Kenzo Isozaki could say honestly that he had never been afraid before in his life. Raised as a business-samurai in the fern islands of Fuji, he had been taught and trained since infancy to be disdainful of fear and contemptuous of anyone who felt it. Caution he allowed—it had become an indispensable business tool for him—but fear was alien to his nature and his carefully constructed personality.

Until this moment.

M. Isozaki stood back while the inner door of the air lock cycled open. Whatever awaited within had been on the surface of an airless, tumbling asteroid a minute earlier. And it was not wearing a spacesuit.

Isozaki had chosen not to bring a weapon on the little asteroid hopper: neither he nor the ship was armed. At this moment, as ice crystals billowed like fog from the opening air lock and a humanoid figure stepped through, Kenzo Isozaki wondered if that had been a wise choice.

The humanoid figure was human… or at least human in appearance. Tan skin, neatly cut gray hair, a perfectly tailored gray suit, gray eyes under lashes still rimmed with frost, and a white smile.

“M. Isozaki,” said Councillor Albedo.

Isozaki bowed. He had brought his heart rate and breathing under his control, and now he concentrated on keeping his voice flat, level, and emotionless. “It is kind of you to respond to my invitation.” Albedo crossed his arms. The smile remained on the tanned, handsome face, but Isozaki was not fooled by it. The seas around the fern islands of Fuji were thick with sharks descended from the DNA recipes and frozen embryos of the early Bussard seedships.

“Invitation?” said Councillor Albedo in a rich voice. “Or summons?”

Isozaki’s head remained slightly bowed. His hands hung loosely at his sides. “Never a summons, M…”

“You know my name, I think,” said Albedo.

“The rumors say that you are the same Councillor Albedo who advised Meina Gladstone almost three centuries ago, sir,” said the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus.

“I was more hologram than substance then,” said Albedo, uncrossing his arms. “But the… personality… is the same. And you need not call me sir.”

Isozaki bowed slightly. Councillor Albedo stepped deeper into the little hopper. He ran his powerful fingers over consoles and the single pilot’s couch and the rim of its empty high-g tank.

“A modest ship for such a powerful person, M. Isozaki.”

“I thought it best to exercise discretion, Councillor. May I call you that?” Instead of answering, Albedo took an aggressive step closer to the CEO. Isozaki did not flinch.

“Did you feel it an act of discretion to release an AI viral telotaxis into Pacem’s crude datasphere so that it could go looking for TechnoCore nodes?” Albedo’s voice filled the hopper cabin. Kenzo Isozaki raised his eyes to meet the gray glare of the taller man. “Yes, Councillor. If the Core still existed, it was imperative that I… that the Mercantilus… make personal contact. The telotaxis was programmed to self-destruct if detected by Pax antiviral programs, and to inoculate only if it received an unmistakable Core response.”

Councillor Albedo laughed. “Your AI telotaxis was about as subtle as the metaphorical turd in the proverbial punchbowl, Isozaki-san.” The Mercantilus CEO blinked in surprise at the crudity.

Albedo dropped into the acceleration couch, stretched, and said, “Sit down, my friend. You went to all that trouble to find us. You risked torture, excommunication, real execution, and the loss of your parking privileges in the Vatican skimmer park. You want to talk… talk.”

Temporarily off balance, Isozaki looked for another surface on which to sit. He settled on a clear section of the plotting board. He disliked zero-g, so the crude internal containment field kept up a differential simulating one gravity, but the effect was inconsistent enough to keep Isozaki teetering on the edge of vertigo. He took a breath and gathered his thoughts.

“You are serving the Vatican…” he began.

Albedo interrupted at once. “The Core serves no one, Mercantilus man.”

Isozaki took another breath and began again.

“Your interests and the Vatican’s have overlapped to the point that the TechnoCore provides counsel and technology vital to the survival of the Pax…”

Councillor Albedo smiled and waited.

Thinking for what I will say next, His Holiness will feed me to the Grand Inquisitor. I will be on the pain machine for a hundred lifetimes, Isozaki said, “Some of us within the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations feel that the interests of the League and the interests of the TechnoCore may well hold more in common than those of the Core and the Vatican. We feel that an… ah… investigation of those common goals and interests would be beneficial to both parties.”

Councillor Albedo showed more of his perfect teeth. He said nothing.

Feeling the hemplike texture of the noose he was placing around his own neck, Isozaki said, “For two and three-quarters centuries, the Church and the Pax civil authorities have held as official policy that the TechnoCore was destroyed in the Fall of the Farcasters. Millions of those close to power on worlds across Pax space know the rumors of the Core’s survival…”

“The rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Councillor Albedo. “So?”

“So,” continued Isozaki, “with the full understanding that this alliance between Core personalities and the Vatican has been beneficial to both parties, Councillor, the League would like to suggest ways in which a similar direct alliance with our trading organization would bring more immediate and tangible benefits to your… ah… society.”

“Suggest away, Isozaki-san,” said Councillor Albedo, leaning farther back in the pilot’s chair.

“One,” said Isozaki, his voice growing firmer, “the Pax Mercantilus is expanding in ways which no religious organization can hope to do, however hierarchical or universally accepted it might be. Capitalism is regaining power throughout the Pax. It is the true glue that holds the hundreds of worlds together.

“Two, the Church continues to carry on its endless war with the Ousters and with rebellious elements within the Pax sphere of influence. The Pax Mercantilus views all such conflicts as a waste of energy and precious human and material resources. More importantly, it involves the TechnoCore in human squabbles that can neither further Core interests nor advance Core goals.

“Three, while the Church and the Pax utilize such obviously Core-derived technologies as the instantaneous Gideon drive and the resurrection créches, the Church gives the TechnoCore no credit for these inventions. Indeed, the Church still holds the Core up as an enemy to its billions of faithful, portraying the Core entities as having been destroyed because they were in league with the Devil. The Pax Mercantilus has no need for such prejudice and artifice. If the Core were to choose continued concealment when allied with us, we should honor that policy, always willing to present the Core as visible and appreciated partners when and if you should so decide. In the meantime, however, the League would move to end, for now and forever, the demonization of the TechnoCore in history, lore, and the minds of human beings everywhere.”

Councillor Albedo looked thoughtful. After a moment of gazing out the port at the tumbling asteroid beyond, he said, “So you will make us rich and respectable?”

Kenzo Isozaki said nothing. He felt that his future and the balance of power in human space was teetering on a knife’s edge. He could not read Albedo: the cybrid’s sarcasm could well be a prelude to negotiation.

“What would we do with the Church?” asked Albedo. “More than two and a half human centuries of silent partnership?”

Isozaki willed his heart rate to slow again.

“We do not wish to interrupt any relationship which the Core has found useful or profitable,” he said softly. “As businesspeople, we in the League are trained to see the limitations of any religion-based interstellar society. Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures… indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy. As businesspeople dedicated to the mutual profit of ourselves and our business associates, we see ways in which a second level of Core-human cooperation, however secretive or limited, should and would be beneficial to both parties.”

Councillor Albedo nodded again.

“Isozaki-san, do you remember in your private office in the Torus when you had your associate, Anna Pelli Cognani, remove her clothes?”

Isozaki retained a neutral expression but only by the utmost effort of will. The fact that the Core was looking into his private office, recording every transaction, made his blood literally chill.

“You asked then,” continued Albedo, “why we had helped the Church refine the cruciform. “To what ends?” I believe you said ‘Where is the benefit to the Core?’”

Isozaki watched the man in gray, but more than ever he felt that he was locked in the little asteroid hopper with a cobra that had reared up and opened its hood.

“Have you ever owned a dog, Isozaki-san?” asked Albedo.

Still thinking about cobras, the Mercantilus CEO could only stare. “A dog?” he said after a moment. “No. Not personally. Dogs were not common on my homeworld.”

“Ah, that’s right,” said Albedo, showing his white teeth again. “Sharks were the pet of choice on your island. I believe that you had a baby shark which you tried to tame when you were about six standard years old. You named it Keigo, if I am not mistaken.” Isozaki could not have spoken if his life had depended upon it at that second. “And how did you keep your growing baby shark from eating you when you swam together in the Shioko Lagoon, Isozaki-san?”

After a moment of trying, Isozaki managed, “Collar.”

“I beg your pardon?” Councillor Albedo leaned closer.

“Collar,” said the CEO. Small, perfectly black spots were dancing in the periphery of his vision. “Shock collar. We had to carry the transmitter palmkeys. The same devices our fishermen used.”

“Ah, yes,” said Albedo, still smiling. “If your pet did something naughty, you brought it back into line. With just a touch of your finger.”

He held his hand out, cupping it as if he were cradling an invisible palmkey. His tanned finger came down on an invisible button.

It was not so much like an electrical shock passing through Kenzo Isozaki’s body, more like radiating waves of pure, unadultered agony beginning in his chest, beginning in the cruciform embedded under his skin and flesh and bone—and radiating out like telegraph signals of pain flowing through the hundreds of meters of fibers and nematodes and clustered nodes of cruciform tissue metastasized through his body like rooted tumors. Isozaki screamed and doubled over in pain.

He collapsed to the floor of the hopper. “I believe that your palmkeys could give old Keigo increasing jolts if he got aggressive,” mused Councillor Albedo. “Wasn’t that the case, Isozaki-san?” His fingers tapped at empty air again, as if cueing a palmkey. The pain grew worse.

Isozaki urinated in his shipsuit and would have voided his bowels if they had not been already empty. He tried to scream again but his jaws clamped tight, as if from violent tetanus. Enamel on his teeth cracked and chipped away. He tasted blood as he bit through a corner of his tongue. “On a scale of ten, that would have been about a two for old Keigo, I think,” said Councillor Albedo. He stood and walked to the air lock, tapping the cycling combination in. Writhing on the floor, his body and brain useless appendages to a cruciform of horrific pain radiating through his body, Isozaki tried to scream through his locked jaws. His eyes were swelling out of their sockets. Blood ran from his nose and ears.

Finished with cycling the air-lock combination, Councillor Albedo tapped at the invisible key in his palm once again.

The pain vanished. Isozaki vomited across the deckplates. Every muscle in his body twitched randomly while his nerves seemed to misfire.

“I will bring your proposal to the Three Elements of the TechnoCore,” Councillor Albedo said formally. “The proposition will be discussed and considered most seriously. In the meantime, my friend, your discretion will be counted upon.”

Isozaki tried to make an intelligible noise, but he could only curl up and retch on the metal floor. To his horror, his spasming bowels were passing wind in a ripple of flatulence.

“And there will be no more AI viral telotaxes released in anyone’s datasphere, will there, Isozaki-san?” Albedo stepped into the air lock and cycled the door shut.

Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.

It took Rhadamanth Nemes and her three siblings only a few minutes to fly the dropship from Pax Base Bombasino to the village of Lock Childe Lamonde on the slate-dry world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, but the trip was complicated by the presence of three military skimmers that that meddling fool Commander Solznykov had sent along in escort.

Nemes knew from the “secure” tightbeam traffic between the base and the skimmers that the Base Commander had sent his aide, the bumbling Colonel Vinara, to take personal charge of the expedition.

More than that, Nemes knew that the Colonel would be in charge of nothing—that is, Vinara would be so wired with real-time holosim pickups and tightbeam squirters that Solznykov would be in actual command of the Pax troopers without showing his jowled face again. By the time they were hovering over the proper village—although “village” seemed too formal a term for the four-tiered strip of adobe houses that ran along the west side of the river just as hundreds of other homes had for almost the entire way between the base and here—the skimmers had caught up and were spiraling in for a landing while Nemes looked for a site large enough and firm enough to hold the dropship.

The doors of the adobe homes were painted bright primary colors. People on the street wore robes of the same hue. Nemes knew the reason for this display of color: she had accessed both their ship’s memory and the encrypted Bombasino files on the Spectrum Helix people. The data was interesting only in that it suggested that these human oddities were slow to convert to the cross, slower still to submit to Pax control. Likely, in other words, to help a rebellious child, man, and one-armed android hide from the authorities.

The skimmers landed on the dike road bordering the canal. Nemes brought the dropship down in a park, partially destroying an artesian well.

Gyges shifted in his copilot’s seat and raised an eyebrow.

“Scylla and Briareus will go out to make the formal search,” Nemes said aloud. “You stay here with me.” She had noted with no pride or vanity that her clone-siblings had long since submitted to her authority, despite the death threat they had brought from the Three Elements and the certainty of it being carried out if she were to fail again.

The other female and male went down the ramp and through the crowd of brightly robed people. Troopers in combat armor, visors sealed, jogged to meet them.

Watching on the common optic channel, not via tightbeam or vid pickup, Nemes recognized Colonel Vinara’s voice through his helmet speaker. “The Mayor—a woman named Ses Gia—refuses permission for us to search the houses.”

Nemes could see Briareus’s contemptuous smile reflected on the Colonel’s polished visor. It was like looking at a reflection of herself with slightly stronger bone structure. “And you allow this… Mayor… to dictate to you?” said Briareus.

Colonel Vinara raised a gauntleted hand. “The Pax recognizes the indigenous authorities until they have become… part of the Pax Protectorate.”

Scylla said, “You said that Dr. Molina left a Pax trooper as guard…” Vinara nodded. His breathing was amplified through the morphic, amber helmet. “There is no sign of that trooper. We have attempted to establish communication since we left Bombasino.”

“Doesn’t this trooper have a trace chip surgically implanted?” said Scylla.

“No, it is woven into his impact armor.”

“And?”

“We found the armor in a well several streets over,” said Colonel Vinara.

Scylla’s voice remained level. “I presume the trooper was not in the armor.”

“No,” said the Colonel, “just the armor and helmet. There was no body in the well.”

“Pity,” said Scylla. She started to turn away but then looked back at the Pax Colonel. “Just armor, you say. No weapon?”

“No.” Vinara’s voice was gloomy. “I’ve ordered a search of the streets and we will question the citizens until someone volunteers the location of the house where the missing spacer was put under arrest by Dr. Molina. Then we will surround it and demand the surrender of all inside. I have… ah… requested the civil courts in Bombasino consider our request for a search warrant.”

Briareus said, “Good plan, Colonel. If the glaciers don’t arrive first and cover the village before the warrant is issued.”

“Glaciers?” said Colonel Vinara.

“Never mind,” said Scylla. “If it is acceptable to you, we shall help you search the adjoining streets and await proper authorization for a house-to-house search.” To Nemes, she broadcast on the internal band, Now what?

Stay with him and do just what you offered, sent Nemes. Be courteous and law-abiding. We don’t want to find Endymion or the girl with these idiots around. Gyges and I will go to fast time.

Good hunting, sent Briareus.

Gyges was already waiting at the dropship lock. Nemes said, “I’ll take the town, you move downriver to the farcaster arch and make sure that nothing gets through—going upriver or down—without your checking it out. Phase down to send a squirt message and I’ll shift periodically to check the band. If you find him or the girl, ping me.” It was possible to communicate via common band while phase-shifted, but the energy expenditure was so horribly high—above and beyond the unimaginable energy needed just for the phase-shift—that it was infinitely more economical to shift down at intervals to check the common band. Even a ping alarm would use the equivalent of this world’s entire energy budget for a year.

Gyges nodded and the two phase-shifted in unison, becoming chrome sculptures of a naked male and female. Outside the lock, the air seemed to thicken and the light deepen. Sound ceased. Movement stopped. Human figures became slightly out-of-focus statues with their wind-rippled robes stiff and frozen like the trappings on bronze sculptures.

Nemes did not understand the physics of phase shifting. She did not have to understand it in order to use it. She knew that it was neither the antientropic nor hyperentropic manipulation of time—although the future UI had both of those seemingly magical technologies at its command—nor some sort of “speeding up” that would have had sonic booms crashing and the air temperature boiling in their wake, but that phase shifting was a sort of sidestepping into the hollowed-out boundaries of space-time. “You will become—in the nicest sense—rats scurrying in the walls of the rooms of time,” had said the Core entity most responsible for her creation.

Nemes was not offended by the comparison. She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.

The two reflective figures jogged down the ramp and went opposite directions—Gyges south toward the farcaster, Nemes past her frozen siblings and the sculptures of Pax troopers and Spectrum citizens, into the adobe city.

It took her literally no time at all to find the house with the handcuffed Pax trooper asleep in the corner bedroom facing the canal. She rummaged through the downloaded Pax Base Bombasino files to identify the sleeping trooper—a Lusian named Gerrin Pawtz, thirty-eight standard years old, a lazy, initiative-free alcohol addict, two years away from retirement, six demotions and three sentences to brigtime in his file, assignments relegated to garrison duty and the most mundane base tasks—and then she deleted the file. The trooper was of no interest to her.

Checking once to make sure that the house was empty, Rhadamanth Nemes dropped out of phase shift and stood a moment in the bedroom.

Sound and movement returned: the snoring of the handcuffed trooper, movement of pedestrians along the canal walk, a soft breeze stirring white curtains, the rumble of distant traffic, and even the samurai-armor rustles of the Pax troopers jogging through adjoining streets and alleys in their useless search.

Standing over the Pax trooper, Nemes extended her hand and first finger as if pointing at the man’s neck. A needle emerged from under her fingernail and extended the ten centimeters to the sleeping man’s neck, sliding under the skin and flesh with only the slightest speck of blood to show the intrusion. The trooper did not wake. Nemes withdrew the needle and examined the blood within: dangerous levels of C-H-OH—Lusians frequently were at risk from high cholesterol—as well as a low platelet count suggesting the presence of incipient immune thrombocytopenic purpura, probably brought about by the trooper’s early years in hard-radiation environments on any of several garrison worlds, a blood alcohol level of 122 mg/100 ml—the trooper was drunk, although his alcoholic past probably allowed him to hide most of the effects—and—voilá!—the presence of the artificial opiate called ultramorph mixed with heightened levels of caffeine. Nemes smiled. Someone had drugged the trooper with sleep-inducing amounts of ultramorph mixed with tea or coffee—but had done so while taking care to keep the levels below a dangerous overdose.

She sniffed the air. Nemes’s ability to detect and identify distinct airborne organic molecules—that is, her sense of smell—about three times more sensitive than a typical gas chromatograph mass spectrometer’s: in other words, somewhere above that of the Old Earth canine called a bloodhound.

The room was filled with the distinctive scents of many people. Some of the smells were old; a few were very recent. She identified the Lusian trooper’s alcoholic stink, several subtle, musky female scents, the molecular imprint of at least two children—one deeply into puberty and the other younger but afflicted with some cancer requiring chemotherapy—and two adult males, one bearing the distinct sweat impressions of the diet of this planet, the other being at once familiar and alien. Alien because the man still carried the scent of a world Nemes had never visited, familiar because it was the distinctive human smell she had filed away: Raul Endymion still carrying the scent of Old Earth with him.

Nemes walked from room to room, but there was no hint of the peculiar scent she had encountered four years earlier of the girl named Aenea, nor the antiseptic android smell of the servant called A. Bettik. Only Raul Endymion had been here. But he had been here only moments before.

Nemes followed the scent trail to the trapdoor beneath the hall flooring. Ripping the door open despite its multiple locks, she paused before descending the ladder. She squirted the information on the common band, not receiving a responding ping from Gyges, who was probably phase-shifted. It had been only ninety seconds since they had left the ship. Nemes smiled. She could ping Gyges, and he would be here before Raul Endymion and the others in the tunnel below had taken another ten heartbeats.

But Rhadamanth Nemes would like to settle this score alone. Still smiling, she jumped into the hole and dropped eight meters to the tunnel floor below. The tunnel was lighted. Nemes sniffed the cool air, separating the adrenaline-rich scent of Raul Endymion from the other human odors.

The Hyperion-born fugitive was nervous. And he had been ill or injured—Nemes picked up the underlying smell of sweat tinged with ultramorph. Endymion had certainly been the offworlder treated by Dr. Molina and someone had used painkillers prescribed for him on the hapless Lusian trooper.

Nemes phase-shifted and began jogging down a tunnel now filled with thickened light. No matter how much of a head start Endymion and his allies had on her, she would catch them now. It would have pleased Nemes to slice the troublemaker’s head off while she was still phase-shifted—the decapitation seeming supernatural to the realtime onlookers, performed by an invisible executioner—but she needed information from Raul Endymion. She did not need him conscious, however. The simplest plan would be to pluck him away from his Spectrum Helix friends, surrounding him with the same phased field that protected Nemes, drive a needle into his brain to immobilize him, return him to the dropship, stow him in the resurrection créche there, and then go through the charade of thanking Colonel Vinara and Commander Solznykov for their help. They could “interrogate” Raul Endymion once their ship had left orbit: Nemes would run microfibers into the man’s brain, extracting RNA and memories at will. Endymion would never regain consciousness: when she and her siblings had learned what they needed from his memories, she would terminate him and dump the body into space. The goal was to find the child named Aenea.

Suddenly the lights went out. While I am phase-shifted, thought Nemes. Impossible. Nothing could happen that quickly. She skidded to a halt. There was no light at all in the tunnel, nothing she could amplify. She switched to infrared, scanning the passageway ahead and behind her. Empty. She opened her mouth and emitted a sonar scream, turning quickly to do the same behind her. Emptiness, the ultrasound shriek echoing back off the ends of the tunnel. She modified the field around her to blast a deep radar pulse in both directions. The tunnel was empty, but the deep radar recorded mazes of similar tunnels for kilometers in all directions. Thirty meters ahead, beyond a thick metal door, there was an underground garage with an assortment of vehicles and human forms in it.

Still suspicious, Nemes dropped out of phase shift for an instant to see how the lights could have gone out in a microsecond. The form was directly in front of her. Nemes had less than a ten thousandth of a second to phase-shift again as four bladed fists struck her with the force of a hundred thousand pile drivers. She was driven back the length of the tunnel, through the splintering ladder, through the tunnel wall of solid rock, and deep into the stone itself. The lights stayed out.

In the twenty standard days during which the Grand Inquisitor stayed on Mars, he learned to hate it far more than he thought he could ever hate Hell itself.

The simoom planetary dust storm blew every day he was there. Despite the fact that he and his twenty-one-person team had taken over the Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of the city of St. Malachy, and despite the fact that the palace was theoretically as hermetically sealed as a Pax spaceship, its air filtered and boosted and refiltered, its windows consisting of fifty-two layers of high-impact plastic, its entrances more air-lock seals than doors, the Martian dust got in.

When John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa took his needle shower in the morning, the dust he had accumulated in the night ran in red rivulets of mud into the shower drain. When the Grand Inquisitor’s valet helped him pull on his cassock and robes in the morning—all of the clothing fresh-cleaned during the night—there were already traces of red grit in the silken folds. As Mustafa ate breakfast—alone in the Governor’s dining room—grit ground between his molars. During the Holy Office interviews and interrogations held in the echoing great ballroom of the palace, the Grand Inquisitor could feel the dust building up in his ankle hose and collar and hair and under his perfectly manicured fingernails.

Outside, it was ridiculous. Skimmers and Scorpions were grounded. The spaceport operated only a few hours of the day, during the rare lulls in the simoom. Parked ground vehicles soon became humps and drifts of red sand, and even Pax-quality filters could not keep the red particles out of the engines and motors and solid-state modules. A few ancient crawlers and rovers and fusion rocket shuttles kept food and information flowing to and from the capital, but to all intents and purposes, the Pax government and military on Mars had come to a standstill.

It was on the fifth day of the simoom that reports came in of Palestinian attacks on Pax bases on the Tharsis Plateau. Major Piet, the Governor’s laconic groundforce commander, took a company of mixed Pax and Home Guard troopers and set out in crawlers and tracked APC’s. They were ambushed a hundred klicks short of the plateau approach and only Piet and half his command returned to St. Malachy.

By the second week, reports came in of Palestinian attacks on a dozen garrison posts in both hemispheres. All contact was lost with the Hellas contingent and the south polar station radioed the Jibril that it was preparing to surrender to the attacking forces.

Governor Clare Palo—working out of a small office that had belonged to one of her aides—conferred with Archbishop Robeson and the Grand Inquisitor and released tactical fusion and plasma weapons to the beleaguered garrisons. Cardinal Mustafa agreed to the use of the Jibril as a weapons’ platform in the struggle against the Palestinians, and South Polar One was slagged from orbit. The Home Guard, Pax, Fleet Marines, Swiss Guard, and Holy Office commands concentrated on making sure that the capital of St. Malachy, its cathedral, and the Governor’s Palace were secure from attack. In the relentless dust storm, any indigenie that approached within eight klicks of the city perimeter and who was not wearing a Pax-issued transponder was lanced and the bodies recovered later. A few were Palestinian guerrillas.

“The simoom can’t last forever,” grumbled Commander Browning, the head of the Holy Office security forces.

“It can last another three to four standard months,” said Major Piet, his upper torso bulky in a burncast. “Perhaps longer.”

The work of the Holy Office Inquisition was going nowhere: the militia troopers who had first discovered the massacre in Arafat-kaffiyeh were interviewed again under Truthtell and neuroprobe, but their stories remained the same; the Holy Office forensic experts worked with the coroners at St. Malachy’s Infirmary only to confirm that none of the 362 corpses could be resurrected—the Shrike had ripped out every node and millifiber of their cruciforms; queries were sent back to Pacem via instantaneous-drive drone regarding the identities of the victims and—more importantly—the nature of the Opus Dei operations on Mars and the reasons for the advanced spaceport, but when a drone returned after fourteen local days, it brought only the ID’s of the murdered and no explanation of their connection to Opus Dei or the motives for that organization’s efforts on Mars.

After fifteen days of dust storm, more reports of continued Palestinian attacks on convoys and garrisons, and long days of interrogation and evidence sifting that led nowhere, the Grand Inquisitor was happy to hear Captain Wolmak call on secure tightbeam from the Jibril to announce that there was an emergency that would require the Grand Inquisitor and his entourage to return to orbit as soon as possible. The Jibril was one of the newest archangel-class starships, and it looked functional and deadly to Cardinal Mustafa as their dropships closed the last few kilometers to rendezvous. The Grand Inquisitor knew little about Pax warships, but even he could see that Captain Wolmak had morphed the starship to battle readiness: the various booms and sensor arrays had been drawn in beneath the starship’s skin, the bulge of the Gideon drive had sprouted laser-reflective armor, and the various weapons’ portals were cleared for action. Behind the archangel, Mars turned—a dust-shrouded disc the color of dried blood. Cardinal Mustafa hoped that this would be his last view of the place.

Father Farrell pointed out that all eight of the Mars System Task Force’s torchships were within five hundred klicks of the Jibril—a tight, defensive grouping by space-going standards—and the Grand Inquisitor realized that something serious was in the offing.

Mustafa’s dropship was the first to dock and Wolmak met them in the air-lock antechamber.

The interior containment field gave them gravity.

“My apologies for interrupting your Inquisition, Your Excellency…” began the captain.

“Never mind that,” said Cardinal Mustafa, shaking sand from the folds of his robe. “What is so important, Captain?”

Wolmak blinked at the entourage emerging from the air lock behind the Grand Inquisitor: Father Farrell, of course, followed by Security Commander Browning, three Holy Office aides, Marine Sergeant Nell Kasner, the resurrection chaplain Bishop Erdle, and Major Piet, the former groundforce commander whom Cardinal Mustafa had liberated from Governor Palo’s service.

The Grand Inquisitor saw the captain’s hesitation. “You can speak freely, Captain. All in this group have been cleared by the Holy Office.”

Wolmak nodded. “Your Excellency, we have found the ship.”

Cardinal Mustafa must have stared his incomprehension.

“The heavy-duty freighter that must have left Mars orbit the day of the massacre, Your Excellency,” continued the captain. “We knew that their dropships had rendezvoused with some ship that day.”

“Yes,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “but we assumed that it would be long gone—translated to whatever star system it was bound for.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wolmak, “but on the off chance that the ship had never spun up to C-plus, I had the dropships do an in-system search. We found the freighter in the system’s asteroid belt.”

“Was that its destination?” asked Mustafa.

The captain was shaking his head. “I think not, Excellency. The freighter is cold and dead. It’s tumbling. Our instruments show no life on board, no systems powered up… not even the fusion drive.”

“But it is a starship freighter?” questioned Father Farrell.

Captain Wolmak turned toward the tall, thin man. “Yes, Father. The H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru. A three-million-ton ore and bulk freighter that’s seen service since the days of the Hegemony.”

“Mercantilus,” the Grand Inquisitor said softly.

Wolmak looked grim. “Originally, Your Excellency. But our records show that the Saigon Maru was decommissioned from the Mercantilus fleet and rendered into scrap metal eight standard years ago.”

Cardinal Mustafa and Father Farrell exchanged glances.

“Have you boarded the ship yet, Captain?” asked Commander Browning.

“No,” said Wolmak. “Because of the political implications, I thought it best if His Excellency were aboard and authorized such a search.”

“Very good,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

“Also,” said Captain Wolmak, “I wanted the full complement of Marines and Swiss Guard troopers aboard first.”

“Why is that, sir?” asked Major Piet. His uniform looked bulky over his burncast.

“Something’s not right,” said the captain, looking at the Major and then at the Grand Inquisitor. “Something’s very much not right.”

More than two hundred light-years from Mars System, Task Force GIDEON was completing its task of destroying Lucifer.

The seventh and final Ouster system in their punitive expedition was the hardest to finish off.

A yellow G-type star with six worlds, two of them inhabitable without terraforming, the system was crawling with Ousters: military bases out beyond the asteroids, birthing rocks in the asteroid belt, angel environments around the innermost water world, refueling depots in low orbit around the gas giant, and an orbital forest being grown between what would have been the orbits of Venus and Old Earth in the Old Sol System. It took GIDEON ten standard days to search out and kill a majority of these nodes of Ouster life.

When they were done, Admiral Aldikacti called for a physical conference of the seven captains aboard His Holiness’s Ship Uriel and revealed that the plans had been changed: the expedition had been so successful that they would seek out new targets and continue the attack. Aldikacti had dispatched a Gideon-drive drone to Pacem System and received permission to extend the mission. The seven archangels would translate to the nearest Pax base, Tau Ceti System, where they would be rearmed, refitted, refueled, and joined by five new archangels. Probes had already targeted a dozen new Ouster systems, none of which had yet received news of the massacre along Task Force GIDEON’s swath of destruction. Counting resurrection time, they would be attacking again within ten standard days.

The seven captains returned to their seven ships and prepared for the translation from Target System Lucifer to Tau Ceti Center Base.

Aboard H.H.S. Raphael, Commander Hoagan “Hoag” Liebler was uneasy.

Besides his official capacity as executive officer of the starship, second in command to Father Captain de Soya, Liebler was paid to spy on the father-captain and to report any suspicious behavior—first to the chief of Holy Office Security aboard Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship, the Uriel, and then—as far as the Executive Officer could tell—all the way up the chain of command to the legendary Cardinal Lourdusamy. Liebler’s problem at the moment was that he was suspicious but could not articulate the cause for his suspicions.

The spy could hardly tightbeam the Uriel with the dangerous news that the crew of Father Captain de Soya’s Raphael had been going to confession too frequently, but that was precisely one of the causes of Liebler’s concern. Of course, Hoag Liebler was not a spy by training or inclination: he was a gentleman of reduced circumstances, forced first by financial constraints to exercise a Renaissance Minor gentleman’s option of joining the military, and then constrained further—by loyalty to his Pax and Church, he convinced himself, more than by the constant need for money to reclaim and restore his estates—into spying on his captain.

The confessions were not all that out of the ordinary—the crew was made up of faithful, Church- and confession-going born-again Christian soldiers, of course, and the circumstances in which they found themselves, the possibility of a true and eternal death if one of the Ouster fusion weapons or k-beams made it through defensive containment fields, certainly added to the urgency of that faith—but Liebler sensed some extra factor at work in all these confessions since Target System Mammon. During the lulls in the vicious fighting here in Target System Lucifer, the entire crew and Swiss Guard complement of the Raphael—some twenty-seven hands in all, not counting the bewildered Executive Officer—had been cycling through the confessional like spacers at an Outback port whorehouse.

And the confessional was the one place at which even the ship’s Executive Officer could not linger and eavesdrop. Liebler could not imagine what conspiracy could possibly be afoot. Mutiny made no sense. First, it was unthinkable—no crew in the nearly three centuries of Pax Fleet had ever mutinied nor come close to mutiny.

Second, it was absurd—mutineers did not flock to the confessional to discuss the sin of a planned mutiny with the captain of the ship.

Perhaps Father Captain de Soya was recruiting these men and women for some nefarious deed, but Hoag Liebler could not imagine anything the priest-captain could offer that would suborn these loyal Pax spacers and Swiss Guard troopers. The crew did not like Hoag Liebler—he was used to being disliked by classmates and shipmates, it was the curse of his natural-born aristocracy, he knew—but he could not imagine them banding together to plan some evil deed directed his way. If Father Captain de Soya had somehow seduced this crew into treason, the worst they could do was attempt to steal the archangel—Liebler suspected that this remote possibility was the reason he had been placed aboard as a spy—but to what end? Raphael was never out of touch with the other archangels in the GIDEON Task Force, except for the instant of C-plus translation and the two days of hurried resurrection, so if the crew turned traitor and attempted to steal the ship, the other six archangels would cut them down in an instant.

The thought made Hoag Liebler physically queasy. He disliked dying, and did not wish to do so more than necessary. Moreover, it would not help his career as a restored Lord of the Manor on Renaissance Minor if his service duty was remembered as being a part of the Crew That Turned Treasonous. It was possible, he realized, that Cardinal Lourdusamy—or whoever was at the apex of his espionage food chain—might have him tortured, excommunicated, and executed to the true death along with the rest of the crew just to conceal the fact that the Vatican had put a spy aboard.

This thought made Hoag Liebler more than queasy.

He consoled himself with the thought that such an act of treason was not just unlikely, it was insane. It was not like the old days on Old Earth or some other water world that Liebler had read about where an ocean going warship goes rogue and turns pirate, preying on merchant ships and terrorizing ports.

There was nowhere for a stolen archangel to run to, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to rearm and refit the ship. Pax Fleet would have their guts for garters.

Commander Hoag Liebler continued to feel queasy and uneasy despite all this forced logic.

He was on the flight deck four hours into their spinup to the translation point to Tau Ceti System when the priority squirt came in from Uriel: five Ouster torchship-class destroyers had been hiding in the charged-particle dust torus of the inner moon of the outer gas giant and were now making a run toward their own translation points, using the G-type sun as a shield between them and the GIDEON Task Force. The Gabriel and the Raphael were to deviate from their translation arcs enough to find a firing trajectory for their remaining C-plus hyperkinetic missiles, destroy the torchships, and then to resume their exits from Lucifer System.

Uriel estimated that the two archangels could spin up to translation about eight hours after the other five ships had departed. Father Captain de Soya acknowledged the squirt and ordered a change of course, and Commander Liebler monitored the tightbeam traffic as Mother Captain Stone aboard Gabriel did likewise. The Admiral isn’t leaving Raphael behind alone, thought the Executive Officer. My masters aren’t the only ones that don’t trust de Soya.

It was not an exciting chase—not actually a chase at all, when it came down to it. Given the gravitational dynamics of this system, it would take the old Hawking-drive Ouster torchships about fourteen hours to reach relativistic velocities prior to spinup. The two archangels would be in firing position within four hours. The Ousters had no weapons that could reach all the way across this system to hurt the archangels: both Gabriel and Raphael had enough weaponry in their depleted stock to destroy the torchships a dozen times over. If all else failed, they would use the hated deathbeams.

Commander Liebler had the con—the priest-captain had gone to his cubby to catch a few hours of sleep—when the two archangels cleared the sun for a firing solution. The rest of Task Force GIDEON had long since translated. Liebler turned in his acceleration chair to buzz the captain when suddenly the blast portal irised and Father Captain de Soya and several others stepped in. For a moment Liebler forgot his suspicions—forgot even that he had been paid to be suspicious—as he goggled at the unlikely group. Besides the captain, there was that Swiss Guard sergeant—Gregorius—and two of his troopers. Also in attendance were Weapons Systems Officer (WHIZZO) Commander Carel Shan, Energy Systems Officer (ESSO) Lieutenant Pol Denish, Environmental Systems Officer (VIRO) Commander Bettz Argyle, and Propulsion Systems Engineer (GOPRO) Lieutenant Elijah Hussein Meier.

“What in the hell…” began Executive Officer (XO) Liebler and then stopped. The Swiss Guard sergeant was holding a neural stunner and it was aimed at Liebler’s face.

Hoag Liebler had been carrying a concealed flechette pistol in his boot for weeks, but he forgot about it completely at this moment. He had never had a weapon aimed at him before—not even a stunner—and the effect of it made him want to urinate down his own pant leg. He concentrated on not doing that. This left little room to concentrate on anything else.

One of the female troopers came over and lifted the pistol out of his boot. Liebler stared at it as if he had never seen it before.

“Hoag,” said Father Captain de Soya, “I’m sorry about this. We took a vote and decided that there was no time to try to convince you to join us. You’re going to have to go away for a while.”

Summoning up all the dialogue he had ever heard from holodramas, Liebler began blustering.

“You’ll never get away with this. The Gabriel will destroy you. You’ll all be tortured and hanged. They’ll rip your cruciforms right out of your…”

The stunner in the giant sergeant’s hand hummed. Hoag Liebler would have gone facedown onto the deck if the female trooper had not caught him and lowered him carefully to the deckplates.

Father Captain de Soya took his place in the command chair. “Break away from this course,” he said to Lieutenant Meier at the helm. “Set in our translation coordinates. Full emergency acceleration. Go to full combat readiness.” The priest-captain glanced down at Liebler. “Put him in his resurrection créche and set it to ‘store.’” The troopers carried out the sleeping man.

Even before Father Captain de Soya ordered the ship’s internal containment field set to zero-g for battle stations, the priest-captain had that brief but exhilarating sense of flying one feels in the instant after having jumped off a cliff before gravity reasserts its absolute imperatives. In truth, their ship was now groaning under more than six hundred gravities of fusion acceleration, almost 180 percent of normal high boost. Any interruption in the containment field would kill them in less than an instant.

But the translation point was now less than forty minutes away.

De Soya was not sure what he was doing was right. The thought of being a traitor to his Church and Pax Fleet was the most terrible thing in the world to him. But he knew that if he did indeed have an immortal soul, he had no other choice in the matter.

Actually, what made Father Captain de Soya think that a miracle might be involved—or at least that a very improbable stroke of luck had occurred—the fact that seven others had agreed to come along with him in this doomed mutiny.

Eight, including himself, out of a crew of twenty-eight. The other twenty were sleeping off neural stuns in their resurrection créches. De Soya knew that the eight of them could handle Raphael’s systems and tasks under most circumstances: he was lucky—or blessed—that several of the essential flight officers had come along. In the beginning, he thought it was going to be Gregorius, his two young troopers, and himself. The first suggestion of mutiny had come from the three Swiss Guard soldiers after their “cleansing” of the second birthing asteroid in Lucifer System.

Despite their oaths to the Pax, the Church, and the Swiss Guard, the slaughter of infants had been too much like murder for them. Lancers Dona Foo and Enos Delrino had first gone to their sergeant, and then come with Gregorius to Father Captain de Soya’s confessional with their plan to defect. Originally, they had asked for absolution if they decided to jump ship in the Ouster system. De Soya had asked them to consider an alternate plan.

The Propulsion Systems Engineer Lieutenant Meier had come to confession with the same concerns.

The wholesale slaughter of the beautiful forcefield angels—which he had watched in tactical space—had sickened the young man and made him want to return to his ancestral religions of Judaism and Islam. Instead, he had gone to confession to admit his spiritual weakening. Father Captain de Soya had amazed Meier by telling him that his concerns were not in conflict with true Christianity. In the days that followed, Environmental Systems Officer Commander Bettz Argyle and Energy Systems Officer Lieutenant Pol Denish followed their consciences to the confessional.

Denish was among the hardest to convince, but long, whispered conversations with his cubby-mate, Lieutenant Meier, brought him along.

WHIZZO Commander Carel Shan was the last to join: the Weapons Systems Officer could no longer authorize deathbeam attacks. He had not slept in three weeks.

De Soya had realized during their last day in Lucifer System that none of the other officers was about to defect. They saw their work as distasteful but necessary. When push came to shove, he realized, the majority of flight officers and the remaining three Swiss Guard troopers would have sided with XO Hoag Liebler. Father Captain de Soya and Sergeant Gregorius decided not to give them the chance.

“The Gabriel is hailing us, Father Captain,” said Lieutenant Denish. The ESSO was plugged intact as well as into his energy systems console.

De Soya nodded. “Everyone make sure your couch créches are active.” It was an unnec order, he knew. Every crew member went into battle stations or C-plus translation in his or her acceleration couch, each rigged as an automated resurrection créche.

Before jacking into tactical, de Soya checked their trajectory on the center pit display. They were pulling away from Gabriel, although the other archangel had gone to three hundred gravities of boost and had altered course to parallel Raphael’s. Across Lucifer’s solar system, the five Ouster torchships were still crawling toward their own translation points. De Soya wished them well, knowing all the while that the only reason the ships still existed was the momentary distraction Raphael’s puzzling course change had caused for Gabriel. He plugged in tactsim.

Instantly he was a giant standing in space.

The six worlds and countless moons and nascent, burning orbital forests of Lucifer spread out at his belt level. Far beyond the burning sun, the six Ouster motes balanced on tiny fusion tails. Gabriel’s tail was much longer; Raphael’s the longest yet, its brilliance rivaling the central star’s. Mother Captain Stone stood waiting a few giant’s paces from de Soya.

“Federico,” she said, “what in Christ’s name are you doing?”

De Soya had considered not answering Gabriel’s hail. If it would have offered them a few more minutes, he would have stayed silent. But he knew Stone. She would not hesitate. On a separate tactical channel, he glanced at the translation plot. Thirty-six minutes to shift point.

Captain! Four missile launches detected! Translating… now! It was WHIZZO Commander Shan on the secure conduction line.

Father Captain de Soya felt sure that he had not visibly jumped or reacted in front of Mother Captain Stone in tactical. On his own bone line, he subvocalized, It’s all right, Carel. I can see them on tac. They’ve translated toward the Ouster ships. To Stone, he said on tactical, “You’ve launched against the Ousters.”

Stone’s face was tight even in simlight. “Of course. Why haven’t you, Federico?” Rather than answer, de Soya stepped closer to the central sun and watched the missiles emerge from Hawking drive immediately in front of the six Ouster torchships. They detonated within seconds: two fusion, followed by two broader plasma. All of the Ousters had their defensive containment fields to maximum—an orange glow in tactical sim—but the close-range bursts overloaded all of them. The images went from orange to red to white and then three of the ships simply ceased to exist as material objects. Two became scattered fragments tumbling toward the now infinitely distant translation points.

One torchship remained intact, but its containment field dropped away and its fusion tail disappeared. If anyone aboard had survived the blast effects, they were now dead of the sleet storm of undeflected radiation that was tearing through the ship.

“What are you doing, Federico?” repeated Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya knew that Stone’s first name was Halen. He chose not to make his part of the conversation personal. “Following orders, Mother Captain.”

Even in tactsim, Stone’s expression was dubious. “What are you talking about, Father Captain de Soya?” Both knew that the conversation was being recorded. Whoever survived the next few minutes would have a record of the exchange.

De Soya kept his voice steady.

“Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship tightbeamed us with a change of orders ten minutes before the flagship translated. We are carrying out those orders.”

Stone’s expression was impassive, but de Soya knew that she was subvocalizing her XO to confirm that there had been a tightbeam transmission between Uriel and Raphael at that time.

There had been. But the substance of it had been trivial: updating rendezvous coordinates for the Tau Ceti System.

“What were the orders, Father Captain de Soya?”

“They were eyes-only, Mother Captain Stone. They do not concern the Gabriel.” On the bone circuit, he said to WHIZZO Shan, Lock on death beam coordinates and give me the actuator as discussed. A second later he felt the tactsim weight of an energy weapon in his right hand. The gun was invisible to Stone, but perfectly tactile to de Soya.

He tried to make his hand on the butt of the weapon look relaxed as his finger curled around the invisible trigger. De Soya could tell from the casual way that Mother Captain Stone’s arm hung free from her body that she was also carrying a virtual weapon. They stood about three meters apart in tactsim space. Between them, Raphael’s long fusion tail and Gabriel’s shorter pillar of flame climbed toward chest height from the plane of the ecliptic. “Father Captain de Soya, your new translation point will not take you to Tau Ceti System as ordered.”

“Those orders were superseded, Mother Captain.” De Soya was watching his former first officer’s eyes. Halen was always good at concealing her emotions and intentions. He had lost to her in poker on more than one occasion on their old torchship, Balthasar.

“What is your new destination, Father Captain?”

Thirty-three minutes to shift point.

“Classified, Mother Captain. I can tell you this—Raphael will be rejoining the task force in Tau Ceti System after our mission is completed.”

With her left hand, Stone rubbed her cheek.

De Soya watched the curled finger of her right hand. She would not have to raise the invisible handgun to trigger the death beam, but it was human instinct to aim the firearm at one’s opponent.

De Soya hated deathbeams and he knew that Stone did as well. They were cowardly weapons: banned by Pax Fleet and the Church until this expeditionary force incursion. Unlike the old Hegemony-era deathwands that actually cast a scythelike beam of neural disruption, no coherent projection was involved in the ship-to-target deathbeam. Essentially, the powerful Gideon-drive accumulators extended a C-plus distortion of space-time within a finite cone. The result was a subtle twisting of the real-time matrix—similar to a failed translation into the old Hawking-drive space—but more than enough to destroy the delicate energy dance that was a human brain.

But however much Stone held the Pax Fleet officer’s hatred of deathbeams, it made sense for her to use it now. The Raphael represented a staggering investment of Pax funds: her first goal would be to stop the crew from stealing it without damaging the ship. Her problem, however, was that killing the crew with deathbeams probably would not stop Raphael from translating, depending upon how much of the spinup had been preprogrammed by her crew. It was traditional for a captain to make the actual translation manually—or at least to be ready to override the ship’s computer with a deadman switch—but Stone had no assurance that de Soya would follow tradition.

“Please let me speak to Commander Liebler,” said Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya smiled. “My executive officer is attending to duties.” He thought, So Hoag was the spy. This is the confirmation we needed.

Gabriel could not catch them now, not even by accelerating to six hundred gravities herself.

Raphael would have reached translation requirements before the other ship could get within tow range. No, to stop them, Stone would have to kill the crew and then disable the ship by using the last of her physical arsenal to overload Raphael’s external containment fields. If she was wrong—if de Soya was acting under last-minute orders—she would almost certainly be court-martialed and expelled from Pax Fleet.

If she did nothing, and de Soya was stealing one of the Pax’s archangels, Stone would be court-martialed, expelled, excommunicated, and almost certainly executed.

“Federico,” she said softly, “please reduce thrust so that we can match velocities. You can still follow orders and spin up to your secret coordinates. I ask only that I board the Raphael, and confirm that everything is all right before you translate.”

De Soya hesitated. He could not use the guise of orders for his precipitous departure under six hundred gravities, since wherever Raphael ended up, there would be two days of slow resurrection for the crew before the mission could continue. He watched Stone’s eyes while also checking the tiny image of Gabriel on its three-hundred-gravity pillar of white fire.

She might try overloading his fields with a salvo of her remaining conventional weaponry. De Soya had no wish to return missile or lance fire: a vaporized Gabriel was not acceptable. He was now a traitor to Church and state, but he had no intention of becoming a true-death murderer. The deathbeams it had to be then. “All right, Halen,” he said easily. “I’ll tell Hoag to drop to two-hundred-g’s long enough for you to come alongside.” He turned his head as if concentrating on issuing bone-channel orders. His hand must have twitched. Stone’s did as well, the invisible handgun rising a bit as her finger tightened on the trigger.

In the split second before the disruption struck, Father Captain de Soya saw the eight sparks leaving the simtact Gabriel: Stone was taking no chances—she would vaporize Raphael rather than have it escape.

The mother-captain’s virtual image flew backward and evaporated as the deathbeam tore into her ship, severing all com connections as the humans aboard died.

Less than a second later, Father Captain de Soya felt himself jerked out of simspace as the neurons in his brain literally fried. Blood flew from his eyes, mouth, and ears, but the priest-captain was already dead, as was every conscious entity on the Raphael—Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers on C deck, GOPRO Meier, VIRO Argyle, ESSO Denish, and WHIZZO Shan on the flight deck. Sixteen seconds later, the eight Hawking-drive missiles flashed into real space and detonated on every side of the silent Raphael.

Gyges watched in real-time as Raul Endymion said good-bye to the family in red robes and paddled his kayak toward the farcaster arch. The world was in dual lunar eclipse.

Fireworks exploded above the canal-river and strange ululations came from thousands of throats back in the linear city. Gyges stood and prepared to walk out across the water to pluck the man from his kayak. It had been agreed that if Raul Endymion was alone, that he needed to be kept alive for interrogation in the starship waiting above—finding the girl Aenea’s whereabouts was the goal of this mission—but no one said anything about not making it more difficult for the man to fight or escape. While still phase-shifted, Gyges planned to hamstring Endymion and sever the tendons in his forearms. He could do that instantly, surgically, so that there would be no danger of the human bleeding to death before being stored in the ship’s doc-in-the-box before interrogation.

Gyges had jogged the six klicks to the farcaster arch in no time, checking out pedestrians and the strange windcarts as he passed the frozen forms and figures. Once at the arch and concealed in a patch of willows on the canal’s high bank, he shifted back to slow time. His job was to guard the back door. Nemes would ping him when she found the missing spacer.

During the twenty minutes of waiting, Gyges communicated with Scylla and Briareus on the internal common band but heard nothing from Nemes.

This was surprising. They had all assumed that she would find the missing man within the first few seconds of real-time after she had shifted up. Gyges was not worried—he was not actually capable of worry in the true sense of the word—but he assumed that Nemes had been searching in widening arcs, using up real-time by frequently shifting down and then back up. He assumed that his common-band queries had been made while she was phase-shifted. Added to that was his understanding that while Nemes was a clone-sibling, she had been the first to be devatted. She was less used to common-band sharing than Scylla, Briareus, and he. To be truthful, Gyges would not have minded if their orders had been simply to pull Nemes out of the rock on God’s Grove and terminate her then and there.

The river was busy. Each time a ship approached the farcaster arch from either the east or west, Gyges shifted up and walked across the spongy surface of the river to search it and check on its passengers. Some he had to disrobe to ascertain that it was not Endymion or the android, A. Bettik, or the girl, Aenea, in disguise. To be sure, he sniffed them and took needle biopsies of the robed ones’ DNA to make sure that they were natives of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. All were.

After each inspection, he would walk back to the bank and resume his watch. Eighteen minutes after he had left the ship, a Pax skimmer flew around and through the farcaster arch. It would have been tiring for Gyges to have to board it in fast time, but Scylla was already aboard with the searching Pax troopers so he was spared the effort.

This is tiresome, she said on the common band.

Yes, agreed Gyges.

Where is Nemes? It was Briareus back in the city. The clumsy troopers had received their radioed search warrant and were going from house to house.

Haven’t heard from her, said Gyges.

It was during the eclipse and the accompanying ceremonial nonsense that he watched the windcycle wagon pull to a halt and Raul Endymion emerge. Gyges was sure that it was Endymion. Not only did the visuals match perfectly, but he picked up the personal scent that Nemes had downloaded to them. Gyges could have phase-shifted immediately, walked over to the frozen tableau, and taken a DNA needle biopsy, but he did not have to. This was their man.

Instead of broadcasting on the common band or pinging Nemes, Gyges waited another minute.

This anticipation was pleasurable to him. He did not want to dilute it by sharing it. Besides, he reasoned, it would be better to abduct Endymion after he had separated from the Spectrum Helix family who even now were waving good-bye to the man in the kayak.

Gyges watched while Raul Endymion paddled the absurd little boat out into the current of the widening canal-river. He realized that it would be best to take the kayak as well as Endymion: the watching Spectrum Helix people would be expecting him to disappear if they knew that he was trying to escape via farcaster. From their point of view, there would be a flash and Endymion would have farcast out of sight. In reality, Gyges would still be phase-shifted, now carrying the man and kayak within the expanded phase-shift field. The kayak might also be useful in revealing where the girl Aenea was hiding: telltale planetary scents, methods of manufacture.

Along the riverbanks to the north, people cheered and sang. The lunar eclipse was complete.

Fireworks exploded above the river and cast baroque shadows on the rusted farcaster arch.

Endymion turned his attention away from the waving Spectrum Helix family and concentrated on staying in the strongest current as he paddled toward the farcaster.

Gyges stood, stretched languidly, and prepared to phase-shift.

Suddenly the thing was next to him, centimeters away, at least three meters tall, towering over him.

Impossible, thought Gyges. I would have sensed the phase-shift distortions.

Exploding skyrockets spilled bloodred light on the chrome carapace. Metal teeth and chrome spikes twisted the expanding flowers of yellow, white, and red across quicksilver planes.

Gyges caught an instant’s look at his own reflection, distorted and startled, and then he phase-shifted.

It took less than a microsecond for the shift. Somehow one of the creature’s four clawed hands made it into the field before it completely formed. Bladed fingers dug through synflesh and muscle, seeking one of Gyges’s hearts.

Gyges paid no heed to the attack but attacked in return, swinging his silvered, phase-shifted arm like a horizontal guillotine. It could have cut through whiskered carbon alloy as if it were wet cardboard. It did not cut through the tall form in front of him. Sparks and thunder exploded as his arm bounced away, fingers numbed, metal radius and ulna shattered. The clawed hand within him pulled out ropes of intestine, kilometers of microfiber optics.

Gyges realized that he had been opened from navel to breastbone. It did not matter. He could still function.

Gyges clenched his right hand into a sharpened bludgeon and thrust it forward into gleaming red eyes. It was a killing blow. But the great steam-shovel jaws opened, closed, faster than phase-shifting, and Gyges’s right arm suddenly ended above the wrist.

Gyges threw himself at the apparition, trying to merge fields, attempting to get his own teeth within tearing distance. Two huge hands seized him, the bladed fingers sinking through shift field and flesh to hold him tight. The chrome skull in front of him slashed forward: needle-spikes pierced Gyges’s right eye and penetrated the right frontal lobe of his brain.

Gyges screamed then—not out of pain, although he felt something similar for the first time in his short life—but out of pure, relentless rage. His teeth snapped and clacked like steel rendering blades as he sought the creature’s throat, but he continued being held at three-arms’ length.

Then the monster ripped out both of Gyges’s hearts and threw them far out over the water. A nanosecond later, it lunged forward, biting through Gyges’s throat and severing his carbon-alloy spinal cord with a single snap of long teeth.

Gyges’s head was severed from his body. He tried to shift to telemetric control of the fighting body, peering through blood and fluid out of his remaining eye and broadcasting over the common band, but the transmitter in his skull had been pierced and the receiver in his spleen had been ripped away. The world spun—first the corona of the emerging sun around the second moon, then skyrockets, then the color-dappled surface of the river, then the sky again, then darkness. With fading coherence, Gyges realized that his head had been thrown far out into the river. His last retinal image before being submerged in darkness was of his own headless and uselessly spasming body being hugged to the carapace of the creature and being impaled there on spikes and thorns. Then, with a flash, the Shrike phase-shifted out of even fast-time existence and Gyges’s head struck the water and sank beneath the dark waves.

Rhadamanth Nemes arrived five minutes later. She shifted down. The riverbank was empty except for the headless corpse of her sibling. The windcycle wagon and its red-robed family were gone. No boats were visible on this section of river. The sun was beginning to emerge from behind the second moon.

Gyges is here, she sent on the common band. Briareus and Scylla were still with the troops in the city. The sleeping Pax trooper had been found and released from his handcuffs. None of the citizens queried would say whose home it was.

Scylla was urging Colonel Vinara to drop the matter.

Nemes felt the discomfort as she left the shift field. All of her ribs—bone and permasteel—were either fractured or bent.

Several of her internal organs had been pulped. Her left hand would not function. She had been unconscious for almost twenty standard minutes. Unconscious! She had not lost consciousness for one second in the four years she had lain in the solidified rock of God’s Grove. And all this damage had been done through the impenetrable shift field.

It did not matter. She would allow her body to repair itself during the days of inactivity after leaving this Core-forsaken world. Nemes knelt next to her sibling’s corpse. It had been clawed, decapitated, and eviscerated—almost deboned. It was still twitching, the broken fingers struggling to get a grip on an absent enemy.

Nemes shuddered—not out of sympathy for Gyges or revulsion at the damage done, she was professionally evaluating the Shrike’s attack pattern and felt admiration if anything—but out of sheer frustration that she had missed this confrontation. The attack in the tunnel had been too fast for her to react—she had been in mid-phase shift—which she would have thought impossible.

I’ll find him, she sent and shifted up.

The air grew thick and sludgelike. Nemes went down the bank, forced her way through the thick resistance of the water’s surface, and walked out along the riverbed, calling on the common band and probing with deep radar.

She found Gyges’s head almost a klick downstream. The current was strong here.

Freshwater crustaceans had already eaten the lips and the remaining eye and were probing in the eye sockets. Nemes brushed them away and took the head back to the bank of the canal-river.

Gyges’s common-band transmitter was smashed and his vocal cords were gone. Nemes extruded a fiber-optic filament and made the connection directly to his memory center. His skull had been smashed on the left side and brain matter and bits of DNA-processing gel were spilling out.

She did not ask him questions. She phased down and downloaded the memory, squirting it to her remaining two siblings as she received it.

Shrike, sent Scylla.

No shit, Sherlock, sent Briareus.

Silence, ordered Nemes. Finish up with those idiots. I’ll clean things up here and be waiting in the dropship.

The Gyges head—blind, leaking—trying to speak, using what remained of its tongue to shape sibilant and glottal syllables. Nemes held it close to her ear.

“Ss—pp-le-ssss.” Please. “Ss—he—puh.” Help. “Ssssttp—m-eh” Me.

Nemes lowered the head and studied the body on the splattered bank. Many organs were missing.

Scores of meters of microfiber were spilled in the weeds and mud, some trailing away in the current. Gray intestines and neural gelpaks were split and scattered. Bits of bone caught the growing light as the sun emerged from Twice Darkness. Neither the dropship nor the old archangel’s doc-in-the-boxes could help the vatborn. And Gyges might take standard months to heal himself.

Nemes set the head down while she wrapped the body in its own microfilaments, weighting it outside and in with stones. Making sure that the river was still free of ships, she tossed the headless corpse far out into the current. She had seen that the river was alive with tough and indiscriminate scavengers. Even so, there were parts of her sibling that they would not find appetizing.

She lifted Gyges’s head. The tongue was still clucking. Using the eye sockets as grips for her thumb and forefinger, she threw the head far out over the river in an easy underhand toss. It went under with barely a ripple.

Nemes jogged to the farcaster arch, ripped a hidden access plate free from the rusting and supposedly impenetrable exterior, and extruded a filament from her wrist. She jacked in.

I don’t understand, came Briareus’s code on the common band. It opened to nowhere.

Not to nowhere, sent Nemes, reeling in the filament. Just to nowhere in the old Web. Nowhere the Core has built a farcaster.

That’s impossible, sent Scylla. There are no farcasters except for those the Core has built.

Nemes sighed. Her siblings were idiots. Shut up and return to the dropship, she sent. We have to report this in person. Councillor Albedo will want to download personally. Nemes phase-shifted and jogged back to the dropship through air gone thick and sepia with slow-stirred time.