"You can defend yourself?" Kugara loaded another shell into the shotgun with a metallic chunk. "But that's it, isn't it? So here's your choice. Fix Nickolai, attack me, or watch the tach-comm go bye-bye."

"Kugara," Mallory whispered, "we need the tach-comm."

The militiamen who still had carbines were coming to the same conclusion, leveling their weapons at Kugara. She aimed the shotgun at the tach-comm again, oblivious to the lasers pointed at her, or beyond caring.

To Mallory's surprise, the black thing, the Protean, said, "I cannot make him as he was."

"Whatever you can do, do it now!"

The Protean knelt over Nickolai's body and placed its hands on his chest. The hands deformed into a flowing web-work that spread across Nickolai's body, covering him in a black net. The threads thickened and pulsed, closing the holes in the net, until Nickolai was completely contained in a pulsing black cocoon.

"Christ preserve us," Mallory muttered.

After a few moments, the cocoon reversed itself, flowing back into the thing's hands. When the black became a pulsing webwork withdrawing from Nickolai's body, Mallory noticed that dozens of threads withdrew from holes in the floor around Nickolai's body. The prone tiger was surrounded by an outline of holes in the ferrocrete floor.

What, why?

When he saw the web withdraw from a new right arm that hadn't existed moments before, Mallory answered his own question. Raw material.

He had known, as soon as Kugara uttered the word, "Protean." But it hadn't truly sunk in until now. The realization ignited a primal fear, one that was worse than the fear associated with AI, or the technologies that were used by Salmagundi to replicate the minds of its citizens. The wars mankind fought with genetic engineering and with thinking machines were awful, but understandable.

The kind of heretical technology he saw in this figure of blackness went beyond those. The misuses of this kind of self-replicating nanotechnology had taken more lives than the other two combined. When the terraforming of Titan went wrong, it left nothing recognizable on the surface. A million people gone at once, over a billion total in the years afterward from accidents and attempts to contain the spread of the technology.

And those that worshiped at the altar of Proteus had, despite everything, embraced the changes that the technology had wrought within them.

When the Protean stepped back from Nickolai's body, the tiger appeared unscarred. Even the face was rebuilt.

Nickolai's chest moved with a regular rhythm. Kugara approached him and knelt to place a blood-soaked hand against the now-pristine fur on the tiger's neck. She rested her fingers over his carotid and her shoulders shook weakly as she said, "Thank you."

"Symmetry allowed modeling of the missing limb. I had no surviving model for rebuilding the eyes."

Kugara looked down at Nickolai's face, touching the side where he had fired a gun into his own skull. Still unconscious, he didn't move when she lifted the lid on his left eye.

The eye was completely black, a featureless orb mirroring the blackness of the thing that had repaired him.

"Can he see?" Kugara asked, staring into the solid blackness of Nickolai's new eye.

"I used myself to model the sensory pickups. He will see as well as I. We must repair the tach-comm."

For the next fifteen minutes, the communications center was a scene of barely organized chaos. Once Nickolai wasn't in crisis, the Salmagundi militia started balking at being ordered around by Kugara, at least until Flynn, the native who'd been carrying the shotgun, explained that they were all trying to do the same thing here: get a tach-comm message off, warning about Adam. In Flynn's case, he called Adam the "Other."

It seemed an apt name.

Flynn was also Tetsami, one of the founding members of Salmagundi, and someone who had helped build the systems for this facility.

The presence of Flynn/Tetsami made Mallory wonder at God's providence. The presence of the Protean made Mallory wonder if he had truly lost his way. He couldn't help but wonder at his own path, when his goals coincided with something that was unquestionably Godless, if not pure evil.

He stayed with Nickolai, since he wasn't much help with the repairs. A few times, Mallory placed a hand on Nickolai's right arm, trying to feel some sort of distinguishing feature. He couldn't feel any. The only truly obvious sign of what had happened was, when he examined both arms, he could tell that the right one was an exact mirror image of the left, down to the markings on his fur, and a few incidental scars.

"It's on-line," Kugara said from across the room. "We got the tach-comm running."

Flynn closed the control panel where he had replaced the last component. "So now we need to set the transmit destination." He looked at the Protean. "Who do we call?"

"We must warn my colony on the planet Bakunin."

"Uh, we can't do that," Flynn said.

"We must!"

Mallory swore the floor shook with the Protean's words. He stood, and two militiamen reached for their useless laser carbines.

"No," Flynn said, "They don't exist anymore. The Protean commune was wiped out when the Executive Command from the old Confederacy shot an orbital linac at it."

"No..."

"They've been gone for nearly two hundred years."

The Protean shrank into itself. Its voice seemed to crack. "That was the only chance. They could have fought against the other. Without them it is only I. It is lost."

"To hell with that," Kugara said. "We got this thing running. We're going to transmit somewhere-"

Mallory walked up to her. "I have some coordinates where you can aim this."

She looked up at him. "You're going to call the pope?"

"It's why I was sent here."

She nodded. "Hell, if they're expecting a call from you, maybe they'll take all this seriously."

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Ragnarok.

"Never stand between an armed man and the exit."

-The Cynic's Book of Wisdom.

"Not the end of the world? It's always the end of the world!"

-MARBURY SHANE.

(2044-*2074).

Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard).

Salmagundi - HD 101534.

Abbas didn't take Shane's revelations particularly well. Parvi was surprised that the woman didn't gun them all down, right there. If anything, the potential importance of Mr. Shane made everything worse. If the man was telling the truth, he was the exact veneer of legitimacy that the Caliphate was looking for.

And it did nothing to help Abbas get her handful of techs out of Adam's path.

She ordered the trio of Shane, Dorner, and Brody to an unused quarter of the landing quad, along with Parvi and Wahid. Away from Dr. Pak's body, but not out of sight of it.

Three nervous-looking techs held them under guard, occasionally looking up at the sky. In the time since Dr. Pak had fallen to the ground, the eclipsing band of darkness had grown to dominate the whole sky. It had also taken on a less uniform color, as if it had a granular texture or a variable opacity.

It didn't look as if they had enough time.

Just as the crew around the dropship began disconnecting umbilicals to the ground station, Parvi heard someone scream out in Arabic. The only word she recognized was "Allah." She turned in the direction of the voice.

The sky boiled.

What had been pockets of granular detail swelled downward and became pendulous, and dropped downward like huge drops of oil. The oil drops glowed in outline with the darker colors of the spectrum, blues and deep violets. The glow contributed to the surreal twilight.

"This can't be good," Wahid whispered.

The pulsing liquid sky illuminated itself. Electric-blue flashes traveled across it, within it, resembling lightning hidden within a thunderhead, but more regular, purposeful, slow, and deliberate.

If the band of material girdling Salmagundi kept closing in, eventually it had to lose its integrity. That seemed to be what was happening, but rather than breaking apart, it seemed to be condensing.

The heavy-looking drops separated from their host in waves, a slow-motion rain that filled the sky with spheres of burning violet and electric blue. There was no sense of scale, but what looked like tiny drops from the ground could have been hundreds of meters across.

The band in the sky fragmented, composed completely now by droplets of itself, as if they were watching a holo on cloud formation stuck on continual zoom.

Abbas screamed orders, all of which Parvi suspected boiled down to the Arabic equivalent of "move your ass."

The character of the light changed, taking on a rosy tint.

One by one, the dispersed droplets suspended in the sky changed their color. Or, more likely, the atmosphere around them had begun to contribute to their appearance.

"Wahid, you have any idea how long it takes from atmospheric entry to reach the surface assuming a free fall from infinity?"

"That depends on the gravity, the terminal velocity of the object, what kind of atmospheric breaking-"

"Guess!"

"Five minutes?"

"We're screwed."

"I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534.1 arrived here on the tach-ship Eclipse which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis. Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago-" Once Mallory started transmitting back home, Kugara talked to the six black-uniformed guys who'd come storming in with Mallory. "Who are you people?"

"They're Ashley Militia," Flynn said.

"So you guys are what passes for an army on this planet?"

"We're the personal guard for the Grand Triad," one of them said, "under the command of Alexander Shane."

Another one asked, "Who are you?"

"Me, I'm just a mercenary that took the wrong job." She looked down at the still-unconscious Nickolai. "Are we on the same side here?"

No one denied it.

"You guys saw the dropship out there?"

They nodded.

"I think we want to be on it." She looked at the four guys without guns and asked, "Think you can carry him?" She pointed at Nickolai.

"You want us to-"

She turned to Flynn and asked, "So did anyone store any weapons down here?"

"By the guard station there might be-"

Flynn was cut off by the Protean's voice.

"The other is here. Now. Go. Run now."

The Protean actually grabbed Mallory and pulled him away from the tach-comm. "Now!"

Mallory stumbled back from the holo and Kugara yelled, "Does anyone need to be told twice?"

In moments, it appeared to Parvi as if the entire sky burned, as thousands of spheres became the heads of burning trails that obscured everything behind them.

On the ground, the crew redoubled their doomed efforts. Parvi looked at their guards. They had their weapons tilted down at the ground, as they stared slack-jawed up at the fiery sky- "Put down the fucking weapon!" A woman's voice yelled from across the landing quad. "Get on board the damn dropship! Now!"

It wasn't Abbas.

Parvi turned to see Julie Kugara running at them from a trapezoidal building at the opposite end of the LZ. Parvi barely had a chance to register surprise at her survival before one of the techs aimed his weapon in her direction.

"No!" Parvi yelled at them, but the tech's head vanished in a haze of red mist even before the words touched her lips.

Suddenly they were in the midst of a firefight.

The Caliphate techs that were still outside the dropship dove for cover or converged on Kugara, who led a group of men who carried a strange mix of laser carbines and antique slugthrowers. The techs dropped as if they'd walked into a buzzsaw.

Suddenly, someone tackled her to the ground.

She looked over her shoulder and saw Shane looking down at her. "Stay down," he said. "You're the pilot." He coughed and spat up a mouthful of blood.

"You're hurt."