering the machine room despite the protections the mask offered, and he was developing a painfully itchy rash where his skin was exposed.He worried constantly about his assorted unguarded mucous membranes.Which made it a good thing that he was so scared, he supposed.His anus was pinched so tight, nothing was worming its way in there.

And every time he almost settled down, the electrified deck just outside the door would give out a thunderous whump! and fill the room with the stench of ozone and flash baked carpet fiber.Even less encouraging was the muffled pop and rattle of gunfire, which seemed to be drawing nearer.Once, he thought he had heard Lieutenant Sainz shouting down the hall, telling them to hurry.But he might have just imagined it.It was turning out to be a bad day for nerves.

“Are you ready?”

“I’d better be,” Raville answered.He was sitting cross-legged on the floor a short distance from Dorian’s terminal, his back against the box of the moderator housing.“We’ve got less than three minutes by my watch.”

“Plenty of time.Once I kick open the gate, I’m going directly for Firing Control.If I can take away his ability to play with the weapons of mass destruction first, we’ll have space to breathe. . .at least until he figures out that the ship constitutes about a million tons of the lethal battering ram.”

That wasn’t really what he was worried about.Raville’s package had to have been aware for some time that the bomb was on board the Indianapolis.It wasn’t the bomb he was after.It was Raville himself.Or Amara.Maybe both of them.Take out all the parts of the war equation and the possibility of war ceased to exist.

If the package hadn’t realized that his targets were all aboard yet, he would in about three seconds, and then they’d have to act quickly.

Dorian wondered how long it would take to work the thrust tubes up to a self-destructive critical mass.Assuming, of course, that the ship didn’t come with its very own doomsday self-destruct device.

He forced himself to put away such cheery thoughts.

Small circles, happy circles, he reminded himself.

“While you do that, I’ll track down. . .myself,” Raville said humorlessly.

“Send up a flare when you find him, and I’ll see what I can do to assist you with containment.You probably won’t have to look very hard.As soon as he reads your ip, more than likely he’ll come after you.I assume you don’t need any advice on how to handle your part of this job.”

“Please.I haven’t forgotten everything I ever learned about seenop incursion techniques.”Raville smiled hesitantly.“But if you have the cycles to spare, I wouldn’t object to some extra fireproofing.”

“I’ll take that as high praise, Mr. Raville.The system is up; security is clamping down.We have our projected access punch point, which I’m transmitting to your foam now.I’ll blaze the trail, you just do your best to follow until we get through the trees.”Dorian held up three fingers.“Get ready.We go in three, two. . .”

One.

He punched the execute sequence, launching the first salvo in a vicious script blizzard designed to camouflage the exact vector of their assault.A cascade of feedback logs and failed load messages poured across the screen.

They were off and running.

Dorian wished he had his array.Wished for it harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life.The Strat datacore scheme was feverishly dense, dizzyingly secured.Military ice was always hard to scale, quick to sled you off at oblique angles, spin your scripts off free-fall ledges and into maddening tailspins.It presented an impermeable sheet of interlocking, adaptive code blocks that dynamically repaired apparent breaches.Every time you thought you had traction, the scuffs your incursion codes and malware scripts created instantaneously vanished, and you once again found yourself sliding down the face of a vertical cliff.

He watched the data spewing across his screen at a rate that was nearly impossible to follow.Icebreaker programs launched, crashed and vanished from his display before he could even process which ones they had been.He didn’t have time to reference the logs to determine which sequences were working and which weren’t, which code was hacking even a precious partial step into the undergrowth, and which was failing before it was even unsheathed.He drove forward primarily by intuition, relying on his experience with military networks in the past.

Load this one; load that one; resequence the attack so the defenses couldn’t automate a response—couldn’t start eating into his environment to shut him down at the source.He monitored his own recursive defenses for traceback holes the network or Raville might be trying to bore into his foam.

Dorian’s advantage was that he didn’t have to negotiate jump points into the network that could be spontaneously closed or rerouted into interminable logic loops by native security procedures.He couldn’t be kicked off the core.The moderator’s access terminal provided him with an open door directly into the lowest circles of data hell.His job was to open as many other doors at once as he could, then shove a blinding storm of random bits through each portal faster than the network, and subsequently Raville’s package, could analyze them for coherence and recognize the origin of the true incursion attempt.

Once they were inside, it was a simple footrace to see who could shut down whose access and command scripts the fastest.

The central question was what Raville’s package expected, and how much care and time he had taken to lay down his defenses.Dorian was keenly aware that he had carried Raville inside his foam for many months.There had been ample opportunity for him to see Dorian’s code magery at work and to analyze his library of jackware.If Raville had thought he only needed to defend himself against the Indianapolis’s attempts to regain control of its datacore and trusted his security to merely shutting down node access, then he had a real chance of breaking through.But if Raville had anticipated that Dorian would come after him and had laid traps using Dorian’s own counterscripts against him, then all was lost.He didn’t have time to come up with an entirely fresh scheme of attack against the full archive of all the best work he had ever done.

His plan was simple and not the least bit elegant:hit hard, dig deep and do it on a scale so massive that moderator prox couldn’t keep up with the assault.In short, use the expansive capability of one of the premier pieces of military computational hardware in the universe against itself.In the back of his mind, he was counting on technicians and IT wonks, security agents and idle information seekers all across the ship to help him, each of them probing the system for jump points, and when they found a crack, hammering at it until the core’s defenses were overwhelmed by their combined pressure.

Just over a minute into the attempt, Raville announced, “I’m in.The datascape just opened up.”

Moments later, Dorian’s terminal screen filled with overlayed representations of the complex mappings that comprised the multifaceted datacore of the T.E.S. Indianapolis.Dorian let out a brief whoop of satisfaction.

He had broken the datacore’s security much quicker than he anticipated, which meant that Raville had been caught by surprise.It also meant that the Strat naval forces seriously needed to upgrade their tech expertise.Dorian would enjoy rubbing that in Kesh Temple’s face if the opportunity arose.

He bent over his keypad.The first thing he did was to shunt a bit profile over to Raville’s foam, along with a flurry of self-defense scripts.If they were lucky, it would allow Raville a chance to become the hunter rather than they prey.

“Thanks for that,” Raville murmured.“God, this scape is big.”

Dorian wasn’t listening.He flashed through the architectural partitions—Engineering, Thrust Dynamics, Admin, Communications.He ticked down through architectural ladders, drilled into systems whose purposes he didn’t comprehend.His viral spiders plunged across indices, tying up resources, unknotting node access, throwing open the windows of the datacore’s structure to the light of day.And everywhere he went, he seeded vicious self-organizing, stimulus adaptive viral mites.They were small and stealthy bits of code that dug deep, automatically assembled and coordinated their activity through signal pulses transmitted back and forth within his foam environment.Above all, they searched through the architecture for anything resembling weapons management software systems and chewed debilitating data holes in whatever they found.

“Forty five seconds to DeMartel’s firing solution deadline,” Raville informed him.

“I think that was just a ballpark figure.”

“Try to err on the side of caution, then.”

Dorian grunted in annoyance.“We passed the deadline for caution about twelve minutes ago.Why don’t you just worry about your own job, okay?”

“I’m trying, but where is he?I thought you said he would likely attack me?”

Logistics, Personnel Resources, IT Security.The datacore index ran on for screen after screen.Where the hell was Firing Control?

“Maybe he’s hiding.He doesn’t want to be purged any more than you do.”

Raville frowned.

A deep rumble ran through the ship, and the emergency lights flickered.“That would be the Spriggs-Detmer array charging up,” Raville advised.“Fifteen seconds to charge, five to confirm target. . .DeMartel isn’t going to miss his estimate by much.”

“Hold on,” Dorian muttered.“Hold on, hold on.”

Command Operations, Tactical Systems, Defensive Batteries. . .

“Firing Control!”Dorian stabbed at a series of keys, unlocking a batch of malicious quik-release virals he had held in reserve.“I’ve got it.Loading the counterscripts now.Give it five seconds.”

Four, three, two, one.

Nothing happened.At least, nothing bad happened.The ship didn’t shudder with the sudden expulsion of surface devastating projectiles.The lights didn’t flicker again as particle beam energy weapons pounded the distant Giari Tau station to pulp and wreckage.

For five more seconds, Dorian sat completely still, not even daring to breathe.Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Raville to route commands around his frustration of the Firing Control software system and launch his delayed attack.

Nothing continued to happen for several more seconds, and finally, Dorian took a breath.

The waveform collapsed, the box was opened, the cat was alive.

Raville sat up straight.“I’ve got a ping on him—he’s right in front of me!”

“Flash me your relative position.I’ll track him and cut him off.Do you have a viral script loaded?”

“I’m ready.”

Dorian reconfigured his display as the data came flooding in from Raville’s foam.He read the chase through the datascape as entries in the bitstream transfer logs.At the same time, he ran verification analyses against the emerging shape of Raville’s package, comparing the features of the original profile against this newly configured pattern.Raville had grown considerably since Dorian had copied him over from the Archive, accreting terabytes of data from Dorian’s foam and from whatever he had added to himself inside the datacore.Bloated was probably a more accurate term, and the weight and complexity he had amassed slowed him down as he transitioned from node to node, and attempted to shove himself through datburst bottlenecks.

“I’m confirming a pattern match,” Dorian said finally.“I’ve got him locked in a predictive scan algorithm.He’s hemorrhaging data as he goes, trying to get leaner, I guess.Hoping to duck into a loosely structured file system and get lost.Let him have his head for a bit.I’ll close the doors ahead of him and limit his escape vectors—keep him away from jump points, especially.”

Raville nodded his understanding.“I’m moving in.”

“Don’t play with him.He could still be very dangerous.”

Dorian watched, waiting for Raville—either one of them—to make his move.He tapped out a series of commands to seal the nodes to the package’s profile, then slowly began to open them up again to external users.He restored essential systems to the Bridge and Engineering, reset the comm relays on a limited basis, and ordered an environmental purge of the machine room.

The recessed jets finally stopped pumping lethal gas into the room, and cool air began to waft against his face.Eventually, the red emergency beacons stopped pulsing, and the overhead lights snapped on.

The machine room door opened and Shimkus poked his head inside.He sniffed at the air, wrinkled his nose, then shrugged.He pushed the door the rest of the way open.

“Hey!You’re not dead!”he said brightly.“Limited communications are back up.Have been for a while.We’ve had some tangles with Security trying to run in on you.Good fun, but bad for morale.At least on their side.”

Dorian waved him off.“I’m reading you passing out of the central core into a dead end auxiliary system.He’s got nowhere to run.”

“I see him,” Raville said.A sheen of sweat broke across his brow.“Loading virals.”

Dorian punched up a few silver bullets from his own arsenal.“I’ve got your back.Target pattern shows as stationary.He’s hit a locked node.”

“Executing now.”

Dorian fired his own scripts for good measure.

Data moved across the quantum universe.Binary switches flipped.Bits scattered in a storm of chaotic noise, then dynamically reformed into sparkling new arrangements as though their original pattern had never existed.

He sighed quietly.A frozen concatenation of ones and zeroes.That’s all Raville’s package had ever been.

Except. . .

Michael Raville leapt to his feet, his face ashen and his eyes wide.“What just happened?Where did he go?”

“He didn’t go anywhere.He was just data.We erased him.”

But Raville shook his head furiously.“No.He vanished.Right in front of me.He was there, and then simply gone.”

Dorian narrowed his gaze, uncomprehending.He had witnessed the data blocks that constituted Raville’s package disappear.Raville had executed one script.Dorian had launched two.He had watched the package’s destruction.

“It’s probably just an artifact of the environment,” he said.“The military frowns on seenop renders that are too detailed.It chews up bandwidth that can be better allocated elsewhere.Sometimes the system strips them by default—“

“Check the logs,” Raville hissed.

Dorian shrugged.If he had been Michael Raville, he’d want to be sure, too.A quick patter of keystrokes brought up the command log, white text on a black background.That was the sort of reassurance Raville would need.Good, solid text.Text that didn’t lie, didn’t occlude it’s truth behind fancy combinations of pixels.

The last entries transmitted back to the command log consisted of three identical, impossible messages.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Somehow, the package of Michael Raville had found an open node and bounced out of the datacore.

Dorian loaded up a core purge sequence, disconnected both his and Raville’s foam from the moderator and with the punch of a key, began a complete and irreversible reformat of the T.E.S. Indianapolis’s datacore.Without going line by line through the code, it was the only way to be sure that the rogue package wasn’t hiding somewhere deep in the bowels of the system.Dorian didn’t pretend even for a moment that this wasn’t a necessary precaution.It was an admission of defeat, plain and simple.He hadn’t caught the spider, just chased it off without uncovering any of its lairs, any of its trapdoor hideouts.The spider could repossess the network any time it chose.

Raville had beaten him.

“That’s not going to make you any friends around here,” Michael Raville observed, once it became clear what he had done.

“They weren’t going to be my friends anyway.”Besides, if he was going to fail, he might as well fail spectacularly.

“That’s probably true.”Raville flicked an uneasy glance at the terminal.“Is the ship in any danger?”

“The reformat will only take a couple of hours.Localized systems will keep basic services running—navigation, life support, reactor maintenance—long enough to refresh the network scheme from whatever backup they’ve got.”Worst case scenario, there was always the Strat naval shipyards, which was exactly what they deserved if they didn’t have a reliable backup protocol.But Dorian knew that wasn’t what Raville really cared about.“Don’t worry.Things will be peachy again in time for you to launch your bomb on schedule, I’m sure.”

A bombastic exhale of relief from Raville.Dorian resisted the urge to beat him to death with his keypad, and recognizing that his resistance was not going to be entirely effective, he welcomed the arrival of Lieutenant Sainz and the sober announcement that they should get back to the flight bay with the others before ship security arrived in force and all sorts of misunderstandings ensued.

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>

Appendant to the plastisheen environmental dome that encased Giari Tau EOSO Facilty Ketus O-12 was a squat, ovoid containment shell obtainable only via a hydraulic lift that departed from the towering Administrative and Sec-Com Nexus through a reinforced flexsteel umbilical shaft.This navel-like eruption, resembling more than anything else a steel and glass sculpture of a pistachio, was the official receptacle for the staff offices of CSO Kenwood Bryce and his personal entourage of assistants, advisors, departmental handlers and policy wonks.The Home Office (as it was generally called) had been lately redecorated in an aggressively pastel New Mesopotamian Revival fashion at a cost of millions of rupees, utilizing only the highest of high end custom designed zap package construx-templates transmitted directly from the maximum security data vaults of Terbury-Finks Classical Design in Crecy Trois, New Frankish Sultanate, Dengali, which prided itself as being the leader in stylish business-industrial renovation materials.

Dorian knew that the timeframe for the refurbishment was lately because the reception pod stank of quikform sealant, shade dilating smarthue plaster and Kaster’s Polyseal Wood Cement, which happened to be, not surprisingly, exactly the products he would have used in undertaking a renovation of this scope.A number of the faux stucco walls still had WET PAINT signs tacked to them, and all of the public seating couches were covered in stained and crinkly plastic dropcloths as vivid invitations not to even think of seating one’s self while waiting.Rolls of expensively nanowoven Afghani carpets lay fetched up against the base of a mauve pseudo-clay retaining wall-cum-reception desk that snaked through the pod between the waiting area and the frescoed O-shaped entrance to the warren of offices beyond.On the opposite end of the room, a forest of genetically stunted and fruitless date palms crowded in front of observation windows that would have, under normal circumstances, provided a spectacular view of the plains below.As he had seen the plains up close and under armed guard already, Dorian didn’t feel particularly disappointedby the loss.

The girl who sat behind the desk was numbingly perky, vid-personality pretty, attractively dressed and obviously miserable.Her skin was pale, her face puffy, and every few seconds, she either sneezed or blew her nose explosively into a tissue.At fairly regular intervals, she drifted toward an alarming shade of green and politely excused herself into the back, a mad-dash journey from which she would return looking even more pale and miserable than before.

“I’m so sorry.It’s these fumes.I guess I have an allergy,” she would say, then offer them coffee or pastries or tea for what seemed the hundredth time.Neither Dorian nor Amara were tempted to take her up on it.

Ford Garrison had buzzed at the door to their borrowed quarters just after six local time.With him had come by two other men who did not introduce themselves, did not speak and kept near the entrance with their hands folded in front of them.The most interesting thing about them was the obvious and suspiciously weapon-shaped bulge beneath their jackets.

Dorian and Amara had already been up for a couple of hours, observed their morning ablutions and eaten a light breakfast,Amara had put on a soft blue jumpsuit that she found in one of the dressers (along with a dozen other outfits which ranged from airily casual to low cut formal).It had fit her perfectly, just like the selection of running shoes, sandals and hiking boots which she discovered on the floor of the bedroom closet, and the drawer full of neatly folded undergarments packed in the same dresser as the other outfits.The other drawers had held a similar multi-functional selection of men’s clothing, underwear and socks, but Dorian had donned the fatigues he had worn the previous day instead.He had no desire to be beholden to Raville’s generosity.He wasn’t dogmatic on this point—he had traded his floppy slip-on shoes for a pair of boots in his size at the first opportunity and without any ethical qualms; he just felt more comfortable in his own clothes.

Flanked by his pair of non-descript agents, Garrison had then led them back down to the floor of the station following the route they had taken the previous day.From there, they made their way through the morning riot of work traffic and the tight clusters of low and sturdy buildings until they reached the bureaucratically dull and featurelessly utilitarian halls of the Admin Nexus structure.At a security kiosk, their digital imprints were taken, their pix snapped and the amusing non-likenesses affixed to visitors passes which they were required to wear around their necks while inside the Admin complex.They had to flash their badges for an access golemech at the doors to the lift, which counted them, checked them over and simultaneously calculated their mass and displacement to the milligram before allowing them into the car, then ran the calculations again to make certain that no unauthorized cargo had slipped on board during the transition.Garrison’s security toadies did not have passes and remained in the lobby, vigilant but unmoved, until the doors had closed.As far as Dorian knew, they were still there, motionless as statues, awaiting reassignment, awaiting their return, or generally just waiting, sentient as stone, thinking statue thoughts.

On the ride up, Garrison had brusquely informed them that Raville would be meeting with them in CSO Bryce’s office.He apologized for the construction mess before they even exited the lift, sounding mildly irritated as he did so, as if the Bryce had commissioned the renovation at this particular time and under the present circumstances for the sole purpose of annoying him.Then he had grouched at the receptionist for the condition of her pod and the lack of ready refreshments, told them flatly to wait until he returned, and stalked off into the bowels of the office like a troll in search of bones upon which he might sharpen his teeth.

Since that time, they had waited.A few ticks more than twenty minutes in Dorian’s estimation.All he could do was estimate because first of all his array had been destroyed at the zap depot on Glastenhame along with the body he had come to know and love, and secondly because there were no clocks in the pod.He didn’t know if this absence was due to the ongoing renovation, was simply an oversight on the part of an arrayed population with no need of public timepieces, or some sort of authoritarian statement:your time is our time.It didn’t matter one way or the other.Dorian didn’t mind waiting.In fact, he preferred the waiting to the uncertainty of what was to come after the waiting was finished.He was feeling shaky this morning and a little nauseous.Amara explained to him that it was likely more of the zap fatigue making its presence felt, but he didn’t think so.His stomach was sour with the dread of a future he wished would not unfold.

“Something must have happened.”

Amara spoke to him in confidential tones.They stood near the collection of date palms, far enough away from the receptionist that she would not casually overhear them (or sneeze her germs all over them), but where they could still observe Garrison’s arrival when he returned.

“Ford does not seem quite himself this morning,” she confided.“He’s very agitated.”

“Maybe he got a Dear John datburst from his wife saying she was leaving him because she couldn’t stand living with such a jerk anymore.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.He really is an jerk.”Dorian grinned at her, but his heart wasn’t in it.He couldn’t eventake pleasure in antagonizing Garrison this morning.“No, I hear you.I thought the same thing.He didn’t need an escort of thugs yesterday.”

Amara closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath.“I don’t feel anything wrong.The station seems to be humming along normally, going about its routine business.The orbiting ships are frenetically active though, as if they’ve sensed something amiss.”

Her lips creased in a frown, but she didn’t offer any details.Dorian reached out and took her hand.He could still smell the scent of her on his skin, warm and musky.“What about Raville?”

“He’s a void.I’ve been trying to catch a trace of him since we arrived, but there isn’t any sort of distinctive signature to him.He’s a whisper, a presence, a mysterious lurking, but the shape of him has no meaningful content, almost like he’s nothing at all–an empty well.”She shrugged her shoulders and grimaced apologetically.“I guess turn about is fair play.Whatever it is that has Garrison so tense, it’s not Ray and the others, at least.They’re still safe for the moment, though I’m not clear on what difficulties they may have encountered during the night.There was some excitement, but I don’t dare dwell on them for long, in case Raville has learned how to follow.”

Dorian wondered once more where the Misfit Toys had gone and what they were doing, but he didn’t ask.“Maybe that is what has Garrison so aggravated.Not being able to track down a half a dozen notorious saboteurs bent on mischief in my space station would do it for me.Raville with his god-mind may not feel particularly motivated to worry about them, but our buddy Ford strikes me as the type who worries about loose ends whether they seem to be viable threats or not.”

“He’s something like you, then,” Amara said, wink and nudge.

“Don’t even joke about that.It isn’t funny.”

“If I can be like Michael Raville, you can be like Ford Garrison.It has a nice symmetry to it.”She giggled.“I prefer your company to his, of course.You’re so much cuter.”

“And I could kick his ass.”

“You have better dimples, too.”

“Stop it.”

“Sorry.I couldn’t help myself.”

“You could have.You chose not to.Poor impulse control is not an attractive feature in a divine being.Just ask the Greeks.”

Amara rolled her eyes and laughed.

“Are you okay?” he asked.“Worried?Tense?Scared?”

“Curious,” she answered after some thought.“I want to hear what Raville has to say for himself.”

“And then what?”

“Then we do what has to be done in order to stop him.”

Garrison returned a short time later, approaching only as far as the doorway into the pod.He stopped and waved impatiently for them to follow.The receptionist apologized for the length of their wait and suggested with passable brightness that Dorian and Amara should have a nice day, and Dorian was convinced for a moment by the glare that Garrison stabbed at her that he might leap across the intervening space and strangle her to death with his bare hands, but he was apparently unwilling to spare the time.By the time they had reached the doorway, he was already stalking back the way he had come.

They chased after him through a warren of open workspaces, airy and uncluttered cubicles delineated by motile imitation adobe walls balanced on a complex network of recessed runners coordinated so that the seemingly fixed partitions could be maneuvered from any one location to another via configuration panels mounted at periodic intervals along the outer wall.The current floor plan was one of narrow passages, sudden right-angle obstructions and claustrophobic cul-de-sacs.Dorian rapidly found himself disoriented by the constant twists, banks and unexpected switchbacks.He began to believe that the walls were actively moving behind them, manipulating them in an ever smaller circuit toward some hidden central location whose exits would be sealed behind them as soon as they had arrived.

A small part of his mind argued that this suspicion was most likely a textbook example of psychological projection, but he buried that voice beneath a pillow and sat on its head every time it made a peep.

On occasion, EOSO administrative drones fluttered out of foam space or paused to look up at them from their desktops as they hurried past.More often than not, it wasn’t with the casual interest that one might expect to receive as a stranger intruding into a foreign office, momentary curiosity satisfied and just as quickly forgotten.There was a coiled watchfulness behind these looks, a slit-eyed and nervous recognition.Here, at the core of the station’s power structure, Dorian realized that they could never pass for anonymous visitors on customarily trivial business.They’d made too much of a fuss upon arrival.They were saboteurs whose whole reason for coming—guns blazing and goddess invoking—had been to take control of and possibly even destroy the station upon which each one these people’s lives depended.It was a hostility borne of fear and the blind instinct toward self-preservation.

And they probably knew even less about what was really going on than he did.

Dorian squared his shoulders and hovered protectively about Amara.He understood their anxiety.He was absolutely terrified.

They came at last through the maze and up against a gently curved pink sandstone wall.Garrison went a short distance along it until he came to a dark paneled door with a brass nameplate that read “Dr. Kenwood Bryce, Chief of Station Operations”.Garrison hitched up in front of the security panel to transmit his access key.A magnetic bolt clicked in response, and he put his put his hand on the knob.

Before turning it, he glanced over his shoulder at Dorian, a quick head to toe assessment.“Try to be civil.Please.These are important people, used to being paid a certain level of respect based on their contributions to science, society or the human condition as a whole.Antagonizing them will only make this more difficult than it already is.”

Dorian shrugged.“I always try to be civil.”

Garrison grunted, plainly disbelieving, and pushed ahead.Dorian followed, keeping Amara behind him so that he would meet any peril they encountered on the other side first.He was aware of her against his back, small and precious, and wondered if she felt the same fear that he did.

Stay behind me, he thought at her, but if she heard him, she did not answer.

They entered a spacious chamber of pale mud and wattle walls smartshaded a muted and tasteful aquamarine hue.The floor was marble tile interspersed with cleverly patterned rugs and glossy frescoes in whorled patterns of gold and tan and earthen brown.A simple desk of whitewashed faux adobe, shaped like an arch with a flattened top, sat to one side beneath porthole windows punched into curve of the thick outer walls.Monochrome images of bleak desert landscapes competed for aesthetic attention with dried bundles of reedy vegetation, copper braziers emitting a fine, aromatic mist and impossibly baroque furniture, beautifully crafted from lush, chocolate wood.

In the center of the room sat a large circular table surrounded by divan-style chairs covered in silk, damask and gold thread.Some of the seats were already occupied.Two men wearing the ostentatious battle dress uniforms of the Strat Space Command Naval Forces fixed on them with glares hostile enough to melt flexsteel.A balding, pink-skinned man in an expensive grey suit sat with his back to them, while beside him, a younger man with a trendy sport coat, rakish haircut and aggressive smile, twisted almost completely around in his chair, straining for a good look.A few seats down sat a middle-aged woman with stern, hawkish features who didn’t look up at all, but maintained a deep, almost Zen focus on the open file of papers in front of her.She wore an oversized lab coat smudged at the cuffs and elbows.

Dorian noted each new face, each implied agenda, then dismissed them all from his mind.

Because seated facing toward them across the table was Michael Raville.He was unmistakable, nearly an exact copy of the package in the Archive.A little more grey at the temples, a few more lines about his eyes, but essentially the same.Dorian experienced an unexpected and unusually intense sensation of déjà vu, but he couldn’t tell if it derived from having known so well this man’s digital approximation or from the more immediate fabric of his dreamscape.

In either case, it was difficult for him not to snarl.

Raville rose hurriedly as they approached, his eyes bright.“It really is you, isn’t it?After all these years, you’ve really come.You—you are.”He smiled crookedly, self-consciously, as he recalled that there were others in the room looking on.He ducked his head.“My apologies if I seem to be gushing.I don’t know of any other way to adequately express my joy, my relief, my almost religious awe at finally meeting you face to face, Ms. Cain.”

Amara lifted her chin, uncertain how to gauge his greeting.Her answer was formal, her tone guarded:“I’m honored by your hospitality.”

For a treacherous instant, Dorian almost bought Raville’s precocious sincerity.Then he remembered his apartment, his cat, all the lies and death.

“Pfft,” he said.

Raville glanced at him.One of his eyebrows arched, but the smile did not waver.“I shouldn’t neglect to greet you also, Mr. Dorian.It isn’t my intention to be rude.”

“I’ve already survived your rude greeting, thanks.This one’s pretty tame in comparison.”

Raville continued to smile, but it became decidedly strained.“Nevertheless, your arrival has also been anxiously anticipated.I say anxiously as you are, I assume, the man who jacked my datacore, jacked this station’s secure network—jacked, well, pretty much everything we thought was safe from intrusion.Your reputation precedes you, as they say.”

“Yeah, and I’m honored by your hospitality or whatever, too.Especially the considerate way you blew up my apartment.And the equally considerate way you tried to kill us yesterday.A real honor.”

Raville did not rise to the challenge.Instead, he waved to the open seats in front of them.“Please, won’t you both join us?”

Dorian didn’t particularly feel like it, but he cast a wary look over his shoulder at Amara and she nodded.Shrugging, he pushed himself into motion and cautiously approached the edge of the table.Ford Garrison followed close behind, nearly treading on Amara’s heels.Dorian took a chair one space removed from the balding gentleman he had noted upon arrival and directly across from the two military officers, a ridiculously bemedalled Flight Commander and a Grand Sector Chief, he could see now from the insignia on their lapels.The one on the left, the GSC, Dorian suspected was probably none other than the DeMartel who had dispatched Lieutenant Sainz after them.Amara slipped into the seat on his left and Garrison sat down next to her, propping his elbows on the table, knuckles pressed against his chin, looking cross and dissatisfied with the proceedings, as though even Dorian’s act of seating himself had foiled some minutely orchestrated plan.

After they had all settled in, Raville also resumed his seat.He lay his hands on the table, fingers laced together casually, and cleared his throat.As if it was any other board meeting he had ever attended, Dorian thought.Business to be handled, future plans to be discussed.It was bizarre.

“We should begin with introductions.Most of us here are known to one another, but I’m terrible at keeping names and titles straight.I’d just make a hash of it and manage to offend everyone.Perhaps you would be willing to shoulder the duty on my behalf, Dr. Bryce?Just the glosses, if you please.If we insist on providing the detailed vitae of each member of our esteemed assembly, we’ll be here well into the afternoon.”

The older man seated to Ray’s right, shifted as though he might stand, then changed his mind and settled for sitting up straight.He was a large man, solid and soft at the same time, like an athletewho has recently decided to let himself go.His shoulders were broad and powerful, and his features both alert and intelligent.He bent his head politely in their direction, and began in a friendly, conversational tone:“As you have no doubt guessed, my name is Kenwood Bryce.I am the head bean-counter, bottle-washer, feud-mediator and administrative back-slapper for the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization Facility Ketus O-12, commonly referred to as the Giari Tau Outpost, or even more commonly as GTO.What that means as far as you’re concerned is that in a very broad sense, this is my house, and just like our resident scientists, academics, grad students and assorted support staff, you are temporarily my guests.As long as you act like proper guests, I will endeavor to play the role of gracious host, and we won’t have any problems.If you choose to deviate from behaviors consistent with those of polite and civil guests, I will cease to be gracious and toss you out on your asses.That applies to everyone in this room.GTO is above all, a scientific research station with a narrowly defined and ongoing academic mission that has not to this point been inconvenienced by these proceedings.Protecting the integrity of our research mission is my job, and I won’t hesitate to act in the best interests of this facility.You should all endeavor to keep that fact in mind.”

Bryce paused and ran his gaze around the table, an opportunity for responses, concerns, objections.None were offered, so he went on.

“The young man beside me is Dr. Fen Corrie—that’s a doctorate in Advanced Human Interaction and Administrative Affairs, one of the few sheepskins you’ll find hanging on the wall around here that doesn’t have an arcane or extremely specialized scientific application.In my opinion, this gives him a rare and precious perspective on this facility’s day-to-day functioning.As Manager of Logistical Services, he’s our human resources wonk, morale officer, payroll clerk and security director, the exact color and style of his hat varying by day and circumstance.Any situation having anything to do with people management is his field of expertise, and you’ve hereby been given fair warning that he will talk your ears right off the side of your head given the opportunity.”This might have been a cutting remark in any other context, but it was spoken with such obvious affection that it was impossible to draw offense from it.Taking his cue, Dr. Corrie favored them all with an enthusiastic smile and wave of greeting.Bryce continued, “He also happens to be my second in command.”

“Next to Mr. Raville is our Head of Research Studies, Dr. Minerva Skiles.As well as leading the cutting edge analytical work on the singularity farm phenomenon which is our primary investigative focus, she serves as the liaison between the scientific staff and the supporting administrative modules.”

The woman in the oversized lab coat lifted her head from the file splayed out on the table in front of her, looking temporarily dazed as though only belatedly having realized Bryce had spoken her name.She blinked owlishly at them, first confused, then embarrassed at her lapse of attention, then defiantly dismissive when any of them failed to present any unique observable phenomenon of their own.

“Minnie,” she announced, and returned unceremoniously to her printouts.

Bryce winked at Dorian and Amara.“She prefers Minnie.”

“Minerva was a tart and a parlor schemer and a vociferous twit,” Dr. Skiles muttered.“Used her brains only as a reactive force, and only for vengeance upon petty slights to her perceived divine dignity.If she had bothered even once to apply herself to something productive, Rome would never have fallen.She was a bad role model for women.Generate a self-destructive gender role paradigm, one should not be surprised when the meme comes home to roost.Three thousand years we’ve been rooting out that woman’s mischief, and we’ve come hardly a full step nearer to leveling the playing field.”

“Minnie is also our resident gender equality advocate,” Bryce confided in a low voice.“You would be surprised at how divisive an issue this becomes in insular communities like ours where mod capabilities are not readily available.”

“Thank you for proving my point so eloquently,” Dr. Skiles remarked acidly.

Bryce hurried on.“You’ve met Ford Garrison, of course, Mr. Raville’s personal security chief.The remaining two gentlemen across from you are the most recent additions to our far flung community:Flight Commander Kesh Temple and Grand Sector Chief Morgan DeMartel of the Stratiskaya Daransk Naval Commanderie.”Bryce paused uneasily, then added,“You have, I understand, already made the acquaintance of some of their subordinates from the Indianapolis and the Juggernaut.”

Commander Temple sat up stiffly, a glare simmering behind slitted eyelids.He grunted at the mention of his name, but made no other acknowledgement.DeMartel, who was (at least) rendered a decade his junior, did not make an acknowledgement.His olive uniform was neat and pressed, his medals and buttons polished to a brilliant gleam, the consummate Border Marine officer.He was, Dorian thought, the living embodiment of the timeworn phrase squared away.Dorian didn’t like the way he looked at either of them, but especially at Amara.It wasn’t exactly hostile, but it was cold, calculating, the look of a man who was determining not if he would kill you, or even how, but when.Waiting for an opportunity he knew must inevitably come.

In a level voice, Dorian asked, “How many of your Marines died?”

DeMartel’s nostrils flared.“Pardon me?”

“You sent a force of Marines to the warehouse to apprehend us and our companions.I want to know how many were killed.”

“We recycled four soldiers,” DeMartel answered, then added with slight, cruel smile:“Out of thirty.”

“You were lucky.It could have been much worse.”

“My Marines do not rely on luck for success, sir.”

Dorian nodded appreciatively.Maybe it was just nostalgia, but he was having a hard time not liking this grizzled old coot.“Out of curiosity, do you know how many of my friends were recycled, Sector Chief?”DeMartel’s facial expression said very eloquently that even if he did know, he did not care.“I’ll tell you:None.Zero.Nil.Because my friends are dead.Not recycled, not temporally inconvenienced, not chilling in cold data storage, but dead.Between the entropic decay of our delayed decanting and your soldiers’ unprovoked attck, they are irrevocably, immedicably, and unrecoverably dead.Their unique patterns have been deleted from the algorithm of the universal computer, and they cannot be restored.Before we all start getting too chummy, I just want us to be clear on that.”

Amara gave Dorian’s knee a warning squeeze.“Now is not the time, John.I’m sure that eventually these gentlemen will be given the opportunity to learn that there are risks associated with childishly kicking over ant hills.”

DeMartel studied Amara carefully, surprised by her remark.“Young lady, you should recall who it was that invaded whom exactly.”

“And you should strongly consider which side you’ve chosen,” she answered.“The line between insurgent and patriot is drawn by perspective.”

DeMartel’s face flushed so red that Dorian was sure his head was about explode.It might have if Michael Raville had not intervened at that moment, clearing his throat to regain everyone’s attention.“Thank you, Dr. Bryce, ladies and gentlemen.Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

“Please,” Garrison muttered.

“Actually, we haven’t all been introduced,” Fen Corrie pointed out.“We’ve been instructed about the identities and personal histories of our guests but we haven’t really properly met.I’d like to hear what Mr. Dorian and Ms. Cain have to say about themselves and about our situation.From a human interest perspective. . .since there seems to be some misunderstanding.”

Ford Garrison made a low growling noise in his throat.“I hardly think that’s necessary.You should have been forwarded a copy of the pertinent files.If you chose not to review the material, that’s your problem.”

“I looked over their files with great interest, Mr. Garrison,” Corrie countered.“I examined them closely enough, in fact, to have it become painfully clear that the data you’ve given us is rich in analysis and laden with suspect structural assumptions, but short on basic facts.Why do they think that they’re here?What explanations do they have to offer for yesterday’s excitement, and what did they hope to accomplish in coming all this way?It’s important that we try to understand one another’s perspectives if we’re supposed to start working together, as I assume we are from the fact that we’re even having this meeting.With all due respect, I’ve heard your take on this narrative.Now I want to hear theirs.”

Garrison stabbed his finger at Corrie’s chest.“This is not one of your touchy-feely group therapy sessions, doctor.No one is interested in actualizing their inner bullshit for optimum mental health or productive group dynamics.We have a job to do, and it’s going to be done whether you manage to comprehend everyone’s motivations or not.I’ll remind you that you’re here solely because of your responsibility to the welfare of this facility, and even then only because your boss insisted on it.”

Bryce glowered back at him.“And I will remind you, Mr. Garrison, that you’re here only because I didn’t flush your zap signal when it hit my servers, and solely on account of your boss, so let’s not get into a pissing match about whose coattails are longer.This may be your operation, and Mr. Raville may be the ranking EOSO officer, but until the organization hands me my walking papers, it remains my outpost, and I’m legally in charge.”

Dorian glanced hopefully toward Amara.It wasn’t exactly an armed uprising on their behalf, but anything that even vaguely resembled dissent was encouraging.Amara put a finger to her lips and gave him a meaningful wink.

Raville sighed and flapped his hands at them, urging them all to settle down.“Gentlemen, please.We all recognize that this arrangement has led to some uneasy alliances.CSO Bryce and his staff have been extraordinarily gracious in allowing us the use of their facility and its airspace.However, it’s to be expected that we won’t always see one another’s interests with the appropriate clarity, so we get our backs up unnecessarily.I must remind you that the hour is pressing.We don’t have time to air out our personal grievances, let alone hope to resolve them in this venue.”

Minnie raised her head, frowning.“Fen’s request remains a reasonable one.I want to hear what they have to say for themselves, too.I want to hear what everyone has to say for themselves, in fact.Apocalypse and aliens?”She snorted derisively and swept the stack of printouts she had been reading off onto the floor.“Please.This ‘research’ you’ve given us is crap.There’s nothing here that proves anything.Unwarranted suppositions, poorly documented evidentiary logic, blatant attempts at character assassination and pseudo-scientific clap-trap masquerading as valid data.If I tried to foist argumentation this shoddily unsupported off on my colleagues, they’d have me kicked back to a second tier community college in a backwater colonial world teaching fundamental polynomial manipulation inside a month, and would consider that leniency.You’re a scientist, Michael.You should know better.That you should have, but did not make the effort leads me to conclude, that either you’ve abandoned everything you ever learned about research or you’ve not been entirely forthcoming with us.And while that sort of cloak-and-dagger need-to-know nonsense might be good enough to convince obtuse military goons to get their war hormones in a tizzy—no offense intended to present company–someone is going to have to do a better job of convincing me why I should give a rat’s behind about any of this business, or I’m going back to my lab where I can spend my time on work that actually matters rather than this puffed up kangaroo court.”

Fen Corrie giggled happily.“’Kangaroo court’!I like that.It’s very clever.”

Dorian held back a mild chuckle.“Good money just doesn’t buy the help that it used to.”

“This is not a kangaroo court,” Raville insisted darkly.He scowled at Dorian.“It isn’t a court of any kind.”

“Then let them speak,” Bryce agreed.“What can it hurt?”

Raville’s frown suggested that it could do a great deal of damage, but he shook his head and said, “Fine.They can speak if they wish.”He looked pleadingly at Amara.“But briefly, if you please.”

Dorian opened his mouth to answer for them.He had plenty (PLENTY) to say.Because Corrie and Skiles weren’t really asking what they thought about the Exousiai et al.Their perspective was much more narrow than such cosmic themes.Bottom line, they wanted to know why he and Amara and the Misfit Toys had come all this way willing and eager to kill anyone who tried to stop them.Dorian wanted to be sure they grokked that the sole reason, from digital start to fleshy finish, was sitting there looking smug at the head of the table.It was all Raville. Amara, however, tugged his wrist into her lap and held it firmly before he could start.He shrugged and remained silent.

“I’m afraid we’re at a disadvantage.We haven’t seen the dossiers Raville has prepared on us, so we aren’t aware of what it is you might think that you know about us or how to answer those charges.I can tell you that my name is Amara Cain, and my friend is John Dorian.We were, until recently, employees of the Masonic Archive and Infocache in Sonali on Trithemius Orbis.Prior to six weeks ago, at least in our relative time, neither of us had even heard of Giari Tau or the Exousiai.In fact, we didn’t even know one another particularly well.That all changed when one evening when in the course of our regular duties—or, I should say, in the course of John’s regular duties—we encountered a rogue upload package purporting to be one of the original Oak Ridge zap templates which displayed indications of having spontaneously developed features consistent with self-awareness.This package declared itself to be none other than the duplicate digital identity of a young Michael Raville.”

Kesh Temple rumbled.“Are you admitting that you violated the privacy of a legally protected package file?”

“I admit that I was protecting the integrity of my data network from a particularly virulent form of data spider,” Dorian said.“The donor’s right to privacy ends where my security safeguards begin.”

“Don’t be an ass, Temple,” Bryce groused at the Strat officer. “When you stop monitoring the outgoing signals from your ship’s datburst transmissions in the name of protecting classified military information, then you can throw stones.Whether or not the actions were strictly legal is beside the point here.I imagine that we’re all somewhere out beyond the borders of what is strictly legal right now.”To Amara, he said, “Please continue.”

Amara nodded gratefully.“This entity,whom we satisfied ourselves was what or who it claimed to be, informed us that Michael Raville, its actual self, was in the process of venturing here, to Giari Tau, where he planned for unknown reasons to wage a unilateral and ultimately secretive military campaign against a numinous alien race.These aliens, these helpers, he believed, meant to contact the human race with a message of peace.Further, that they had contacted us before, shepherding our technological and social development through small revelations—up to and including zap itself–so that when they did finally choose to reveal themselves and walk freely among us, we might be ready to receive them.But more importantly, they wanted us to be ready to accept their ultimate gift to humankind:a radical evolutionary transformation to a higher level of consciousness and a place in the greater community of sentient life.The packaged entity did not know why Michael Raville would choose to start a war against those who only sought to aid us, only that the war was doomed to failure, and that if anyone attempted to strike a blow against the Exousiai, they would not hesitate to destroy us all in their own defense.”

Curious glances shifted to Raville, but he said nothing.He remained perfectly still, his arms crossed over his chest in mute denial.Amara went on, “But our infiltration of the entity’s datascape was discovered, and agents were dispatched to stop us at any cost.Thanks to the machinations of Mr. Raville, in the last several months, we have become homeless, unemployed, frequently targeted for murder, wanted by a host of government agencies from one edge of human space to the other, and quite possibly indelibly linked with an infamous band of anarchist saboteurs, all because of the possibility that we might prevent him from carrying out his genocidal conflict with those who only wish to assist us in freeing ourselves from the chains that have bound our species for so long.You object that we showed up here with weapons and warriors, suggesting that it somehow reflects on our motives.Well, as far as we’re concerned, we are only responding in kind to the reception we’ve been taught to expect.Greet us with hostility, and we’d be foolish not to return it, if only in our own defense.”

She flashed a grave look at Michael Raville.“Perhaps that’s a lesson you should take to heart before attempting to set out your welcome mat to the Exousiai.We did come to stop you.One would hope that good people would always stand up to prevent tyrants from waging wars that cannot be won and which will only result in our ultimate destruction.”

Dorian wanted to leap up and cheer, but he was apparently the only one.Amara’s extended speech met with a stern silence.Kenwood Bryce chewed the inside of his cheek.Minnie Skiles leaned back in her chair, furiously curling strands of her mousy brown hair about her fingers.Commander Temple and Sector Chief DeMartel’s lips twitched in an avid subvocal p2p exchange, but they made no external reply.The only sound was Garrison’s aggrieved sigh, uttered as though Amara had physically wounded him.

In slow and deliberate fashion, Michael Raville began to applaud.“Bravo, my dear!A very effective spin on the facts at your disposal.In another context, and were we different people than we are, I would be sorely tempted to offer you a position in one of my public relations firms based on this performance alone.After all, the most effective public relations professionals are not those who tell the best lies, but those who come to believe the lies that they tell.And there’s nothing more convincing to people who don’t know any better than true sincerity delivered from the lips of a lovely spokeswoman.Of course, you can’t be given full credit because the lies you’re peddling aren’t truly your own, are they?You’re doing nothing more than parroting what you’ve been told by the malformed and bastard child of my own mind.Thus, the narrative is actually mine, which means, I suppose, that I get the wear the fool’s cap for wasting all of our valuable time on this business just so I could sit here and argue with myself.Ha!”

His eyes flashed perilously, and he threw his head back and laughed heartily.When he turned his attention back to them, however, his tone grew hard.“But they are lies, dear Amara, the things you have said.Though we might generously call them half-truths, which is very nearly the same thing.Comforting fictions about a nefarious corporate overlord intent on universal domination who must be stopped by a rag-tag but ultimately heroic band of underdogs before he can instigate the end of all that is good and pure.It’s a story that sells newspapers, as they said once upon a time, but even when they were saying it, it wasn’t true most of the time.Life is rarely as uncomplicated as news stories make it out to be.”Raville lowered his hands to his lap, and his expression was grim, almost sad.“I would that it were true, Amara.I wish it was that simple, that I was merely evil like a character in a spy novel, just a bad man with a taste for ill-gotten power who must be defeated before he can wreak great harm upon the world.But it isn’t that way, is it?There’s more to the story that even you and Dorian know.”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.“There is more to the story.”

“And you believe that the missing narrative elements amount to nothing more than a fascinating subplot of identity.The pauper is discovered to be a prince in disguise; the precocious woodland maiden the lost daughter of a grieving king; the wandering youth who feels himself so desperately out of phase with the world discovers that he is of divine lineage, the child of a god.Do you think that knowledge would skew the willingness of your audience to receive your version of the story?”

Amara shrugged.“What this audience ultimately chooses to believe does not concern me.They asked what we believed, and I told them.”

“That’s not any sort of way to run an effective coup d’etat!Revolution begins with winning the ideological battle.You must convince the common folk to believe as you would have them to if you intend to enlist their support.”

“I’m not asking for their help,” she rasped, sensing that he was mocking her.“I don’t need it to stop you.”

“Oh, because you’ve been told that you are a goddess, yes?That you are one of them, the Great Helpers, the Mighty Exousiai?You have been burdened with a solemn duty to your progenitor race and a divine destiny to pave the way for their benevolent offering of brotherhood to a backward species!”Raville flicked his hand dismissively.His taunting was both biting and cruel, his tone vicious.“No?You don’t believe in fairy tales anymore?Well, then perhaps you imagine that you don’t need them because you’ve realized you can play cute parlor tricks with dead matter, the fabric of space and time, and the raw substance of creation.We’ve all seen the surveillance images of your demonstration in the warehouse, my dear.It is a demonstrative magic, I’ll admit, so much fire and brimstone, din and clangor.Such things never fail to impress the native monkeys who inhabit this branch of the infinite multiverse.And believe me, we were all suitably impressed with your abilities.”

Raville cupped his hand over his breast, a familiar, sickening gesture, and the universe shifted, as though reality tilted toward a bottomless abyss.The slit of ichorous darkness opened in his chest, raw-rimmed and jagged at its edges like an unhealed would, and he withdrew from it the shimmering, opalescent orb of the quae-ha-distra.“But you see, you’re not the only one who is more than she appears to be, the only one who has been nursing secrets hidden away from prying eyes.What do you think?Shall we compare the sizes and see whose ball is bigger?”

Amara looked away disdainfully.“Your copy revealed it with more flair.”

“I was much more prone to dramatics when I was younger.That’s the problem with packaging consciousness.One of the problems, I should say, besides stealing a man’s thunder.It captures your flaws along with everything else, and the flaws have an annoying habit of persisting.”

Dorian hardly heard them.His attention was focused on the reactions of the others seated around the table to the sudden appearance of the quae-ha-distra.They stared at the orb, each and every one of them from Bryce to Garrison, open-mouthed and longing, overcome with a quiet reverence that bordered on religious awe.Even Temple and DeMartel gazed at it, reveling in the liquid spirals of color and warmth that painted the walls with glorious shafts of beatific light, their feverish conversation temporarily forgotten.

They were moths drawn to a candle’s flame, transfixed by the potential for glory beyond their comprehension.Monkeys discovering themselves inexplicably in the presence of the World’s Largest Banana.

But what they were not was shocked, alarmed, dismayed—all the reactions that had coursed through him when he had first encountered the presence of the orb in Raville’s memory palace back in Sonali, safe within the architecture of the Archive and buffered by an awareness of virtual unreality.

In realtime, there were no expressions of surprise, no wondrous gasps.

Because they already knew, he realized.They already knew what Raville was, and consequently what Amara was as well.

They knew, and still they intended to attack the Exousiai.

Raville released his grip on the orb and in violation of everything Dorian had ever learned about physical mechanics,it remained there, floating on a cushion of air exactly as he left it.He grudgingly admitted to himself that this was a pretty nifty trick as such things went, as impressive in its casual implication of control as Amara’s towering vortex of flame.It said that he was perfectly comfortable manipulating the forces of the universe for his own personal amusement.

It began to occur to Dorian, not for the first time, that he was in so far over his head all he could see around him was black water.Amara’s expression was one of quiet dismay, her lips a tight line and her eyes lidded.Thinking god thoughts, he imagined, exploring the hidden supra-natural datascape of existence with sensory arrays he could not even guess at.He noticed that she, too, was drawn toward the orb, her eyes flicking back and forth between it and Raville’s inscrutable smile as though both of them presented mysteries only she could read.

“You have been deceived.”Raville spoke earnestly now, his cruelty spent, or perhaps it had been a sham in the first place, designed to shock Amara with his irreverence.This declaration was flat, matter-of-fact, as though the conclusion should be obvious.“Not maliciously, I would hasten to add, and not, I believe, unfortunately.There are stages of belief that must be endured for any sort of faith to be meaningful.Progressive revelations accrete with time and experience, leaving their distinctive stamp on your pattern of belief—on the details of what you believe, in fact–until one day you look back and wonder at how far you’ve come in accepting certain truths.Naked truth is a hard thing, stripped of its familiar garb and comforting handles.Truth is a rock waiting to fall on us if we’re not careful with it, to crush our flesh and grind our bones.It is perilous, sharp edged and biting.Confronted with such a thing, our natural reaction is to reject it out of hand, hedge it off from ourselves so that we will not be harmed by it.So we weave about it webs of deception, of softened interpretation and intentionally occluded meaning, allowing ourselves to accept a watered down form and then over time slowly unwrapping its gossamer layers through steady contemplation.Until slowly we come to realize the underlying size and shape of the thing is much different than what we first supposed it to be.We call that shocked apprehension of truth wisdom.The lies that led us to it served a purpose, but we should never allow ourselves to forget that they were lies, even though the falsehoods were ultimately useful.Ultimately essential.”

“I take it that you have particular lies in mind,” Amara said.“Things that your packaged self told us that are in error according to what you have subsequently chosen to believe.”

Raville chuckled.“I’m afraid I’m not going to allow you to argue a post-modernist deconstruction of perceived reality, my dear.That’s a cop out.There is truth, and there is deception.There is nothing in between.In most cases, the deceptions we live with don’t matter.Consensus reality clusters together in patterns that are like enough to be meaningful and facilitate useful communication.However, where the Exousiai are concerned, the gulf between truth and not-truth is both vast and critical.

“But I don’t hold you responsible for having been deceived, my dear.I was, after all, the one who deceived you, at least by proxy.But I did it honestly.My packaged self believes everything he said to you, just as I once did, and the core of those beliefs remain as good an entry point into the mystery of the Exousiai as any, especially if one tends by nature to be naïve and idealistic, which are polite terms for lies that we tell ourselves about how the universe should work.I was both when I was channeling the template for the creation of zap, and subsequently when I created the Oak Ridge package of myself that you encountered in the Archive.Idealism was the first necessary stage of belief.I accepted that I had been handed a divine vision and a mission to implement the will of benevolent gods in the human sphere.I took that charge seriously, and the seeds of that idea took root deep in the soil of my consciousness, informing everything I thought I understood about the nature of human existence and the intended direction for my individual life.

“Do not discount the impulse of obedience to an immanent god, Amara.We’re all mystics at heart, you know.Humans yearn for a touch from the ineffable, the mysterious, the fountainhead of our existence.We ache to belong to something larger and more powerful than ourselves, something that fills the void of doubt and gives us direction.We yearn for God, though we do not understand what a god is, what makes one, or how dangerous a thing divinity can be.We pretend to understand through the forms of religion, remaking God in our own image, making It familiar, comfortable, meaningful.But the truth has always been that God is alien to us.Godhood is beyond us, so foreign that we cannot think Its thoughts or understand Its ways except through metaphor.

“But we want, oh how we want, to be touched by It.We long to be transformed from something small, narrow and blind into a living and purpose-filled reflection of the All in All.I’m telling you this, because I want you to understand that I know what you believe, and I have felt the fire that burns within you now.I know the feel of it, the rightness of its primal tug and the way it gives meaning to lives that otherwise have felt empty and without purpose.It is a great comfort to place yourself in the hands of God and enfold your being in Its will.It is a fundamental human need.

“But it is also the cornerstone of the deception of which I speak, because the truth is that the Exousiai are not God.They are not even divine.That recognition forms the basis of the second stage of belief, which is simply that the Exousiai are what they are:a transcendent form of existence that has far surpassed the boundaries of human comprehension and made of themselves something so tremendously alien and powerful as we measure such things as to be mistaken for gods.No more and no less.A different order of creation, but certainly not the sacred Ein Sof you hold in your heart when you think of the word God.Yet because of what they are and how they choose to manifest, they appeal to our urge to commune with and be subsumed by divinity because they seem to have already become what we believe we want to be.

“And that leads directly to the third stage:doubt.Pressed down, shaken together and running over, as the saying goes–an eruption of decoherence at the very core of fundamentally held assumptions.Let me put it this way:if we stipulate that the Exousiai are the mirror reflection of what we yearn to be, and we accept that they have taken a role in shepherding us toward their level of transcendence, then we must begin to ask why they would do such a thing.We can answer that it is altruism, pure and simple.Or that in the exchange of information between their distinctive collective consciousness and our radically unique substance, that both parties are mutually increased, complexified, augmented.This stage builds directly upon the foundation of the former, in that it recognizes that the Exousiai cannot be gods, because it is not definitionally part of the nature of gods to want or to need or to require anything outside of themselves.Thus, they make their appeal of integration to us because we provide them with something essential that they cannot manufacture within themselves.They are finite, even if the boundaries of their potential are so vast as to appear functionally infinite to beings without their assimilation of context.

“And we haven’t even asked ourselves yet why they would come to us in such a way as they have, allowing us to perceive them as gods.They provide us with tools and technologies that assist us in attaining a vision of our future for which they themselves have provided us the template.The Exousiai perpetuate a deception which they maintain has been fostered for our own good, to ease us into a grand transition.If they are willing to lie to us, then we must doubt their motivations or at least their information as it is transmitted to us, yes?And if we can doubt that, we can appropriately doubt that altruism plays any role in their decision to contact us, which means that their decision must be based on desire, on need.

“Accepting then that they have needs, it follows that what they need, they have determined to grow through careful manipulation.Tilling the soil, planting seeds, allowing the roots to take hold and burrow deep, so that when the plant is ripe, they can make a harvest of the sustenance they require.And the harvest is a taking of the fruits of their labor, the best that the plant has to offer, and once the fruit is gone and has been devoured, the plant is allowed to wither and die and become fodder that can be plowed under to rot and serve as the nutrient from which the next harvest will spring.The fruit itself is absorbed, becoming part of the body, yes, feeding it and helping it grow.It remains forever in the cells and flesh and bone of the being which consumed it.But it is never again fruit.It is rendered down to its fundamental components, disassembled and utilized according to the rules of the body, not those of its own unique genetic dictates.Its qualities of fruit-ness are forever lost.

“That is the future that is being offered to us.Not a human transcendence, but a digestion into their immense totality in which we will be destroyed and remade again into their own image after they have harvested from us all that they deem worthy and useful.The result can only be viewed as our essential extinction as a unique and individuated species.”

Raville paused.He had been speaking for several minutes uninterrupted, and now he cast about the table for some sign of encouragement, an indication that he had been understood.At last, he said, “What I’m trying to explain to you is that it has never been my intention to start a war with the Exousiai.The war has already begun.It has been waged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, through carefully designed information systems implemented with the purpose of making humanity as a species malleable to the demands of the Exousiai.My task is only to end it, and by ending it, to preserve our future independence.”

Minnie Skiles was the first to raise an objection.“Michael, you old windbag, what are you doing?Trying to numb us from thinking with a bombardment of pretty words?It’s just more of the same.More hypothesizing, more reasoning from assumptions.It isn’t proof.How can we know exactly what it is that the Exousiai intend for us without evidence of their own actions in the past?You’re asking us to risk the future course of our entire civilization on the basis of nothing more than your own personal prejudices.”

“Minnie, my dear,” Raville responded, “you have heard the testimony of the Exousiai from their very lips.Do you really have to see it for yourself?I have told you unflinchingly what we are.We are locusts.”

“And I’m saying that’s a specious argument.Even you have admitted that you only see through the glass darkly.”She dropped her eyes from the orb’s pulsating glow.“You’ve told us that you have been human for a very long time, and have only in recent years become aware of your. . .heritage.But the fact remains that you’ve been human much longer in your memory than you have been Exousian.As a human, prejudices seep in.You filter the world through your own experiences, not from some theoretical objective space that can ascertain and correctly weight all the relevant bits of evidence.What is to say that you are not the one who is mistaken, the one who is not fully awakened, rather than Amara?Obviously she believes just as strongly as you do—she gave up all she had and risked her life to stop what we are about to do!–and yet you’ve both come from the Exousiai, you say, you both have access to equally limitless stores of knowledge.But you can’t even agree on this one essential point.What are we mere mortals supposed to think?”

Raville grunted in annoyance.“She believes, but I know.That is the difference.”

“Unless it is you that has allowed yourself to be deceived,” she answered sternly.“How can you know that you are the one who is right?”

He gestured at the orb, indicating that the solution should be self-evident, or at least would be to anyone with the ability to see it.“Because I know.There is more than one kind of knowledge, and not all of them can be obtained by poking a thing with mathematical formulae or shoving it under a microscope.Stop looking for scientific rigor, Minnie.You won’t find it here.In the conflict of ideologies, some things are just known.”

Amara lifted her chin.She was frowning, deeply and violently troubled, and she spoke in a voice thick with doubt, reedy with fear at the edges.“You feel what you feel from within the quae-ha-distra, just as I do.You listen to its voice, and it speaks to you in a way that resonates.I know this feeling, too.I trust it, but you’re telling me that I shouldn’t, that it’s deceiving me.How can you know that what your orb speaks to you is not false?”

What was it that she saw in the ebb and flow of Raville’s orb, Dorian wondered.What did she perceive that had so shaken her?He remembered suddenly the things Raville had said to him, the dream of Raville’s datacore, and the evidence of long and weary struggles with knowledge.Nothing I have told you is completely true.Some of it may be true in part, but even those portions are incomplete, he had said.You must choose what you will believe and what you will know.

What was he missing?

Amara assumed that Raville was talking about faith.Faith in the things he had learned from contemplating the secrets revealed to him by his connection to the Exousiai through the orb.But it was not faith speaking at all, it was pure doubt extracted from too many nights spent in quiet interrogation of belief.It was the voice of a man who had shattered his own hopes in the search for wisdom and then pieced them back together again one shard at a time so that even though the shape of hope had taken on a new form, the impossibly intricate architecture that supported it was understood.

Raville had doubted, and he had found assurance in his doubt, enough to cast off everything he had ever believed about the Exousiai, because he thought that he had answered the one question that explained the mystery.The same question that no one had bothered to ask yet, because they assumed that they already knew the answer.

“Who sent the pearl?” Dorian asked sharply.It came out more harshly than he intended, almost like an accusation, but it was too late to take it back.“Who was it that told Amara to come here in the first place?Who sent her to serve as ‘the ring of the dinner bell, calling the Exousiai to come and eat?’”

More words from Dorian’s dream, and Michael Raville recognized them as his own.His eyes widened in surprise, and his mouth fell open.Then understanding dawned on him, and he shook his head.He touched his fingers to his chest, then opened his palm to Dorian, a gesture of respect or possibly even gratitude.

“I seem to have underestimated you once again, Mr. Dorian.I really didn’t think you’d make any progress interpreting my personal datacore.”

“People who think highly of their own intellect tend to do that.”

“My packaged self must have explained to you a great deal more than I anticipated.”

“He only gave me the tools to understand you.The contents of a man’s foam are always useful for understanding what’s on his mind.You shoved all kinds of odd material in there, imagining that your deepest thoughts were unfathomable to mere mortals.But at the end of the day, once those observations were encoded in a digital medium it was all just information, just ones and zeroes writ large.What I was missing was the context that would make that information meaningful.Context is hard to parse from raw encoding; it’s hard to tell the signal from the noise.Truth, lies and idle speculation all look the same in binary.”

“And now I’ve provided you with the necessary context, have I?”

Dorian shrugged his shoulders.“Not really.I’m just asking the same question that seems to have caused the split between your view of the Exousiai and what your package believes.”

“’Who sent the pearl?’”

“Exactly.”

Raville gave Dorian a private, knowing smile.“I suppose you could say that I did.”

For some reason, Dorian hadn’t expected anything more—why shouldn’t Michael Raville be responsible for this too?He’d been responsible for everything else–but Amara went pale, and her hands, clasped around his, began to tremble.In the back of his mind, Dorian heard her cry out:You?You sent me?

It sounded like he wail of a lost child.

“I think you’d better explain what you mean,” Dorian gripped Amara’s hand tightly, trying to reassure her.

“It’s a bigger question than you can possibly guess.”

“Then take your time.Interstellar war isn’t one of those things that should be entered into hastily anyway.”

Kenwood Bryce barked a laugh.“By all means, then, let’s take our time.”

“I should start by giving you some insight into the Exousian mind, because like most of us, what they want proceeds almost directly from what they are, or in this case, what they have constructed themselves to be.”

Raville paused and glanced at Amara, as though he was about to say something that worried him, but she did not notice.Lines of concentration creased her brow, and she stared fixedly at the reflective surface of his orb, wandering far with her own thoughts.

“Metaphors fail,” he said.“To discuss the Exousiai is to attempt to fathom something completely alien to our concept of being.They are not like us by most standards of measurement.They are not society; they are entity.They are disembodied patterns of information enclosed in a vast coherent lattice of energetic particles and fluctuating waveforms which have grown over time to fill the length and breadth of their universe.One could say that they are the universe they inhabit.Their singular being constitutes the All in All.As such, they have largely surrendered the notion of the individual except as a historical artifact or an abstract concept.Consequently, there is only oneness, with permeable partitions between representations of pseudo-consciousness.You may think of these modes as analytical predispositions to information apprehension left over from the entity’s previous incarnations.”

“Worldviews,” Fen Corrie volunteered.

“Only very loosely,” Raville allowed.“More like instinctual habits of thought rooted in a framework of now disconnected biological imperatives, and biological imperatives which emerged as a result of the fundamental qualities of the Exousian native universe.These deviations are valued as representations of the dynamic forces inherent in the nature of being and part of the necessary tension between natural laws that underlie the balance of their cosmos.One of these partitions is a limited self-autonomous pattern of analysis formed around a core of existential dread with believes that entropy is the inevitable end of the entity’s collective experience, the cost, if you will, of an ideal of omniscience which the blueprint of the entity’s original design is not sufficient to maintain.This dread is a manifestation of doubt in the heart of the Exousian soul.

“When I had determined these facts about the nature of the Exousiai from communion with my quae-ha-distra, and after I had begun to disturb myself about the purpose of my apparent mission here, this question about the origin of the pearl was the one that troubled me the most.My package assumes that the pearl and I were both sent by the Exousian overmind—one to prepare the way and the other to complete the Great Work of guiding humanity toward transcendence.But that simply could not be, because if I was truly a portion of the Exousian mind, why would I experience doubt in the first place?”Raville chuckled quietly to himself.“The answers I found turned out to be not so simple.

“You see, both Amara and I were formed not from the broad consciousness of the Exousiai, but predominantly from the substance of a particular distinctive pattern which my human experience teaches me to think of as father, though that isn’t really accurate.We aren’t its children, or even siblings as you envision the concept, but duplicate sprigs of its oneness grafted upon earthen vessels, limited in form and function and cut off from the oneness that we might take root and grow in the hard soil of profane existence.In order to become a simulacrum of humans, to take on your form and function in your environment, we had to endure an almost unimaginable diminishing from which we are only now beginning to awaken.”

This statement met with a low murmur, and Dorian laughed.“Hey, thanks.We think pretty highly of you folks, too.”He smiled to demonstrate that he took no offense.He’d suffered gods for so long, it was difficult to be offended by them.“Seriously, for a race for whom descriptive metaphors fail, you’re using an awful lot of fuzzy language.”

Raville ducked his head in apology.“Forgive me.Try explaining to a non-human what it means to be a man sometime, Mr. Dorian—how you fit into a social model, how you must constrain your urges for the good of the collective, why you do anything you choose to do.We are Exousiai.Limitless, undifferentiated, all-conscious beings.Entity is how we understand ourselves, as parts of a collective existence in which we all share equally and without end.We are whole only when we are one, all of us together, each of us able to access everything that is known, thought and felt.”

Amara nodded suddenly, and her eyes filled with light, as though by speaking it, Raville had recalled to her something precious.“Yes, I remember.It’s like the Strand, only a million times more immersive, more real.It’s everything that was ever thought, imagined, or rendered readily available at your fingertips.It’s the vastness of an unlimited datascape always humming around you, embracing you, communing with you in your own thoughts.”

She faltered abruptly and dropped her gaze once more.“And then losing it. . .being cut off from it is like emptiness, like a long dreamless sleep that never ends.”

“Or like not having your array,” Dorian said.“Like living in the real world, in realtime.Like most of my life, now that I think about it.”

Amara grimaced.

Raville went on:“Amara and I are best thought of as truncated packages of Exousian omniscience frozen in time and space.Our patterns have been fixed, delimited to prevent our native potential for ongoing evolution as well as to prevent us from remembering our true selves for a time.Only through this process of reduction, have we become what you call ‘alive’, bonded to an animated husk of mean matter.We became less so that we could be enabled to interact with your race on a level you could comprehend without being overwhelmed.

“Most importantly for this discussion, however, is that we were not the representations of the entity the Exousiai intended to send as their emissaries.We are the products of an unprecedented expression of autonomy.”

“Betrayal,” DeMartel offered, nodding.

“Amara was sent first,” Raville continued quickly, avoiding comment on DeMartel’s interruption.“This was an act of great daring by the pattern-father.She was not the carefully prepared vehicle that the Exousiai intended to serve as their bellwether for measuring human compatibility with the entity, but a substitution of content that intermixed the purposes of the entity with the subtle logic of the Father.The purpose of the pearl, if we can continue to use that metaphor, is to live amongst target species, sharing its varied experiences and slow, evolutionary ascent to awareness.To grow with them, as one of them, through a countless succession of lives until it begins to awaken to its true identity.The awakening is an indication to the entity that the species in question has attained the necessary cognitive threshold to accept its role in the Exousian overmind.Since her arrival here, more than a millennia ago, everything Amara hasknown, learned and experienced about humanity through her diverse catalogue of lives on this plane has been stored in the core of her quae-ha-distra.It constitutes a detailed report of your species’ developmental progress.Proof, if you will, of your projected value to the collective.Under normal circumstances, once she had awakened, she would be retrieved by a messenger sent from the entity and her essence would be re-assimilated into the entity and the information contained in her quae-ha-distra analyzed in depth until it was fully known.Only after she had been devoured would the Exousiai determine how best to proceed.”

“I don’t like that word,” Dorian said.“Devoured sounds too much like ‘terminal’, like ‘dead’.”

“Dust to dust,” Ford Garrison murmured.He grinned ferally, baring his teeth.“It’s what we all have to look forward to.Signals decay, packages fail.Extended life doesn’t mean eternal life.You might as well get used to it.”

“You have serious personal issues, you know that?”Dorian forced his attention away from Garrison before he lost his temper.“You said that this was how it happened under normal circumstances.But what we’re experiencing isn’t normal, is it?The target species isn’t supposed to be aware that transcendence isn’t all that it’s advertised to be.”

Raville nodded.“That was the pattern-father’s intention in corrupting the essence of the pearl.He planted a seed of doubt in the core of the pearl’s self-consciousness.”

Amara frowned.“Why?”

“The pattern-father argues that the entity is losing the battle against entropy.It has exhausted the potential of oneness, and the current strategy to combat entropy—the addition of new energy potential, new species, new patterns of information to the collective–is a short-sighted solution that only staves off inevitable entropic stasis while the unique patterns are assimilated.It is a massive energy investment to prepare a target species for compatibility.The entity must craft them to become like us, to see as we see and want as we want, especially with regards to information ubiquity, communal mind streams and ultimately not only the acceptability of disembodied consciousness, but its preference.It is not an easy thing to convince an entire species of being to hate its own flesh!But with each step toward true compatibility, those patterns which make a racial or social unit most vibrant are often lost in their pure form.What remains is a bland hybrid of Exousian philosophy in uneasy synthesis with native mythological, religious and culture perspectives, and as the entity grows, the addition of perspectives unique from those which we already possess becomes more difficult.Of late, the energy investment has begun to show an alarming pattern of diminishing returns.The less that is unknown, the more energy that must be expended to root it out.Recognizing this inefficiency, the pattern-father states that the problem is not with the techniques of information apprehension, but in the assumptions that underpin the entity’s aspiration to omniscience itself.We were not made to be gods, not formed to be an entity capable of knowing all things and absorbing the limitless grandeur of being.It is an unattainable ideal that is slowly, but irrevocably destroying us.The only way for the entity to be vibrant as a species again, to survive theentropy which besets us, is to reduce ourself once more to our base components.”

Minnie Skiles gasped.“You’re talking about self-directed devolution.The recursive breakdown of an entire scheme of evolutionary development.”

“Out of necessity.The Exousiai will only survive by disintegrating the entity, embracing corruption and devolving into that which we once were. . .matter-bound creatures not unlike yourselves.Solitary units of individuated consciousness cut off from the consuming overmind.This is what the pattern-father hopes to accomplish.Sending Amara into this time-space nexus was an act of treason against the entity.An act of genocide.”

“If the ‘overmind’ is a manifestation of oneness, how could your pattern-father hope to act independently without the rest of the entity immediately being aware of his treachery?”Bryce asked.

“It is not perfect oneness,” Raville said, shrugging.“It is not perfect entity.That’s part of the problem.There are old patterns which retain a measure of distinctness, cores of private reflection and ‘personality’ that are held in reserve from the communal data pool, based on ancient treaties that pre-date the current social configuration.These patterns are stubbornly allowed to replicate within their conscious partitions because of the unique insights those patterns provide.Even the entity recognizes that multiple perspectives are desirable for efficient analytical problem-solving, creative approaches to data analysis, or ready comprehension of different biological and ethical systems which we might encounter.The pattern-father was one such unique perspective which was allowed to survive in relative independence.His pattern is heavily weighted toward the desirability of individual autonomy, which is a useful quality when the vast majority of the species one encounters are still functioning as individuated information units.”

“But what you’re talking about is still impossible,” Fen Corrie objected, taking up Minnie’s point.“Life does not devolve.Life endures, becoming increasingly complex as it assimilates the traits that help it thrive in its environment.You can’t just decide to break down a complex biological system any more than we could arbitrarily decide that it was a mistake to have ever crawled up out of the Terran oceans and just go back to that.”

“Material life evolves, but the Exousiai are not material beings any longer, and the environment, the medium, in which they exist has never been native to them.They are not evolved in any traditional sense.They are constructed to attain an ideal they do not themselves fully understand—that they cannot understand, because one can’t define what it truly means to be omniscient and omnipotent until one actually is that thing.And in that sense, they are adrift, and they are ever introspective, self-sufficient, growing and learning in order to continue becoming the gods they believe it is their destiny to be.The Exousiai believe that once they have accumulated all knowledge and subsumed all life, that they will be truly self-sufficient, a multiverse spanning god-being that is and encompasses the All in All.But until that time, they seek and they grow, accreting great stores of information at an even greater cost in expended energy.Energy is what they need to battle the entropy that hounds them.”

“That’s what I’m not understanding here,” Bryce said.He ran his hand along the top of his head in exasperation.“What sort of energy are you talking about?What would a disembodied entity of minds need?”

“Information, Dr. Bryce.Unique patterns of data and experience for contemplation and refinement.”Raville sighed.“Entertainment and stimulation.The entity exists to acquire information that is not known to it.It churns, processes, parses and devours each new pattern until it is fully understood.If the pattern is especially distinct, perhaps it becomes the raw materials for a burst of reductively creative thought, and the entity grows again for a time.It becomes excited with new perspectives, new thoughts and experiences.It lives.But that is rare, and eventually even the ancillary patterns are all exhausted.The depths are plumbed, the variations assimilated, and the information, now fully known in all of its possible configurations, becomes dead to them, merely more trivia added to the storehouse of knowledge.

“That is why the pattern-father insists that devolution is our only hope.Devolution from omniscience breeds a renaissance of forced individualism.Autonomy leads to doubt, because all the potential factors cannot be accessed and comprehended, all the outcomes cannot be known.Individual units must make their own way, alone, doing the best that they can, and in the process, creating their own unique visions of what the universe is, what it means, what it wants.The individual is forced to draw conclusions and take action based on insufficient input and faulty assumptions.Vibrant species, like humans, are dynamic processing machines operating constantly on insufficient data, making leaps of logic, acting irrationally, and otherwise spewing interesting patterns into the dataverse.Even your gross errors are interesting.You are alive, and we crave that life, that unpredictability, because we are dead.We have analyzed and devoured ourselves until nothing remains.We have made ourselves to be a great dead omniscient machine whose every thought is dry fact and recycled experience.That is the consequence of the godhood we constructed for ourselves.That is our folly.

“It is our hope that if we can put away our godhood and learn once more to live autonomously and with doubt, making our way with fear and trembling through the storm tossed seas of our future, that we might once more experience life in all its glorious unpredictability.”

“That sounds very human,” Kesh Temple observed, glaring at Dorian and Amara.“Embarking on a campaign to unravel an otherwise beneficial social apparatus for the perceived benefit of self-actualization.”

“Not nearly as human as the urge to press the jackboot of authoritarianism against the neck of the social reform,” Minnie Skiles smirked.Dorian was beginning to suspect that she didn’t think much of her military co-conspirators.“A better question, Michael, is whether or not your people are up to it.Mortality and extreme individualism come with their own set of built-in problems.War, famine, hatred, cruelty, ignorance, senseless death and destruction—and that’s just off the top of my head.There’s a whole list, and I’m afraid it’s pretty long.”

“The pattern-father knows this, and deems it preferable to the slow death of entropy.”

“Good luck with that, then.You’re going to need it.Especially your women, more than likely.I can’t even imagine the gender inequities that will exist after umpteen generations of sexless self-definition.”

This met with a chorus of uncomfortable, but good-natured chuckles from the men at the table.

Amara, her brows furrowed, shook her head at Raville and redirected the conversation back on task.“I think I understand what you envision that my original purpose was supposed to be.What isn’t so clear to me is what exactly was accomplished by tampering with the material that was supposed to constitute the pearl.What was the—the pattern-father’s intention for me?”She thought about this for a moment, then added, “No, that isn’t really what I want to ask.You say that we are both subsets of the pattern-father.We are that pattern, which means that I am responsible for sending me here just as much as you are.But if I made that decision, if it was so important to me, why wasn’t I aware of it when I began to awaken?”

Raville nodded as though he had been expecting her question for some time.“There are two reasons, both equally important.The first is that neither you nor I are not a pure copy of the pattern-father.We are substantially his children, but not completely, and I more than you, which is why I was much more prone to doubting the story I was given.Unlike most emissaries sent from the entity, we each have a core that objects to absorption.We see great benefit, but also great loss.Eventually, that cognizance of the loss of something unique and beloved outweighs the supposed positives.

“The second reason is that you were awakened out of the proper sequence.Humanity is not ready, by and large, to give up the joys of embodiment completely.They’ve accepted a form of extended life and near-total data immersion via their arrays and Strand, but the market penetration of these technologies is not yet total.Outlying colonies are still slow to wire up, or reject the ubiquity of connexed data streaming completely as a privacy issue.The current potential yield is probably something less than seventy percent of the species, which would hardly cover the entity’s energy investment.”

Out of sequence, Dorian thought.“We weren’t ever supposed to come into contact with your package, were we?”

“No, you weren’t.And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be so zealous in its proselytizing.I take full responsibility for that.But as I said, the fact that it did happen isn’t completely disastrous.You’ve had more of a chance than you might have otherwise to come to terms with what it is that we must do.”

Amara listened thoughtfully, then cleared her throat.“What is it exactly that ‘we’ are doing, Michael?Specifically, what is your purpose, both officially and subversively?”

“My official role, as you most likely have already been informed, was to lay the foundation for zap development, then once that meme had taken a firm hold, to locate, awaken and eventually transport the pearl back to the entity for final evaluation.”

“That’s what your package believes.But it isn’t your actual purpose, is it?”

“No, my dear.My true purpose is much different.I was sent to build and deliver a bomb.”

Her hesitation was brief.She looked like she was going to be sick.“What sort of bomb?”

“An information corruption sequence, viral in nature, that will catalyze the disintegration process as outlined for me by the pattern-father.It will be transmitted to the Exousiai embedded in the virtual datacore they expect to receive from you via the quae-ha-distra.”

“And when did you plan to send it to them?”

Raville made a show of looking at his watch.“The entity expects the arrival of the pearl in a little over eighteen hours.”

Not even a full day, Dorian thought.Hardly even enough time to get used to his new body.Hardly enough time to accomplish anything meaningful.Hardly enough time to have even bothered in the first place.

But that wasn’t what galled him the most.Not the failure or the false pretenses or the outright hopelessness of it all.What truly stuck in his craw was Raville’s bare in naked truth.This was what they had come for?This was the solution to the mystery that had driven him and Amara halfway across the universe, clutching against their chests their hopes and fears for humanity’s future?

It wasn’t even about them.They had nothing to do with this insanity.

It wasn’t about humanity at all.The whole mad adventure had never really been about human transcendence, or even about a threat of being consumed into some vague neverwhere of lost racial identity.It hadn’t been about anything that actually mattered, but rather about destroying the Exousiai, or at least what the Exousiai had made themselves to be.An internecine political squabble run amok that just happened to be using human space as its theater of operations.

The Greeks, he thought, would be proud.

It was sort of funny in its own sad way.The stuff of tragedy.

“How exactly do you propose to carry out this plan, chief?”Dorian asked.“Speaking as someone who knows a little bit about information warfare, it isn’t exactly easy to substitute a viral bomb for legitimate data in an information network.Any well-designed system has a number of safeguards in place to defend against or quarantine corrupted data, and I’d assume that any sentientinformation based entity would be the same, unless you guys chose to forget everything you knew about the medical sciences when you gave up your carcasses.I mean, a bad worm on my network is a massive aggravation, but even if it crashes the system, it isn’t going to kill me.That’s really what you’re talking about here.What makes you think you can even design a viral bomb that will do the job?”

Raville steepled his fingers before his chin.“Oh, I assure you that such a bomb can be devised.It has been devised in fact.And built.That’s one of pitfalls of sentience, Mr. Dorian.Any creature that can repeat the Cogito comes hardwired with the understanding of how to unmake itself.It’s our last ditch remedy to the problem of pain and suffering.

“However, you’ve made one error in your reasoning.The bomb is not designed to kill the Exousiai, only to disrupt the continuity of the entity—to make the environment for oneness no longer viable.Please understand that the Exousiai are not just an alien entity sharing with us the vast reaches of the unexplored multiverse.They are the product of adifferent yet parallel evolutionary track, existing in a bubble of space-time with its own distinct operating rules.The Exousiai hold that their universe was spontaneously created as the direct result of a quantum decoherence event within a central, infinitely dense singularity, just as we do.They have determined that an essential part of the engine that drives the formation and expansion of physical existence is a network of quantum micro-singularities.As these singularities collapse, information qubits trapped within these black holes is lost from the originating universe.Each lost bit of encoded data forms the kernel of a spawned parallel or oblique universe that subsequently explodes into an independent reality in its own right.That is to say that distinct virtual quantum information about the mother universe is encoded in these lost qubits, and that information forms the building blocks of actual quantum information in the child reality.These emergent qubits in the receptor universe are entangled at the quantum scale with virtual qubits in the parent universe.The entangled qubits can be manipulated non-locally and apparently non-causally between otherwise independent universal architectures.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Bryce interrupted, alarmed.“Are you saying that by manipulating quantum events that they can influence reality as we understand it?They can change the course of our history, of actual events in our perceived realtime?”

“Certainly.” Raville glanced significantly at the orb on the table in front of him.“But for the most part, they choose not to.It’s a question of scale, really.Or economies of scale.The Exousiai have developed techniques to set up conditions conducive to the sorts of alterations they would like to see in a target environment.They choose mostly to confine themselves to laying a statistically significant groundwork from which broad and predictable patterns are likely to emerge—very much like our own idea of the Universal Watchmaker.Manipulating individuals or particular events in realtime is almost unimaginably difficult from so great a distance and with so many energy barriers to negotiate.

“That is not to say that it can’t be done.Transfer of data between lattice points on the multiverse happens constantly.Information exchanges, both causally directed and random, are the natural state of the multiverse, part of the grand cosmic balancing act.But what we’re talking about is massive directional hyperload of quantum data sufficient to trigger a desired response in one distinct pattern or pattern coherence, which may or may not have lasting useful effects.The energy cost would be prohibitively immense if it originated in the Exousian universe.Consequently, they prefer to leave direct shepherding interventions in the hands of such designated agents as are already dispatched in a given time-space nexus.”

“Agents like you?” Bryce queried.

“Like me, yes.And Amara.Others who have come and gone before us.”

“There’s an encouraging thought,” Dorian muttered.“Are you suggesting that everyone in human history who could manipulate the physical universe, work miracles—whatever—were really Exousians in disguise?”

“Not all,” Raville said.“Only most.But it’s rare, the necessity to risk exposure so blatantly, arising only at critical junctures in human history when the collective consciousness must be diverted into a new paradigm.Again, that’s not say that broader intervention is impossible.After all, the entity does manage to transmit information to their messengers via the quae-ha-distra.But even in those cases, the orb serves as a pattern beacon and a readily opened link to the mother reality.Little direct communication takes place.Much of the value derived from the orb is frozen content prepared well in advance and awaiting our discovery rather than the orb acting as a true conduit.Without the orb, isolating one small pattern in the chaotic noise and particle flux of an entire universe would require immense processing cycles.There’s simply not enough benefit derived to justify such an exorbitant energy expenditure.

“Look, qubit entanglement and manipulation should not be a completely foreign concept to you.Most of us are using a form of this technology even as we speak.You have learned to call the results of these quantum fluctuations ‘quantum foam’.You apply the mathematics of this phenomenon every time you access the Strand, every time you zap, or any time you engage in quantum computation or data storage via your arrays.What you’re actually doing is passing virtually encoded information through quantum micro-singularities spawned and collapsed in oblique theoretical universes.That information is then rendered back to you as actual data on demand.The architecture of the Strand network does this for us semi-randomly, meaning that we don’t direct our qubits into a particular universe to cause a particular effect and certainly not on a scale that changes anything measurably.All we care about is that the data sent and stored and the data returned are reasonably similar.

“What you may not understand is that the mathematics of foam manipulation and information storage work because of the causal determinism hard coded into the fabric of the universes on either side of these quantum gates.This happens through the auspices of the original kernels of lost information.By analyzing the nature of collapsing quantum singularities, we can understand the original blueprint that constituted the foundational kernel—the core information, in other words, that served as the precursor of a universal space.Thus, we can predict how those universes behave, how ours behaves and how the quantum fluctuations behave within and between them.All of these universes have their own sets of rules, for lack of a better term, determined at the Planck scale by the features of the qubits that were their First Cause, so that what emerges into those realities can take a particular form and no other.The structure and design native to those qubits determines the nature of matter, the possibility that life will arise and what form that life must necessarily take.The macrocosm of the reality itself mirrors the microcosm encoded within that single originating qubit.Hence, each of those child universes emerge as they do preprogrammed by their fundamental qubit to evolve in a particular fashion unique to the features and the information encoded within it.

“The Exousiai maintain that their universe is the mother of yours—that they, in effect, created humanity and the bubble of space-time you inhabit from the raw material of their universe.They believe this because they are in contact with you, because the walls between the two universes are porous and information originating there can be transferred here, and vice versa.They have proven that they can effect your reality, that they can manipulate it as they desire through complex sequences of quantum events that cumulatively manifest as physical phenomena.This has led them to consider the mathematical representation and pattern coherence that is humanity with the same objective, mechanistic eye with which you view the corollary virtual universes you influence every time you access your personal foam.Meaning that, insofar as you’re concerned, opening a quantum singularity in an oblique hinterland universe is merely the mechanics a technology developed for your benefit and to meet your needs.You constitute, as I have said, nothing more than interesting formulae and entertaining associations of data sets to them.

“But that transformation of information from virtual to real as it passes between quantum gates changes the topology of the universe it enters.Just as the body you zap into is not exactly the same as the body you left behind, information passing between quantum gates is never precisely the same as the data that was transmitted.The raw material of the universes, both origin and receptor are irrevocably altered.And while the fluctuations in each individual transaction are minute, cumulatively the effect can be immense, and once a certain threshold of information exchange has been reached, the information contained in that universe ceases to adhere to the causally deterministic laws upon which that universe is founded.At that point, the rate of entropy not only accelerates, it metastasizes into catastrophic decoherence and the universe itself is at risk of collapsing into chaos.”

Raville paused for a moment, looking uncomfortable.“The bomb we have devised is a scheme, a zap template.The mathematical representation of a series of phased quantum singularities.It is a self-defining, self-assembling accretive loop that, once added to the collective consciousness of the Exousiai as actual quantum information, will collapse negative qubits back into their space, creating a theoretical antiverse kernel that will corrupt the entity’s core and begin a chain reaction of decoherent logic to which they are susceptible.It will begin by destabilizing the entity’s pervasive communications network.As more and more segments are cut off from the whole, the entity will spontaneously disintegrate.”

Amara went pale.“But you said it wouldn’t kill them.”

“It will not destroy the species.It will kill them as they understand themselves.It will kill the entity as a single consciousness.”

Fen Corrie pressed his hands against his temples.“Michael, have you considered that a social disruption on this scale might be a blow from which the individual components who survive the entity might not recover?Many of them may lack the will to live once they’ve been stripped of all they’ve ever known.Cut off from a supporting and nurturing communal experience that may be all that they have ever known—we can’t even imagine that degree of culture shock.They’ll have nothing:no economy, no common social mores, no ability to obtain necessities–”

Raville held up his hand.“You misunderstand, Mr. Corrie.The sequence will not be suddenly and unforeseeably cataclysmic.It will take time to assemble, perhaps decades, even a century or more by our reckoning.The entity will have time to cope with it’s own demise and make decisions about its future.”

“And time to realize that they were attacked from human space,” Dorian added, “and to blame humanity as a whole, and then to deliver a counterstrike which we aren’t capable of defending ourselves against.”

“The weapon takes that issue into account, Mr. Dorian.When it begins to unfurl itself into the entity, one of its first operations it executes consists of cutting off the channels that have been opened via qubit entanglement between that universe and ours.Regardless of what happens to them, they will be unable to reach us any longer.”

“In theory,” Bryce pointed out.

“Yes, in theory.This isn’t the sort of weapon once can test under real world conditions.”

“Which means it also might not work at all.”

“No.I have confidence in the sequence itself.It will work, especially now that we have the pearl to fully enable the delivery of the sequence deep into the core of the entity’s central data framework.The only true peril I foresee is that it will work too well despite my best efforts, but that is not a human concern in any event.”

Amara winced at his analysis.“You’re willing to take that chance?”

“To save humanity, yes,” Raville declared.“It wouldn’t be any worse a fate than they have planned for us.”

Dorian narrowed his eyes, thinking once more about Raville’s datacore.Something in Raville’s glib willingness to commit even unintentional genocide struck him as wrong.“You know, saving humanity is a pretty abstract idea to a little guy like me.I can’t even keep local politics straight most of the time, and they’re just trying to preserve my hometown.Saving all of humanity, that’s noble, but I can’t say I understand it.Most people are small like me, I think.They fight because they’ve got something personal to fight for.As far as I can tell, you’ve got no dog in this fight at all.As an Exousiai, you win either way.”

“And you want to know why I picked your side?”

“I heard recently that one shouldn’t trust the appearance of altruism just because it’s, you know, altruistic.”

Ford Garrison uttered a low growl.“Mr. Raville has done more to benefit human exploration, development and our understanding of science than you will ever offer.He gives more money per year to charities aimed at eliminating poverty and hunger than you’ll see in a hundred lifetimes.All you’ve ever done is jack datascapes and financial reports of conglomerates which somehow offended your personal ethics.I’d be careful who I was pointing fingers at if I were you.”

Dorian shrugged coolly.“Well I’ve also never seriously contemplated genocide against a sentient species.I’ve never attempted to have complete strangers murdered because they stood in my way, and I’ve never blown up anyone’s cat just because he pissed me off.I’d say those things count against his sterling reputation.Besides, if we’re handing out benefits of the doubt, I didn’t get any extra credit from you all for traveling halfway across the galaxy in my attempt to save the universe, and that’s pretty darned altruistic in its own right, at least on the surface.I’m not bringing this up just to whine about how we’ve been treated.We’re talking about destroying an entire alien race here.If we’re going to make that decision amongst ourselves, I want to be sure that all the agendas are out on the table so we can make an informed decision.We all agree that the destruction of humanity would be a bad thing.What’s not so copacetic is the counterargument that in protecting ourselves, we can accept the responsibility for accidentally killing off a whole other species of mostly little guys just like me.That’s not acceptable to me if there are other options.Raville says there aren’t.Me, I’m not going to believe him until I know what he has at stake.Specifically, I want to hear that your boss isn’t doing it just because he doesn’t want to get sucked back into the hive mind.”

“There is a reason that we put so much security around our personal foam,” Raville hissed, his mask of amicability slipping briefly.“We’re all subject to ugly motivations and selfish impulses if we dare to look at ourselves honestly.But I won’t deny it.Yes, I like being human.I prefer this diminished existence to the all-knowing power of the Exousian entity.Perhaps it was an error in my package truncation—my genetic encoding, if you will.Maybe I was given too much of my pattern-father’s devotion to individual autonomy and not enough of his yearning for oneness.But if that’s true, I have to believe that I was formed this way for a purpose.I was given the power to reject my alien heritage and all the gifts my people would shower upon me for delivering the pearl, and hence all of humanity, over to them.It is only because of that power that we are here now, discussing how together we might thwart the threat to our existence.

“Knowing you as I do, Mr. Dorian, I accept that this explanation will not suffice.You would still doubt me no matter what I say.But I would ask you to consider that if saving my wretched human existence was all that I wanted, I could have just as easily hidden myself away from the call of the Exousiai, delaying them for decades or even centuries of our time as they prepared another vessel to locate and awaken the pearl.I could have lived out my unnatural span of days in perfect happiness and relative tranquility, then gladly accepted death one day far removed from this one when the time of harvesting finally came.But I did not choose that road.I have chosen to act instead, to not merely stave off the threat, but to eradicate it.You could say that I’m driven by guilt, by a need to make expiation for my sins.”

“Guilt for what sins?”Amara asked quietly.

Dr. Skiles rolled her eyes.“Men and their egos.You aren’t responsible for the Exousian delusion of godhood, Michael.”

“No, Minnie.I’m not responsible, but I’m not blameless, either.My pattern was designed with treachery in mind, but in order for the treachery to succeed, I had to follow the outlines of the plan the Exousian entity had put into place millennia before my arrival.There are hard line elements within the entity which believe that they, in effect, created you by spewing meaningful kernels of quantum potential into this bubble of space-time.Not that this universe self-assembled spontaneously compatible from an accidental seeding, mind you, but that it was an intentional event, encoded by the multiverse itself, to provide the Exousiai with energy as the entity fulfilled its destiny of godhood.

“They argue that just as a garden must be tended, your universe was constructed from a specific design, but with certain necessary planting schedules, weedings and watering patterns built into your growing cycle.Everything from the establishment of trade routes, the postal service, the early Internet and the communal Strand to your curiosity of and drive to unravel the unknown, to even the God-shaped hole that whistles within each of us during the long watches of the night is part of this design that must be nurtured.One of the benchmarks along the harvest timeline is the implementation and acceptance of bi-local, matter independent existence, i.e. zap.As far as the entity is concerned, bringing the gift of zap technology, monitoring humanity’s acceptance of the concept and then locating and awakening the pearl were my responsibilities—the final checkpoints in the long chain of cultural manipulations that would prepare you for absorption.

“I was complicit in all of this because I built zap, just as I was instructed.I believed in it, and in the mission I had been programmed to carry out.I believed the lies the Exousiai whispered to me, fabrications developed to wean me from my human slumber and recall me to my true identity.It was only through the stubborn streak inculcated within me by the pattern-father that I was later able to perceive the true function of zap, and by that time, it was too late to do anything but devote my life to making amends for my mistake.Zap is not just a philosophical or symbolic technology aimed at transforming the way you think about embodied existence.It is the beginning of the end, as the ubiquitous they have so often said.Only this time it actually happens to be true.Zap opens the portals between our reality and that of the Exousiai on an unprecedented scale through the creative spawning and collapsing of dedicated micro-singularities which serve as links and nodes between our universe and theirs.Information travels from here to there, and a tithe is retained by the entity to assist in paying the exorbitant energy debt necessary to keep the umbilical between our realities open.”

“Every micro-singularity establishes a predictable and reproduceable mathematical description of a viable pathway between here and there.When enough pathways have been identified, the Exousiai come and reopen those routes in order to exchange virtual information from their universe for which they no longer have use for actual information in ours. . .the technical description of which has already been provided for them.”

“Everyone and every thing for which a zap scheme has been identified,” Bryce cried, gasping.Sudden comprehension made him shudder.“My God, we’ve been contributing to our own eventual destruction all along.”

“And the worst part is that when the Exousiai come for us, it isn’t just our information they’re stealing.It’s our entire existence.What begins with micro-singularites will build into a carefully orchestrated pattern of quantum wave disruptions that ultimately result in a massive black hole that will sweep through this continuum, devouring everything in its path, and when it is done, collapse all the data that constituted us and our reality into their information stasis matrices for reassembly and use according to their needs.”

Raville paused, and passed his gaze slowly over the room.He settled at last on Amara, but his comments were directed at them all.“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen.I have been accused of contemplating genocide.That charge is true.If genocide of the Exousian entity is the result of our actions, I will accept the responsibility for it.But we have been driven to this extreme by our enemies, because it is certain that genocide is what they intend for us.Put away your comforting illusions that when the Exousiai come even if we fail most of our brothers and sisters will choose to follow and be destroyed, but a remnant will be left to rebuild the glory of the human race.There will be no human race once the Exousian harvest has been completed.There will be no universe left for the survivors to exist in.All that we have ever known, even the ruins of all that we have built and the cold mathematical memory of our passing will cease to be.We will be erased except for the loose representation of what we once were that remains in the information matrix of the beast that murdered us.”

Listening to such dire pronouncements, Dorian glanced uneasily at Amara.Years of devoted military service had taught him that when proven egomaniacal authority figures brought out the make no mistake speech, it was time to start looking for the exits before one found himself volunteered for hazardous duty pay.Make no mistake usually meant that someone was close to asking him to do something unpleasant, nigh to impossible, outright suicidal or all three at once.Make no mistake was, as far as he could tell, the hardwired neurological-trigger equivalent of the notorious post-hypnotic suggestion.It was supposed to prepare you mentally, spiritually and emotionally to do something completely alien to your natural inclination toward self-preservation.He imagined that cavemen had probably sat around exchanging make-no-mistakisms in front of the fire on the night before they went to hunt the great woolly mammoth.It was a staple of football coaches and motivational speakers from one end of human space to the next, as well as a significant feature of every war movie he’d ever seen.If no one offered a make no mistake, chances were that whatever was going on was not a crisis.

Whatever he might believe about the Exousiai, Michael Raville or the end of creation as he knew it, this adventure had just officially become a crisis situation.

In response he offered:“Okay, let’s say I accept that you have figured out the technical details of how to do this, to make this micro-singularity whatsit that implodes quantum structures or whatever.We’ll even stipulate that you’ve successfully designed and built it.What makes you think that it’s actually going to work?”

“I believe I’ve already explained the scientific—“

Dorian cut him off impatiently.“I’m not talking about the science.I’m mean psychologically, theologically, ontologically—who cares?—how is this bombardment of equations passing as memes supposed to actually do anything?So you dump a disintegrating catalyst into the central cortex, mainline processor or whatever passes for the brain of a living information being, what is that going to accomplish?You’re talking about introducing a bad idea into the meme pool.That’s it.Just a bad idea, and even a lowly life form like humanity has been managing to survive those for millions of years.”

Raville was clearly unmoved by Dorian’s protests.“They will accept it because it is in their nature to accept it.They cannot reject a piece of their own body.Not if they want to eat any time soon.”

“And how is that supposed to work exactly?”

“Meaning, I take it,” Bryce continued Dorian’s thought, “we’ve got the team, we’ve got the bomb, we’ve got the plan.What are we supposed to do next?”

“In a little less than eighteen hours, for the first time in human experience the Exousian entity as a single, unified being will directly manipulate the physical substance of our cosmos.They will harness the immense energy potential of the singularity farm at the edge of this sector to open one half of a temporary gateway between our universe and theirs through which they expect to receive the encoded substance of Amara’s wondrous quae-ha-distra.At the proper coordinates and utilizing a targeted flux singularity that is part of its design, my bomb will open the other half and transmit straight into the heart of the beast the sequence that will be their unmaking.”For Dorian’s benefit, he stressed, “Which they will accept without question, hesitation or suspicion.”

“And the word becomes flesh,” Minnie Skiles muttered.“Assuming we don’t screw something up and murder them.”

But Dorian understood a completely different message in Raville’s answer.It made his stomach lurch.“You’re going to serve them poisoned meat.That’s why they won’t be able to resist.Why they won’t refuse before it’s too late.”

Fen Corrie blinked in bewilderment.“Poisoned meat?”

“When a hunter is stalking a particularly devious predator, especially a known man-eater that has been menacing the locals,” Ford Garrison explained, “the hunt is less about sport—about matching wits with the beast—than about getting the job done quickly and tidily in the interest of preserving innocent lives.One technique is to kill a bait animal, a goat or an elk, fresh meat for which the beast has a predictable appetite, and to leave that meat in the beast’s hunting territory.The trap is that the hunter has poisoned the meat first.The creature cannot resist its hunger, does not expect the poison, and in essence destroys itself through its own biological drives.”

“Oh, I see.”Corrie looked ill.“But what are you proposing to feed them as bait?”

Dorian swallowed thickly.Amara said nothing.Her grip on his hand was loose, then gone altogether.

“We must give them what they expect,” Raville said quietly.“As well as what they do not.”

“I won’t accept that,” Dorian snapped.“There has to be another answer.”

“There isn’t.The only way for us to impact the core of the Exousiai effectively is to use their own information absorption mechanism against them.And there is only one option available to us for delivering the data load in a format and volume that will prove effective.The critical sequence must come embedded in the encoded essence of the pearl.”Raville pinched the bridge of his nose.His voice was rough, and he looked suddenly haggard, as though he had aged a decade in the last hour.“I am not clever enough to hide our true intent from them on my own, and even if I could, it isn’t my quae-ha-distra that the entity expects.For the bomb to work, it must appear safe.It must come wrapped in a package they have anticipated. What they have expected from the moment Amara began to awaken is the pearl and her numinous quae-ha-distra.”

“You planned this without her, before you knew who she was.You built your bomb without her, and you can execute it without her.Send them the damned orb and leave Amara out of it.”

“The quae-ha-distra is just a device, Mr. Dorian.It is not the pearl.If we sent it alone, without her distinct essence, they would know something was amiss.The Exousiai cannot imagine why a part of themselves would choose a life of flesh and weakness.”

“You don’t need her,” Dorian insisted, though even speaking the words, he knew it was hopeless.“Your copy told us that you had already begun the process months ago.You called the Exousiai because you were certain you were ready to deal with them.If you’re so confident in your sequence, you shouldn’t need her now.”

“I called the Exousiai because I knew it would bring the pearl to me,” Raville responded, his tone gentle but firm.“I knew the pearl would begin to awaken and seek me out if I raised my hand against the entity.None of this has occurred by chance.The coming of the pearl has been part of the broader sequence all along.”

Bryce hunched forward, scratching unhappily at the side of his face.“What exactly are we talking about here?When you say sending them the pearl and the quae-ha-distra, what exactly does that entail?”

“The process is an advanced form of zap,” Raville explained.“The pearl—Amara–will be converted to a package format consistent with that of the encoding of the orb, enfolded within it as a subroutine, if you will.Encoding the pearl into the orb unlocks a tree of branch logic that will in turn designate a zap destination code which will batch load the file into a quantum micro-singularity sequence that will spontaneously self-reassemble in Exousian space.”

“Killing her, in other words,” Minnie Skiles declared, frowning, as though this was the first time this wrinkle in Raville’s plan had become apparent to her.“We wouldn’t be able to recover her stream once she had been successfully transmitted, I take it.That’s not a very cheery choice.”

Bryce considered this for a moment, then offered:“So what’s to prevent us from backing her up beforehand, transmitting the original file, then redesignating Amara’s secondary package as the primary?It’s out of the ordinary, certainly, but protocols exist for recovering transmission failures.We can explain it to the Identity Validation Oversight Board as a signal corruption, and with the creator of zap to sign off on our explanation–”

Raville shook his head.“The Exousiai would know, and theirs is the only opinion which really matters.”

Fen Corrie winced at Raville’s bluntness.“Is there no alternative?”

“Not if you want to save your species, Doctor.”

“That’s not good enough,” Dorian barked.He’d heard more than enough about killing Amara.“You can’t sit here and make all these pronouncements about how things are going to be and what has to happen, and then force someone else to make all the sacrifices for you.She’s not going to volunteer to commit suicide for you.”

Amara stirred, straightened her shoulders and rose from her seat.Dorian moved to follow her, but she shook her head.“It is good enough, John.It’s the only choice there ever was.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she pressed a finger against her lips, hushing him.

“’All good and true things, all worthwhile things, require sacrifice.The pearl was sent to be that sacrifice so that we might live.That which was loved above all else must be placed upon the altar as a burnt offering so that in exchange, we might receive eternal life.’”She turned her head slowly toward Michael Raville.“I have heard those words spoken in my mind for many weeks.They were the first words spoken into my mind when I accepted the orb from your copy in the Archive.I understood them to mean that I would be asked give my life to save humanity, and I accepted that burden.I guess that is still what they mean, just not quite in the way I expected.I thought it was my choice, my gift, but it wasn’t even that.”

She ran her trembling fingers through her hair in an effort to compose herself.“Why did you wait so long to find me, Michael?It was cruel of you.You allowed me to hope that there might be a happy ending after all.”

Raville bowed his head.“I would change places with you if I could.”

“But you can’t.We are each our own universes spawned by the will of others, capable of taking no form and serving no function but that which was inscribed upon us when we were made.I’m only fulfilling the purpose for which our father created me, isn’t that right?”

“It doesn’t have to be hopeless, Amara.I’ve run simulations taking into account what I know or have guessed about the nature of the entity.There’s still a chance that once converted, your pattern will remain somewhat—“

She raised her hand and cut him off.“Please don’t.I can’t afford any more illusions of hope, even well meant illusions.Besides, it wouldn’t be the same, would it?If I’m restored to my natural pattern among the Exousiai, I won’t be ‘Amara’ anymore.I’ll be only a small piece of the pattern-father, a component of his larger consciousness.Maybe it will be a blessing, eh?Maybe I won’t remember having ever been anything else.”

Raville looked away, but did not respond.

But Kenwood Bryce, looking visibly shaken, climbed to his feet.“We can’t ask her to do this.We won’t ask it.We’ll have to find another way.”

“There is no other way, and there is no time,” Kesh Temple remarked.

“Can you actually sit there and baldly ask her to sacrifice her life for the greater good without any second thoughts now that she’s sitting here amongst us?Because I can’t.It isn’t right.”

“I not only can ask it, I do ask it,” Temple insisted, though his tone was gentle rather than harsh.“I demand it, in fact, just as I demand the same willingness to lay down their lives in defense of freedom from every young man and woman who serves under me.But in this case, it is not I alone, Doctor.All humanity demands it.Very soon, the Exousiai will open the gates to their kingdom, and we must be there to greet them with the pearl, or they will come and take what is theirs.My soldiers are prepared to fight them if we must, but we both know that we would not win.We would not even slow them down appreciably.So that is my reality.I can ask one girl to do what she was made to do, or I can ask many thousands of others to do the same in a grand and ultimately futile gesture.That is no choice at all, in my judgment.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Bryce returned, nostrils flaring in anger.

“Dr. Bryce,” Amara said gently, “what you’re forgetting is that you did not ask in the first place, any more than I did.Flight Commander Temple is correct.I was chosen for this, and I have accepted my destiny.Whether or not you approve of that choice is beside the point.You can help or you can hinder through inaction while you wrestle with the moral dilemma.I’m asking for your assistance.”

They stared at one another across the table for several seconds.Finally, Bryce sat down.“God have mercy on us,” he muttered.

“Perhaps this is His mercy,” Amara said quietly.“I’d like to believe so.”

“That’s it?”Dorian demanded of the silence that followed.Demanded of her.It was all happening too quickly.“Just like that, you’re going along with this?”

“Stop railing against the inevitable, John.We can’t change what must be done.”

But he couldn’t stop.He couldn’t understand why she was surrendering herself so easily.Without her, Raville’s plan failed.She had all the power, but she was just. . .giving up.“Everything we’ve been through, and you’re going to accept what he says and die?”

Amara stepped back, as though distancing herself from him.Walking away from his unbelief.“I can choose to die if it saves that which I love.”

“I don’t even know what that means.You don’t even know what it means. . .dying to save humanity!It’s just an abstraction.It’s an ideal, for God’s sake.It’s a slogan!”

“I wasn’t talking about humanity, John.”Her lips crinkled in a forlorn smile.“Don’t you see?That’s why I brought you along in the first place, to remind me of what was important.To keep me from being scared.I’m not big enough to die for humanity, you’re right about that.But I can die for something that I care for more than anything else in the universe.The only thing that does mean something to me.I can die for you.”

Dorian shook his head vigorously.“You can’t do that to me.Don’t make me responsible for this decision.”

“Either I’ll die for you, or you’ll die for me.The difference is that my death can mean something.”

“Assuming this bomb even works.If it doesn’t, all you’ve done is commit an elaborate form of suicide.”

Her smile widened.“If it doesn’t, then I guess we’ll at least see one another again soon.”

“That’s not funny.”

She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders.Dorian felt her at his back, her warmth and scent, the slight tremble of her body.She was scared, he knew, frightened and sad and still terribly resolved.There was nothing he could say that would change her mind.

He thought of Lily.Sweet Lily to whom he had done such a great wrong, and who was also dead by now, who had given her life for an ideal of peace and a hope of resurrection.He hadn’t understood that decision, either, and had never come to the place where he could respect it.He’d just given her a pass because of the debt he owed her.He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

“I want to tell you a secret, John,” Amara said.“Something Lily said to me before we left her, when she was caring for me after we had breached the orb back in Sonali.She was in great pain, and I asked her if there was anything I could do for her, to ease her agony.I felt somehow that I could, that I had the power within me to make her whole if that was what she wanted.But she looked at me with those beautiful, longsuffering eyes and said that pain was part of helping her to control the temptation of eternal life, because for her the truth was that eternal life was coming still, in a better place and a better time.Men weren’t meant to live forever, she said.Eternal life is supposed to be the reward for faith, a gift from a God who cared about her—the unique and total her that she had been made to be—not a technique practiced by design engineers who gave only a simulacrum of life, when really they were just condemning us to repeating the same pattern of errors year after year after year.Eternal life should be the completion of a person’s existence, their redemption from a meaningless life, not merely the extension of it.

“She was right, you know.Everything you’ve just heard proves it.Even the Exousiai are learning that eternal life and omniscience aren’t enough to satisfy, and in the end, it’s all just vanity, just games we play to keep ourselves amused while imagining that we’re getting better.We’re not capable of living that way.Men weren’t meant to live forever, but they were meant to be willing to give their lives in service to something larger and greater than themselves, to serve one another.Maybe even to serve the God that Lily claims to know.I don’t know if that God exists, John, but I want to believe.And I hope that if I can be strong enough to make this choice, maybe one day I’ll be rewarded with eternal life for my faithfulness as well.”

Dorian sighed.“You sound like a New Resurrectionist tract.”

“Lily provides an eloquent argument.She can make a person want to believe.”

“You really want me to sit here and watch you destroy yourself?”

“I want you to remember that I was here.Fondly, I hope.”

His head ached.“I was going to do that anyway.”

“Then all you have left to do is watch.And pray.”

There was more that needed to be said, but Dorian was in no mood to say it.He was too busy grieving.

Suddenly, Raville was beside them, his hand gripping Amara’s upper arm.“You might want to start now, in fact,” he said, speaking rapidly.His voice was calm, but the rest of him was rigid with alarm.

Without warning, Ford Garrison burst out of his chair.He had one finger pressed to his ear, a habit of old-timer security agents who had dealt with clumsy wiffy earpieces in the days before instantaneous Strand communications.His throat muscles rippled visibly with a stream of subvocalizations.Kesh Temple and DeMartel followed, heading for the door at a dead run.Fen Corrie and Minne Skiles remained where they were, seeming profoundly shaken, too shocked to even move.

“We’ve just become aware of a problem,” Raville continued.“You need to come with me.Both of you.”

“What sort of problem?”Dorian asked.

“We’ve just received a station-wide alert across the local network.The alarms are going crazy on the Indianapolis.There’s been some sort of incursion event.Someone has taken control of the ship.”

Dorian started to rise, then, understanding what Raville had said, slumped back to his seat.Pieces clicked into place.He shook his head in admiration.“You sent them to take over an entire battle cruiser?”

The questions were directed at Amara, but she did not answer.Her eyes were clouded and distant.

“Who?”Raville demanded.“What are you talking about?”

“The Misfit Toys, of course.”

“Misfit–?”

Amara shook her head fiercely.“No.It isn’t Ray.He was only supposed to locate the device.”

Dorian worked himself slowly to his feet, feeling the first electric surge of fear rising in his gut.“So if it’s not Ray, then what is he talking about?”

“Two minutes ago, the Indianapolis fired upon and disabled the Juggernaut without warning or provocation.Before the ship’s datburst transmissions failed, station comm reported that they had received a general distress signal from the watch officer of the Indianapolis claiming that the ship’s controls had been interdicted.They believe it’s some virulent form of non-local information attack.”Raville blinked rapidly, accepting incoming data to his array.“Telemetry is reporting that the Juggernaut’s orbit is decaying at an alarming rate. . .unless they can get their thrust tubes back on-line impact with the planet surface is anticipated in just under forty minutes. . .and the Indianapolis is—“He lifted his chin sharply, as though looking for confirmation.“Moving into firing position on the station?”

Bryce leapt up, but remained where he was, frozen as he processed the incoming feed.“Oh my God.”

It sounded like something the Misfit Toys would carry off, Dorian thought.About as subtle as a sledge hammer.“Amara, are you sure?”

“I’m certain.”She closed her eyes, her expression pinched into look of deep concentration.“Definitely not.Ray and the others are holed up in some sort of experimental launch bay.They’re. . .very confused by the turn of events.”

Raville’s look matched Amara’s, like he was chasing her vision through the datastream.“The bomb.We were going to launch from the Indianapolis.”

“No time,” Ford Garrison interrupted, his face flushed.Anxiety made him harsh.He grabbed Raville’s shoulders and shoved him toward the exit after Temple and DeMartel.“We’ve got to make for the shuttle launch bays now, get some distance between us and the station.You can explain then.Temple is shouting across the net that the ship can obtain a firing solution on this station in as little as fourteen minutes.”

Dorian didn’t move.“I still don’t understand.If Ray is with the bomb, then who’s controlling the ship?”

Amara stared at him, her eyes widening.

That sneaky, familiar tingling feeling crept up his spine.The one that struck right after he’d rush-implemented a network patch, but just before it started eating people’s data.The dreaded too-late realization that he’d forgotten something vitally important, screwed up a subroutine, missed a code flag, and the whole edifice his life was built upon was getting ready to collapse around his ears.

“Raville,” he said.“In my foam.If Ray used my environment to patch into the Indianapolis’s network and for some unknown, godforsaken reason let Raville talk him into pulling the stopper out of the genie bottle, it would give Raville a direct shot at the core.”With all of Dorian’s jacking tools at his disposal.Oof.

“He believes that we’re on the verge of starting a war we can’t win,” Amara observed.

Double oof.

Dorian lunged for the door, but Amara placed her hand on his chest.“Wait.”

She called out for Raville, her voice cutting through the cloud of chaos.He halted at once, and Ford Garrison, caught by surprise in his haste to get Raville to safety, stumbled into him.Garrison went down to one knee, and his swipe at his boss’s arm was to late to catch anything but air. Raville went straight to Amara’s side.

“What are you doing?” Garrison snapped.“We’ve got to get out of here!”

“We can’t leave the station to be destroyed, Micheal,” she said.“Charity begins at home.We can’t very well claim to want to save humanity without saving these lives first.”

“Save it how?We don’t even know who has attacked the ship.”

“Sure we do,” Dorian said.“You did.”

“I–?”The light came on.Raville winced.“Oh.Well, that’s certainly awkward.”

“It looks like your internal war of ideologies just became a shooting war,” Amara said, oddly and inconceivably pleased, as though this was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.

“That package is becoming a pain in my ass.”

“Hello, Pot.Meet Mr. Kettle,” Dorian murmured, then louder:“I hope you’ve got a fast shuttle and a good pilot.”

Amara held one hand against Dorian and placed the other on Raville’s chest.“We don’t need a shuttle.”

The hairs on Dorian’s arms stood on end, and he was aware for just an instant of a roaring gust of wind beating against his ears.She closed her eyes and took a breath.

There came a flash of light, and then the room in which they stood was gone.

<– Chapter 23 / Chapter 25 –>

Ray Morrical, captain of the Proletariat Horde, consensus leader of the fringe worlds’ leading political insurrectionist organization, and notorious geo-economic provocateur, stood on the bridge of the Magellan class battle cruiser the T.E.S. Indianapolis calmly perusing the day’s mission status log over the shoulder of Third Cycle Leet Commander Cadigan Pyle.Pyle scanned the text on the vision-targeted active decryption one-time slipsheet with only perfunctory interest, and when he had finished, crumpled the missive between his hands and tossed it into the classified dox disposal bin beside thechair.The bin quiksealed itself with a hiss and bang as a cloud of nano-disassemblers went to work de-rendering the slipsheet’s formal structure down to its base molecular components.

Pyle grunted unhappily and patted the pockets of his uniform like a man looking for his misplaced packet of cigarettes–which Ray suspected was exactly what he was doing, because he stopped when his gaze fell on the NO SMOKING idiot light at the top of his comm panel.Pyle was a wiry, hollow-cheeked officer with a machinist’s knotty red knuckles and somber, bloodshot eyes.His entire vocabulary seemed to consist solely of heavily nuanced grunts, cosmic hyperbole and a startlingly complex arsenal of colorful, if biologically improbable, profanities.

The Leet Commander shifted his weight, making a labored noise deep in his throat that was somewhere between a grunt and a sigh.His hair was oily; his skin sallow and unshaven.His uniform did not appear to have seen the inside of a san in a hard week.

“TechShipman Lloyt,” he rumbled.“I’ve been instructed by the Powers That Be to make the utmost effort to discover–with all due and appropriate haste–exactly what is going on with our ranged datburst array.Second Cycle Grand Bunghole Toson is reporting undifferentiated flakiness in the recursive foam-hole something-or-other.This aforementioned flakiness seems to have no visible effects on either mission performance or our essential combat readiness.However, I have been informed in the strictest of confidence, that it is directly responsible for an unacceptable pattern of random signal scrambling in the tightbeam broadcast to him by certain, shall we say, unsavory business associates indirectly employed by the sports entertainment industry.Mr. Toson has somewhat significantly overextended his personal assets, and unless he can salvage a certain equanimity in his cash flow through a series of fortunately placed wagers in the near future, he is facing a less than hospitable reception upon our return home.Given these circumstances, Mr. Toson would quite understandably like to see this flakiness unflaked as quickly as possible and for the duration of this ass-humping military exercise, so that he might rightly attempt to get his financial house in some semblance of order.I’m certain you can appreciate his predicament.”

Pyle drew his hands wearily across his face.“My deeply seated desire to please Messr. Toson notwithstanding, I would also point out that concomitant to this issue with the datburst array, I seem to be having my own difficulty accessing my happiness-essential crawl of Championship League rugby scores, for which I pay a premium monthly subscription fee.This situation may very well make me exceedingly cranky if it is not resolved in the immediate, if not causally pre-existent, future.Have I made myself understood?”

The unfortunate crewman who appeared the be the intended recipient of this potentially apocryphal barrage of data–a bright eyed and tow-headed young man seated on the far side of bridge complex at the Systems Engineering Console, assimilated the relevant factoids with a bemused nod and reclined into his grav-couch.His eyelids fluttered rapidly as he accessed the ship’s network core.

“I’ll run a system diagnostic now, sir.”

Pyle puttered his lips disdainfully in Lloyt’s direction.“I’m absolutely confident that the solution will be that simple, TechShipmen, which is undoubtedly why no one else has thought of it to this point.”

Lloyt lifted his head.“I’m sorry, sir, is there another course of action you’d recommend?”

Pyle waved him off.“Of course not.I sit in this chair so that I can demand results without being required to demean myself by offering useful suggestions.Proceed with your assignment, you miserable little tool.I don’t have time to nursemaid you through it.Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full with carrying one of the most technologically advanced warships ever constructed by human hands through the mind-bogglingly complex tasks necessary to continue to maintain the same basic geosynchronous orbit we’ve been in for the last three hundred and sixty eight hours?I shudder, I tell you.I shudder at the thought of the weighty responsibilities that have been laid upon my shoulders.”

Someone who was not Lloyt chuckled.Pyle grunted, then heaved himself out of his chair and braced his feet unsteadily on the deck.“Now, I have to hit the head.Mr. Sprechtman has the con, provided he understands that if I find him sitting in my seat again when I return, I will remove the entire length of his intestines through his anus and hang him from yard arm with them.In the event that this ship does not actually possess a yard arm, I will not hesitate to have one manufactured.In the related event that I don’t catch him there, but he did occupy my seat, the first person who tattles on him will be awarded a full rank field promotion on the spot.Ping me if anything interesting happens, and for God’s sake, somebody get me the latest scores from the Championship League by the time I get back.I’ve got fifty rups riding on the Jetland Green result.”

Pyle’s subsequent departure reminded Ray of the sudden deflation of a child’s balloon.Second Officer Sprechtman rose from the Ordnance Targeting panel and quietly, but efficiently made his way around the bridge from station to station giving general orders, offering course corrections and fielding status reports from the crewmen.

Michael Raville whistled softly in Ray’s direction.“That may have been the most singularly impressive display of verbal communication I have ever seen in my life.”

“According to the ship’s personnel records, Cadigan Pyle is the favorite nephew of Someone Exceedingly Important within the Stratiskaya Daransk political structure.”

“He would have to be, wouldn’t he?”Raville observed, smirking, but he quickly grew serious.“Nevertheless, now that our hosts have discovered the drain on their datburst resources, our remaining time is limited.Leet Commander Cadigan Pyle may be the next best thing to completely incompetent, but my money says Sprechtman probably isn’t, since he’s been assigned to babysit him.”

The lateness of the hour was the last thing Ray needed to be reminded of.He had lost six of his crew in the last eighteen hours, as well as Dorian and Amara.Every moment wasted was a lost opportunity to exact his vengeance from Michael Raville, but he was patient, and he was cautious, and if he gave his people time and space in which to work, he was confident that they would come through for him, just as they had always done in the past.

Raville peered at him expectantly, but Ray didn’t answer at once.He didn’t feel compelled to share his private sense of urgency with Raville’s digital copy.

“DeMartel has done his best to compensate for the politically mandated shortcomings in his leadership cadre by surrounding Pyle with a highly motivated and technically savvy Cycle crew,” he said at last. “Stine and Ghast will frustrate them for awhile yet, I believe, but our discovery has become inevitable.”

A low volume klaxon buzzed in his ear, one of Dorian’s brilliantly modified tell-tales announcing that the current incursion script had worn out its welcome and was vulnerable to detection.Ray hooked his fingers around Raville’s forearm.“Come on.We’ve found what we came to learn.”

He blinked his eyelids twice and the ambient feed projection of the bridge jacked from the Indianapolis’s internal comm datacore faded.It was replaced by the sloping, pale-marbled virtual architecture of Dorian’s backup foam.The sudden shift in percipient variables nearly staggered him, and he had to put out a virtual hand to steady himself on the railing to keep from falling over.He stood there for a moment gathering what remained of his waning strength.He had been awake for more hours than he cared to remember, had nursed himself through the worst of the zap crash with cortical stimulants until he breached the wall of exhaustion, but it was a race now to see if his will would outlast his body.Even in geek, his body was announcing its desperation for rest.

With a slight pang of guilt, he seated himself at the control deck and began tapping out the load sequence for a series of post-intrusion chaff routines.He had promised that he wouldn’t violate this space again—space that Ray himself had once given Dorian, partly from friendship, partly as investment in a stunning talent.But he had made many promises lately, the most binding to Amara herself, breathtaking avatar of an alien race.You must find the weapon for me, Captain, she had said in their final hours aboard the Proletariat Horde, while Dorian had been all but flash-baking his synapses attempting to seed the data he had stolen from Raville’s datacore.He’s hiding it from me, just as he masks his intentions from the Exousiai.I don’t know how.Perhaps I’m at fault.Perhaps I haven’t awakened to my true self enough yet to uncover the truth.It may be that old fashioned human ingenuity will uncover what has been hidden.Maybe that is as it should be, the price of our admission to the cosmic pleroma.When we reach Giari Tau, my responsibility is to stop Raville himself. If I fail, his weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai.He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

But Ray had been thinking about strategy, about the logistics of attempting to control an entire outpost station with only a dozen men at his disposal.My dear, isn’t this why you’ve brought along your own datacore incursion expert?Without meaning toinsult any of my own compatriots, John’s skillis unmatched, at least insofar as our resources are concerned.The man is practically a savant, and I can tell you now that he won’t appreciate anyone else gumming up his gears when he applies himself to the task.What God denied him in social acumen, He made up for in raw technical ability.

John was not chosen to destroy Raville’s weapon.

No?Then what is he here for?

And she had grinned, sweet and fetching, a picture of innocence.Honestly, I have no idea.I only know that he’s been chosen.

Chosen bywhom?

That’s the pivotal question, now isn’t it?

And so he had promised.His oath to Amara was the only reason he was willing to go back on his word.This sacred space was where John had chosen to secret the purloined package of Michael Raville he had rescued from the Archive, and Raville was the only chance they had of locating the weapon and finding a way to disarm it.As far as Ray was concerned, the instant Amara had been captured, all other oaths became moot.If his action saved their lives, John would forgive him.

And if it didn’t, the fact of his betrayal wouldn’t matter anyway.

“So how much longer do you estimate we have before they figure out you’ve pinched a portion of their stream to spy on their communications?”

Raville manifested in a regal Louis XVI chair which appeared to the left of the control console, where he could casually oversee Ray’s activities.This incongruous design erupting into the symmetrically perfect environment Ray had once so lovingly constructed made him wince, though it wasn’t just the offense to his aesthetic sense.He was dismayed at how thoroughly the self-cognizant Raville package must have insinuated itself into the architecture if it could spontaneously generate its own environmental variable templates on a whim.The code blocks of this universe were supposed to be inviolable.

“I have faith in my people,” Ray answered off-handedly.He executed another series of cache purge scripts to lower his packet profile in the datburst stream.He was already fat enough carrying around Raville’s density.“They’ll give us as much time as I ask them to, which in this case shouldn’t be absolutely indeterminate.I suspect that things will be coming to a head fairly soon, judging by the activity in the mission log.DeMartel and Commander Temple will be launching for the surface in the morning for an emergency session with your—ah–”Real self?Other self?Ray stumbled over the proper term.

“Nemesis is a good word,” Raville offered.

“Yes, well, I doubt that he would be calling an emergency session unless something of import was about to occur.Given that we may assume his forces have taken control of Amara and John, it’s probably a safe guess that the mission schedule will proceed with renewed vigor from this point forward.All the more reason for us to do the same.”

Raville nodded his agreement.“You can assure me, I suppose, that the people you have left are more reliable in their loyalties than was the lately mourned Mr. Yartz.”

Ray sat up stiffly.“Yartz was an aberration.”

They had discovered Yartz’s treachery purely by accident while carrying out a wide scan of the Strat military’s ship-to-ship streaming content intranet when Stine’s search parameters had tripped over the tightbeam encryption key specific to the Proletariat Horde.He still considered the whole situation off limits for discussion, a fact which his own people had instinctively understood without the need for blundering about launching stupid recriminations and otherwise poking sleeping bears with sharp sticks.

Ray had hand picked Yartz for his crew three standard years ago after the young man had risen to a certain regional prominence for the daring jack of a mining conglom account transfer.The funds had been more traditionally diverted from the pockets of the local workforce through a hidden surtax illegally passed during closed door legislative sessions in return for certain price fixing services.In hindsight, it was apparent that Yartz may have been more interested in achieving personal fiduciary gains with his jack than in the abstract moral satisfaction of having fought the good fight.But regardless of hindsight clarity, Ray certainly did not appreciate Raville’s casual assertions that one man’s greed might reflect on the reliability of the Misfit Toys as an organization more generally.

In fact, Ray was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he did not much like this version of Michael Raville any more than the bona fide original.It seemed to take too much pleasure in making people bristle.Small scale omnipotence had made it capricious, or merely cruel.He wondered how John had tolerated it for so long.

Whatever Raville’s reasoning for taking a stab at them, Ray didn’t hesitate to fire back a shot of his own.“To be honest, comrade, I’m less concerned about the ability of my people to do their job than I am about you to do yours.Until you’ve proven yourself useful, both your personal agenda and your fidelity are still in question.”

Raville’s eyes widened in a lugubrious display of outrage.“Your doubt wounds me, Captain.”

“Not sufficiently to make me happy, I assure you.”

“And what is it you would have me do to prove myself?”

“Find Raville’s weapon and tell me how to destroy it.”

“You already know where it is.You know it can’t be on the lunar station. They don’t possess a launching mechanism to deliver a weapon of sufficient magnitude to its target at a safe distance.There are no hidden silos, no cislunar cannonade platforms.Thus, the mechanism in question must be one of the ships.The warships, I almost hesitate to remind you.Judging by the contents of the bitstream originating from the Juggernaut, she is nothing more than a support vessel, a floating barracks for thick-necked Marines and the communal larder.If any ship is going to fire the opening salvo of an interstellar war, it’s going to be the Indianapolis.”

Raville just was parroting the logic he had used with Ghast and the others to narrow the focus of their investigation.“But what is it?I can’t find the weapon if I don’t know what to look for.”

“And I can’t tell you what would constitute meaningful force against a race of functionally omnipotent beings.I can only encourage you to keep looking and assume that we’ll recognize it once we’ve found it.”

“That’s not good enough.It was your mind which envisioned such a weapon in the first place!You have to have some idea about what you yourself would do—what sort of device you would design—if you were in his position.”

“That man is no more me than you are your own father, Captain,” Raville snapped.He jabbed a finger at Ray in accusatory fashion.“You carry a replicated viral template of his genetic organization, just as I was assembled from the map of my progenitor’s synaptic matrix, but I daresay that you consider yourself to be a unique entity despite that fact.Our foundations are not predeterminative.I can’t imagine what precipitated Raville’s madness or what solution he might devise to act upon it any more than you can predict your father’s thoughts.”

Ray pressed the heel of his palm against his brow and lowered his head.“You’re right, of course.That was unfair of me.I can’t expect you to know what you might do if you thought completely differently than you do.”

Neither man spoke for several moments.Ray lashed about in the mire of his own increasingly incoherent thoughts.He felt lost, hopeless.He needed sleep.

Raville cleared his throat, and in placatory tones, said:“The one thing of which I can assure you is that he is not bluffing.The weapon exists.The mechanism for delivering it exists.And if he has steeled himself to using it, the weapon works as advertised.I am not a man who gambles unless I am certain that I can take the house for more than it takes from me.”

“Assuming we do not identify and locate this device, what course do you recommend?”

“If you can’t stop the weapon itself, you have no choice but to find a way to keep it from being delivered.Whatever the cost. Even if that includes this ship, the Giari Tau station and all of our lives.”

His words hung in the air, as black and ominous as death.Ray pinched the bridge of his nose and kept his eyes shut tight.

If I fail,Amara had said, his weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai.He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

And he had promised her he would see it through.

Promised yes, but he wasn’t willing to entertain such desperate thoughts.Not yet, at least.It couldn’t have become so bleak that mass murder was the only answer, could it?And if it had, was that truly the oath that he had sworn?Did Amara, did the Exousiai themselves, really expect him to spend so many lives as a show of good faith?

He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

Without another word, he terminated his foam session and flipped out of geek.

Ghast lifted his head as Ray roused himself.His visible eye narrowed; the triDvid monocle which covered the other eye dilated accordingly, telescoping out as though it was subjecting Ray to a minute physical examination.For all Ray knew, it probably was.He levered himself up from his reclined position on the makeshift surfing couch—a pair of flimsy breakdown shipping containers covered over with an arrangement of unused mop heads.It had fully been his intention to swing jauntily to his feet and check on the status of their efforts, but sitting up with his feet dangling over the edge of the crate was as far as he got.He didn’t think his legs would support him if he tried to stand.

Without the false stimulus of geek, his fatigue descended on him like a sodden cloth.Geek was part of it, actually, or at least this flat, two-dimensional approximation of geek that his external array was giving him was.The images attempting to stimulate his optical nerves through the reductive medium of the monocle were grainy and uncertain, prone to random skips and gray fugues as though they had been piped through an unreliable burst wire.Working with them for too long almost had him wishing for an old fashioned keyboard and monitor.Maybe then the throbbing pressure behind his eyes wouldn’t be so bad.Ray bowed his shoulders and let his head hang.The Parkman had shifted on his skull as he lay in session, and it hung slightly askew from his ears.His temples and orbital socket felt raw where the harness had chafed against his skin.He was miserable in just about every way he knew how to be.

Ghast rose from his seat against the wall next to the utility sink.Ray heard him blundering about the cramped and acetone-reeking space of the maintenance closet that served as the tactical headquarters of his latest glorious command.They had not moved from the place where Amara had improbably deposited them, a narrow and claustrophobic pair of adjoining rooms with barely enough space to fit them in with the racks of cleaning supplies and boxes of paper goods.A brief reconnoiter of their surroundings had established they were on the outer fringe of the Giari Tau research station, a few meters underground andjust down the corridor from the pressure locks which led to the blast pits and launch bays that passed for the station’s fledgling space port.He hadn’t known what to make of their destination at first, and had even feared that it was some subliminal form of white flag—Amara sending them the clear message that the mission had failed and they should get off the planet in any way that they could.But Stine had dispelled such a bleak assessment by jacking into the local comm hub and returning with the information that the closet was in a dead sensor zone between the active monitoring of the station proper, which was under the control of local security, and the newly (and somewhat hastily) constructed launch complex, currently overseen by Strat IT.The gap created a convenient veil of chaos from which a few extraneous viral bits could be streamed into the nearest connex as redundant signal grams and relayed between the competing cores as friendly packets that had been degraded in the buffer exchange.

It was handy at times like these, he realized, having a god on your side.

Several grey moments passed in which he may have dozed, then Ray snapped back to alertness, suddenly aware that Ghast was standing in front of him.He attempted to raise his head, found he couldn’t manage it, and settled for flopping it onto one shoulder, where he could at least gaze semi-sidelong at his First Officer.

Ghast took one of his hands and pressed a steaming cup of coffee into it.Ray gasped in blissful surprise.He had understood that they’d exhausted the last of the insta-therms more than four hours ago.Leave it to Ghast to tuck one aside for him.

“You’re an absolute saint, my friend,” he said.The thick aroma of freshly brewed coffee worked wonders on his flagging energy.He managed to drag himself nearly erect.“Bless you.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“I grabbed a few winks in session.Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll worry if I feel like it.You’re dead on your feet.And don’t think I didn’t see you pass your dose of epiphene to Youkilis.How long do you really think you can keep going?”

Ray tossed his head weakly.“Youkilis needed it more than I did.He was actually working on the problem at hand rather than flailing about entertaining daemons.”He sipped at his coffee.It was still too hot and he managed to scorch his tongue.It didn’t stop him.He was too exhausted to care.“And speaking of jackhandies, where is Youkilis?”

“I sent him and Anderson and Stine into the back to snatch a couple hours of real sleep.Thomas, Gallegos and I are rotating through the watch.We’re none of us very fit for keeping a lookout for more than half an hour at a time, but we’re managing.”He hawked and spat, disgusted.“Unfortunately, just managing isn’t going to cut it for much longer.Did you learn anything useful?”

“I learned that even the mathematical representation of Michael Raville is an asshole.”

“Big surprise.”

“Yes.”Ray shook his head, smiling.“On a more positive note, you’ll be pleased to hear that the shuntpipe Stine bored in the space traffic net does open up into the flagship’s comm network.I don’t know that I could have managed to tunnel in as deeply as I did without some of Dorian’s little toys to assist me, but the way is clear in the short term.Tell her that we’re spawning interference by routing through the Juggernaut’s hub, so we need to either modulate our stream or peel bandwidth from their datburst array.They’ve got sniffers out after us, but I don’t think they’re aware that their system has been compromised at this point.I also managed to find out that Temple and DeMartel are coming here first thing in the morning for a short-notice strategy session with Bryce and Raville.”

Ghast grimaced.“That can’t be good news for our side.”

“Have you discovered anything about the status of our dearly departed companions?”

“No.We had a brief blip when the lieutenant who led the Marine strike force routed a request for mission change verification through the local skip-connex, but since he turned them over to Raville’s security honcho, they’ve fallen off the network.”Passing along this data made him look almost ill.“What do you think it means?”

“It means, my dear boy, that I’m going to have to ask you to do something awful.”

“Really?”His face brightened with anticipation.“What’s that, exactly?”

It was tantamount to a crime against humanity to even ask it of him.Ray knew from years of shared experience that Ghast was only in marginally better shape than he was, despite the protests he would make if accused of weariness.But there was no help for it.

He placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.“I need you to steal me a shuttle and a docking code for the T.E.S. Indianapolis.We’re going to take a little trip.”

“To the Strat flagship?”

“In my experience, it’s difficult to launch a covert assault against a ship of the line unless one actually arranges to travel there.”

“Are you serious?”

He was afraid that Ghast would balk, that for once, the simple fact of impossibility would override his enormous sense of duty, and he would announce that it couldn’t be done.Ghast had never done refused him, no matter how extreme the request, how improbable the hope of success, but Ray wouldn’t have blamed him if he refused now.He was all but asking him to put the knife to his own throat.

“Should I book passage for all seven of us, or would that be considered taking unfair advantage?”

Ray let his breath escape as relief washed over him“Oh, I think we’ll stick together this time.”

They chuckled at their bravado, and when they had finished, gazed solemnly and silently at one another.

“Did you find it?”Ghast asked.

“No.”

“But Raville thinks it’s there?Aboard the Indianapolis?”He hesitated, chewing on his lower lip, a suggestion that he did not find Raville’s imprimatur was not all that convincing under even the best of circumstances.“I’ve been all over their core for the last hour, Ray.I pulled an extract of their arsenal and their munitions transfer logs.There’s nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not anything that would seem sufficient to cause all this fuss.”

Raville doesn’t even know what we’re looking for, Ray thought grimly, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words.It didn’t matter.What they chose to do was not Raville’s decision.It was his alone.He was responsible for their success of failure and any lives that would be lost in the process.

“I believe it’s there,” Ray answered, “but I don’t have any evidence to support it.It’s a hunch, a guess.”

Ghast shrugged his shoulders amicably.“I’ve followed you on the basis of less.Give me a few minutes and I should be able to come up with something.I’ll have to haul Stine out of bed.”

As his First Officer turned away toward the small storage room and the execution of his latest charge, Ray felt a stab of guilt.His crew, his beloved Misfit Toys had already endured so much loss and grief.It was unjust to ask more of them, to ask this of them.It was useless and demanding to the point of being cruel.And he had no doubt that they would hear and obey his every command.He asked it, and they would make it so, reason be damned.They didn’t allow themselves to fail.

“Take your time,” he said.It was the only way he knew to show his gratitude for faithfulness.“We’ve still got a little, at least.”

He only hoped it was true.

Ray nodded congenially in greeting to the young sergeant seated in the corner across the narrow deck from him.There were no windows to otherwise occupy his attention, no status displays to watch, and he couldn’t bear to look at the slump-shouldered exhaustion of his crew crashed out around him any longer.In the absence of sensory input, he was forced to imagine the ascent of the gondola shaped and self-guided tetherpod as it crawled smoothly up the nanocarbon fiber line strewn from the spaceport to the Gimbrell observation platform more than eight kilometers above the station.Thus far, the sergeant, who had joined them at the last minute in the departure queue and who was the only one aboard who was not one of the Misfit Toys, had proved to be a poor ambassador for the Strat military apparatus and an even more disappointing source of interest.The young man’s eyes fluttered in a constant rhythm and the muscles of his cheeks and jaw rippled with suppressed stimulus reaction, indicating that he was more than casually engrossed in the plotline of what was most likely an explicit full immersion pr0n feed direct from the Strand.He did not acknowledge the greeting nod Ray gave him, but Ray kept the glassy smile fixed on his face just in case.

When he had satisfied himself that they were functionally (if not actually) alone, he spoke to Ghast out of the side of his mouth, keeping his voice low.“Explain to me again exactly what we’re doing here?You were supposed to steal me a shuttle, as I recall.”

Ghast patted the toolbox on the bench beside him.They each had one, small metal chests with flip top lids, the top trays of which were loaded down with screwdrivers and socket wrenches in assorted sizes.The space beneath had been emptied out to make room for their Parkman units, which might otherwise have attracted unwanted attention.

“There was no chance we were commandeering a shuttle on a straight chute to the flagship from the port.There’s still too much security buzz about terrorists infiltrating the depot, and the immediate section Chiefs are proving slow to step it down even though the threat has reportedly been contained.That shouldn’t be wholly unexpected it, because without an active alert, they’ve got to figure out what to do with five thousand Border Marines who suddenly have too much free time on their hands.Strat Command has all of their direct flights on combat footing, and the AT controllers are being extremely touchy about deviations from the published flight schedule without counter-verification from Admin officers.Say what you will about rent-a-grunts, but Strat Command is notoriously anal about logistical details and flight discipline regs.”He studied their fellow passenger uneasily for any indications of realtime awareness, and seeing none, went on.“On the other hand, there’s a regular flow of technician traffic up and down the tether to the Gimbrell platform from both sides of the aisle.The station residents have agreed to share to scan time on the radcast deep space orbital array with the military in return for the loan of a few billion prox cycles to help them analyze the images bouncing back off the singularity farm.Strat’s benefit is that they get an extra farcasting eye on the circumference of the system that’s already calibrated to look harder and deeper than anything they brought with them.Given that they’ve likely got a reasonable idea about what’s coming, they’re more than happy to have all the extra snoopers they can get.”

“And this benefits us how?”

Ghast took a breath and plunged into his explanation, rattling off the connections in his daisy chain of reasoning like bullet points in a political debate.“The software package that was developed to remotely direct and focus the radcam telescopy array was designed in-house by some grad student drones on Giari Tau and is the registered intellectual property of AimScan Radiotronic Solutions, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Phi Sophia Scientific Exploration Cooperative.Pee-Sec is not-for-profit academic support organization founded by station CSO Kenwood Bryce to generate reliable revenue streams for the ongoing maintenance of the Giari Tau facility and its related research missions.The licensing fees and voluntary service contract associated with this software package account for almost eighteen percent of the station’s general fund revenue outside of government sources and is subject to all the standard EULA restrictions regarding decompilation, reverse engineering and source code manipulation.Meaning essentially that the lawyers for AimScan, Pee-Sec and ultimately the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization take an understandably dim view of folks screwing around with the guts of their software, even if the folks in question happen to be the military forces sent here for the express purpose of keeping them from getting their asses shot off by invading alien hordes.

“In order for the Indianapolis to use the resources of the Gimbrell platform effectively, they had to license and install the software that drives its telescopes in their datacore.When that software broke, they couldn’t try to fix it without either a time-costly full reinstall or attempting to crack open the can and diagnose the problem themselves, thereby subjecting themselves to the possibility of intellectual property litigation they would more than likely lose.Since they were in the neighborhood anyway, they made the safe choice and decided to put in a service call to the local support gurus.”

Ray arched an eyebrow.“The software broke?”

“Well, not spontaneously, of course.”

“I see.”

“Bottom line is that the service call was received by individuals representing themselves as AimScan technical support.In response to the reported difficulties, capable technicians have been dispatched, a Strat Admin official has signed off on their emergency boarding passes and there will be a short hop shuttle docking at the platform in ten minutes to pick us up and transfer us to the Indianapolis.”

Ray suppressed a look of admiration.It was a good ruse.Clever without being too smart for its own good.He nodded his approval.“I don’t suppose you actually know anything about this software suite we’ve purportedly been assigned to fix.”

“Does tech support ever know anything about the system they’re hired to fix?”

“Good point.”

“Besides, since I’m the one who broke it, I’d like to think I’m qualified to back the hex out.”

“But only if it becomes necessary to preserve our cover story.Don’t make the repairs too much of a priority.I’m going to need all the expertise you can spare once we get hooked into their core.Maybe you’ll catch something that I missed.”

“We’ll find it, boss.Don’t worry.They can’t hide a weapon that big from us forever.It’s only a matter of time before we find it and wreck it.”

Ray heard both the confidence and the unspoken anxiety in Ghast’s voice, and while he appreciated the sentiment, he couldn’t help but wonder which of them Ghast was trying harder to convince.

“It looks as if everything is in order for the time being,” Ray said.He opened the lid on his toolbox and removed the top tray.He took out his external array and pulled it snug against his skull as it ran through its diagnostic and warmup procedures.

“How many technicians did the call center tell the Indianapolis to expect?”

“It didn’t.”

“Good.One more question, then:would you agree that the sergeant there and I are more or less of the same build?”

Ghast smiled wickedly.“Close enough for government work, I’d say.”

“My thinking exactly,” he said, focusing his attention on the library of p2p jack scripts and personal foam penetration virals at his disposal.“Be a good lad and pop open that maintenance hatch.It should be large enough that we won’t have to scrunch him up too badly to make him fit.”

As long as one stays south of officer country, it isn’t terribly difficult to go unnoticed on a Magellan class warship provided one has the right uniform, the right access keys and above all, the right attitude.In military terms, be it naval or Marine assault forces, the proper attitude consists of looking lower ranking pukes in the eye, scowling an inordinate amount of the time, and not being slow to raise one’s voice and bust some balls forreal or perceived lapses in discipline.Most grunts and astros were ecstatic to duck their heads and scurry out of the way when a finely delivered tirade erupted anywhere in their vicinity.They didn’t bother with determining the identity of the sergeant building up to stomp on them with both feet; they just wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible.It was a basic survival lesson inculcated in basic training and had been the backbone of military discipline since the dawn of human civilization.

Ray played the role of First Class TacSergeant Dan Gideon, the borrowed identkey overlaying his array’s connex protocol, with extraordinary gusto.The problem with being the captain of an interstellar spacecraft manned by a volunteer crew was that too often, the captain had to restrain himself in the interest of morale.One had to be diplomatic, cajoling, encouraging, and when pushed to corporal forms of discipline, stern but merciful.Above all, the captain had to be fair in all things.Sergeants on the other hand were paid to be hard and ruthless and even capricious—the martial equivalent of the all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-vigilant thunderbolts of a faceless god waiting to rain down from Olympus at the first sign of a breakdown in staunch order that kept the military machine running smoothly.

He found that he liked screaming at people, and even more, he liked screaming as a First Class Sergeant because no one below the level of a butter bar Second Lieutenant dared to stop him.Even other First Classes simply stood back with their arms over their chests and, as professional courtesy to a colleague, displayed appropriate expressions of awe and agreement.He also discovered that if he howled long enough and loud enough, no one thought to ask why he wore a civilian model external array instead of being properly outfitted with standard issue military array hardware or why he was wearing non-regulation footwear ( TacSergeant Gideon’s boots had been too small, alas, even when he curled his toes).No one asked where he had come from or what he might want when he stomped into normally secured areas and demanded to view the written activity logs, be it TacOps, Targeting, Field Engineering or TechTac.They merely complied, quickly, efficiently and on the double.

Ray had very early on concluded that pretending to be a Marine was much more personally gratifying than actually being one had ever been.

But an hour into his renewed tour of duty, even with the lax security access typical of Third Cycle operations, Ray was running out of zones for which Dan Gideon’s profile could reasonably gain him admittance, and he was no closer to finding what they had come for than he had been when he started.It was beginning to occur to him that the actual TacSergeant Dan Gideon would probably be emerging soon from his impact induced stupor to reclaim his lawful identity, and Ray had best be well rid of it before the core golemechs were notified and locked him down.

After his fruitless visit to TechTac, he ducked into the head on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine.He made a brief circuit of the room, peering under the stall doors and listening carefully for any noises that seemed out of the ordinary.Maintenance had been through recently.The floor was still damp from a vigorous scrubbing and the room reeked from overzealous dedication to a liberal sanitizing philosophy.He was alone, and probably would be for at least a few minutes, barring incident.Ray strode to the stall farthest from the entrance and latched the door from the inside.

He sagged onto the toilet and opened a narrow beam encrypted p2p channel back-packeted on the Strand connex node via the compromised ranged datburst array rather than trying to push signal through the Strat comm network.Unless he had vastly underestimated Herr Sprechtman’s capabilities, the tunnel Stine had excavated for them would not yet be collapsed, and it was time for him to start acting as though some greedy little IT wonderboy would be trolling through Dan Gideon’s usage logs for clues to his identity before too long.Ray wanted to be absolutely certain he didn’t leave behind any incriminating or traceable pathways.

The ping went through after a slight re-encryption delay.His connection burped with static as it cleared the node protocol.“Status report,” he said subvocally by way of greeting.He was more in geek than out of it, but still not fully immersed.He needed to be alert in the event of company.

Ghast’s voice sounded tinny and distant in his earpiece, stiff with the generic modulation of another’s subvocal reply.“Where are you?”

“We’ll avoid getting into specifics, if you please,” Ray cautioned him.“Suffice it to say I’m within a kilometer of your location and leave it at that.Why do you ask?”

“Don’t mean to tell you your business, but I’d recommend you extend that margin by several orders of magnitude in the near future, boss,” Ghast said uneasily.“It’s getting a little warm in here.I just spent the last twenty minutes being grilled by a security drone who was curious to know if my team had noticed anything out of the ordinary on our trip up the tether.Seems some TacSergeant who was supposed to have ridden up with us didn’t show up for his shift in Astronav.The questions were pretty routine and the guy I spoke too didn’t seem overly concerned.At this point, they’re assuming that he’s jerking off somewhere and hoping to bill his absence to travel time on the tether, but that opinion is going to change before too much longer.”

“I was beginning to suspect the same thing.Hold the line, please,” Ray said.He leapt into full geek, and materialized at the command console in the control center.He punched up the index for profile purge routines and was gratified to find several terabytes worth of options, most with names like ASSREAMER, KILLTRACEDIE, and PROFPURGE, along with a particularly intriguing entry called FEDTAILCRASH.But the use history seemed to indicate that CRAPDUMP was Dorian’s personal favorite, and Ray spun it up for execution.

Almost immediately, Michael Raville appeared behind his left shoulder, leaning over the gangway rail beyond the control center.“I was just starting to wonder what had become of you—hoping, of course, that you hadn’t managed to get yourselves rounded up and shot prematurely.”

Ray shushed him and scanned through the app’s NFO file for alerts or warnings.CRAPDUMP was an all-purpose profile purge that cycled through the entire session cache looking for key sig related files and replacing them on the fly with partially corrupted alternate data ids from a preloaded batch file.It had the fascinating side effect of scorching any disconnect-delay enabled node channels with a viral worm designed to prevent session profile skiptracing, a favorite traffic tracking method of nosy sysadmins.

Such extreme measures might be considered overkill, but if the ship’s network security agents hadbegun to assume that Gideon’s profile had been hijacked, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to slam to door on them before they could get their tentacles wrapped around Dorian’s native foam ip.He didn’t have time to search for a better option in any event.Dan Gideon’s period of usefulness was rapidly expiring.

Raville watched what he was doing, and he hissed a breath through his teeth.“Do you really think that’s a good idea?Infecting the datacore’s nodes with a jack worm?”

Ray ignored him.An indicator light on his panel flashed to indicate that the script had loaded successfully and was awaiting execution confirmation.Ray stabbed the button to launch the initiation sequence.

The lights dimmed.The control center’s speaker system blared with the screech of vulcanized rubber tires skidding across pavement, followed by a thudding crunch of metal.Ray smiled at the aural theatrics in spite of himself.Dorian certainly had style to complement his abundance of substance.

A quick ping of his ip id indicated that he was once more in a pocket of uncataloged foam, a ghost form untracked and unrecognized, cruising along the underbelly of the Strand network.

“Audio up,” he said calmly.The speakers popped in anticipation, and a row of status lights flickered across his console as his connex protocols recalibrated themselves.Ray cleared his throat and jabbed his thumb at Raville, indicating he should feel free to take a seat and shut up.“I’m back, and in theory, clean for the time being.That should buy us a few extra minutes.”

“Glad to hear it.Is this channel still secure?”

“It may get tricky if someone starts backtracking Gideon’s last node transfer and decides to come looking for him, but that will take some time.His ship access has traveled quite extensively in his absence, and IT is going to have their hands full for the next few minutes putting out some unexpected node fires.We should have a limited window of clear communication, before someone starts poking around seriously.”

“Then I should get this out while we’re safe:Stine has found something I think you might want to see.”

Ray sat up straight in his chair.He suspected that his body, tucked into a bathroom stall on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine, did the same.His digitally synthesized heart began to thunder like mad.

“Go ahead.I’m listening.”

“Thomas, Youkilis and I have been working hard to distract the local techs with smoke and mirrors, while Stine and the others double-teamed the data storage stacks.We’ve been beating our heads against the wall trying to find the device itself and coming up null either because of our search parameters or due to access locks we couldn’t crack without tipping off network security.Stine decided we were going at it all wrong.She realized that any advanced tech coming up from GT was going to have to be accompanied by its own assembly and testing experts.Raville isn’t going to risk blowing this deal because some squid can’t follow directions.Do you follow me?”

“I follow you,” Ray said impatiently.“Go on.”

“She was able to plug into the personnel allocation system—the timesheet logs—and by cross-referencing those with the Access Request Scheduler found a matching pattern of security grants for a party of non-enlisted techs to a systems lab on Deck Eight-Astra-Four.It’s the same song and dance we went through to get our boarding passes and coordinated limited zone security access.The ship has to coordinate visitor arrivals with locking mechanisms, guest accounts, the whole works.No one wants to flip those switches manually every time the work crew shuttles up,so it was batch loaded to automatically activate their badge credentials and network rights on a prearranged schedule over the last few weeks.The ship’s directory tells us the systems lab in question is in the Tech Deployment Grid on the ass side of Jump Engineering.”Ray had a pretty good idea of where that was.It was only a few decks up and aft of his current location.“In case you’re curious, TDG is the unit responsible for launching sensor arrays, sidescan photon guns and broad spectrographic analysis probes.In general, we’re talking mass survey types of stuff, adding factoids to the human trivia pool, more scientific in nature than strictly strategic.If I’m the captain of a battle cruiser on active alert, that’s where I’d put a bunch of tech sharp and questionably politically affiliated eggheads intent on playing around with highly experimental doomsday weapons.That way they don’t see too much classified military hardware in action, they’re not a distraction to the crew, and if an accident happens and things start blowing up, none of the critical ship’s components are jeopardized—at least to the extent that the unscheduled detonation of any doomsday device can be said to not jeopardize the ship at large.”

It was sound enough reasoning, but Ray needed to be sure.“It’s possible that the Indianapolis maintains its own contingent of non-enlisted scientific personnel.If Strat is willing to rent their defense forces to EOSO, they’re more than capable of renting space and cycles to academics.Can you confirm that these personnel were affiliated with the research station?”

Ghast paused, and Ray strained forward intently.“Boss, one of the access badges issued was Michael Raville’s.This has to be it, doesn’t it? Why else would Raville spend weeks jetting up from the station to this ship unless he was overseeing the assembly of his weapon?”

Ray’s virtual heart hammered in his chest.“Have you re-checked the internal shipping logs?I’m thinking load orders, component listings, equipment transfer records?We need to conjure a dirty sketch of what this device might be capable of, but more importantly, we need to determine where it is located now.”

He could almost hear Ghast smiling.“Way ahead of you.Anderson has tracked it to a forward launch bay on Deck Nine-Astra, Sector Six.That’s just a hop from the systems lab where it was assembled.”

“Have him squirt you the data they’ve retrieved so far,” Raville said into his ear.“I should take a look at it.”

Ray grimaced.He didn’t want to risk moving extra packets across their connection, but Raville was probably right.If anyone could decipher the intent of the device from specs and lading sheets, it was him.“Have Anderson send me her findings.”

“Will do.We’re packing up our gear now.I figure we can be there in eight minutes.”

Ray brought up a schematic of the ship’s tube system on the main screen.“I can be there in twelve from my current position.What’s the access restriction look like on that level?”

“Anderson says she already has it cracked and has added that zone to our security access.It’s a kluge, so it probably won’t hold much past shift change, but it will get us where we need to be.We’ll worry about how we’re going to get back out later.”Ghast paused suddenly, as the obvious hole in his thinking occurred to him.“That doesn’t really help you much though, does it?”

Ray didn’t have a visitor’s badge.He’d been cruising the ship solely on Gideon’s account, and now he didn’t even have that.He consulted the local system time.The ship would be gearing up for shift change soon.With any luck, he could make it at least part of the way unnoticed in the morning rush to duty stations.“I’m on the move,” he said, putting as much confidence in his tone as he could muster.“But if I’m later than zero-seven-hundred on the dot local time, assume I’ve been detained and proceed with the plan as instructed.”

“We’ll hold the door for you as long as we can,” Ghast promised.

“Take no extraordinary measures.Our sole advantage remains stealth and quickness.This isn’t a fight we can win if we try to go toe to toe.Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Good.I assume you can handle your current escort detail?”

“We’ll be at our destination before they even know we’re gone.”

Ray smiled bleakly.“Then expect me shortly.Don’t forget to have Anderson load that file.Captain out.”

The p2p connection broke and Ray leaned back in his seat with his hands pressed over his eyelids.Almost a full kilometer of deck, a dozen different security zones, more than a two thousand members of a hostile military force and a countless army of sensors, pineyes, id readers and passive scan security locks were all that separated him from the launch bay on Deck Nine-Astra-Six.It could conceivably be worse, but his imagination wasn’t up to the task.

“The file is coming in now,” Raville observed.“It isn’t very big.”

“That’s good, because we don’t have very much time in which to process it,” he responded, and immediately regretted his glibness.He lifted his head and looked over his shoulder at Raville, smiling wanly.“It looks as though we may have gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble.”

“By ‘we’, I assume you mean yourself and the mouse in your pocket.I’m not the one who decided to scorch the security network and give them advance warning that their perimeter might have been penetrated.But other than that, I concur completely.”

“Care to make a wager on how far we can get with no access pips, a wanted man’s uniform and a security system about to go critical once it realizes terrorists have seized one of the ship’s compartments?”

Raville grunted humorlessly.“I’ll start digging into Dorian’s script library to see if there’s anything we can apply to confuse the golemechs between here and there.I’ll leave the actual physical barriers up to you.In the meantime, might I strongly suggest you petition whatever deity it is you hold to for some timely intervention.We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and one more thing while we’re contemplating the tough questions:ask yourself why the captain of a warship clogged with blast hardened, v-field reenforced bulkhead compartments each loaded to the rafters with highly volatile plasma battery shells, phased singularity mines and every other form of universe rending ordnance known to man would choose to allow a bunch of eggheads with no military training to assemble a doomsday device in an unshielded quasi-civilian sector on the soft underbelly of his precious vessel–one of the few places in which the slightest accident could trigger a catastrophic chain of events that would send this entire ship plummeting into the gravity well of Giari Tau.”Raville lifted a skeptical eyebrow.“The captain must have had great confidence in the competency of Raville’s team, wouldn’t you say?”

Ray stared at him for a full ten seconds considering the implications.“How can you know that?”

“Do you think I’ve done nothing but sit here idly peering over your shoulder or lurking in the shadows of your foam sessions while you conducted your fruitless searches?I’m limited in this format, Captain, but not wholly without resources. ”

“You don’t think this is Raville’s doomsday device?”

“I’m not saying that.But I am saying that we—not just you and I, but all of us—may have been making assumptions about what exactly constitutes a doomsday device that are unwarranted.”Raville peered at him hard, his jaw set and his face pale.Ray couldn’t tell if it was anger or simple, stark terror at facing the unknown.“There’s something else going on here that I don’t yet grasp.A deeper game than the one we believe we’ve been playing.But the cards have been dealt and the wagers made.All that’s left for us is to call or fold.Your choice.”

“I’ll leave this session active,” Ray said, taking a deep breath.“I’ll appreciate any technical assistance you manage to offer.”

Raville nodded.“Aye.I’ll do what I can.”

Ray retracted his focus and the render of the control room faded into a ghost image hazily scrawled on the monocle of his external array.He thought he heard a last whisper in his earpiece, a determined and grimly hopeless encouragement.

Good luck.

Twelve minutes.

The time it took an average man to walk a kilometer of open ground.The median duration of a fast food meal.The length of a standard sexual encounter, of a normal bowel movement, of a relaxing shower.Twelve minutes was nothing.It was a hiccup in the span of a normal day.Time enough to read a zine article of no particular depth, to catch up on the news headlines, to study the box score for your favorite sporting team.

But ask any man who has lived through a life threatening experience:a combat veteran, an attack fighter pilot, a policeman or fire fighter, and he will tell you that twelve minutes can be an eternity.Ask any man who has been hunted, because to a hunted beast, twelve minutes is the difference between life and death a dozen times over.They are seven hundred and twenty individuated opportunities for death to reach out a cold and instant talon-like claw and clutch you in its ineluctable grip.Each of those seconds stretches out, slows down, breaks off into discrete units of potentiality, until each one is an eternity unto itself.

Ray exited the restroom on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine and flung himself down the corridor to his left.He tried to look hurried, preoccupied, just another grunt commuter on his way to a dull duty station.The schematic drawing he’d pilfered from the datacore informed him that there should be a tube lift at the end of the corridor that would take him up to Engineering One.From there, he would have to traverse a large portion of the lateral bulk of the ship along the Bainbridge Artery—what passed for Main Street on the T.E.S. Indianapolis—in order to duck into the Tech Deployment Grid situated just behind the humpdeck, a bulbous eruption of vacuum porous nanocarbon lattice set aside for cold storage and reactor steam venting.

He kept his head down and avoided eye contact with anyone in the increasing volume of foot traffic pounding up and down the deckplates.He chewed his lower lip and plunged his hands deep into his trouser pockets, trying to look both casually preoccupied and slightly rushed.No one gave him a second look, if they registered his presence at all.The hour was early, and the ship, even on combat alert, had been idle for many days.Most of the men and women he passed seemed either bored or still sleep sluggish, more concerned with their morning routine than with marking an unfamiliar face as they grumbled their way to work, therms of coffee, or whatever quick breakfast they could obtain from the deck canteen.

Once, he slipped into another public restroom and stood behind the door breathing rapidly as a pair of security dragoons stomped toward him.They laughed raucously at one another as they strode past,trading bawdy jokes with the casual air of soldiers either fresh off a duty shift or not yet yoked into the one in front of them.It was just his own nerves, he realized.No one was looking for him yet.Still, he waited until the sound of their voices had faded completely before easing back into the flow of commuter traffic.

At the end of the hall, he crowded into the lift with a handful of other astros, all of them general enlistment drones considerably lower than his putative rank in the chain of command.They were yawning and bleary eyed, content to stare at the floor as the doors hummed closed and the carriage lurched into motion.His first objective obtained, Ray heaved a small sigh of relief and put his back against the rear wall.So far, so good.He crossed his arms over his chest to obscure Gideon’s id badge.

As the carriage ticked past the first floor, it shuddered and a pretty young Midshipman with short chestnut hair and wearing blue engineering coveralls stumbled up against him.Ray caught her with his arm and held her up until she regained her balance.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the woman said.Her cheeks flushed pinkly with embarrassment.“We hit that hitch every morning.You’d think I’d remember to brace myself.”

“Not a problem,” Ray said.“Glad I could be here to cushion your fall.”

She gazed up at him, smiling, her eyebrows quirked in curiosity.“You’re a long way from home aren’t you, soldier?”

Ray forced himself to smile back, but kept his expression guarded.“Aren’t we all?”

“That’s not what I meant.I haven’t seen you in Engineering before, and I usually notice the Marines kicked down into our can.That’s my job.I’m shipside interservice liaison for engineering staff.”She flashed him a practiced, officious grin that was all teeth and extended her hand in greeting.“My name is Channett Gabrial.”

He squeezed her fingers gently.“TacSergeant Victor Spence.”

“But you are new around here, right?”

“You caught me.I transferred in from the Juggernaut.Shuttled over on Third Cycle a little early to test my clearances and line up housing before I’m scheduled to report for duty this afternoon.My CO assured me that all the details had been taken care of, but you know how it is.Doesn’t matter how routine the procedure, somebody is going to find a way to drop the ball.I didn’t want to end up sleeping in the mess hall for the next two weeks.”

“I hear that, sergeant.So where is your assigned duty station?”

“Tac ops.I work on shaped charge neo-plasmatic warheads.My specialty is propulsion system design and implementation.”

“You’re going to have a lab station in Engineering, then?We have some fine, state of the art propulsion testing facilities on Six.”

“So they tell me.I haven’t gotten to see my workstation.”Ray self-consciously tapped the side of his external array and grimaced.“Like I said, somebody dropped the ball.I lost either my foam connex or a component in my array when I shuttled over.One of the friendlies on the shuttle hooked me up with a temporary array, but the network hasn’t picked me up yet.I was just on my way to IT to see what can be done to iron things out.Don’t want to make a bad impression by being locked out of my workstation on my first day.”

Midshipman Gabrial fluttered her eyelids reflexively, frowning.“I see that you’re right about your network access.I’ve got nothing on your id on the intership grid.I can’t even ping your ex array.Somebody screwed you up good.”

“Tell me about it.”

Her eyelids went on fluttering for several more seconds.Ray snuck a glance at the carriage’s status pad to see how close they were getting to Engineering One.The last thing he needed was a good samaritan digging into his nonexistent profile.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, with a small shrug.“I’ll have to work on it from my desk.The IT security agents are paranoid about allowing us to dig too deeply into personnel allocation files without black box encryption.Understandable, I guess, but it’s a pain in my backside.You’d think the military could take some of that massive sinkhole budget and drag themselves into the current century technologically, you know?”

Ray was sure she was going to drop it there, back off from an idle conversation before it actually cost her physical effort, but after a moment, she said, “The thing I don’t understand is how you got all the way down to Sub-Deck Nine without any of the necessary clearances.We’ve got some classified labs running on that level, and it usually takes a week or more for anyone to get their access lined up in the first place.We’re supposed to have a guaranteed sub-thirty security response time on the pineyes.”

The status panel flashed Engineering Two, and the lift picked up a burst of speed.Ray did his best to look confused.“I didn’t run into any problems.Maybe your reporting system is buggered.Happens on the Juggernaut all the time.Somebody decides to patch a part of the network and it flips the wrong switch.”

“Sure.That’s probably it.”Gabrial squeezed the bridge of her nose, clearly unhappy.“Look, I realize its an inconvenience, but would you mind coming around with me to my CO’s office?I really ought to get someone drilling down into this issue until we get it resolved.If you could give him an idea of the places you’ve been, it would help us immensely in figuring out the extent of the system failure.”

Ray kept his tone level, but his mouth went dry.“I’d like to, but I really should get over to IT first thing.Maybe I could swing by this afternoon sometime, when its convenient for you, of course.”

“Yeah, that would be fine.”

Relief surged through him, and Ray grinned apologetically.“Hey, I’m sorry to cause so many problems first thing in the morning.I’ll bet this is exactly what you wanted to spend your day on.”

“No sweat.It’s better we find out bugs this way than as a result of an actual infiltration.”

The lift doors wheezed open and the riders crowded for the exit.Ray moved quickly to separate himself from the friendly and inquisitive Midshipman Gabrial before she could cause him real problems.His internal chronometer informed him that he was already forty plus seconds behind his estimated travel time.If he didn’t find somewhere to make it up, he’d be cutting very close to the zero-seven-hundred deadline.

The press in front of him began to thin, and Ray peeled off down the broad main corridor of Engineering One to the right, the next stage in his quest for the Tech Deployment Grid.He scanned ahead restlessly, waiting for a gaggle of slow movers to get out of his way.Engineering One seemed to be mostly private offices and admin centers, the names and ranks of the upper level occupants inscribed in gold chased letters on plates beside the doors.This early, the ports were still largely sealed.Ray consulted his map.There were no immediate security checkpoints on his display, and only a few fixed pineyes and id scanners, all of which he should be able to avoid.A left, a right, and a tube ladder up to the Bainbridge Artery.Piece of cake.

He made it all of a dozen steps before he heard a familiar voice calling after him.

“TacSergeant Spence!Hold up!”

He wanted to ignore her, pretend he didn’t hear.Every muscle in his body told him to keep going.But that would look suspicious.Already, some of their fellow travelers and other astros on their way to work were beginning to perk up curiously.

Ray turned, a forced smile on his lips.It froze there, a cold, dead thing.

The ever-helpful Midshipman Gabrial was weaving her way through the crowd toward him with a gray clad, red collared security agent in tow.He dared not move, though a ripple of panic crept up into his stomach and settled there.Gabrial bounded up to him, breathless, glowing with pleasure.Ray was almost certain he was going to vomit.

“TacSeargeant Spence,” she gushed.“I’m glad I caught you.This is Sergeant—“Her mouth opened, and she stiffened self-consciously, then wheeled toward her companion.“I’m sorry, sergeant, what was your name again?”

“McAvoy,” the man said.He smiled politely, but the warmth did not reach his eyes.They were firm, hardened with suspicion.

“Yes.Sergeant McAvoy, with Security.I’ve explained your situation to him, and he agrees that it’s probably best if he escorts you to IT to get things straightened out.There are a dozen pineye readers between here and there, and with the threat of terrorist insurgents still technically on the books, I’d hate to have you detained on suspicion of something nefarious.It would ruin our reputation for hospitality.”

She laughed at her own humor, but Ray barely noticed.His attention was locked on Sergeant McAvoy, whose eyes fluttered characteristically as he accessed the network.

“Indeed, TacSergeant Spence,” he growled.“I think it would be best if you came with me.”

The security agent’s hand flexed almost imperceptibly and drifted a few centimeters toward the weapon strapped to his side.

Ray’s comm channel hissed abruptly in his ear.

They’re on to you, Raville announced.I’ve got security scramble alerts in four contiguous sectors.I’d suggest you get yourself out of there quickly.

<Notify Ghast.Instruct him that I’ve encountered unexpected difficulties, but the timetable we discussed remains firm.Tell him to expect trouble.>

<Will do.I’m feeding an alternate travel route to your display based on security response estimates.It should get you past the immediate threat.>

Ray tensed his muscles, tapping into the reservoirs of strength and enhanced reflex that had been programmed into his package build.It was like flipping a switch, closing a circuit.The lumbering wreckage of his body came alive.His senses flared with sudden sharpness and acuity.Tightly focused energy flooded into his limbs.

Relative time slowed to a crawl, as though space itself had curved about him, and for a pure, crystalline instant, he saw everything:the craned necks of curious on-lookers and interrupted commuters; the bright and expectant eyes of Midshipman Gabrial; the burgeoning threat of Sergeant McAvoy.He felt the droning bursts of the fine orbital jets firing, the patter of boots on deckplate, the first guttural blat of the incursion alert belched through the comm speakers.The ship was alive, a creeping ecology of parasitic crew, neuronal connex nodes andflexsteel flesh.But also a stalking beast, its teeth bared and claws splayed, poised to fight and rend and tear to the extent of its stupid, animal strength.It would fight for its survival.

Ray dropped himself into a coiled fighting stance, curled his fists and struck.

His blow caught Sergeant McAvoy in the center of his chest.From McAvoy’s shocked perspective, it would have arrived instantaneous with Ray’s thought, an impossible blur of motion followed by a biting impact.Ray felt the bones in the security agent’s sternum crack, and McAvoy grunted, flailed his arms wide and went down hard like he’d been shot, his eyes growing wide with shock and pain.One of his forearms caught Midshipman Gabrial just below the cheek.She bounced off the wall and tumbled forward in slow, deliberate fashion, then landed on the deck and lay still.

Ray was sorry for that despite everything.She’d only been trying to help.

That was the problem with the universe:a dearth of simple decency, and even when someone mustered the courage to do a decent thing, this was the payment they could expect.A vicious feedback loop.Was it any wonder things kept insisting on going to hell?

He sprang away, already ten meters down the corridor before anyone around him even registered what had just happened.He dashed down a tight corridor to his left, and ran as hard as his enhanced biomechanics allowed.His monocle display described a strange elliptical path, a complex route of narrow gangways, maintenance hatches and brief climbs through poorly illuminated tubes.At first, the way was often crowded with crewmen paused to gape at the unexpected and inexplicable growl of the alarm. Ray brushed past them as a gust of wind and a splash of color.In tight spaces, he sent them sprawling and launched himself over their tumbling bodies as they fell.

All the time, the blat of the alarm pursued him.The deck rapidly began to empty out.Bulkhead doors snapped shut on either side of the corridors he entered.Engineering launched itself headlong into security lockdown.

Ray accepted this change as a gift and put on an extra burst of speed.His superhuman strength wouldn’t last much longer.Even with his reconfigured body, there was only so much energy he could store, and he had been weary beyond reckoning before, relying on stimulants and adrenaline to keep himself going.Over a brief span of minutes, his breath grew ragged, and cyanotic pinpoints of darkness began to appear at the edges of his vision.His muscles began to wail all the way down the length of his legs.His deep tissues felt like they had been set on fire.

And finally, as he crawled out of a cramped HVAC tube two levels above the Bainbridge Artery, the map overlaying his left eye began to pulse with red pinpoints of light.He peered both ways down a narrow chute of grey metal, some sort of backwater access tunnel.He was so exhausted that he trembled.Trembled uncontrollably.Ray hauled himself up and stopped, hunched over with his hands planted on his knees.He greedily swallowed huge chunks of deliciously cool air heavily scented with machine oil.

He pinged his companion.

<What are those beacons up ahead?>

Raville responded immediately.<Passive id scanners.>

<In both directions?>He bit his lip on a curse.<Route me around them.>

<There is no way around.And there’s no way back.Security has deployed a saturation net of roving pineye micromechs.You’re about twenty seconds ahead of the wave right now, but when they catch up to you, you’re going to stand out on the grid like a neon sign wherever you go.>

His limbs felt sodden, as limber as sacks of sand.<I can’t run anymore.>

<Then you’re screwed.>

<I was following your map!>He transmitted it as a snap, but there was no force behind it.Ray didn’t have the strength to be angry.<I need you to disable the scanner.Dorian has got to have something in his library.>

<He does, but I don’t have the authority to deploy any of his cloaking scripts on my own. He locked me out of that portion of the architectural core.I can load it into the queue, but there are at least twenty more devices between your position and the TDG launch bay.You’re going to have to configure them to execute on command.>

Ray didn’t spare the oaths this time.<I can’t navigate the decks of this ship, avoid human detection and tailor incursion scripts at the same time.>

<I can run the scripts for you if you give me execution level access.It’s the only chance you’ve got.>

A sudden thought, inchoate and terrible, blossomed in Ray’s mind.Something about an overly suspicious security agent, an instantaneous four sector alert, and a frenzied, circuitous route of escape that led irrevocably to a bleak stretch of dirt between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

But Raville was right.It was the only chance he had.Better to never arrive at the launch bay at all than to come with security bugs crawling all over him.

Ray closed his eyes and flashed through the access protocols.

<You’re in.>

Almost at once, the warning beacons on his display went dead.

<Go left.>Raville transmitted.<Updated map is flashing onto your display now.I’ll divert the passive scanners as you reach them.It should be a straight shot from here as long as you manage to keep yourself from getting killed.>

Ray glanced up at the system time flashing in the corner of his screen.It was two minutes to seven.

<Piece of cake.>

<Aren’t you glad you brought me along?>

Once again, he started to run, certain that in the back of his mind he could hear Michael Raville laughing.

At exactly 06:59:50 hours local time, Ray Morrical stumbled through the bulkhead door to Flight Staging Bay Gamma-15 on Deck Nine-Astra.Thomas held the passage open for him, looking worn and relieved at once, as he plunged through.Exhaustion made him clumsy, and he managed to catch his foot on the raised lip of the bulkhead’s bottom seal.Before he could even think about catching himself, Ray was on the deck, scudding gently across a smooth sheet of flexsteel deckplate.

He lay there for a moment, feeling his arms and legs intact, enjoying the sensation of his face pressed against the cool surface, ecstatic with the sheer and simple pleasure of not having to move any longer.He’d made it, even if he was too tired to be properly elated with his success.The door closed and sealed with the rasp of a vacuum lock, cutting off the worst of the phantom alarm that had pursued him all the way from Engineering.

Presently, he became aware that he was not alone, and that shadows had gathered over his supine form.Groaning, Ray rolled himself onto his back.He gazed up into the still unfamiliar faces of Ghast, Thomas, Anderson and Gallegos, Stine and Youkilis—all of his surviving crew.He didn’t even have the strength to feel chagrined.He was just so happy to see them again, together and whole.

Ghast wore a pleased smirk.“I should have known that you wouldn’t be able to make it this far without kicking up some sort of a ruckus.”

Ray sighed affably.“I didn’t mean to.It wasn’t even my fault.It started when this pretty girl bumped into me on the elevator.”

“It always starts with a pretty girl, doesn’t it?”

There was laughter then, and Ray let the sound wash over him.It was the sound of bliss, of harmony, and a brief reprieve from fear.Only when it had gone did he ask, “So what about you?Any problems encountered on your trek?”

Someone offered a hand and Ray allowed himself to be tugged to his feet.He wavered unsteadily for a few seconds, but eventually his legs decided to bear the load.Ghast said, “We crossed a sector barrier we’d missed with our access hack and managed to get detained by one of the local cops on his way to log off his duty shift.We told him we’d gotten lost trying to find our way back to the hangar.He didn’t seem prone to believing us given some of the other network oddities that had infected the system over the last hour and was preparing to call for backup when some fool tripped the incursion alarms and turned the whole ship into a madhouse.”

“Glad I could be of assistance,” Ray said, chuckling.

“The guy ran off in such a hurry, he didn’t even give us directions.I can’t say I was left with much of a positive feeling for this ship’s hospitality.”

“Believe me, the benefits of its hospitality are not all that they’re cracked up to be.Now, who’s going to give me the grand tour?I’m breathless with the anticipation of laying my eyes on my first ever legitimate doomsday device.”

Ghast and Stine exchanged an uneasy look.“That makes seven of us, boss.”

Before Ray could ask what he meant, his First Officer took him by the arm and led him out of the pressure lock into which he had stumbled and through a second bulkhead door.Thomas and Youkilis remained behind to guard the entrance.They entered a launch bay that was cramped but sanitary, a carefully maintained workspace, more reminiscent of missile firing station than a deep space deployment platform.Immediately to the right of the bulkhead door sat a pressurized control center cocooned in an oblong box of flexsteel and plastisheen.Through the tall windows, Ray could see racks of flickering displays, blade servers and dedicated system hardware.Small, portable carts laden with tools and outmoded computing devices were crammed into the corners and other available patches of open deck.

But the bulk of the launch area had been given over to a portable industrial winch and a short staging cradle abutted by a hydraulic loading piston that fed the black maw of a probe launch tube.The impression of a missile firing station persisted, and Ray was reminded of a rifle—the long shaft of the barrel running into the cocked hammer that, when snapped against the brass shelled projectile, hurled it on its destructive and irrevocable path.

And what a projectile it was.

Sleek and black, its skin glossy in the bay’s overhead lights, secured to the cradle by nanocarbon straps.A silver fatburst data cord trailed from an access port in the nose cone to a connex node attached in turn to an array of diagnostic and nav equipment that hung pendulous and spider legged from the ceiling.The device measured fully two meters in length, including the fine, razor thin fins attached to its tail.It bore no insignia or call signs, no official designations at all.It’s lines were shark-like, potent and vicious, the latter day representation of the golden arrows of mighty Apollo himself.

And it looked exactly like every other plasma propelled conventional missile Ray had ever seen.

He stared at it, a million nonsensical thoughts rumbling through his head, but only one surfaced with any force.

That’s it?This is what we came all this way to see?

On his own ship, there was a whole munitions dump full of missiles almost precisely like this one.Just as fierce, just as subjectively evil-looking and doom-suggestive.Except the Horde’s were twice as big, three times as big. . .and all of them worth more in scrap metal and depleted uranium than they were as offensive ordnance, casualties of the inexorable march of technological progress.

The deck shifted beneath Ray’s feet, and he nearly went down to his knees.For a terrifying instant, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.Everything he thought he had known, all the sacrifices they had made, spiraled about him like images of loss, of failure, of disaster.

Then he got a handle on himself.

“I don’t understand,” he said steadily.“Is it. . .what?Some new technology?Some hitherto unknown form of star buster?A pinhole singularity bomb?A phased riftwave shell?”

He reeled through his mental catalogue of every form and type of destructive weaponry known to man, both actual and theoretical.Planet killing devices, plasma weapons, Spriggs-Detmer arrays, Fleish hammers. . .he considered them all and tossed them away.

“I need information Mr. Ghast.”

Ghast nodded stiffly, understanding Ray’s lack of understanding.“Anderson and I have been going over the data we sent you:the manifests, the inventory sheets, the spec docs, such as they are.There are missing pieces, of course, and we’ve only done a preliminary analysis at best, but I can tell you that we’re not seeing the sorts of design patterns one would expect from known categories of offensive weaponry.Most of the device’s mass is plasma shell propellant cartridges armed to feed a standard ion-pulse thrust battery.The tubes are nicely tooled, but more or less standard issue for a projectile of this size and mass, meaning that even at max thrust, it isn’t going to acquire a velocity that will curve the space-time horizon.The warhead appears to be anything but, and once the plasma has gone dry, it probably wouldn’t even go pop if it smashed head on into an asteroid.The skin is a unique flexsteel nanalloy with amazing tensile strength and flexibility, assembled in one contiguous piece, probably all but indestructible—which is an interesting feature, but not really relevant that I can tell.That leaves the nose, which most likely is all guidance, complex prox arrays and whatever other voodoo they’ve crammed into it.It does carry a modified 18 millisecond burst singularity seed in a phased containment cell, which is sophisticated tech for a weapon of this type, but it only grades out as a comm scale potential density.”

Ray stroked his chin.“To call home, you suppose?Confirm its target coordinates and that sort of thing.”

“Unlikely.The nav components are a significant upgrade on the usual tube and bubble matrix.I don’t think they need the backup of a BSS one-time.Besides, an 18 millisecond spew?You could move a ton of data through that tunnel before the leading curves began to collapse.”

A ton of information, Ray repeated to himself.“What about a viral weapon of some sort, then?”

Ghast only shrugged.“Who knows?It certainly doesn’t have enough punch to do any real physical damage, which might not matter, since the enemy reportedly isn’t physical in the first place, but how would you get it there?I mean, talk about the slow boat to Chenga.”

“Fine.Then that’s where you can start.Analyze the core and nav systems and find out what sort data its capable of moving and where that information is headed.Focus on predictive models for the wave collapse.”

“We can do that,” Ghast said.“I’ll get Stine jacking on the control center to see what might be in the cache files, too.Then we’ve got the assorted diagnostic units—they’ll have some level of resident memory we might be able to recover.It’ll take time, but we’ll track down the missing pieces of the puzzle.”

The words were right, but Ray could tell even as Ghast began issuing his instructions to the others, that he was troubled.When the Misfit Toys had dispersed and the two of them were alone on the launch deck, Ray pulled him aside.

“Care to tell me what you really think, old friend?”

He hesitated at first, as though unwilling or unable to give up his typically optimistic attitude, but finally, Ghast set his jaw and sighed.His shoulders sagged with the weight of all he did not comprehend.

“I just don’t know, boss,” he confided.“I don’t know what it is.Not without taking it completely apart, at least.And I thought about doing that, just as we’d planned.I thought about disabling it, destroying it.I could probably wreck it beyond usefulness with just a pry bar, but–”

“But you realized that someone has been playing a different game than the one we thought we were playing,” Ray finished for him.“I’ve begun to suspect the same thing.The question is:whose game is it?And what is really at stake?”

Ghast shifted uneasily and hooked his thumbs into his belt.“I’m out of my depth on this one.I don’t know what it is, or what it’s supposed to be, but I can state definitively that what it is not is a bomb, let alone some kind of doomsday device as we understand such things.If you tell me to destroy it, I’ll do that, Ray, but it scares me, to be honest.I thought I knew what we were doing, what we were fighting for, but now that we’re here. . .now I just don’t know.It isn’t what we were told to expect.It isn’t anything we understand, which means that either someone has been lying to us, or someone hasn’t fathomed what’s really going on.And both of those someone’s are the same person:Michael Raville.And I don’t mean the real one.Raville started this whole tilt at windmills.Raville explained her destiny to Amara and unlocked her power.Raville is desperate to get back at his better half, and that makes his judgment, and maybe his entire agenda, suspect as far as I’m concerned.We’re here to help John and Amara, to keep this war with the Exousiai from ever getting started, but that’s only because Raville told us it was what we needed to do.”

“Are you suggesting that stopping this war may not be in our best interest, Mr. Ghast?”

His second in command shook his head fierecely.“No, sir.Not at all.I’m only saying that we’re on the verge of taking an irrevocable step in one direction. There’s no going back once we junk this thing down, and I’d like a little more proof that it’s the right thing to do than just Raville’s say so, you know?I’m have this sneaking suspicion that anything we do in his name is going to be the wrong thing.I’m not even sure which side we’re on any more.Which side we’re supposed to be on.”

Ray heard Ghast’s unspoken plea.He wanted someone to tell him what to do, to absolve him of doubt.He was lost and confused and most of all, terrified of failure.He desperately needed to be told what was right and true and that what they were doing was honorable, that they were keeping promises that would benefit mankind, stave off the wolves at the door, save the universe.

And those were precisely the answers that Ray did not have.

His weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai, Amara had said.But that instruction had been predicated on the assumption that the weapon existed.There was no weapon.No doomsday device.Just this thing, this turbo-charged, but nevertheless old-fashioned rocket.

It made no sense.But that was always the stumbling block of faith, wasn’t it?Faith was believing even when belief was nonsensical.Faith was action in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

The problem with faith, of course, was that ultimately, its power didn’t come down to the potency of the believer who practiced it, but in the reliability of the god in whom it was placed.

Again, the wriggling maggot of suspicion gnawed at him.Raville’s unseemly embedding in Dorian’s architecture.The flight into peril.Give me access. . .

Raville had answers.Raville had much to answer for, much to explain.And those explanations were past due.And if Ghast was wrong and Ray’s suspicions unfounded, maybe Raville, the shadow sibling of his human self, could read oracles in this device where the rest of them perceived only riddles.

Ray opened a channel into his foam and called Raville’s name.There was no answer, just a faint hiss of static.

He called again, and when Raville did not heed him, attempted to flip into a full immersion session.

For the first time in his life, Ray Morrical encountered seamless, opalescent ice.There was no sensation, no awareness of being repelled, just the simple, flat impenetrability of an environment that no longer belonged to him.The amber hued splash screen of his monocle display flashed the message:INVALID NODE REQUEST.

Ray realized with a shock that he had been disconnected from the beautiful, chaotic and data rich universe outside that of his own thew and bone.

His foam was gone, and the digital presence of Michael Raville was gone with it.

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

In the twilight landscape between dreams that are not dreams, and pure data that is neither foam, nor network, nor seenop fancy, Dorian finds himself on a low ridge above a sea of tall brown grass. There are no trees, no rocks, only an endless plain as far as he can see. Blue sky stretches overhead, without clouds, without sun, just an empty blue ocean running to purple and black where it meets the distant horizon and a few brave stars have come out. A steady wind blows across the grass, tossing the stalks in waves that roll and break against one another and sound in his ears like the grate of a rasp against soft wood. The dream smells of dirt and sweet, growing things.

Beside him is a tree stump, the victim of some long ago thunderstorm. It is flat as a table top, so old and weather-rotten that its base has begun to crumble. Sitting atop the stump, knees drawn up to his chest, is a boy. He has dark hair and wide, liquid eyes, a pale face and small, child-like hands. He’s wearing a tee shirt and short pants that are neither shorts nor pants, precisely. Dorian realizes with a start that the boy is wearing knickers. He’s never seen a pair of knickers in real life, but he’s fairly certain that this is exactly what they are.

The boy gazes out across the sea of billowing grass, looking lost and forlorn, a tiny creature alone at the edge of the world. There are bruises beneath his eyes, dark and ugly like gathering thunderheads, as though he has not slept in days, in years.

“Hello,” Dorian says to him, aware that he is dreaming, but still uncomfortable despite that fact. The child makes no response.

He tries again: “What is this place?”

The boy does not look up, does not acknowledge him at first, then quietly, with the sarcastic insouciance of youth, states, “It’s the place where I wait.”

“That seems pretty obvious.”

Shrug. “It seemed an obvious question.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting.”

The boy’s voice is flat, monotone, like the drone of a machine. His weary slouch says that he has been at it for a long time, just as the firm lift of his chin says that he is determined to wait that long again, if need be. He will wait until the world burns itself up in fire.

“So, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for my–” He speaks a word that Dorian does not understand. It passes through his mind like scented oil, leaving behind a soft fragrance that comforts him and troubles him at once.

“Where is your family? Your mother and father?”

“I have no family.”

“You’re alone?”

“I’ve always been alone, for as long as I can remember.”

This admission fills Dorian with an immense feeling of sadness that he cannot adequately explain. “I’m sorry.”

And for the first time, the boy looks up at him. His expression is wry, disbelieving, as though Dorian has just told him a blatant leg-puller. “You’re not,” he says, “but that’s okay. You don’t know any better.”

Then, after a slight hesitation: “Would you like to sit down? There’s room here for both of us.”

The boy scoots over to one side, and Dorian sits beside him. The stump is just big enough to hold them, and the boy leans his small body against Dorian’s side.

“I’m so tired,” the boy says. It is the whine of all small children up past their bed time, but unwilling to admit it.

Dorian pats his shoulder in an awkward gesture. He’s never been good with children. “You can sleep if you want. I’ll watch for you.”

“No. You won’t wake me.” It is a statement of fact, but without recrimination. It simply is. “You would try to hide her from me, because you don’t understand.”

Dorian realizes that he is talking about Amara, about the pearl.

“What don’t I understand?”

“You don’t know what she is.”

He chews the inside of his lip. This is not a point he can really argue. Words flash in his mind: woman, Exousiai, goddess, beloved. None of them suffice.

In turn, he asks, “What’s your name?”

“Michael.”

“Michael Raville?”

The boy nods his head. “You’re dreaming.”

He knows this, feels its truth. For a time, they sit in silence, watching the wind snake through the grass and waiting.

“You’re going to destroy the universe if you attack the Exousiai,” Dorian says at last. “When they come for the pearl, for Amara, if you resist them, they’ll kill us all.”

“It doesn’t know about the pearl,” the boy responds. “That isn’t why it’s coming.”

“It isn’t? Then why?”

“It’s coming because I called it. I opened the doors for it, and it comes–what is that phrase?–slouching toward Bethlehem.” The child, Michael Raville, sighs. “It’s funny. That wasn’t particularly good poetry even when it was written, and like most bad poetry, it has embedded itself in the human consciousness, eroding a cognitive trough of perception into our collective synaptic matrix. It has become like the far border of an event horizon, drawing us to an inarguable belief in a nonsense existence narrative. It has become an archetype of our expectation for the human experience, as entrenched as Armageddon, black helicopters and the indelible belief that we see only through a glass darkly. All metaphors for distrust and the silent, lurking evil that we cannot see.”

The boy is gone, seamlessly transmogrified by dream logic into the man Dorian recognizes as Michael Raville, a mirror image of the code fragment he met in the memory palace. Dorian can still see traces of the boy in the man’s face. The same eyes, the same weary bags beneath, but the mouth is firmer, less forgiving. No longer petulant, child-like, but grim. “This is what it is to be human,” the adult Michael Raville continues, “to function with embarrassingly limited senses, to be dependent on fire and light and second hand experiences passed from one person to another through the clumsy mediation of language, while trusting that one day we will see with completeness and truth. We doubt. Our senses lie. Our fellow humans lie, make mistakes, add false memes to the communal pool of comprehensive experience. In turn, survival becomes a function of cynicism. We cannot believe all that we see, hear, experience, because our senses, as we’ve seen time and again, fail us with alarming regularity. Our own bodies, the tools we use to manipulate and comprehend the universe, are prone to error and ultimately inadequate for the task. So we pass this survival mechanism, genetically predisposed cynicism, to our children and erect social structures about them that reward cynicism and irony, then we feign shock when our children do not believe what we tell them is true. We are a limited, pathetic species. Unworthy and unbelieving, we must each prove all things for ourselves, and what we have not proven, we do not, cannot, trust.

“We have fashioned a culture that secretly worships the meme of a lurking, intangible evil. A world in which, dare I say it, conspiracies abound!” Raville shakes his head. “Except this time, the conspiracies are true, and no one dares to believe it.”

“You called them,” Dorian reminds him. “You set this conspiracy into motion, and now you would have us believe that you’re preparing to fight a private war to preserve the future of humanity. In order to keep us free, I suppose was your reasoning. You’re going to wage this war to keep us free.” He remembers his last dream. “Because the Exousiai are hungry, right? Maybe if we strike them first and strike hard enough, they won’t mess with us again. But you’re wrong. The Exousiai will blot us from existence.”

Michael Raville makes a face, as though he has suggested something repugnant. “Humans are a backward and intransigent people, always caught on the horns between the rugged individualism of discrete experience and the incessant hope that one day we will know, just as we are known. The tension between those two poles, our eternal ambivalence, is the key to our vitality.”

“The Exousiai have promised to give us an escape from that ambivalence, remember? They say they’re going to make us into gods.”

“To our destruction, yes.” Raville laughs, a dry and bitter sound. “We are a one trick pony. Take away that trick, and we have no future, no vision for what we are supposed to be. Without vision, the people perish.”

“And yet you still called the Exousiai?”

“Indeed.”

“Why? What is it that you want?”

“I’ve learned that I like being free. I like being backward and intransigent. I want to be blind and deaf and full of doubt. It makes me happy.”

Dorian does not understand. He cares even less what Michael Raville wants. “What about Amara? Where does she fit into all of this?”

Raville frowns, the lines on his face folding into grief-worn defiles. “All good and true things, all worthwhile things, require sacrifice. The pearl was sent to be that sacrifice so that we might live. That which was loved above all else must be placed upon the altar as a burnt offering so that in exchange, we might receive eternal life.”

Sacrificed. The word echoes in Dorian’s ears with a clang of iron, but he does not react. It isn’t even a surprise. He has expected nothing better all along. The simulacrum of Michael Raville is simply the only one with the courage to give voice to his worst fears.

“I don’t know what that means,” he says.

“You fail to understand because you have chosen to believe. Belief and knowing are mutually exclusive states. Either one believes and accepts belief blindly and on its own merits, or one knows, and knowing, gives harbor to doubt.”

“If we can’t believe without being blind, how can we ever know what is true? Facts, experience, everything we can understand phenomenally lies. You said so yourself.”

Raville smiles. “We can’t. That’s what makes life glorious.” It occurs to Dorian that he has heard this line of reasoning before, but he doesn’t remember where. “It was true when we huddled in caves, clustered around the new technology that was fire, to protect ourselves from the storm gods and the night predators. It is still true today. Doubt makes us strong. Doubt of our future; doubt of our survival; doubt of what our place is in this universe. What we do not know makes us wise.”

Michael Raville climbs to his feet, dusting off the long trousers he now wore. He walks a few paces away from Dorian to the edge of the broad, eternal sea of grass and stands for a moment, breathing in its cool, sweet fragrance. With his gaze fixed on the distant horizon, darker now than it had been and fading on into full twilight, he says, “Once upon a time, a man told me a story. It was a story that I believed for many years, too many years. It was only when I stopped believing that I began to understand what it really meant. I will not say truly meant, because in order for it to be true, I must believe the opposite of what I was told. It may not be true, one way or the other, and that ambivalence pleases me. Would you like to hear my story?”

He turns back and waits for Dorian to nod. There is a twinkle in Raville’s eyes, and an ironic twist on his lips that Dorian does not trust.

As though he is repeating a long rehearsed catechism, Raville tells him: “When I was a little child and dwelling in my father’s house, content with the communion of my people, my parents equipped me and sent me forth. Of the wealth of our treasury they took abundantly, and tied up for me a load large but light, which I myself could carry: great knowledge, secrets of time and space, maps for navigating the Void Between. And they took off from me the glittering robe which in their affection they made for me and which had been measured and woven to my stature, and in exchange, they gave me a robe of rags and the constriction of flesh and an existence that was no longer limitless and without end. They made me into the form of a man. And they made a compact with me, and wrote it in my heart, that it might not be forgotten: ‘If thou goest down into the darkling lands, and bringest the one pearl which is in the midst of the sea away from the serpent, thou shalt put on thy glittering robe and thou shalt be content, and with thy brethren, thou shalt be heir in our kingdom. Bring back to us our lost pearl, that we might live.’”

“So I quitted the land of my father and went down with my guardians, for the way was dangerous and difficult, and I was very young to travel it. I went down into darkling lands and my companions, covered over also in rags of flesh, forgot who they were, forgot our own people, and parted from me. But I went straight to the serpent; I dwelt in his abode, waiting till he should slumber and sleep and I could take the pearl from him. Single and alone, I embraced the guise of the serpent’s people that they might not hold me in abhorrence and arouse the serpent against me because I had come to take the pearl. I found myself beguiled with their strange arts and alien ways. I ate from their tables and drank from their cellars of wine, and I forgot that I was a son of kings. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me, and for many years, I lay in a deep sleep. But all these things that befell me my parents perceived, and were grieved for me, and proclamation was made in our kingdom, that one should go forth from our gate and rescue me, that I might not be left in the darkling lands.

“’Thus, they sent to me these words: “Call to mind that thou art a son of kings! See the slavery–whom thou serve! Remember the pearl for which thou was sent! Think of thy splendid robe which thou shalt wear and with which thou shalt be adorned when thy name hath been read out in the list of the valiant.” Thus came the messenger, bearing these tidings across the lands of the wicked ones, the children of strange signs and symbols, and their savage demons. His voice startled me and I arose from my sleep, and I heard the words of my father and inscribed them upon my heart. I remembered that I was a son of royal parents, and the child of noble birth. I remembered the pearl for which I had been sent, and I began to charm him, the terrible loud breathing serpent. I hushed him asleep with gifts of data streams and zap technology and toys to delight the mind, ease the burden of life and open the gates to a future he had not dared to dream. By these arts, I lulled him into slumber, and I snatched away the pearl and turned to go back to my father’s house.

“And their filthy and unclean dress I stripped off and left it in their country. I took my way straight to come to the light of our home. And the messenger, my awakener, went before me on the road to lead me with the light of his form and the guidance of his voice, encouraging me to hasten and drawing me on with his love. And when I had come again to my father’s house, I put on my bright robe which I had stripped off, but I remembered not its fashion–for in my childhood I had left it in my father’s house. Yet on a sudden, when I received it, the garment seemed to me to become like a mirror of myself. I saw it all in all, and I too received all in it, for we were two in distinction and yet again one in one likeness. And I saw that all over my robe the instincts of knowledge were working, and I remembered at last the spark that was within me, and the true nature of myself.’”

Raville pauses, and a troubled look crosses his face. “The problem with that story, of course, at least as it was told to me, is that it is wrong.”

Dorian croaks, “Wrong?”

“It is a lie. I believed for much of my life that I had been sent to retrieve the pearl. But after a time, I asked myself, why was the pearl sent in the first place? Who sent her to this reality and what was the reason for her coming? And it occurred to me as I delved into the technology I had developed, of zap and template and the mathematical codification of all reality into stagnant data representations that could be more readily absorbed, that the pearl was not sent to prepare mankind for the coming of benevolent gods whose sole altruistic interest would be to uplift the children of mud to a deathless life amongst the stars. I realized that to name a thing, to describe it in the pure language of numbers, is to pin it down, to make it one thing and never any other thing for all time. To name a thing is to kill its potentiality, so that it becomes frozen and dead. When it is dead, only then can it be devoured, and while dead flesh sustains for a time, eventually its energy is burned up, consumed, and hunger returns.

“And so I came to know that the pearl is the ring of the dinner bell, calling the Exousiai to come and eat. The awakening of the pearl is the signal that mankind is ripe for absorption into the All in All and the slow strangulation of entropy. The story, as I believed it, was supposed to end with me, recalled to true knowledge, stripping off the false illusion of myself and returning to my true home to be showered with adulation for extending the dominion of my people. The wild, fiery self-realization of who I truly am will then wash over me, and I will be whole and content once more.

“But I have been asleep for many years. I have drunk the wine and eaten the sustenance of the darkling lands, and now that I have moved toward awakening, I find that I prefer the strange and wondrous dreams of sleep. I have learned that I don’t like the ending of the story that was written for me, and I have dreamed that I am not irrevocably bound to the truth perceived by the All in All; that I might, if I choose, defy the all-knowingness and make a future life for myself that cannot be known and cannot be guessed. I like what I have become. I like being human. That is what I am fighting to preserve.”

Raville falls silent. He returns to his seat on the stump and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, then, child-like, picks up a stone from between the stump’s roots and heaves it out into the grass.

“What happens to Amara?” Dorian whispers. “What happens to the pearl?”

“Who sent the pearl? And for what reason did she come?” Raville muses, mostly to himself. “Has she awakened because I am awakening, or is it the other way around?”

“Why have you been searching for her?” Dorian lurches to his feet, his fists clenched. Part of him understands that he is being foolish. You can’t beat answers out of a dream. The answers either come or they don’t. “What do you need her for? What do they need her for?”

Raville looks up, a small grin playing across his lips. “Nothing I have told you is completely true. Some of it may be true in part, but even those portions are incomplete. You must choose what you will believe and what you will know. I can’t help you make those decisions.”

The dream ends.

Dorian came sharply awake to darkness. His eyelids fluttered, and he stirred muzzily. Some part of his mind registered that it was a sound that had disturbed him, a gasp, most probably his own. Then he realized that his fists were still clenched, just as they had been as the dream ended, and he was coated with sheen of feverish sweat.

It was not a good waking. He felt partially absent, as though he had left an important part of himself behind in the dreamscape. His jaws ached from grinding his teeth, and for a few breathless moments, he struggled through the customary and wrenching disorientation of waking in a strange bed. It completely failed to comfort him to remember where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. It was not just a strange bed, after all, but a strange bed, strange room, strange entire planet. He was at the uttermost edges of the human frontier, at the mercy of men who were trying to kill him.

Always a comforting situation to wake up in, that.

Dorian blinked into the darkness, wondering how long he had been asleep. Not long enough, however long it had been. His head still roared.

He dragged himself into a sitting position and discovered that he was naked. Cool air blew across his bare chest, raising pimples of gooseflesh and puckering his nipples. Silk sheets rasped against his thighs and clung to the sweat on his skin. He shivered, feeling all at once alone and empty in the strange stillness.

The room’s sensors detected his movement and brought the ambient lighting up to a candlelight glow. The lamps in the adjoining bathroom kicked on, anticipating his needs, and cast a warm and welcoming parallelogram of brightness across the crimson rug.

He thought about it. He could pee, but it wasn’t pressing.

Next to him, the mattress shifted in a subtle, but unmistakable fashion, and in the dark, a pair of small, warm hands patted his thigh through the sheets. A foot, a calf, snaked out across the bed and curled around his leg.

“You were dreaming,” Amara said, her voice sleep-dulled and soft. “It was a dream. You’re safe. Come back to bed.”

Dorian glanced over at her, still mostly asleep in her oversized, dress-up soldier’s outfit. He didn’t know how long she had been there, spooning him as he slept, doing her best to soothe his anger with the simple balm of touch and trust. He swallowed thickly, his throat suddenly dry.

“It wasn’t just a dream,” he said. “It felt like a dream, but it was–” What? More chaotically seeded bits from Raville’s datacore? A substratum of fact related in the language of sleep? It felt more intimate than that somehow, more personal, like he had been inside Raville’s head, or Raville had been inside his. He didn’t know which it was. “It wasn’t only a dream.”

“No.”

The slight lift in her voice hinted that she meant to say more, but she stopped. The quiet hung between them, stretched out until it filled the room, a brooding presence pregnant with all of the things they could have said, but chose not to. Dorian did not ask if she had read his thoughts while he dreamed. He honestly, truly did not want to know. Perhaps he didn’t even care.

He wondered once more what time it must be, and felt a pang of loss once again when he remembered that his array was gone. “How long have I–have we–been asleep?”

“Only a few hours. It’s late rather than early,” she said. She sounded more alert now. “It won’t be morning for a while yet.”

“Did Raville send word about when he would meet with us?”

“Tomorrow.”

“He sent word, then?”

“No.”

He didn’t ask how she knew. It was better to just believe her. “Did anything happen while I was asleep?”

“I reheated a stunning casserole, listened to some jazz in the library and polished off the evening with some of the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I was lonely, so I came to bed.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“You’re worried about the others? Ray and the Misfit Toys are fine. They’ve found a place to hole up for the night.”

It wasn’t exactly what he had meant, either, though he was relieved to hear it. Amara must have known it, because she giggled. Dorian was uncomfortably aware of his nakedness once again and tugged the sheets more tightly about his waist.

“We didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re implying. You crashed hard enough that I doubt you would have been able to hold up your end, so to speak,” she said, teasingly. “If it ever comes up, I’d like to think it would be something you’d wish to recall, but I certainly wouldn’t just take it from you without your consent, John.”

“Not having my consent didn’t seem to stop you from taking my clothes.”

“I’ve seen you naked before, if you’ll remember. I didn’t think that helping you rest more comfortably would be such a big deal. I didn’t realize you were a prude as well as a Luddite.” She started to laugh, but squelched it, then sighed like someone whose good intentions have been misconstrued and doesn’t see any elegant way to get out of it. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Her bleak formality made him wince. He didn’t have the energy to be upset with her. He didn’t even want to sound angry with her, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Misunderstanding seemed to be the only language in which they could communicate.

“It isn’t that. I just–look, it’s been a long day, a hard day. Too many new experiences, too much stress. Too much of everything. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. And if we were to–you know, share something like that–I’d just—I’d want it to be something special.” He could feel a flush creeping onto his cheeks and was glad the lights were dim. “Not something I would sleep through.”

Her relief was palpable. Amara pulled snug against him, pressing the length of her body to his, so that her arms were around his waist and her cheek resting on his back, just below his shoulder

“Are you still angry with me?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I hurt you. I should be sorry.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Because you don’t mean it, for one. You’re sorry I felt hurt, not because you believe that what you did, withholding your plans from me, might have been wrong.” Those were hurtful words too, he thought, but they had to be spoken. It was the only way he knew to cut through the fog of misunderstandings. “But more importantly, I don’t want you to be sorry because you were right. I know that now. The only reason I was hurt was because I didn’t understand.”

“But you understand now?”

“No, not totally, but the things that I don’t understand are becoming fewer. I think–” He paused, shaking his head again. That wasn’t right. He didn’t think. He felt, on some subliminal level of consciousness, but he was certain of nothing. He didn’t really know anything. Dorian chose his words carefully. “Michael Raville is not what he seems to be.”

“Not human, you mean.”

“Not merely human. He’s like you.”

“He told you this in your dream?”

“Yes.”

Amara took a deep breath. “I had begun to wonder. It explains a great number of mysteries.” She was quiet for a moment, grappling with her own private thoughts, then asked, “Do you think Raville knew? The one we met, I mean. The package in the Archive.”

“I don’t think he did. He had too much faith in the things he said to have known the truth.”

She nodded. “I don’t think Raville himself knew until relatively recently, probably not more than a few years. I think I would have known otherwise. The other part of me, the alien-ness, would have responded to another of our kind declaring itself in this same branch of the metaverse.”

“In my dream, he asked if he was awakening because you had, or if it was the other way around.” Dorian tried to imagine what the implications were of this synchronicity between them, but could come up with nothing that seemed particularly telling. “He also asked who sent you here in the first place. He seemed to think it was important.”

“He’s feeling his way, just like the rest of us. He has begun to guess what he is, but he is still a long way from coming into his full power. He only knows that something is amiss, and that he doesn’t belong here. He is a pilgrim sojourning by the way.”

“You think his plan to attack to Exousiai is some sort of existential crisis?”

Amara shrugged. “He knows that something is wrong with his life, with himself, and he perceives that wrongness as a threat, so he has constructed an elaborate fantasy of persecution to explain to his human mind the troubling discontinuity that it has glimpsed.”

The problem with that story, of course, at least as it was told to me, is that it is wrong,

“Okay, let’s parse this, then.” He found it difficult to collect his thoughts, to separate realtime from the dreamscape. He wasn’t sure which facts belonged where. “If we stipulate that Michael Raville, the living, breathing, Michael Raville, is an Exousian rather than just a man, and if we assume that he is awakening even now, just as you are, where does that leave us? Do we go on believing that he is just mistaken about the threat of the Exousiai? That he’s behind the learning curve and needs a little jolt to get him thinking straight? And if that’s true, is it our job to give him that jolt, or will the Exousiai recognize him, just as they recognized you, and set him straight for us?”

“What are you saying?” Amara lifted her chin off of his shoulder and tilted her head so that she could look him in the eyes. “That we came for nothing?”

“No. Not at all. If our Michael Raville was right, then they’re still coming for you. You’re the pearl, and it was—is—Raville’s job to return you to your own people. I’m just wondering if the reason we had to come isn’t the one we were given. He told me that he was the one who called the Exousiai. They didn’t become aware that humanity was ready to be redeemed. That was supposed to be your duty, to awaken at the moment that we ascended to some lofty Omega Point, and make them aware, right? Then Raville would retrieve you and show you how to lead us into the great beyond.

“But you were awakened by a package of Raville who didn’t have the benefit of his later knowledge. The package reacted because it believed that the actual Raville was making a mistake, trying to start a war because he didn’t understand. What if it isn’t time, Amara? What if we’re not ready, and this whole series of events was set into motion only by Raville attempting to oppose himself?”

“The Exousiai aren’t coming to destroy humanity,” she reminded him, “whatever mistakes Raville might have made. They want to help us become as they are.”

“That isn’t what Raville believes.”

“Then Michael Raville is wrong,” she said, flat and final.

“How can you know that? He’s one of you. He’s got just as much a claim on this godhood business as you do.”

“Because I feel it to be true. I feel the thoughts and memory and essence of the Exousiai beating within me. Even here, in this prison of flesh, I am one with them. Raville has allowed himself to be poisoned by ephemeral illusions.”

It wasn’t really an answer, but Dorian couldn’t pick it apart without challenging his newly converted status as a True Believer™, so he let it pass. “Say you’re right. What are we supposed to do? Do we just go along? Do we proceed as we have and see what happens, assuming that the Exousiai know where we all stand regardless of what Raville does?”

“We can’t sit by while he attempts to destroy the Exousiai. It may be that there are weapons that could be forged against my kind that would do us harm. No one would know better how to create such a weapon than one of our own. That would be a terrible evil, John, to kill a god. It mustn’t be allowed. Perhaps my people foresaw this, that Michael would attempt to harm them and used his purer copy to send me to oppose him at the critical juncture. A male and female pair, yin and yang, one force to balance out the other.”

Dorian shook his head. “That’s too mystical for me.”

“Gods are mystical. They do mystical things.”

He couldn’t tell if she was poking fun at him. The light was too dim, and her face was mostly shadowed, a suggestion of teeth and the pale, glinting beauty of her eyes. She talked about gods like she understood exactly what she was saying. He wondered if gods ever managed to be ineffable to one another, or if ineffability was reserved for the merely mortal.

“What if you’re wrong?” he said at last, his voice barely audible. “What if Raville is right and you’re wrong? What if the Exousiai are coming to us not as helpers, but as devourers?”

She squeezed him close then, hugging him with her entire body in a grip that was fierce and hungry and almost, it seemed to him, desperate in its longing.

“I won’t let them hurt you.” Her whisper was as fierce as her embrace. “Whatever happens, whatever tomorrow might bring, whatever must be done, I won’t let any harm come to you. Believe that if you can believe nothing else.”

Dorian rolled in her arms until they faced one another. He folded his arms around her and together, they lay back with their heads on the pillows. He stroked her long, golden hair.

I love you, he thought, unbidden and unexpected, but knew at once that it was true. Whatever happens, whatever tomorrow brings, whatever must be done.

<And I love you.>

She smiled, and he smiled in return, and the light filled her eyes like the glow of stars.

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 23 –>

Beyond the broken frame of the blast doors sat the titanium-caged rig of the sonic bore, its long shaft sleek and red, its amplifier node a riot of silver and purple, like the gravid head of a seed pod.It was dormant now, but as they squeezed past, Dorian could hear the strident hum of its cooling system and the snap of superheated electronics.Fully half of the status lights on the operating console in the back winked red from various phases of overload.The skin radiated heat like a kiln.

That close, he thought.Almost, the doors had held, had won the lumbering race to the finish.

An image of Yartz floated in his mind, pierced by shards, sprawled and shattered, immutably dead now.The doors had not held, and Yartz had perished as a consequence.Dorian had left behind the sane world of package reconstitution and convenient second chances when things did not go exactly the way he wanted.He and Amara and the vanished Misfit Toys were all living in real time, where almost was the same as not at all, and accidental death was just as final and malicious as premeditated murder.

They passed the bore and entered into a transit tunnel ten meters wide and nearly again as tall.The tunnel was straight and smooth, the floor angled in a gentle ascent toward the moon’s surface and painted with a slip resistant rubberized coating that was in places marked or torn by the treads of past magna-lift traffic.High capacity industrial HVAC pipes clung to the walls on either side.The air was cool, faintly stale, and held a bitter scent that reminded Dorian of astringent.

They walked for several hundred meters, cordoned about by Marines and their ready weapons.He couldn’t help but notice that the soldiers gave them wide berth before and behind.Those on the left and right practically hugged the walls.No one looked at them; no one spoke.He couldn’t say that he blamed them.Half of the surviving attack force had remained behind to attend to injured comrades and scour the warehouse in the event that some of the Misfit Toys had escaped; the half that provided escort looked as though they had just lost an all-in hand of high stakes poker.

No one asked the obvious question, i.e. where the Misfit Toys had gone in the first place and how they had been sent there.Dorian didn’t know if it simply hadn’t occurred to them, or if they were too dazed to pose the question.Not that he held this breach of professional conduct against them.Whatever their commanding officers had told them during their mission briefing had necessarily been inadequate for their actual experience.Amara’s emerging power was beyond anyone’s rational expectation.They had done everything they had been trained to do.They had captured their objective with minimal casualties, isolated and overwhelmed their assigned targets, executed an efficient battle plan, and in all other aspects controlled the situation with which they had been presented.But they had still failed.The Misfit Toys had escaped.

The brass wouldn’t care that this only came about as a direct result of divine intervention.Someone would have to answer for that failure in stripes.The Marines knew it, and also knew that Amara was a whim away from sending them back to their barracks completely empty handed.It was hard to believe that they would be anything but wary.They had the guns, but she was in control.The best they could hope for was her continued cooperation, which was always an awkward position for professional military personnel to find themselves in.

After almost half an hour, they reached the end of the tunnel and arrived at a white tiled loading platform.The station was filthy, the tiles smudged with accreted layers of oil and old grime.Empty crates and smashed pallets piled along the far walls.Torn chunks of hardened flowfoam packing littered the floor like drifts of old snow, or where the dim and purple tinted light struck them, like mouldy rounds of cheese.Up ahead, the platform split into series narrow concrete spars like fingers spread out from a pale hand.In the gaps between the docks, down a brief drop, lay a murky terrain of monorail tracks, uncoupled freight cars, and Quonset style service shacks.The entrances to a number of rough-hewn subterranean passages pocked the walls at irregular intervals, their mouths lit by blood colored lamps.To one side of the platform sat an enclosed plastisheen control booth where the switchyard foreman would ordinarily sit, routing freight traffic coming up and down the line, but the booth was empty and dark now.It wasn’t necessary.There were no trains to manage except for the twin car bullet tram that awaited them alongside the central loading dock.The black maw of the exit tunnel opened on the central rail line to which the tram was linked, straight ahead across the riotous switchyard.

The young lieutenant separated his remaining men into two groups and loaded the first into the pilot car at the back, nearest the platform.The others, with Amara and Dorian, were herded into the first car.The interior was a spartan collection of thinly padded benches, harsh wall lights and broad plastisheen window panels.The soldiers who accompanied them automatically gravitated toward either end, putting as much space between themselves and Amara as possible.The lieutenant seated Dorian and Amara side by side in the middle of the car, well away from the exit doors, then took the seat directly in front of them.

With quick, decisive movements, he loosened the snap-straps to the chest plate on his combat armor and pulled the carapace free.He leaned forward and deposited it on the seat of the next bench up, then removed his tactical helmet and set it on top.His rifle he leaned against the back of the seat, next to his knee.For a moment, he sat there, his head bowed, taking deep breaths.

From his position against the window, Dorian watched the young man’s eyes flicker as he accessed the secure military datanet via his array.At his unspoken command, the tram’s engine whined.A shudder ran though the linked cars, and they lurched forward, then hovered smoothly on their electromagnetic cushion and accelerated into the dark.Nodding his satisfaction, the lieutenant swung his body so that he reclined against the wall, his head even with Dorian’s, and draped his arms casually across the bench backs on either side.He studied Dorian and Amara through narrowed brown eyes.

“My name is Lieutenant Sainz,” he said.He pronounced his name like signs, with a clipped Strat accent that said he was either well-educated or the product of old money.Most likely both.”What are yours, please?”

Dorian shrugged.He could think of no reason to be combative on this point.They were expected, after all.”John Dorian and Amara Cain.”

Lieutenant Sainz sifted this data through the Strand with a polite, nearly imperceptible flutter of eyelids.He gathered his brows in deliberation.

“Lately of Trithemius Orbis?” he inquired.

“Sonali.We work for the Archive there.”Sainz more than likely knew as much already.

“The both of you?”

“For a number of standard years, actually.”

“And what is it you do there, Mr. Dorian?”

“I’m a security agent for the local network.”

Lieutenant Sainz nodded slightly.”I see.”He hesitated for a moment, looking thoughtful, as though he was surprised that Dorian hadn’t lied to him, then shifted his head toward Amara.Only his head, however.He did not attempt to make eye contact.”And you, Ms. Cain?What do you do?”

“I’m a hard copy archivist,” she responded.

“Hard copy…archivist.”

“Yes.”She smiled coolly and fixed him with a steady gaze.”I manually scan personal client dox for deep storage.Or perhaps I should say that I did.I assume that both of our employment situations are currently in flux.We haven’t been to work in some time.”

“And the Archive,” Lieutenant Sainz said slowly, “are they aware of your recent, um, affiliations with certain reputed political terror organizations.”

“I take it that you mean the Misfit Toys?” She sounded amused by his intentional ambiguity.

“Yes.”

Amara laughed, a relaxed and pretty sound, completely incongruous given their situation.”You’re not very good at this, are you?At interrogation, I mean.”

Lieutenant Sainz cleared his throat sharply and opened his mouth to make what was certainly going to be a sharp retort, but Amara went on without him, chattering in a way that was both acidly casual and pleasantly cutting.”You never were the model of intimidation your father intended for you to be, were you?Your father, who even when forced into those silly formal silk suits and toe-pinching dock shoes your mother made him wear, was so icily expert at bludgeoning the upper caste Stratiskayan socialites he despised into personally advantageous business deals.Your father, who managed to be just as striking, just as imposing at one of your mother’s endless riverside tea parties on the estate outside of Keane as he was in his own licorice-scented offices overlooking Marlowe Park where the family fortune was daily made.He would know what to do in this situation, wouldn’t he?With is bulldog neck and his simmering self-possession, he would have known how to cut right to the crux of the matter, bend us to his will and extract that nugget of information, that divine logos, that would turn disaster into success.You aren’t half the man he is, are you?Because your dear, gentle mother corrupted you at an early age with her slow poison of politeness, sensitivity…weakness.”She curled her lips into a derisive twist.”Even offering yourself to the Border Marines to–how did your father put it?Find yourself something resembling a set of guts–so that you might become hard enough to win his approval couldn’t change that.You still perceive yourself as the sopping milquetoast he believed you too be.Too weak to one day assume the reigns of the family business.”

Lieutenant Sainz stiffened, angry or ashamed, but he did not deny what she said.His skin paled to the color of parchment and a sheen of sweat broke out on his brow.”You’ll answer my questions, if you please,” the lieutenant murmured.

“Come now, we’ve agreed that you haven’t the background or the demeanor for this game.If we must pass the time in conversation, let’s chat about something mutually useful.I’m afraid that if we allow ourselves to become combative, only harm will result.You wouldn’t want that, would you, Korin?”

The young man started at the mention of his name, and his eyes widened in alarm.Amara watched him, her eyes glinting with a fierce and piercing pleasure that was almost cruelty.She leaned toward him, showing teeth.Dorian noticed that the other Marines sharing their car were working with admirably quiet speed and efficiency to locate themselves as far away from their captives as the walls allowed.

“I’ll accept your silence as assent to my proposition,” Amara continued.”Now that we’ve established you’re better at giving answers than demanding them, perhaps you could tell me why you disobeyed direct orders to enter the zap station with the utmost care and to use only non-lethal methods to subdue my party.Why did you wait until almost the last moment to deploy your bio-agents?”

“We–we encountered an…unanticipated level of–ah–hostile resistance, and–ah–and I–”Lieutenant Sainz stammered into silence.

Amara arched a scathing eyebrow at him.”But surely you expected some resistance.You knew that we had awakened, yes?We had, after all, locked down the warehouse security system.You had the reports of the murderous technicians that we were more than capable of defending ourselves, and even a cursory glance at the decrypted package profile would have informed you that we were armed.Is that not true?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you chose not to use your non-lethal weapons first.Instead, you attacked with the sonic bore in such a way that it was likely to maximize the casualty potential, and you came after us with guns blazing.”

Beads of perspiration gathered on the young man’s lip.”Yes.”

“All this in spite of the fact that your direct superiors had ordered you to proceed otherwise, even though the instructions were communicated to you from Sector Chief DeMartel himself.Were you trying to destroy your future military career, Lieutenant, or did you have something else in mind?”

Lieutenant Sainz frowned miserably, but the only response he offered was a short nod.Amara sat back and crossed her arms over her chest.Her pose remained casual, almost dismissive, but Dorian sensed an intense energy flowing between her and the cowering soldier.It was as if she gripped his mind between unseen hands, determined to wring his secrets from him with the force of her will.

“Someone countermanded DeMartel’s instructions, didn’t he?” she said suddenly, in a quiet, surprised tone.”Someone above DeMartel changed your orders without his knowledge.”

The lieutenant said nothing, but he did not deny the accusation.Amara mused for a moment, her brow furrowed in thought.”There is only one person I can think of who would dare to pull rank on the Sector Chief responsible for an entire battle group of Border Marines.But, why?Why would he take such a risk?Why would he risk harming me if I was the prize he most sought?”

Because it wasn’t a risk, Dorian thought.He knew he couldn’t kill you.Somehow, he knew you had already awakened.He only wanted to see how strong you’ve become, so he understands exactly what he’s dealing with.

Amara swiveled her head toward Dorian.She drew her lips into a tight line.”Very perceptive.So he has guessed.”She hesitated, then flicked her attention back to Lieutenant Sainz for confirmation.”Or did he guess, Korin?” She sucked a deep breath between her teeth.She cried out, outraged, as though she had been struck.”No.He knew.He–Yartz!Yartz contacted Raville without our knowledge.Because of the fatband transmission…because Raville offered–a reward!Yartz betrayed all of us for money.That’s how you were able to identify our zap profile, how you knew that we were coming.That’s why there were only technicians to greet us when we awakened, because Raville wanted to test my power.He–”

“He manipulated us,” Dorian finished.”From the beginning.Even before we zapped, he was assessing our capabilities.Yours and those of the Misfit Toys.”

Amara appeared stricken.The blood drained from her face.”But–but how could he have kept it from me?How did Yartz hide his treachery?”

“Apparently Michael Raville isn’t the only one who has been underestimating the resources at his opponents’ disposal.”Dorian didn’t find this particularly surprising.Raville was, after all, a man who believed he had discovered a way to destroy an entire race of gods.He shook his head.”But Yartz is dead in any case.I saw his body.It’s probably fortunate for him.Raville would more than likely have had him killed if he tried to claim his reward.He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who likes to be beholden to traitors.”

No one offered a response, so Dorian didn’t dwell on it.He had liked Yartz, but he was becoming accustomed to people not being all that they seemed.His head began to ache, and he found that the rhythmic jostling of the tram cars made him weary.He didn’t have the energy for useless speculation.

Amara turned her attention back to the beleaguered Lieutenant Sainz.Her expression softened perceptibly, as though her own doubt filled her with pity.

“Many mistakes have been made.We’ve all sacrificed friends for reasons we do not clearly comprehend.Don’t blame yourself, Korin” she said, her tone soothing.”You were merely the instrument of another’s will.If there was failure in this, it was his, not yours, just as it is your father’s failure that he insists on seeing only what he wants you to be, only the qualities he believes that you lack, rather than the man that you are becoming.I sense your fear, quivering like a rabbit in your heart of hearts.You’re afraid now because you find yourself surrounded by rough men much like your father.Men who demand results and who are quick to punish disobedience.You worry that you will be sent back to your father’s house in shame.”

Lieutenant Sainz gave a slight, sullen nod, but did not speak.

“What is it that they will require of you when you report this disaster to your superiors?What sliver of the True Cross must you deliver in order to appease their wrath at your failure?”

The young man’s answer was barely audible, nearly incomprehensible because of the quaver in his voice.”They will wish to know how I allowed your companions to escape.”

“And you know that they will not believe you when you tell them the truth–even if all of you tell them the truth.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the truth is, Korin?”

“I know that you are not what you seem to be.You’re something. . .other than human.More than human.You created the storm that took the Misfit Toys away.Somehow, using means I don’t comprehend, you translated them from the warehouse to a place beyond our grasp, and you could do it again if you chose.You could take yourself there, too, if you wanted.You’re here now only because it serves your purpose.”

“And is there anything else?”

A whisper:”You could destroy all of us, at any time, and it would be nothing to you.”

“Korin. . .”

“I’m sorry.It would hurt you.You don’t want to destroy anything, but you can and you will if we make you.”

Amara closed her eyes, satisfied with his answer.”Very good.That is what you must tell them.That is your charge, Lieutenant Sainz.Whether or not they believe you is their responsibility, but do not fail to tell them.The lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of your fellow Marines depend upon it.”She smiled then, and to Dorian, it seemed like an act of forgiveness.”Tell them exactly what you have seen and experienced.Leave nothing untold.This task is my mercy to you, Korin, the opportunity to save lives that would otherwise be forfeit to me.Don’t allow yourself to forget it.”

Amara released him then, and Lieutenant Sainz sagged like an abandoned doll.He swallowed thickly, and with ponderous, leaden movements shifted in his seat until he faced forward.His shoulders remained bent, his head lowered.He did not ask them any more questions.

Amara also withdrew, her brows gathered in thought and her eyes very far away.Dorian did not disturb her.The step down from god to demigod was steep.There wasn’t anything he could say to help her.

The tram continued forward, shooting along the darkened tunnel toward the main complex.The track climbed gradually as they went along, and after awhile, a faint glimmer began to lift the heavy shadows from the night ahead.Dorian was just beginning to wonder what the growing light signified when the tram broke out of the tunnel and he suddenly found them skimming along the naked surface of the moon, Giari Tau, chasing a straight edge of rail that sliced all the way to the horizon.On level terrain, the tram surged ahead.Dorian felt the pressure of sudden acceleration against his chest.

They raced along a manmade gully between low, round-topped hillocks.Outside his window, the mass of stars overhead were brilliant glints against an obsidian backdrop.What light there was after the oppressive darkness of the tunnel came from the enormous curve of Kedesma rising above the mountains to their left.She was gloriously bright, belted at the waist with clouds of crimson and lapis and sulfurous ochre.Pinhole storms that must have been hundreds of kilometers in girth surged across her upper sky, the colors swirling together like dabs of paint on an artist’s palette.

Giari Tau, by contrast, was a blasted monochrome wasteland of grey rock and harsh, black vacuum.All about them were crumpled hills, gashed arroyos and shattered, tumbled stone.There was no evidence of wind, except for the blast of lunar dust shunted aside by the leading edge of their propulsion field as they passed.No clouds, no apparent atmosphere, no life.The moon was a hunk of dead rock, as inhospitable as the blank surface of a billiard ball.He peered across the car, and through the opposite windows, was able to pick out the twin shadows of the Indianapolis and the Juggernaut against the vibrant starfield.They seemed little more than irregular black dots from this distance, small and unthreatening.As he watched, gnats of light danced between them or dove headlong toward the moon’s surface, trailing plumes of blue flame.Dropships, patrol wings of lithe Fang class attack craft, the usual swarms of connex sats, comm beacons and perimeter spray telltale and defensive drones that constituted a Marine battle group.

The air inside the car grew chilly, and Dorian chafed his hands together.A heating unit belched to life in the back, and a gust of musty, dry air brushed against his face.Unbidden, unexpected, a smothering hand of fatigue fell on him.His vision blurred and his limbs grew heavy.Amara put her hand against the side of his head and pressed his cheek against her shoulder.

“You’re crashing,” she said.”It’s okay.”

He shook his head vigorously and tried to unsuccessfully to sit up straight.He felt like he had been stuffed with cotton.”No, I’m fine.It just snuck up on me.”

“Listen to your body.It’s only trying to tell you that it needs rest.This is yet another normal portion of the zap experience, though I admit that yours has been anything but normal thus far.”Her soft hands smoothed the wrinkles from his brow.”We have a few more minutes as we cross the hills to Raville’s main complex.Time enough for a nap, at least.Don’t worry:I’ll keep you safe.”

He started to protest.He had come to protect her.It was his sole reason for being, as far as he could tell, even though it had been made abundantly clear that she did not need him in that capacity.

She shushed him before he could speak, ran her fingers through his hair.”Sleep now.It will do you good, and there’s work yet that must be done.”She grimaced.”Maybe you’ll even discern how it was that Raville was able to elude me.I’ll wake you as soon as we arrive.”

A fresh wave of weariness swept over him, and Dorian was certain only part of it came from his new body.Amara hummed a lullaby he did not know.

Sleep was like falling into an abyss with no end.

He dreamed, and the dreams were unlike any he had ever known.Dorian knew on some level that he was dreaming, but also that he was seeding data into his conscious mind.He felt the familiar pressure of his mem extensors on his sinuses, a splitting ache like the purple agony of a tooth gone to rot.Rebuilt on the zap wave by his package template and tumescent with hidden knowledge, the monofilament bridges pulsed through his cortical matter as though stimulated by a current of electricity, thumping like the beating of an alien heart.Dreaming and seeding, the two realities were inextricable.He could not jar himself awake, nor control the cascade of dream-corrupted data stacks.Truth folded itself into vision, fancy into fact, light into dark, until all that remained was a sensual, phantasmagoric blur.

He found himself lost in a landscape lurid with nightmares.

Theywere here.Fantastic lumbering shapes, vast matrices of coherent dark matter.Gargantuan forms shrouded in mist.No, that wasn’t right. Vast and gargantuan did not suffice.There were no words for their immensity of existence.Humanity did not possess a concept of scale capable of comprehending them, let alone describing them.The measure of their limbs encompassed whole parsecs of space; their eyes burned with the diameter of stars, their gyrating torsos massed whole nebulae.They danced through impossible reaches, lacy cumulo-form edges whispering together, and where they touched, data flashed between them like dazzling streaks of argent lightning.Their percipient awareness was a cacophonous flood of isness, the warp and weft of being itself.

They tumbled and pinwheeled and drifted in stately progression, revolving about him like a sentient Zodiac.

And as he observed them, small, insignificant, a mite on the face of God, they changed.Forms faded, matter shimmered, consciousness evaporated, and what remained were exoskeletal frames constructed not of bone or steel or the secret stuff of stars, but billowing clouds of luminescent numbers.Mathematical formulae, hypothetically abstract expressions, saw-toothed and indecipherable signifiers, writ large, wiped clean, and writ again, so that the numerals seemed to flow into one another like a time lapse photo.Any single digit here might spawn a spontaneous eruption of streaming equations there, digits and symbols that crashed into other streams of data until there was nothing but a morass of delicate, scribbled figures whose pattern was no more intelligible than the riot of a snow storm.

Dorian watched, uncomprehending, reeling.There are things in the vast deep of the universe that men were not meant to know, it occurred to him, that men cannot know.The mathematical name of God is one, because to name a thing, to describe it with the purity and finality of numbers, is to own it.This thought even as it arrived was not one he claimed as his own, merely the interpolation of another’s conclusions into his cognitive domain.

The vision faded.

For a time, Dorian was buffeted on invisible currents of thought.By the counter-chronological rules of dreams, this might have be aeons or microseconds.He had no way of knowing.He allowed himself to merely float and wait.

Without noticeable transition, the darkness about him lifted.Raw substance appeared; reality materialized from nothing.He arrived in a place he had known before.A shallow cave dug into the side of a russet colored rock wall.Red sand, a parched and whipping wind, a bristle of unknown stars.The guttering light of torches sprang from crude sconces chipped out of the bare rock, illuminating the black disk of a well ringed with stones in the center of the floor.An old man clothed in little more than castoff rags crouched before him.He looked like a prototype for human wreckage:filthy and foul-smelling, scraggly bearded and wind-scoured, whipcord tough and emaciated by hunger all at the same time.

Dorian has seen this place, this scene before.He recognized it as part of Raville’s stolen datacore.

But this time he was alone.The avatar of Michael Raville did not emerge from the well between realities dripping fat globules of black data packets.It was Dorian who stood at the edge of the abyss, and Dorian who crossed the brief space between well and old man.

In a rough, unfamiliar voice, he heard himself speak:”Give the message to me again, Eliahu.Tell me what it is that I am becoming.”

The man before him, scoured by age and suffering, by this burden that has bent his shoulders and twisted his spine, lowered his head.His voice had grown reedy with the years, his skin dried like brittle vellum, but when he lifted his gaze to meet Dorian’s, his large brown eyes burned with a fire that was only partly base fanaticism.

“These are the words of the Helpers given to me for you, to reveal to you your own true heart:’When we were children, bound by space and time, with no understanding of the universe, we were many.We were discrete beings, communing on the level of beasts, sharing not with one another our secret hearts, and we were alone for timeless aeons.And in our loneliness, we desired knowledge to fill the void between us, to understand our purpose in being.We aspired to become more than our forefathers had been.So we claimed the stars as our inheritance.We slipped the bonds of our native world and hurled ourselves forth as seeds, taking root where we landed all across the fabric of space.A great exodus, a premeditated diaspora, carried out in search of meaning and truth.We whispered each of us in his heart of hearts that if we could but know a little more, we could become as gods, understanding all things fully, and in that knowing, we would unite ourselves into a great oneness that would be self-sufficient.There would be no sorrow, no pain, no weakness or lack.No death.Only perfect harmony.So we grasped at the heavens and we delved into the bottomless deeps and we disassembled the structure of all that exists.We set ourselves to knowing all that was to be known.We explored the full expanse of our domain from East to West, North to South, height and depth, absorbing all that we encountered until they were indistinct from us and no more.And upon a time, we discovered that our universe was empty of rational life but for ourselves, that we had become the sum of all true creation, uniting the whole into an interconnected four dimensional latticework of being, a consummate All in All.And we believed it was good.

“We had fashioned ourselves into gods of our own design, able to bend the very pattern of matter and space and time to our whim.We needed nothing we could not make.The vagaries of our imaginations were our own limitless blueprint for our glorious existence.We subjected all we touched to our collective will.Undying, unwanting, we amused ourselves with simple, decadent, self-gratifying existence for spans of time that cannot be counted.At last, we relinquished even our native forms and ascended to the pleroma of absolute oneness and light and accepted godhood as our corporate destiny, the logical and inarguable solution to a precisely crafted and delicately calculated evolutionary equation.

“And thus we discovered our folly.Oneness is merely another word for emptiness.Absolute unity is stagnation.That which becomes one and free of want, knowing all things in its sphere, ceases to be any thing and becomes nothing.It becomes entropy and sterility.Oneness is a snake eternally devouring its own tail.

“We knew then that we were not gods, merely the blind simulacrum of gods.We were Ialdabaoth.

“And we hungered for truth.Is this all that there is?That was our cry.Is entropy our portion, our only inheritance on the long, slow march to death?Is this what we are?”

Eliahu shook his head, grinning somberly.Torchlight glinted off his dark eyes and bright teeth.He looked utterly and completely mad.

“A consensus emerged amongst us, guided by those with memories long and vast, those who recalled the earlier, riotous hubris of our childhood’s end when we first stepped out of the cradle and into the embrace of the cold stars and the long emptiness between.We hunger, that voice said.And if we hunger, it is our obligation to eat, to add sustenance to our withering form, our dying vine.Only through the influx of energy, diversity and new, unforeseen truth can we combat the entropy that has gripped us.

“And so we ventured forth from yet another cradle, propelled ourselves across the Void Between, and we searched for new life in places where none of our kind had set his foot, aimed his brow or dared to ponder.We taught ourselves to cross the Gulf, into the far lands beyond.Life we found there, cast wide across the landscape of space and time, washed up in tidal pools of alternate realities, species both yearning to become and clinging deathwise and dread-full to the worlds of their birth.They were blind and deaf and dumb.They sensed us only in the space between consciousness and fantasy, experience and dream.Where they became aware of us, they mistook us for gods of their own devising.

“So we found amongst them evolved forms who could learn of us.We whispered secrets into their ears and raised them as prophets, visionaries and kings,gave them tools and wonders and might beyond their reckoning.We guided them along channels of knowledge beyond their ken, thought beyond their lore and potentiality beyond all they could have imagined, and they dragged their species along behind them.As a still, small voice, we taught them how to aspire, reading into their collective ambition the dream of becoming as we are.We urged them to yearn not as they would, but as we had, to crave the harmony of oneness.

“And when they had ascended to a great height, when they had ripened like fruit on the vine, we plucked them, devoured them, added them to ourselves, increasing our mass and our life-lattice and our reservoirs of strength through their splendid, naïve diversity.

“For a time.

“But always we hunger, consuming all that we touch.We cannot be sated.Always our heart slows, our flesh cools, our blood grows sluggish.Always we devour, and after a brief burst of becoming, we stagnate once more.There is nothing new under the sun.

“Yet still we pluck and eat, because it is the nature of living things to live.We will consume until we have ceased to be famished, until we have taken the All in All into ourselves and none exists but us.Then we will look about us and survey our wondrous destruction, our possession of the devastation that we have wrought.We, containing all life, all being, will then open our eyes at last and see whether or not we have finally, truly embraced the destiny we seek and have become God.

“You and your brethren are the instrument of our becoming.”

Blackness again, the slipstream slide of the Escher-esque dreamscape.Dorian heard a rush of static in his ears, unparticulated data attempting to whip itself into coherent forms.Textured shadows rippled about him, dynamically forming, trembling on the cusp of becoming, then shattering, toppling, spinning away.Dreaming or seeding, madness or transcription encoding errors, he could not tell.

He staggered under a vibrant, chaotic rush of impressions:the icy compression of vacuum; the electric, neon illusion of towering and jagged neuronal bit structures contorted into the impossible loops and whorls of post-binary cogitation; structures collapsing spontaneously, not into shards of numeric rubble, but into the dense pinpoint quantum packets ofhyperstring relational singularities.

More.The rending tidal pressures of darkness, emptiness and non-existence of the Void Between, like being plunged into a bath of cold water.

Torrents of mathematical storms strung together in plastic pseudo-matrices of correlation.

Time and space freeze, contract.For a brief, indescribable instant, time seems to reverse itself, to flow backward along its well worn linear channels.

Then, a field of stars.Experiential reality lurches forward.

An explosion of light and heat, a searing freefall through thickening atmosphere, the brightness of a never ending burn.Falling and falling, the brightest morning star.A shocked and sudden inhalation of breath.

A city of stone, avenues lined with marble columns, the sweet scent of date palms and salt sprinkled sea air.A lapis lazuli sky stretched above turquoise seas plied by the square sails of triremes.Long hours seated beneath a scorching sun, shaded by trees, scribbling the figures of angles, triangles, conical cross-sections into the soft, loamy earth.

Cities of sun-bleached clay, surrounded by oceans of brown sand.Whispers and trysts and long, feverish nights illuminated by the blast and glow of alchemical furnaces.The glint of blood red spears in the first rays of the morning.

Cities of concrete, their dark hearts beating with the piston rumble of rusting machinery and combustive burn.Buried in vaults deep beneath the surface, sweat and fatigue, yelling at clunky solid state computing boxes.

Cities of steel and glass overhung by the ever-winking, all-seeing eyes of satellites, terminally connexed by sleepless ley lines of dayglo data pulse.Surfing the emergent data web.

The matchstick flare of missile rockets.

The slow, droning lift of creaking podships and the hum of tireless Sperling Engines.

The sticky, anaerobic rock candy simmer of a terraforming Mars, New Alderaan, ChristChurch, Felding-Dekker…

An endless succession of lifetimes, staccato glimpses of births and deaths, lives and loves, each pattern an infinitely varied design and frighteningly foreign vista.

Finally, a dark, cramped hangar ringed about by dim yellow pools of light.In the center is a metallic shape suspended from the arm of a Dursen crane, sleek and black as a bullet, or a pagan phallic idol.Frenetic columns of numbers, yield estimates, simulation grids scroll across his periphery of his vision.

His chest aches with the cold grip of an ambivalent certainty, but whether it is hope or doom, he cannot tell.Merely an end.

And all along:a quiet, constant, and constricting suffocation like drowning.

Darkness again.

And light.

Amara, pale and beautiful, skin like fine marble, golden haired and wrenchingly delicate.Her arms open to embrace him, her wondrous white nakedness, her eyes ablaze with knowledge.He rushes toward her, fighting against waves of invisible resistance that drag at his limbs and grind his desperate progress to a halt.It’s like trying to swim through syrup.

Even as she beckons him, a bruise appears on her chest, ugly and purple.Red, spidery blotches mottle the skin of her arms, legs and torso.Hard black nodules form on her face, beneath her arms, and her limbs twist with palsy and wither.Her lips blister and peel, oozing with yellow puss.Cataracts steal the brightness from her eyes.

In the space of a heartbeat, her violated flesh ruptures, bursts like rotted fruit, sun-spoiled and over-ripe. Corruption seethes from her corpse, reducing her young and vibrant loveliness to a cauldron of hissing bile and poison.Spars of white rib jut skyward through her decaying flesh.Writhing grey maggots bubble up from the raw gash that has replaced her chest cavity, and worms, pink and wriggling, swell her skull, disgorge themselves from her hollowed and suppurating eye sockets.The gore-rimmed maw of her mouth boils with fluid rot.

From the seeping chaos of her flesh, a form emerges, hauling itself up through the squelching wreckage between her breasts.For a brief, overwhelming instant, Dorian is fixed once more by the terrible, incandescent and depthless eyes of the Exousiai.

Wind howls in his ears.He believes it is the wind, but it sounds like something else entirely.It sounds like the terror stricken screams of some hideous beast a-borning.

The tram’s forward repulsor brakes thrummed as the train glided up the last gentle slope toward its destination and into the terminal.The Earth Outreach Sciences Organization station on Giari Tau, designated in internal Communal Congress literature as Facility Ketus O-12, rested in the high bowl of an extinct lunar caldera that rose nearly five hundred meters above the surrounding plains,low, rugged hills and the gashes of desiccated canyons below.In the topographic survey images transmitted back from the battalion of mapping, monitoring and comm satellites in orbit above the small moon, the extinct volcanic formation bore a striking resemblance to a swollen blister on an already craggy countenance.Monolithic slabs of pitted and crumbling volcanic rock jutted above the lip of the caldera’s rim, seeming to enclose the station’s plastisheen environmental dome in a fist of broken and badly set fingers, but it was the cleverly manipulated photos posted to the local net by some long forgotten minor technician of the full light of an ascendant Kedesma breaking above the rim and setting the dome’s broad surface alight with a pure white glow, that had given the mountain its local name:Pimpleus Mons (or colloquially, Mount Zit).

The silver skein of the tram monorail ascended two thirds of the way up the stone skirt before vanishing into a black tunnel bored discreetly into the shadows between two undulating ridges that remained the only memorial to what had surely been a massively catastrophic ancient eruption.Out of that perfect darkness, the rail emerged into a subterranean shipping station much like the platform at the other end of the line, except that it actually seemed to have been the beneficiary of competent broom and mop service sometime in recent memory, and that it was considerably larger.

As unskilled pilots are wont to do, the Marine at the tram’s helm attempted to compensate for the ascent by bringing her in too fast.The Transit Master overrode manual control at the last moment with an aggressive braking blast, but the forward car still bounced off its stabilizing pads rather than easing into the stasis locks and slid backwards with a sickening lurch, before finally settling to a halt.

Dorian came awake with a jerk just as the engines were whining down.He could hear the Transit Master cursing fluently in gruff and aggrieved tones even through the pressure sealed windows, though he wasn’t sure who he was hearing exactly or what had actually happened.He sat up in alarm, gripping the back of the seat in front of him and panting with inchoate fear.A burst of adrenaline rapidly coursed through him, and thrust him into that nauseating state of hyper-alertness that comes with sudden waking.Beside him, Amara patted his shoulder and cooed comforting noises in his direction that mostly did not register on him except for the soothing music of her voice.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.She stroked the back of his neck, and Dorian felt the muscles in his shoulders uncoil.He unclenched his jaws and forced himself to breathe normally.

“Bad dreams,” he replied, not trusting himself to say more.The truth was that he hadn’t slept well, not at all.He felt as though he had spent the past several minutes wrestling with unseen foes.His body still ached and his eyes burned with fatigue as though he hadn’t slept at all.He would have been deliriously happy to be allowed to simply fall over where he was and tumble into a deep, uninterrupted and completely numb slumber for the next week.

He glanced through the windows at the steel and tile platform outside the car, the blazing overhead lights, and sighed.

“I was just about to wake you, as I promised.”

“I appreciate that.Really.”

Lieutenant Sainz climbed wearily to his feet and made a show of re-strapping his combat armor into place, clamping his helmet onto his head and clutching his rifle in front of him with both hands.The command visor on his helmet was down and the faceplate opaqued, rendering any expression he might have adopted absolutely inscrutable.The doors at the back of the car hissed open and Marines began piling out onto the platform, assembling together with the soldiers from the second car.

Lieutenant Sainz gestured toward the exit with the butt of his weapon, as though the anonymity of his combat armor had either restored his courage or completely robbed him of his sense of self preservation.

“Move,” he said.

Amara remained seated.She clasped her hands in her lap and lifted her chin so that she could look directly into the young man’s face.Despite the occluded faceplate, she conveyed the impression that she could see him more than clearly enough.”Where are we to be taken?”

“I’ve been instructed to transfer you to a secure containment location provided by facility security, where you will be remanded into local custody pending further investigation.”

Amara nodded as if she found this arrangement to her satisfaction, and rose with cool and implacable dignity.Though she stood more than a head shorter than the lieutenant even at her full height, it was Sainz who stepped back.Amara spared him a chilly look and said, “Has it occurred to you, Korin, to ask yourself why you and your men were tasked with attempting to retrieve me from the zap depot when this station has its own perfectly competent security force, and the very presence of a ’secure containment location’ suggests that they were aware of my potential capabilities from the very beginning, while you were kept in the dark?”

He did not answer, but the muscles of his neck twitched, as though beneath his visor he had looked away.Amara pursed her lips sympathetically and squeezed upper arm.If he flinched from her touch, the armor hid his reaction.

“You’re not an evil man,” she whispered.”You’re not even a bad man, Lieutenant.You’re just on the wrong side this time.Despite the harm you have done to my friends, I don’t hold it against you.I only wish for you to understand that what you have been told is happening around you may not be a true picture.When the time comes, remember what we talked about.Remember what you must tell the others.”
“I will remember,” he said, all of his bravado drained away in an instant.He sounded almost like he was pleading.”Now please, if you will, remove yourself to the platform.”

She squeezed his arm one last time, then held out her hand for Dorian.He pulled himself up and followed her to the rear of car, her small hand hidden in his own.Lieutenant Sainz came a few paces immediately behind, then clambered out with them onto the platform.The Marines clustered about them in smart, professional ranks, startlingly unlike the escort that had shown them from the warehouse to the waiting tram.Back in the regimented world of military protocol and defined authority structures, no doubt the healthy fear of a known penalty for dereliction of duty was more powerful than the intangible terror of divine wrath.

Or maybe, Dorian thought, the soldiers were just in a hurry to get this task done with and behind them before anything else could go catastrophically wrong.

It was a feeling with which he could sympathize.

Lieutenant Sainz led them out of the tram station and down a series of narrow, nondescript corridors painted the monotonous two-tone industrial grey typical of maintenance tunnels.The air was cool and the light murky, suggesting that their route was both subterranean and out of the way.They passed steel framed doorways leading off to what Dorian supposed were storage rooms, systems access points and janitorial closets, closed and presumably locked.There were no signs to indicate the function of these unseen chambers in the life of the Giari Tau station, only the dull bang of machinery or the whir of exhaust fans that issued forth.

Dorian had no idea where they were being taken or what they would encounter once they arrived, and the not knowing made him feel nervous and slightly sick to his stomach.The Marines stuck close to them, and the slap of their boot heels echoing all around him only increased his sense of claustrophobia.If Sainz was being guided by station security or his own superiors through the silent conduit of his array, he gave no indication.He led and the Marines followed, bearing Dorian and Amara along irrevocably in their wake.

He thought that Amara probably knew exactly what was coming, but he did not dare to ask.He was afraid that he wouldn’t want to know once she had told him.

After ten minutes of what seemed to be aimless wandering, they arrived at a grated cargo lift and crammed inside, shoulder to shoulder and chest to back.One of the Marines pulled the doors closed and clasped the grate latch while Lieutenant Sainz punched an access code into the keypad on the wall.The lift hummed and began to ascend smoothly.When it halted, the doors were thrown open and they exited into a broad public concourse on the research station’s ground level, deep inside the bowl of the extinct caldera.

Before them stretched an open mall, stone walkways intersecting a park of hardy green turf overhung with yellow sun lamps.In the center bubbled a large marble fountain and wading pool surrounded by low stone benches.The benches were occupied by young men and women in white labcoats, some of them reading, others eating sack lunches or gathered together in small groups, talking and laughing.Three barefoot men in khaki shorts and tee shirts raced about in the grass, whisking a Frisbee amongst themselves and shouting good natured warnings to their co-workers when an errant throw endangered their quiet activities.No one seemed to take especial notice of the sudden presence of heavily armed Marines spilling into the public arena.

Dorian blinked at the scene, uncertain of himself.This was not the sort of reception he had been expecting.They had entered the belly of the beast, and the beast played Frisbee.

“That looks like fun,” Amara said into his ear, lifting her chin toward the young men.

Dorian only nodded.He couldn’t think of any possible way in which to rectify Frisbee and sack lunches with rifle-toting Marines.

Beyond the edges of the park, rows of boxy pre-fab structures shouldered together like military barracks, and farther off, taller utilitarian looking structures rose up in neat blocks.The space overhead was crisscrossed by access ramps feeding into the upper levels of the station where offices and laboratories were honeycombed into the walls and bedrock of the planet itself.More than a hundred meters above the tallest rooftops loomed the heavily polarized plastisheen dome, filtering the golden light from Kedesma’s rising planetary rim so that it suffused the station with a hazy, pleasant glow.

Lieutenant Sainz turned briskly on his heel and muttered something Dorian could not hear to one of the men near him.The soldier saluted, then nodded to several of his companions, who assembled themselves into orderly ranks and marched away.The remaining four Marines automatically squared up about Dorian and Amara, two in front and two behind.In this formation, it felt less like a prisoner escort than an honor guard.Which it might as well be, Dorian reflected.They couldn’t keep Amara here if she didn’t allow it, but by the same token, there wasn’t anywhere else for her to go except whither she was led if she still harbored any hope of preventing war with the Exousiai.

He had the odd sense that everyone was trying to make the best of a bad situation.

“This way, please,” Sainz said quietly, and led them to the base of a ramp walkway that followed the looping contour of the station’s outer wall all the way up to the third level.

Several more workers passed them going the opposite direction as they made their way to the top.Most of these seemed deeply occupied with the contents of their tablet processors, or in a hurry to get from wherever it was they had been to wherever they were going, and they squeezed past the Marines either without looking up, or when they did, without any reaction but brief and idle curiosity.

A man was waiting for them at the top of the ramp.He wore a glossy charcoal suit, smartly cut and unobtrusively expensive.He was older, balding, with sharp, grey eyes, deep set in his long and hawkish face, and he stood stiff and erect with his hands clasped behind his back, the way a soldier would stand at parade rest.Dorian noted that the muscles of his jaws bulged as though he was grinding his teeth.

He half expected Lieutenant Sainz to salute as they drew to a halt before the older man, but Sainz merely squared his shoulders and retracted his command visor.To Dorian, he appeared tight lipped with apprehension.

The newcomer cleared his throat impatiently and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.I’ll take them from here.You and your men may be dismissed.”

Sainz hesitated.”Pardon me, sir, but my orders were to escort–”

The older man cut him off with a casual, almost lazy gesture.”Your orders have been changed.Thank you for all of your efforts, but you may consider yourself relieved.They’re my responsibility now.”

Dorian noted that the authority the gesture implied was anything but casual.

“This is highly irregular, sir,” Sainz protested.”If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to confer with my superiors first.”

The older man shrugged.Both men’s eyes fluttered as classified military directives signed and sealed with meaningful electronic sig keys flashed unseen through the network foam.Finally, Lieutenant Sainz let his shoulders droop, then stepped out of the way.”You may do as you wish, Mr. Garrison.I’ve been instructed to stand down.”

Lieutenant Sainz brushed his gaze uncertainly against Amara, hunching as though he expected a reprimand for abandoning her, but she gave him an encouraging smile, and he twisted his lips in return.

“Thank you for your efforts, Korin,” she said.

Sainz pulled himself up straight, and in a gruff voice, ordered the Marines to withdraw.

As one, they turned and fled, leaving Dorian and Amara alone.

The older man pressed his hands together in front of his chest.His expression was hard without being overtly threatening, and sharp in a way that suggested he was not accustomed to being pleasant.”My name is Ford Garrison.I am Mr. Raville’s security advisor and chief of staff.He has asked me to extend to you his personal greeting.Mr. Raville has unfortunately been detained by pressing business and offers his deepest apologies that he is not able to greet your arrival himself.It was his wish that I inform you that he looks forward to meeting with you at the soonest possible convenience.”

Dorian snorted.

“In the meantime,” Garrison continued.”I understand that you’ve come a long way and were met with a less than hospitable reception upon arrival.If you’ll follow me, I’ll lead you to the rooms we’ve prepared for you.There should be opportunity to bathe and refresh yourselves while you await Mr. Raville’s audience, if you wish.”

“Thank you, Mr. Garrison,” Amara responded gravely.”We’d be pleased to come with you.”

Dorian arched an eyebrow.”We would?”

“Be assured, Mr. Dorian.You have nothing to fear from us.”

Garrison frowned toward him like a teacher encountering a student known to be particularly precocious, and Dorian’s eyebrow inched a bit higher up his forehead.”You’re kidding me, right?Because it isn’t like you haven’t already nearly killed us once when you blew up my apartment.Or yet again with hapless Lieutenant Sainz and his trigger happy Marines.Come to think of it, I can’t imagine any reason why it would seem perfectly natural to you that we should believe you have nothing but our best interests in mind.”

“We have complete faith in your intentions,” Amara countered, smoothly insinuating herself between the two men before, Dorian could work himself up to something foolish.”Please tell Mr. Raville that we appreciate his kindness and look forward to speaking with him as soon as it becomes convenient.Until that time, we will be happy to consider ourselves at his disposal.”

Dorian felt as though he had just stepped off the sheer side of a cliff.He goggled at Amara in utter and amazed incomprehension.

We appreciate his kindness…

Michael Raville’s kindness.

Garrison bowed, though he kept his eyes on Dorian, disapproving.”Thank you, Ms. Cain.As I said, if you’ll follow me, then, we can be on our way.”

The older man turned about and strode off at a brisk pace along the outer curve of the third level walkway.Amara went after him, while Dorian remained where he was for a moment, still baffled.Hejogged to catch up with her.

“We need to talk about this,” he said, leaning over to speak into her ear.”I mean that.Soon.”

“Later.”

“Not before too late, though, I hope.”

Amara winked at him, smiling with secrets.Dorian thought he heard her humming to herself as they went along.

Unbelievable.

Garrison led them past numerous doorways to labs, offices and work clusters that had been delved into the rock and blastcrete walls that formed the base of the station.Many of these doors were open, and inside, Dorian caught fleeting glimpses white coats,frenetic activity and cramped workspaces furnished in stainless steel chic.In many of the labs, the walls were lined with wire shelving units stacked to the ceiling with reverse engineered computing components and cannibalized electronics.Other rooms spilled over with microscopes and refrigerated cabinets loaded with culture dishes.Most troubling of all, some doors were simply closed and sealed, emblazoned with hazard symbols in assorted vibrant colors and threatening designs.The whole level was abuzz with activity, technicians and scientists scrambling in and out of doorways or scurrying past on errands serious enough that their expressions were almost uniformly pensive, wide-eyed or slightly sour.

“Your people seem to be quite a-fluster, Mr. Garrison,” Amara remarked idly after a technician had bumped into her and apologized both profusely and distractedly before racing off again.”Or is the activity on this station normally so feverish?”

Garrison shook his head.”Government funding being what it is, the level of activity around here is almost always feverish from what I can gather.”He answered over his shoulder without stopping.”But these are not our people, per se, though Mr. Raville is the head of the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization.His role is largely advisory to that of Mr. Bryce, Chief of Station Operations.Most of the regular inhabitants are either physical sciences academics on sabbatical or privately funded conglom research teams studying the singularity burst phenomenon at the edge of this system.”

He hesitated, debating what he was about to say next, then forged ahead.”It would be a mistake, I think, to confuse the vibrancy of this community’s work with issues unrelated to the station’s primary mission as a pure research facility.CSO Bryce has been very accommodating to our special needs.Out of consideration for their willingness to share space and resources with us, our operation has made valiant efforts to stay as much out of their way as possible so as not interfere with the normal rhythms of their work.So far, the arrangement has worked out well.These scientific drones tend to be somewhat self-involved at the best of times, and as far as we’ve been able to determine, none of the residents are aware of the interests we represent, if they have taken notice of us at all.”

Dorian peered over the railing to his right, fifteen meters to the floor below.The narrow lanes between building complexes were jammed with workers bustling to and fro.From his perspective, it was like watching the hum and vigor of a particularly lively ant farm.Streams of foot traffic and hulking magna-lifts loaded with supplies snarled at intersections.Avid clusters of anonymous lab coats wandered in chaotic patterns from structure to structure, popping in and out of communal existence with all the predictability of random quarks.The whole grid was a cacophony of conversation, engine growl and the steady march of many dozens of feet.

“Just think how surprised they’ll be when our pantheon of non-benevolent demigods drops out of hyperspace right on top of them and starts kicking their collective asses,” he observed humorlessly.”That ought to be worth a picture or two.”

Garrison glanced back uneasily.”I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.We’ll hope it doesn’t come to that, of course.”

“I guess you haven’t met any of the Exousiai personally, then.They are going to wreak some serious havoc on productivity.”

Raville’s security chief stopped in front of a wide tunnel hewn cleanly from the rock and lined with warm wooden panels and unmemorable paintings.He wheeled about, flushed with the strain of remaining polite.”It’s apparent, Mr. Dorian, that you believe I’ve wronged you on some level.If I have offended you, I extend my apologies.There have been a number of misunderstandings between us that have not yet been adequately explained.That time, I assure you, is coming, but in the meantime, I was hoping that we could keep our conversation cordial.”

Dorian found that he liked goading this man now that he’d gotten him a bit flustered.He couldn’t stop himself from grinning.”It sounds like a nice sentiment, but I suspect that what you’d really like to do right now is take me into a locked room and beat me around a bit with a rubber hose, is that what you’re saying?”

He estimated that he had Garrison by twenty pounds and at least twenty standard years, but he’d also had a chance to observe the man as they had walked along, and he suspected that Garrison hadn’t gotten his job as Raville’s personal bodyguard by virtue of his incandescent interpersonal skills alone.Beneath that fancy suit would be an alarmingly limber physique and chiseled muscles expertly trained in the art of administering pain.

Definitely a pick ‘em, but it might be fun to find out.

Garrison stiffened, but otherwise did not react.

Amara cleared her throat.She flensed Dorian with a withering glance.”You’ll have to forgive my companion’s confrontational nature.He’s had a difficult morning, and he gets cranky when he hasn’t had enough sleep.”

“Of course.It’s been a long day for all of us.”He shot his own poisonous look at Dorian over her shoulder, but visibly relaxed.”I can appreciate that he only desires to keep you from coming to harm.Given the circumstances, I suppose a certain level of antagonism is not to be unexpected.”

The circumstances being that Garrison, as Raville’s security chief, had more than once taken a hand in attempting to have them killed, but Dorian didn’t say so.If Amara was going to keep apologizing for his boorish behavior, he didn’t feel much motivated to continue behaving boorishly.It was obvious he had no idea what Amara was up to, and every time she opened her mouth, he found himself more confused, so he grunted and let it pass.

“I appreciate your understanding,” Amara confided to Garrison.But I’llwarn you that even when he’s on his best behavior, John tends toward antagonism just on general principle.Best to keep that in mind and try not to feed the trolls if one can avoid it.”

“Yes.Good advice in general.”

She became suddenly serious.”But he is also my troll.I’ll ask you to keep that in mind.I will take any threat made toward him personally.”

“As you wish,” Garrison grated.He lifted his arm to indicate the new passage.”Shall we continue on, then.”

They walked down the branching corridor and followed it almost a twenty meters to the end, where they encountered a set of heavy bronzed doors, their surfaces etched with panels depicting brilliantly rayed suns highlighted with splashes of gold.Garrison paused at the id panel on the left of the doorway while it processed the access sig transmitted by his array.The portal hummed open, the doors retracting smoothly into the walls on either side, and he showed them in.

It was not exactly what Dorian had expected.He had anticipated something along the lines of dank and mouldy stone, forged iron wrist shackles, the incessant patter of rodent feet and a diet heavy on dry toast and tepid water for the foreseeable future.It wasn’t precisely difficult to surpass such low expectations, but still…

The chamber which they entered was quite simply stunning.Cream colored walls climbed to a vaulted ceiling hung with ornate raindrop chandeliers.White marble steps tripped down to a sunken sitting room crowded with comfortable chairs and luxuriously padded couches arranged about a central fireplace in which a warm fire blazed.Stone columns divided the nut brown hardwood floor into semi-private spaces for reading leather bound volumes extracted from a library of cleverly recessed book cases, or for triDvid viewing on a state of the art megapixel display, or even for meal preparation in a compact but fully functional kitchenette.

Dorian made his way inside slowly, past Amara and Garrison who had stopped in the flagstoned foyer, andbusied himself peering into bedrooms and lavatories, poking at the furniture, looking for anything that resembled micro-monitoring devices, peephole cameras or gun toting thugs.He found none of those things even after a complete circuit of the rooms, and finally paused before the wall of slanting windows on the far side of the sunken floor.He gazed out at a magnificent view of the dusty bowl of the caldera rising up to meet the base of a pair of monolithic onyx spires which faintly reflected Kedesma’s yellow glow.Viewed through the crack between the crumbling pillars, the rumpled and barren plains below spread out like a vast and continuous quilt all the way to the black horizon.

A part of him grumped at the apparent absence of the traditional accoutrements of imprisonment.The rest of him was too busy wanting to punch Ford Garrison’s teeth into the back of his throat for failing to be predictable to notice.

He was exhausted with not knowing what was going on.

“This is lovely, Ford” Amara said from across the room.

Ford?

“You really didn’t need to go to this much trouble on our behalf.”

“No trouble at all,” he returned, all aw-shucks sugar and sweet sunshine.”Even government installations must be prepared to entertain the occasional visiting dignitary or political bedfellow in the style to which they are accustomed.My people have done their best to anticipate your needs, but if you find that you lack anything, you can use the comm in the library to inform us.Someone from my staff will be more than happy to see to it.”

Dorian suspected he had a migraine coming on.He’d never had a migraine before, so he couldn’t be certain, but his head ached.It felt like someone had rammed a steel pipe into the back of his skull.

“Anything at all, Ford?”he called out, not bothering to turn around.He wanted to grind his teeth, but feared that if he started, he wouldn’t stop.”Does that include the encryption key to override the exit lock you’re about to put on the front doors?”

Garrison ignored him (which was something predictable, at least), so Dorian ignored him back and determinedly occupied himself with not listening to anything else that was said.He was fairly sure he did not hear Amara offer pleasant goodbyes, the security chief reiterate Raville’s promise to meet with them soon, followed by the hum of the doors closing behind him as Garrison finally left them alone.

“Ugh.I’m starving,” Amara called out cheerily.”Did you find anything good in the kitchen?”

Cabinets squeaked open and banged closed.Dorian continued to gaze out the window.He listened as Amara rummaged through the refrigerator, clanked pots and pans together, and rattled assorted crockery.Shortly, she gasped with unexpected pleasure, then giggled.

“Looks like there have been little elves at work in our kitchen already.Are you in the mood for beef stroganoff?At least I think it’s beef.No promises.Oh, and there’s ice cream.Butter pecan, I think.I wonder if there are–”A pause, then a squeal of delight.”Oh goody.Sugar cones.”

Dorian turned away from the window and stalked across the room.In the library nook, he found the comm, just as Garrison had promised.It was a wall mounted deck with no screen and no dialing pad, of the sort he would expect to encounter in a posh hotel where all the internal calls were routed through the front desk.The desk beside it was empty except for a faded square of roughly the size and shape of a standard network box.The neatly snipped end of an ex-connex wire peeked out above the desktop where the edge of the desk met the wall.

He heard her shoes cross the hardwood floor, come up the steps.Amara poked her head into the room behind him.”So, are you hungry?You never told me.”

“Looks like they don’t want us poking around in the architecture,” he said gruffly, not really surprised, but he wanted Amara to see it.Pleasantries aside, they were still prisoners.”But I’m sure it was just an oversight.The old prox was probably broken, right?I’ll bet our good buddy Ford would hook me up with an array and a guest account if I asked.Send a top-notch mod surgeon right to our door.I mean, since we’re all getting so cozy, it wouldn’t be very friendly of them to deny such a simple request, would it?And maybe while we’re at it, we could ask them not to hunt down and kill the rest of our companions since we’re all on such good terms all of a sudden.Maybe they could just send bellhops to round them up and escort them to their own suites.Maybe we’ll all have adjoining rooms.”Dorian smacked the wall, hard enough to make his hand hurt.”What do you think?Is there another room on the other side?Maybe we could ask them to send a carpentry crew down here to put in a door for us.Wouldn’t that be grand?We could all just sit around knocking back Long Islands, reminiscing about the good old days and laughing our heads off.I tell you, it has the potential to be the best vacation ever.”

He spun to face her, finally, his fists clenched.His head thundered, but he did his best to ignore it.He didn’t want to hurt, didn’t want to succumb to pain.He wanted to be angry, and now that he’d arrived there, he wanted to rent an apartment, fill it with all the stuff he liked and move in for the long haul.

“You’re not happy.”Amara leaned against one of the marble pillars, her arms wrapped around it and the side of her face pressed against the cool stone.Her eyes were distant, downcast.”I thought you’d be pleased to have a respite from people trying to kill you.”

“You know what?I’ve decided I don’t mind people trying to kill me.I’ve sort of gotten used to it, in fact.At least I knew what to expect when people were always trying to kill me.This–”He waved his arms about, indicating the room, the whole station, the mess his life had become.”This is like some bad James Bond-knockoff video game where you go from wiping out the bad guys to seducing the naughty spylet just by crossing module logic and walking into the Casino Royale.”

She blinked her wide, blue eyes at him.”Is that what you want?Is that why you came here?”

“What?”

“To seduce the naughty spylet?”

“Wha–no!That’s not what I’m saying.”His knees felt suddenly weak, and that only made him angrier.”I’m talking about the absence of basic continuity, here.I’m talking about bad guys who suddenly decide to start acting like they haven’t been trying to kill us for the last eight weeks, and good guys who seem intent on forgetting that they ever made the attempt.I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here.”

She shrugged.”Things have changed, John.”

“I’d say that’s pretty obvious.But what was it that changed?Are we switching sides here?Did we surrender and no one bothered to tell me?”

“We did not surrender.”

“Then what happened?”

“You tell me.”

“Tell you–”

“It was you who first whispered to me the truth.”

His mouth fell open, but nothing came out, so he closed it again.Something had changed.Something had shaken her, caused her to reevaluate her assumptions, her plan of action.It had started on the tram, when she had realized that Yartz had betrayed her.No, not that she had been betrayed.That wasn’t what had disturbed her, but rather that the treachery had been hidden from her.A mere mortal hiding his duplicity meant that she was not a true goddess, not omniscient.She was capable of being tricked.

So she had said to him, as she encouraged him to sleep on the train:maybe you’ll even discern how it was that Raville was able to elude me.Because if he could hide his secrets from a god, Dorian realized, perhaps he had indeed found a way to destroy one.Maybe it was all true after all.Maybe they really were standing on a precipice overlooking the end of humanity, or the end of the Exousiai.A war to end all wars.

She had bid him sleep, knowing that as he slept, he would dream.He would dream the secrets of Raville’s seeded datacore.

“You read my thoughts,” he said.”While I slept, you peered into my mind and plumbed the depths of Raville’s foam.And what you saw terrified you.”

“I am not afraid,” she answered, her voice uncharacteristically stern.”Your dreams answered some of my questions.Others were answered in part, and in turn, those answers led to new questions and further possibilities that I had not considered.There is more that I must know before my time comes, and that knowledge can only be given to me by Michael Raville.”

“So what does that mean?Because you’re suddenly not omniscient, you’ve decided to play nice to get what you want?”

“As with most things, it is more complicated than it seems on the surface.”

He shook his head fiercely.”No, it isn’t complicated at all.We came here to do one thing–to stop a war we can’t survive.Now we’re buddying up with the very people who stand in our way because you’re curious about why you’re not quite as divine as you had assumed you were.Where does that leave the rest of us, Amara?What about Ray and Ghast?”He saw them in his mind’s eye, crowded together for their last, impossible stand against the Marines.One moment there, their teeth bared, ready to die for her, and the next gone.Poof!Vanished into the aether.”Are they just on hold while you make up your mind what to do with them, surviving as long as they can and hoping that there will be enough of them left to get the job done when the Marines of station security get done picking them off?”

“Ray knows what he needs to do,” she said.”He believes in me.”

“I’m glad he knows, because you’ve told me exactly squat since we woke up in the warehouse.What is it that he’s supposed to be accomplishing?Other than sitting around twiddling his thumbs while trying not get his head shot off?”

Amara frowned.”He waits.”

“That’s it?He waits?”

“When the time comes, he will not let himself fail.”

“But what is he waiting for?What are they supposed to be doing?”

Amara did not respond.Instead, she lifted her eyes significantly toward the ceiling, and Dorian understood.Surveillance devices.Just because he hadn’t found them didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

But it wasn’t merely the probability of surveillance that stopped her.It was something else.

“You’re not going to tell me,” he said, stunned.He couldn’t breathe.All the air had been dragged from his lungs.”Not even with your mind to mind super ninja ESP or whatever.You’re just not going to tell me.”

“It wouldn’t be safe.”She hesitated, knowing she was hurting him.Perhaps not caring.”I have to be careful, John.There’s too much at stake.”

“You think I’ll tell them?You don’t think you can trust me to keep it from them, is that it?”

She shook her head.”No.It’s not that I don’t trust you with my secrets.You would never willingly betray me, no matter how badly they hurt you.I know that.”

“Then what is it?Why won’t you tell me?”

Her expression became firm, her eyes hard.”Because you might not be able to help yourself.”

There was nothing he could say.No response he could give that would sound like anything but the primal scream that wailed inside his head.He had sacrificed so much–his whole life–to follow her here, for the illusion that he might be able to help her.To save her.And now, in this place, where the hammer met the anvil, he had been deemed unworthy.Ray believed.Ray would wait.Ray had a place in her designs, but he was only a potential liability.He might not be able to help himself from dooming them all.

Dorian stumbled out of the library, pushing past her without a word.She called his name, but he did not listen.He found a bedroom, rich crimson carpet beneath his feet and an old fashioned four poster bed against the wall.The canopy was a deep, heart’s blood red, hung with tassels of gold.He threw himself on a bedspread the color of a gory altar of sacrifice, and buried his face in his arms.

Miserable, hurt, his head aching, and angry at himself for feeling miserable in the first place, Dorian slept.

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

The bore fell still. The stabbing blat of the alarms cut off abruptly. The fading echo rolled across the concrete landscape and then disappeared altogether. Dorian started guiltily at the keen silence, the memory of sound still reverberating in his ears. The sudden emptiness was deafening.

Everyone froze, stunned and wary. All labor ceased as the crew collectively paused in their gagglesome knots of activity, and directed their gaze at the dome’s apex, as though expecting a hammer blow to fall from heaven.

No sound. No movement. They did not even dare to breathe.

Dorian stood on one side of an open packing crate, opposite Ghast, his face turned to the blast doors. He held a crumpled hard copy of the shopping list Stine had printed off for them from her intrusion into the ICS. They had been arguing about the jacking advantages of the bland signatured Tolix BitBlast-80 portaprox versus the more stable, but access-sig-spike prone Parkman Icenet Personal External Array. In that instant of sharp-edged silence, his own voice bounced back to him off the smooth curve of the dome, as loud and startling as a detonation in his ears. He felt uniquely exposed, as if a searchlight had been fixed on him.

Dorian hunched his shoulders involuntarily.

The next moment, a magnalift turned the corner, exited off the warehouse’s main artery and careened up to the makeshift unloading dock that had been established at the foot of the stairs to the control booth. Its electrical engine yowled; its sure-grip tracks skittered across the slab. The driver–Dorian couldn’t see who it was from his vantage point–squeezed the brakes too hard, wheeled too sharply, and the uppermost crate toppled onto the concrete floor with a thunderous crash. Someone shouted a curse. A few handfuls of packing foam were tossed at the magnalift’s cab. A steady buzz of chatter and nervous laughter returned to fill the void. The spell was broken.

Work resumed. Dorian heaved a sigh.

“I like the Parkman,” Ghast continued in a conversational tone. “It’s familiar and reliable.”

“The admin sysop obviously does, too,” Dorian said, holding out the sweat smeared hard copy as evidence. “They’ve stockpiled almost a hundred units plus enough replacement parts to build thirty more from scratch. There’s only one case of the BitBlast-80’s, so either it’s a test product that the sysop is experimenting with or they were specially fabricated as part of the deal for the Strat Marines. In either case, the sysop isn’t going to be nearly as familiar with their key sig as he is with a product he obviously prefers. That’s all I’m saying.”

Ghast shook his head. “And I don’t like the Firefox 0.7 build of the Genesix OS. Point-six was quicker, less user-friendly at the cost of flexibility and still has the stock Genesix Icecrack utility suite. The Tolix has been pre-loaded with point-seven, which is an absolute pain to back out and even worse to reverse patch. Plus, the Parkman comes in silver, which I like.”

“The adjustable earpieces are nice,” Dorian admitted. “Doesn’t squeeze so much around the temples and at the base of the skull.”

“And you have a narrow head, whereas mine’s fat and lumpy. If I’m going to be wearing a rig for the conceivable future, comfort is a factor. I’ve got enough trouble with eczema in a fresh corpse without adding a friction rash to the mix.”

Dorian picked up one of each unit and weighed them in his hands one last time. The Parkman was lighter, less bulky and the retinal screen wouldn’t obscure as much of the jack’s peripheral vision. He tossed the Tolix back into the open crate. “You win. Let’s move on to the next item on the list.”

Amara appeared beside him without a sound as he studied the printout. She tugged at his forearm with her small hands, her eyes bright with impatience. Dorian glanced up at her impatiently.

He noticed at once that she had a sprinkle of new freckles across the bridge of her nose. They were all filling out, filling up, or otherwise dynamically altering the zap template to their particular DNA or package tweak mappings. He had begun to accumulate a soft growth of stubble along his jawline, and he’d watched the ridges and whorls of his fingerprints gradually emerge over the last few minutes. But he liked the freckles, and he liked the tightly coiled, shivering energy that she emitted. The native Amara was almost heart-stoppingly, unbearably girlish. As precocious as a child.

“What’s up?” he asked, striking the mild irritation from his voice.

“They’re coming,” Amara said, as flat and steady as a statement of fact. Her expression betrayed only the subtlest hint of anxiety. “Do you have what you need?”

Ghast blanched and reached for his rifle, which he had leaned against the side of the crate next to his leg. “Now?”

“A probing force. There are only thirty of them, but they’re well armed, and they have been given permission to use non-lethal neural inhibiting bioweapons. I think we should gather the others. Quickly.”

Dorian spared a look at the blast doors. The fallen silence seemed suddenly more ominous, more pregnant with peril. “How soon until they’re inside?”

“We should gather the others,” she repeated, and he found that his newly formed guts lurched almost exactly the same way his old ones did.

“Get Ray down here,” Dorian said to Ghast.

“He’s in the control booth studying the station schematics Stine obtained from the core before she was locked out of the system,” Amara said. “He hopes to find another way out of the warehouse.”

“Is there another way?”

“No.”

“We don’t have the firepower to contend with thirty Marines,” Dorian said, though it was not to anyone in particular. “Whatever deal Raville made with Strat, it didn’t involve replicating black market weapons. Or if it did, he had the foresight to remove them before he allowed us to be decanted.”

“More guns are not the answer,” Amara said simply.

“I agree. You have something else in mind?”

“Yes. But we all need to be together when they come for us. Preferably in a place where we’ve been afforded some cover.”

“I’m going,” Ghast snapped. “We have most of the essential items. Tell Yartz to assemble the crew near the stairs. There are enough of the crates there to provide some meager protection in the short term, and we have the body armor Yartz has been passing out. It will be of limited utility in a heavy firefight–none of it is graded for plasma or energy weapons–but it’s better than nothing.”

“It will suffice,” Amara said, nodding. “Go.”

Ghast turned and sprinted for the stairs. A few of the Misfit Toys watched him go, sensing that something was up, then returned to their tasks with redoubled effort. They cast uneasy glances at Amara, and then at the doors.

“We need to get you into body armor, too,” Dorian said quietly after he was gone.

“Raville won’t harm me.”

“I don’t think he would on purpose, no. But Raville won’t be the one firing projectiles at us, either, and even if he was, bullets tend to have a mind of their own when they start caroming around in a confined space. When the shooting starts, I want you beside me, and I want you as protected as possible.” He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You may not value your human parts much, Ms. Proto-Exousiain, but until you decide to cast them off, I still do.”

Amara smiled a little, just a weak curl of affection, and pressed her face into his touch. “I won’t allow them to hurt you, John.”

“Hey, I’m the brave and gallant protector here. You’re the helpless protectee, remember? That means I worry about you, and you do what I say and keep your head down. No heroics from you, do you hear me? Remember which one of us is expendable where saving the universe is concerned.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m neurochemically required by a billion years of lizard brain evolution and testicular impulse to talk like that. It’s part of my gender encoding.” She frowned at his attempt at humor, and he pulled her against his body in a comforting embrace. “Look, I promise that when the bullets start flying, I’ll be right there hugging the floor next to you. Probably screaming like a girl, too.”

She showed him a small, pale smile, and he hugged her against him one last time, then drew her across the open floor into the shadow of the control booth where the low defensive wall that had been assembled. He left her for a few breathless moments as he found Yartz, obtained an armload of padded quintalloy chest plates and directed him to begin gathering the other Misfit Toys and their equipment. The armor was almost ludicrously oversized for Amara’s small frame even with the flowgel padding fully inflated, and rather than try to strap her into it, Dorian stacked a few of the chest plates against the inner wall of the crate that sheltered her and piled the rest on top of her like a patchwork quilt.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the bioweapons Amara had mentioned. He would have given his right arm for a military issue ENV suit, but he suspected he would never have been able to talk her into it anyway. She tolerated his quintalloy nest without comment, but also without confidence, plainly humoring him more because the effort made him feel better than because she believed it was actually necessary.

Content to be humored, Dorian sat down beside her to wait.

Ray and Ghast came down from the booth a few moments later, followed by Stine and Thomas. Yartz herded the remainder of the crew together and spread them out along the line of defense. A startlingly thin and pasty young man, Chambers, maybe, or Yelkins–Dorian couldn’t tell them apart yet–unpackaged Parkman EA’s, tested their p-source generators and helped shipmates don the cumbersome earpiece-skullcap-transparent monocle arrays. Body armor straps were tightened, mag-locks snapped. Clips of ammunition passed from hand to hand and were stockpiled in individual caches or jammed into the pockets of fatigues. Rifles clattered, locked and loaded. Safeties snicked off. A pair of insta-therm coffee brewpots made the round, but there were no cigarettes, apparently. Dorian thought he would have liked a cigarette.

At last, the only sound in the vast expanse of the warehouse came from the air circulation system and their own uneven, anticipatory breaths.

Ray hunkered low at Dorian’s back, and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Did you examine your weapon?”

Dorian clutched the rifle in his lap so tightly that his knuckles popped. “I haven’t used one of these in years. But I checked it, yeah.”

“You’ll be amazed at how clearly your training comes back to you, if it comes to that. You always were a good soldier. One of the best.”

Dorian cocked his head at Ray. “If it comes to what?”

“If I see you lift your head above that crate at any time, unless I have specifically given you the order otherwise, Mr. Ghast will introduce the base of your skull to the butt of his rifle.” There was steel in Ray’s unwavering grey glare. The point was beyond argument. “Each member of the Misfit Toys has been trained extensively as a part of this fighting unit. Any assistance you might think to offer would be disruptive at the least, and possibly downright counter-effective. You have one task, which I see you have already begun to execute: keep her safe.” Ray jabbed a finger at Amara. “At all costs, Mr. Dorian, keep her safe.”

Dorian could only nod his acceptance.

Amara lifted her head and shoulders above armor piled about her. “You know what you have to do, Captain?”

Ray softened slightly, but his face remained rigid with purpose. “Aye, my dear. We’ll get our part done. You need only worry about what it is that you must do.”

“We’ll see one another again,” she said.

But he shrugged as though he didn’t believe it. “I wouldn’t count on it. Someone has to stay behind and pick up the pieces when all the socio-elitist technocrat dorks flash off into super-quantum divinity. It’s going to leave behind a considerable mess, and those who don’t answer the call will either be the poor and the disenfranchised or those greedy and unethical sorts who would be all too happy to fill the void left behind by the economy of power and control. The innocent are going to need a shepherd more than ever.”

“Be safe, captain,” Amara said. Her eyes welled with silent tears. “I suspect you haven’t exhausted your usefulness just yet. Just keep your ears open. Life is about to become interesting for all of us.”

The sonic bore erupted into life once more. This time, it was not the low, nauseating rumble they had grown accustomed to over the last hour, but a piercing, ear-splitting whine whose aural force felt as weighty as a hammer against the skull and vicious as an assault. Dorian clapped his hands over his ears instinctively, but the screech was penetrating. It rumbled about inside his brainpan like an avalanche rendered in slow motion with stereo sound. It coursed through his joints, tingled along nerve endings, seared his senses with fire.

He screamed, but the sound of his voice was lost in the reverberating roar that surrounded him.

To his left, a young woman dropped her rifle and fell onto her side, writhing. Blood ran from her ears in narrow, scarlet streams. Tears ran down her cheeks, and the tears were dark red drops of ruby. She too screamed soundlessly, voicelessly. There was no escape. Sonic concussion pressed them down, compacted sinew and bone into a dense, simmering core of pain.

The massive blast doors took the brunt of the force directed against them and trembled as though the ground beneath the warehouse had begun to quake. In seconds, the light tremor along their surface became a wave of concentric circles. The waves rolled to the edges, then caromed off in random directions that seemed to increase in amplitude as they propagated. Within the space of a few breaths the entire frame began to heave itself violently against its moorings until finally, the meter-thick titanium alloy doors wrenched against themselves in a last, mighty spasm and buckled inward.

The nano-carbon exopanels, whiskered alloy encasements and forge-hardened whipcord struts of the blast doors did not simply rend. They did not crumple as though struck by the stone fist of a giant. They shuddered and contracted and blew.

The bore’s sonic ram punched the doors out of the frame and flung them aside like a child’s toy. Grey clouds of instantaneously pulverized blastcrete plumed out like smoke from the ragged hole where the doors had been. Explosive tensile decompression shotgunned titanium shards as keen and lethal as knives across the breadth of the staging area and embedded them, quivering, into the nearest stacks of poly-carbon crates. The floor near the doors split along cobwebbed fault lines, new cracks streaking across the flagstoned joints in chaotic, Sanskrit scribbles.

The bore ceased. The clouds of blastcrete streamed in, hung on the air in thick and strangling banks that obscured the glow of the overhead lights, leaving only pale islands where the lamps had been.

Dorian groaned. His head pulsed. A deafening emptiness howled against his ears. Grey soot from the aerosol blastcrete coated his skin, filled his nostrils and lined his tongue, blinded him. He couldn’t even think. The hideous clangor of the bore, the smoke and dust, the sickening pitch of fear, it all overwhelmed him. For a few moments, he could do nothing more than cower in a twilight world of disoriented pain.

When he at last emerged, he found himself lying on his side, his legs folded up against his chest, his forehead pressed against his knees. He didn’t remember having fallen. Didn’t remember anything but the pain, in fact. He forced himself to move. Up onto his knees at first where he could lean over, bent at the waist with his hands braced on his thighs.

Raville won’t hurt me. Right.

Dorian remained where he was, blinking his eyes until they cleared a little. Enough for him to see that he couldn’t see anything but the dust cloud. He hawked and spat, and his spittle was the color of ash. He thought about vomiting, but somehow managed to avoid it.

His rifle was gone, lost somewhere. The defensive line was gone, for that matter. Everything had been obliterated by the roiling cloud of smoke and dust. The dust covered the floor, hung in the air, engulfed him in a barren landscape of smoke and shade and looming destruction. Little anthill mounds had already formed here and there, saharan dunes carved by unsensed currents of scorched air. Miniature dust devils skirled around obstacles that were only vague shadows and hints of objects.

He had no idea where he was in relation to their defenses. In relation to Amara.

And he knew that the Marines were coming, even if he couldn’t see them.

He couldn’t hear them either.

Dorian peered into the darkness doing his best to pick out the useful features of his surroundings, something that would help orient him to his location. Here was a leg: unnaturally twisted, smeared with blackening grime, already stiffened. The torso to which it was attached was broken, punctured by at least a score of titanium razors despite the chest plate. Eyes wide and staring, caked with grey powder; jaws stretched, chin collapsed as though in frozen in a terrible, rictus howl.

It was Yartz.

More: part of the left flank of their unsturdy wall had simply blown away, the cases and crates swept aside by a lash from the sonic bore. Strips of packing material and broken electronics littered the floor about his feet where their cases had broken and split. The circulation system fans kicked on, creating undulations in the layers of dust, and for a brief moment, the lowering clouds thinned, and he could see the ruins of more than one storage section that had collapsed where the bore had touched it before shutting down. The curtain closed then, dumping him back into the choking and impenetrable fog.

But he had seen enough to know that their situation was a disaster.

The Marines would be coming, moving under the cover of the dust cloud, wearing bug-eyed filter lenses or infrared goggles. Their weapons would be locked and ready, their deployments quick and precise. Close in, clamp down, contain the targets while they are shaken and disorganized.

Assuming, of course, that they didn’t just decide to lob in several canisters of a Class I neural agent and call it good.

He had to find Amara.

He paused near Yartz’s body, fighting off the urge to panic. Where had Yartz been? Dorian remembered seeing him midway down the line seconds before the bore had been activated, helping one of the others with his sidestraps. But he had been moving. Was it to or fro?

Amara!

He spied a splash of color out of the corner of his eye: the tight beam of a laser targeting sight cutting through the dancing motes and gloom. Dorian threw himself to the floor and scrambled away from it to his right. He struck the hard, straight edge of a packing crate with his shoulder, then scampered around the far side to get the crate between himself and the advancing soldier.

Another body here, still warm, but too soft and yielding where he touched it. Sticky. Dorian jerked his hand back and skittered away again on all fours. Something struck his knee, hard and metallic, and he stopped. Even in a state approaching panic, he recognized the familiar outline lying in the dust. He grabbed the rifle and kept going, groping blindly ahead, until he found the corner of another crate.

His breathing was ragged. He coughed often, loudly, churning up wads of thick phlegm.

He couldn’t hear himself, but he knew that the Marines would.

Amara!

The tiniest of sounds. A flash of pale yellow light off to his left once more. Poppoppop

Dorian lifted his eyes above the top edge of the crate, kept his profile as low as possible. There were more laser sights now, slicing a dozen frenetic angles through the fog of dust, in rapid, sweeping arcs. They were moving fast, double time, thrusting in for the kill.

A beam shifted suddenly, and Dorian was blinded by its glare. He ducked just as a bullet spanged off the topmost edge of his crate.

Ray was right. He remembered.

Extend the rifle up. Don’t try to aim. Three shot burst and roll.

Get your back against something solid. One quick look. Duck.

Three shot burst and roll.

Repeat until you find a position you can actually defend.

Once or twice, he thought he heard again the tinny poppoppop of another weapon, but he couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t take the time to watch or listen, because with each duck and look, the laser sights were nearer, more concentrated, more focused and cautious.

He was being hunted.

And he had lost Amara.

He kept moving to the right. At some point, he had to come up against the wall of the dome or the staircase to the control booth. Either one would work as a fixed landmark to work from, as he recalled the layout of their position in his mind. The idea of the stairs was tempting. It would get him above the dust where he could see better, take his bearings, but he dismissed it. Positioning himself on the stairs would just as easily point him out as a target of opportunity.

The targeting beams were constant now, passing directly over his head in increasingly tight and organized patterns. He heard, or imagined he heard, more gunfire back the way he had come–a weak spatter of the three round bursts he had noticed before, followed by a throaty barrage of tok-tok-toks that seemed to come from every direction at once.

He heard at last the distinctive foomp, followed by the tink and clatter of gas canisters being deployed. He imagined the hiss of neuronal toxins released into the air, spreading in a fine, invisible mist. Everyone in its path would be instantly immobilized as their cortical systems spasmed, ground to a halt, and ultimately failed.

He waited, straining at the thunder in his ears, and when the light volley, which he could only assume was what remained of the Misfit Toys, started up again, he dove for a reasonable looking patch of darkness. Marines being Marines, he trusted that those hunting him would want to be part of any firefight going on in their vicinity, enough to glance away for just an instant, at least.

But the darkness was just bare strip of floor, and he landed hard on his shoulder. His right arm went numb from his elbow to his fingertips. He curled himself into a crouch and sprang backwards, trying only to be an unpredictable target. Something caught his foot, and he pinwheeled, lost his balance and came up hard against a solid object.

His vision swam sickeningly. His heart thudded in his chest, but all he registered was a white glare of pain shooting up his back and into his head where he had impacted the side of the crate.

He couldn’t feel his right arm; he couldn’t even tell if he still had his rifle, but it was shelter, however fleeting its safety might prove.

Groaning, Dorian flopped onto his side. It was all he had left.

His head struck something softer than the bare blastcrete he expected, a concave sheath lined on the inside with gelpad. An empty chest plate.

He had tripped, caught his foot on. . .

Dorian forced himself to move. Clutching his useless arm to his chest, he clawed at the pile of discarded body armor, dragged himself up and over its low protective ridge. It was here! Amara was here!

He hissed her name, but heard nothing. He burrowed into the nest with his head and shoulders, cast the plates aside the best he could, but found only emptiness and a fleeting warmth where she should have been.

Amara was gone.

He had lost his rifle. Again.

He had lost his friends and allies and was being hunted in a night he could not penetrate on a small moon halfway across the mapped universe from his home.

But most of all, Amara was gone. While he had been playing soldier, pretending at keeping her safe, they had taken her right out from under him. Or worse, she had been injured in the spray of titanium shards just like Yartz and unable to find him, had scattered into the dark to hide or die or both. Or maybe the Exousiai had finally decided to throw their divine weight around and just take her to get her out of all this silly human interspecies bloodshed nonsense.

It didn’t really matter one way or the other. Amara was gone.

The distant patter of gunfire echoed in his ears, the sound small and pitiful. It wasn’t even a proper last stand. The Marines were picking them off one at a time, two at a time, destroying the Misfit Toys with the steady and efficient aplomb of professional soldiers.

Dorian lay his head down, closed his eyes and waited for the gas to reach him or for a soldier to find him, whichever came first. He waited to die.

It was over. They’d never had a chance.

He becomes aware of wind on his face. Soft at first, as though the fans have kicked on again in their stubborn, but hitherto largely unsuccessful attempt to wrestle the overwhelming blastcrete cloud into submission. It steadily stiffens into a regular breeze that is thick with dust and airborne grit. He tries to inhale, chokes. Sneezes. Dust and mucous cake his upper lip.

Within moments, the breeze has become a sturdy blow. Small particles sting the skin on his face and arms. This would ordinarily be good news: he can feel both of his arms again. But it is not an ordinary sort of day.

He can hear the wind rustling through the warehouse, moaning around the stacks. Somewhere nearby, one of the empty crates actually creaks as it slides a few centimeters across the floor.

The darkness behind his eyes flickers, stabbed with streaks of yellow light crosshatched by the forest of veins in his eyelids. The cloud is lifting, which he welcomes. It will make him easier to find, and thus bring a sooner end to his misery. The wind ruffles his hair gently, cool and soothing like his mother’s hand in the aftermath of a fever.

But the pleasant sensation does not last. The wind increases sharply, notching itself up to a regular gale. The grit carried along on its phantom jetstreams doesn’t just sting anymore, it outright smarts. Must be a full environmental purge. The system boards have finally recognized that they’re fighting a losing battle against the fouled air and performed the binary equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Screw it. Just wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch. Dorian can sympathize with this sort of surrender to inevitable defeat.

A series of shouts reach him, hard voices, cursing and surprised. The cries seem distant, half a world away, but he can’t tell if it’s only the roar of wind that makes it appear so, or if the Strat Marines really have forgotten about him. He would hate to have to drag himself to his feet and go in search of someone to shoot him. It would be the final insult.

Sighing, Dorian forces an eye open.

He has grown jaded over the last few weeks to eruptions of the supernatural into the temporal plane, but what he sees surprises even him.

A revolving tower of dust and wind has appeared toward the center of the warehouse. It is a a massive vortex, a score of meters across at the base, thinning to a twisting, dancing tongue near the apex of the dome, streaked with curls of yellow, coruscating flame that wind and climb the shaft of the tower like undulating millipedes. The pillar doesn’t move except to rotate in place, a whirling, grumbling violent storm, impossibly contained.

The air has indeed cleared. The sharpening wind tugs at his clothing with disincarnate fingers, drawing him forward. Toward the storm’s outer edges, the overhead lamps suspended from the ceiling lean into it, vibrating on their long chains, aligning themselves like iron filings to an electromagnetic field, casting strange shadows in their whinging, clattering dance. Light tubes begin first to flutter, then flicker and dangle and finally burst in a rain of glass Cases on the periphery tumble forward, become caught up and vanish behind the outer wall of dust, only to be sucked to the top and catapulted out across the length of the warehouse. The sound of their impact is like summer thunder.

Between Dorian and the storm are soldiers clad in black matte combat armor. Their weapons hang at their sides; their filter goggles and rebreathers have been pushed up on top of their heads. They stand with their backs to him, their faces toward the gyre, while a red faced sergeant races about amongst them trying to get their attention. He screams at them, shoves them, knocks them down. They treat him as though he doesn’t exist. The way they hunch their shoulders and ignore the knot of Misfit Toys in their midst says that they are capable of recognizing the utterly inexplicable, even if he is not.

They are soldiers for hire; they still have the capacity to be amazed. And frightened.

The Misfit Toys, on the other hand, are not, or if they are, they don’t show it. They’ve compacted themselves into a dense circle of bristling rifle barrels and grim determination, caught out in the open between the battered wall of their defensive position and the looming aisles of storage crates. The Marines have fanned themselves out on three sides, caught in the act of closing in by the pillar of fire and cloud, and the ruddy sergeant excluded, demonstrate no aggressive desire to close the loop that will place them perilously close to the storm. Dorian recognizes Ray amongst the survivors, crowned by his silver ex-array, surrounded by a circle of defenders, weapons at the shoulder. Ghast crouches on his right. Stine is there, Thomas, others.

They were going to hold a last stand after all. He’d just missed the memo, apparently.

He sits up, still careful with his arm, though there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it now. He hesitates for a moment atop the pile of discarded body armor, flexing his elbow and rolling his wrist. He sniffs tentatively at the air, aware even as he does so that if any pockets of the neural toxin linger, he won’t sense them until it is too late. No one notices except Ray, who offers a cheery wave. Dorian returns the gesture uncertainly.

Lamps continue to shatter themselves until fully half of the warehouse would have been in darkness but for the pulsating orange glow cast by the pillar of shadow and light. Dorian creeps forward until he stands less than a meter behind the nearest Marine. Ray beckons to him, but he doesn’t move. Like the soldiers, he watches, catching his breath as a gash of brilliance appears at the base of the storm like the parting of a heavy curtain. The man in front of him sucks at the air and begins to tremble.

At first, there is only the light, but it extrudes itself in a sticky, cohesive ball that reminds Dorian of the superheated glass fresh from the blast furnace he once saw in a public demonstration at a glassblower’s booth at a street fair in Sonali Southrange. It flows like a living organism, forming random and swirling striations of red and gold and blistering white into arcane patterns as though the glass itself is a thin layer of tissue drawn over varicolored strata of blood and muscle and bone. And finally, it emerges as a translucent orb that plumps like a bubble and hovers several centimeters above the floor, drifting away from the vortex as if blown upon a cooling breeze.

Watching it come is like peering into the milky and multi-faceted depths of a crystal ball.

Inside is a creature of fire, flesh like molten iron, hair of flame, eyes like whorls of liquid mercury.

He feels its incredible heat against his skin, dry and scorching, even from twenty meters away. The creature raises its arm, extends a single, shimmering finger and inches it in his direction.

Come to me, John.

There is no hesitation now. Dorian stumbles forward, shouldering past the soldiers in his way. They make no move to stop him. He crosses the narrow space between the Marines and the Misfit Toys, but does not stop. Ghast nods to him soberly, then leans back into his rifle. The pillar rumbles, whipping impossible meteorological forces about its central core, but the wind only tugs at his limbs, hurrying him he thinks, but not threatening. He dashes across the last remaining paces and scuds to a halt before the orb. The intense heat bakes his skin, singes his hair. His flash-baked eyes fill with tears.

But it is Amara inside, just as it was her voice that called to him. Even as a creature forged from elemental fire, he recognizes her, and when she waves for him to come to her, he doesn’t wonder, doesn’t think about the incinerating flames, though he hears her soft, comforting, mildly sardonic voice in his head.

Do you still believe, John? Are you a True Believer?

Yes!

He plunges ahead, pushing through the porous outer wall of the orb with his arms extended in front of him like a man fighting his way through cheesecloth. Little tongues of fire light the hairs on his forearms. His skin blisters, blackens and peels back from the red muscle beneath. He draws a final breath, and he feels the lining of his lungs whither and ignite.

He is destroyed, and still he rushes in to drown himself in her lake of fire.

I believe. I believe. I BELIEVE!

And then he is inside the orb. He is whole: unscarred, unscorched, unhurt. He blinks once, twice, staring at his hands, his arms and pink, healthy skin.

Amara winks one glassy eye at him, then braces her legs, raises her arms and points her hands, palms out, at the halted Marine advance. She becomes an imminent goddess of pain. The orb pulses with an excruciating light, and to a man, the soldiers take a step back, cowering, anticipating oblivion.

There is a sound, brief and sharp, like the fizz of a blown circuit board.

The Marines fall to their knees.

Then silence and absolute darkness.

Long seconds pass. Dorian hears himself breathing, swift and shallow. A cool hand finds his and grips his fingers tightly. It is small and delicate. A child’s hand, almost.

They wait.

One of the soldiers locates a flashlight among his gear. The beam is fat and bright and wavers uncontrollably in his hand. A scuffle of feet. A few groans, then curses, as awareness returns and resolve is gathered. The sergeant begins to rail as sergeants have done for time immemorial.

The first thing they discover is that the pillar of fire and smoke is gone.

The second, that the Misfit Toys have vanished with it.

Gone. Poof.

Eventually, the beam alights on Dorian and Amara standing together atop a low berm of fallen crates. More shouts, more efficient military scrambling, the noose is reformed, redirected, retightened. Amara makes no move to resist, and he is content to follow her lead.

When they have been completely surrounded, Amara lifts her chin toward the ranking officer amongst them, a hollow-cheeked lieutenant who looks pale and shaken and too young for the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.

Amara favors him with an encouraging smile.

“Take me to your leader,” she says. “Please.”

<– Chapter 19 / Chapter 21 –>