Agnosis – Ch. 21

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

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 –>