"... with Xi Virginis... bzzt... have lost visual contact ..."

Xi Virginis sat eighty light-years beyond the official limits of human space. But that hadn't stopped humans from colonizing. And it didn't stop those colonies from being important. The man sending this transmission had been sent to make contact on behalf of the Vatican, long before the Caliphate sent its Ibrahim carriers to do the same thing, more forcefully.

Interference blurred the holo and the planet. At least it appeared like interference, some artifact of transmission, or encoding. However, very many people had analyzed the holo, and what obscured the view of the planet was not any side effect of the transmission.

Something was coalescing in space between the camera and the planet. A cloud of black specks.

When the holo spoke again, it was a different voice that spoke, more of arrogance than of fear. "... bzzt... coming toward... bzzt... behold a great... bzzt..."

The cloud of black motes moved purposefully toward the planet.

"... seven heads... bzzt... crowns upon... bzzt. ..the third part of the stars... cast... bzzt..."

The transmission died.

"Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth," quoted Cardinal Anderson to no one in particular.

Nine months ago, he had sent the last agent to investigate the source of the enigmatic transmission. Nine months. That had been before they knew about the Caliphate carriers that would put those colonies firmly in the reach of the Caliphate. Before the escalation of tensions that prevented serious consideration of anything outside their own borders.

But Father Mallory was still out there, somewhere. They had enough intel from Bakunin to know now that, despite Caliphate interference, he had been able to leave on an expedition to Xi Virginis.

Beyond that, nothing.

Unless Mallory's expedition had access to the new Caliphate tach-drives, the earliest they could have reached their goal would have been less than a month ago, more reasonably, within the week.

It was quite possible that the Caliphate could have beaten them there.

Anderson stared at the transmission and wondered what Father Mallory faced now.

"God help him," Cardinal Anderson whispered.

From the ornate desk in front of him, an assistant's voice emerged, "The trade representative from Sirius has arrived."

He waved, and the troubling holo disappeared from in front of him. "Send the man in," he told his assistant.

It was time to return to work.

PART FOUR.

Crusade.

"There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience."

- ST. AMBROSE (340?-397).

CHAPTER FOUR.

Miracles.

"Problems are never solved, only replaced."

-The Cynic's Book of Wisdom.

"Providence is always on the side of the last reserve."

-NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

(1769-1812)..

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard).

Salmagundi - HD 101534.

Julia Kugara stood on a crystalline outcrop and stared as the sun set on a wasteland. Stretching for kilometers away from her, what had been a forest was now little more than a vast bowl of coals and cooling ash. Close to the horizon, at the limits of visibility in the haze and dimming light, she thought she could see where the burnt trees regained some semblance of individuality as blackened logs scattered like toothpicks. Beyond that, she could see the roils of smoke as the forest beyond still burned.

She wondered how many of her comrades from the Eclipse had died in the blast. The radius of the damage stretched far past where her lifeboat had dropped her and Nickolai, and the lifeboats were supposed to cluster their drops.

What kind of sick universe has me and the tiger as the only survivors?

Much closer, just a dozen meters from where she stood, the blast had been forceful enough to scour the ground clean, leaving a pitted, glassy surface that refracted slight rainbow shimmers in the evening light. About ten meters away from her, the glass stopped in a sharp line.

She spared a glance at the small disposable rad counter, one of the few items left from the lifeboat's emergency kit that had survived. It still showed safe levels of radiation. It was hard to believe the thing-but not any harder than believing she still lived.

She looked at the sharp line that marked the end of the nuke's destruction and wondered what frightened her more, that someone had dropped a nuclear weapon on her, or that something else had deflected it. It struck her in an immediate visceral way that the disappearance of Xi Virginis never had. For all the enormity of it, a missing star was an abstract concept.

This was immediate, concrete. She smelled the cooling ash, felt wind hot and dry enough to scour her skin, tasted a nasty metallic taste in the air.

She walked the perimeter, a perfect hundred-meter circle centered on the alien crystalline artifact that seemed to have grown out of a much more prosaic backwoods encampment. There wasn't much left of that encampment. The nuke had erased it from the face of the planet.

She looked behind her, and the light from the fading sun captured the cluster of crystalline structures. The light reflected the structural details where the surfaces seemed to fold in on themselves in an infinite fractal regression.

Proteus...

The alien structure had obviously been the target of the attack. The presence of Kugara and Nickolai here was incidental. A coincidence.

But it was very hard to believe in coincidence after working for Mosasa.

Was this thing part of your plan? She looked up at the sky. Above her, the stars were beginning to appear. Are you still up there? Is the Eclipse still up there? Or did you both fall into the atmosphere and burn?

She looked back at the horizon.

The only surveillance devices she had were her own eyeballs, but she had satisfied herself that no vehicles were approaching. No team coming to bat cleanup after the nuke. She didn't know if that was troubling or not. With the forest reduced to ash around them, the survival of the Protean's crystal enclave would be visible for a hundred klicks in any direction. Did they care? Were they waiting for something?

Are they otherwise occupied?

She coughed in the metallic-tasting air and decided that she was done trusting the little rad counter.

She walked back to the largest cluster of crystal forms. Within about twenty paces she was inside without ever passing a door as such. The walls folded around her path until they obscured everywhere except where she was going and where she had come from. Eventually she arrived at a space that could have been a room, or simply a space in the midst of the fractal superstructure of the crystalline walls surrounding her.

Two people waited for her. The first to stand was Flynn, a lanky, sandy-haired young man with a single elaborate glyph tattooed onto his forehead like a cubist third eye. He was a native, and if Kugara was to believe him, the tattoo represented an additional personality living in his skull-a woman named Kari Tetsami who shared a Dakota ancestry with Kugara, and who had probably been dead for close to a hundred and fifty years. To hear Flynn talk about it, the colony on Salmagundi took ancestor worship to its logical extreme. It creeped her out.

"Anything?" he asked. Kugara had only known the guy for a couple of hours, but she could already tell the difference between Flynn or Tetsami talking. Right now the earnest expression was completely Flynn.

"Nothing visible approaching," Kugara told him. "But anyone with a good line of sight can tell this place is still standing. If they're serious about wiping it off the planet, I'd expect another nuke."

"We should leave," Nickolai grumbled lowly.

She turned to face her fellow survivor from the Eclipse. He still sat, staring off past Flynn and Kugara, into the semitransparent walls. His muzzle wrinkled in distaste, exposing his massive canines when he spoke.

"We should leave," he repeated.

Nickolai's ancestors, like Kugara's, had been the results of centuries-old, largely military genetic experiments. Unlike Kugara, though, the heretical experiments that created Nickolai's kind had not begun with human DNA. So, while Kugara's people had interbred until there was no way to tell from looking that she was not completely human, there was no mistaking that Nickolai had descended from some strain of Panthera Tigris. He had black and orange striped fur, easily stood three meters tall-almost a full meter on Kugara's height-and topped the scales at five hundred kilos, all muscle.

"And what if they lob another nuke at this place before we're clear?" Kugara said. "At least we know that's survivable here."

Nickolai flexed the claws on his right hand. His claws glinted gray and metallic as he scraped them along the crystal floor next to where he sat. If it wasn't for the damage he'd sustained in their descent, the metal claws would be the only sign his arm was artificial. But the pseudoflesh that had covered the arm had been torn off between shoulder and wrist, and the mechanism that formed his arm was covered now by a white spray bandage. The bandage was meant only as an emergency measure. It was smudged and dirty, and in a few places the surface had split along the grain of his fake musculature, to leak a clear fluid that wasn't quite blood.

"This is an evil place," he said turning so he could actually look at her. "You heard what this man said, didn't you?"

Kugara looked into his slitted green eyes and sighed. She didn't get Nickolai. The back story of this little crystal enclave-if she trusted Flynn and Tetsami's story- made her feel uneasy too. The idea that she stood in what amounted to a colonization by a culture that had not only accepted heretical technologies, but embraced them and built upon them. The idea of being surrounded by billions of microscopic machines that were busy reproducing themselves and primed to consume whatever nearby matter they needed to do whatever it was they did-it made her skin crawl.

But evil!

That was a bit much coming from someone who wouldn't even exist without the benefit of someone using similarly heretical technologies five hundred years ago. Someone who had also willingly and knowingly allowed himself to be employed by an AI.

"We stay put until we have a viable exit," she told him.

"You don't understand," Nickolai whispered.

"And you still don't get a vote," Kugara snapped. "You lost the right to have an opinion when you sabotaged the Eclipse's tach-comm. For all I know, you wanted the ship to blow up."

Flynn looked back and forth through the exchange, gripping his shotgun and edging away from Nickolai as if he expected the tiger to try and force the issue.

Kugara wasn't worried. She had spent over half her adult life in the service of Dakota Planetary Security, where she was trained to deal with threats considerably more dangerous than Nickolai. She was confident she could handle him unarmed.

Even if Flynn didn't quite realize what it meant to be a DPS veteran, Nickolai did. He didn't do anything beyond grumble inarticulately in his native tongue. After a few long moments, he asked, "The other lifeboats?"

Kugara shook her head. "Almost certainly caught in the blast."

Nickolai lowered his head and closed his eyes.

Guilt?

Guilt would be an appropriate response for someone who didn't believe that the mass of humanity were Fallen, the walking damned, and thought the AI Mosasa was synonymous with the devil himself.

Kugara looked at Nickolai's downcast face and wondered if it was possible to understand him.

She turned to Flynn and asked, "The people in charge here, are they likely to help us?"

Flynn shook his head, and his laugh had very little humor in it. "The Triad is primarily interested in keeping things from being disruptive."

"A nuclear weapon is pretty damn disruptive."

"I never said I agreed with their reasoning."

"Damn, do these bastards even know about Xi Virginis?"

"I don't know what they know. I've been out of touch ever since this-" He gestured at the crystal walls with his shotgun. "Since this landed."

Kugara was at a loss for what to do. She was stuck with Nickolai on a planet that was actively hostile to offworlders, equipped with nothing but a nearly empty emergency kit, a needlegun, and the clothes on her back. It was tempting to hunker down and stay out of sight, but where would that ever end?

And then there was Xi Virginis, the Eclipse's original destination. Mosasa had hired a crew of mercenaries and scientists to hunt down an anomaly. But even with the resources of an AI, Mosasa had not expected to find the entire star system missing. That had been enough to panic him. The Eclipse had tried to send a tach-comm back to the core of human space, she still remembered the too-human strain in Mosasa's voice: If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it's this. This changes everything.

But Nickolai had sabotaged the tach-comm.

And this crystalline outpost had grown from a probe that had been headed for somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, a probe that had passed too close to whatever had happened to Xi Virginis. Whatever had consumed- and that was the word Flynn had used-the Xi Virginis system had caused severe damage to the probe, leaving only the remains of the AI autopilot to escape to the nearest inhabited star system.

Much as the Eclipse had done ...

"Whatever we do," Kugara said, "our first priority has to be to communicate back."

"How?" Nickolai whispered.

"There's got to be a tach-comm on this planet somewhere." She looked at Flynn. He looked back at her blankly.

"Somewhere?"

There was a subtle shift in the way Flynn held his shotgun. His hips cocked slightly, his eyes narrowed, and his expression lost most of its innocent qualities. "Kugara," he said, and she could tell it was no longer Flynn speaking, "You seriously underestimate how deeply these guys tried to bury themselves."

"Nothing?"

"Well, there were some rumors that they kept a spaceport mothballed-"

"But?"

"We're talking about something that's had a century and a half to crumble apart. Not to mention we're half a continent on the wrong side of Ashley from it."

"You know where it is?" Kugara asked.

Tetsami chuckled. "I was there when we built the place-"

"Tach-ships?" Nickolai asked.