Date: 2526.7.30 (Standard) Earth - Sol "In twelve hours you must choose what God you serve."

Adam's message repeated, in every language, and on every broadcast frequency used on Earth. Cardinal Anderson stood in the papal apartments realizing that they had reached the limits of what they could do, what the Church could do. They couldn't even communicate with anyone outside the Vatican. Adam's message wasn't just an ultimatum, but it effectively blocked almost all other communications.

The few communications channels that weren't blocked were disabled by the secondary effects of Adam's announcement. He had no news from the wider world, but he had seen the teeming throng in St. Peter's Square, and he had seen columns of smoke rising from Rome's skyline.

"God help us all," he said as he turned from the armored window.

The pope stood by the doorway and said, "Pray that we have acted as God wished."

"I am concerned for your safety," Cardinal Anderson said. "It is close to a riot out there."

"If I am in danger, it is not from the people in the square, and I won't be saved merely by hiding in my apartments. If all I can do is give comfort to those in reach of my voice, I will do so."

"Yes, Your Holiness."

"Perhaps you should see to Mr. Dacham."

Cardinal Anderson nodded as the pope left to give what might be his last Mass.

What might be the last Mass, period.

Date: 2526.7.30 (Standard) 10 AU from Earth - Sol Rebecca Tsoravitch retained a physical presence on the Voice even as her spirit trailed behind Adam to see the full extent of his invasion. Along with her followed the silent ghost of Tjaele Mosasa. Even though her perception was limited by the speed of light, it was vast and she saw more clearly than she had even during the approach to Khamsin.

She knew she was exceptional, even among Adam's host. Few had graduated from fleshy biology to a distributed existence as quickly and as thoroughly as her. The only precedent she had to compare herself to was the original Mosasa, himself, integrating his mind, like a virus, into all of Adam's chosen.

Perhaps that was why Mosasa's AI embodiment chose her in the first place. Perhaps her human self bore some kinship with his. Or perhaps her spirit had absorbed more of Mosasa than others.

Whatever the case, all of Adam's minions whose origins were rooted to the flesh limited themselves in space and time. All felt a need to enforce a boundary between themselves and the rest of the universe, however porous that boundary became. She found herself able to slide her awareness to the limits of Adam's reach. The whole network of thinking machines that formed the cloud drifting insystem ahead of the Voice was open to her eyes and her thoughts. And, if she chose not to be subtle, her actions.

Fortunately, while Adam could see with the entire array of the cloud, he cared little about what his chosen cared to look upon, as long as they followed his direction without question.

She was one of a few entities aware enough to have seen the consequences of questioning Adam. He was not a merciful God. Those who chose his path saw many sins forgiven-but one. Questioning or disobedience was met with instantaneous nonexistence. All of Adam's followers dwelled in a network of matter and information that was, in large part, Adam himself. Should he will it, any of his millions would cease to exist. Already thousands had, some for balking at purging the unbelievers from Khamsin, some for questioning Adam's divine purpose, some for simply asking "Why?" at the wrong time.

It seemed to her that as Adam's sphere grew and his followers multiplied, he grew harsher, more inflexible. Even his words changed with each new world.

To the people of Salmagundi he had said, "I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods."

To Khamsin, he had said, "I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Worship me and you will become as gods yourselves."

To Earth, he was saying, "I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Worship me or become as dust."

Even those who had come to Adam's fold completely willingly, like those liberated from the Hall of Minds to meld seamlessly into Adam's distributed mind, had begun to move and act tentatively, the silent miasma of fear almost as real as the cloud itself.

To her it wasn't unfamiliar. She had grown up under the Jokul Autocracy. She lived well under a government just as draconian about questioning and disobedience as Adam. She policed the data streams under a regime where every citizen knew that every word and act was scrutinized for subversion, and their lives were lived subject to the whims of any anonymous bureaucrat that might take offense to them.

So the caution she saw evolving under Adam's rule was very familiar. As was Adam himself. She also knew how to survive under such authority: Never assume that you weren't being watched. Never voice your dissent. Consume all the information available. And keep constant watch for a potential escape route.

Whatever Adam wreaked upon the rest of the world, her priority was survival. Even as he slaughtered billions, she would unapologetically be on the side of the survivors. Even when it meant being his avatar, walking the surface of the Earth harvesting souls for a god she didn't remotely believe in.

She did not expect a challenge to Adam's omnipotence to come as soon as it did.

The first sign was buried in data the cloud had collected before their arrival. She hadn't accessed it, being more intent on seeing what was happening in real time around the Voice as the conventional armada spread out to engage the few military vessels moving against them in a complicated dance of acceleration vectors that slowly took them in tactical range of each other's weapons.

But as the first missiles were fired, she noticed stars being occluded and felt the gravitational ripples of very dense mass approaching from insystem. Sensing that through the sensors of the cloud, she rolled back those perceptions through time, backtracking the trails of unusual mass to the fourth planet in the system. Focusing on Mars with the past eye of the cloud, she saw the surface of the planet dotted by tall black spires reaching from the surface all the way into low orbit and beyond.

The spires had launched something into space.

Many somethings.

Her attention snapped back to real time as a million-kilometer radius sphere of the cloud ceased to exist. She felt it as if a clawed hand tore out a chunk of her brain, and a limb to go along with it. Her thoughts had spread out along the whole cloud in an effort to make herself less vulnerable. But something was attacking the cloud itself.

She pulled back as more vast holes were plucked out of the cloud, each hitting her like a physical blow. Even as she withdrew, and holes tore through her awareness of the universe outside the Voice, she saw what was happening.

Thousands of dense ovoid objects, only meters across, were flying through space toward them. The first wave was reaching the cloud, and as they did, they released a flash of energy that tore apart the material of the cloud on a molecular level. Each flash erased thousands of Adam's followers less diffuse than she was, and rendered inert large swaths of the cloud.

Then she coalesced herself back into her physical presence on the Voice. Once again, she found herself surprised by her own breathing and the race of her pulse, though this time she was aware of it and stopped her physical body's reactions from running away from her.

She glanced around the prosaic cabin in the Voice with her own body's eyes and wondered what she was going to do if Adam was really threatened.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

Special Dispensation.

"Even if you expect change, the change is not what you expect."

-The Cynic's Book of Wisdom "Naught endures but change."

- LUDWIG BOERNE.

(1786-1837).

Date: 2526.7.30 (Standard).

1,750,000 km from Bakunin - BD+501725.

"I speak now to all peoples, all faiths, all creeds." The words echoed through the cockpit of the Daedalus, Mallory stood between Captain Valentine and the elder Stavros while Valentine's sister operated the communications console. Floating in the display before her was the image of His Holiness Pope Stephen XII. "I bear a dire warning for all of mankind."

Mallory looked into the pope's eyes, feeling a surreal displacement from where he was. So much had happened since he had taught university at Occisis, it felt like another universe.

"Nearly two hundred years ago, when the old Terran Confederacy was collapsing, an unknown number of colonists left the known limits of human space. They formed several colonies orbiting stars in the vicinity of Xi Virginis, eighty light-years past the boundaries of the Confederacy. After nearly two centuries of isolation, we have received contact from them."

The video switched and Mallory heard audible gasps from the others in the cockpit as the holo transmission filled with his own face. "I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory." Mallory looked at himself, haggard and gaunt in the image. It deepened the sense of displacement he felt. "I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship Eclipse, which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis." It slowly sank in that his tach comm had made it. Despite Adam's efforts, a transmission had slipped through. The evil could be beaten. It was possible.

The pope himself must have come to the same conclusion, if the Vatican was retransmitting it. On the screen Mallory said, "The Caliphate has forces here, but the attack is coming from a third party, an entity identifying itself as Adam."

The transmission cut back to the pope who said, "The Caliphate sent the most advanced military fleets to these colony worlds. Carriers with hundreds of ships and tachyon drives that can move as fast as this data transmission. But they did not succeed in annexing these colonies, because they did not face a conventional adversary. They faced the Adversary."

The image cut again, to somewhere not immediately familiar. A man in a Caliphate military uniform with a colonel's lapel pips spoke Arabic into a shaky camera. The pontiff's voice narrated. "This transmission arrived on Earth less than twelve hours ago. It originated from Khamsin, the capital of the Eridani Caliphate, a planet with over five billion people, only ten and a half light-years from Earth. What you are seeing happened four days ago."

Mallory did a quick calculation in his head and decided that the transmission from Khamsin was now nine or ten days old. He couldn't turn away from the transmission, even though he knew what was going to happen. He knew it even before he saw the sky burning with the trails of millions of objects entering the atmosphere.

Both sisters said quietly, "What is that?"

"Adam," Mallory responded. "It is Adam coming to Khamsin like he came to Salmagundi."

On the screen, the dropships-Mallory didn't have a better name for the huge teardrops of molten metal-tore apart a distant urban horizon. Glowing tendrils reached from the teardrops to consume the city. Then the image was of a mass of people thrown to the ground by the force of a nearby impact.

Stavros muttered something in Greek that might have been a curse or a prayer. Mallory counted the rosary in his head. The Valentine sisters simply said, "Shit."

Adam walked into view, glowing, larger than life, speaking Arabic to the fallen people before him. Wails of whipping tendrils surrounded the crowd. A wounded old man bent his head, as if to pray, and one of the tendrils tore the man inside out before consuming him. The crowd panicked, but there was nowhere to run, and the tendrils took everyone, man, woman, and child.

The holo faded to black before the image of the pontiff returned.

"For centuries," the pope continued, "all human society has recognized three basic evils. Religious or secular, we have not tolerated any experiments in these Heretical Technologies: Self-replicating Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and the genetic engineering of sapient beings. Each brings its own unique dangers, and each has been responsible for the loss of countless lives over the past five hundred years. For five hundred years we have seen these things, in and of themselves, as anathema. But evil does not reside in matter, in knowledge, in science. Evil lives in the heart. It lives in the soul. It is our choice to follow a moral framework we acknowledge as outside ourselves, or descend to one written to accommodate our own petty desires, our hubris, our narcissism, our solipsism, our nihilism."

The pope looked out of the holo as if he were trying to force his will through the intervening light-years. "You have seen the works of the entity calling itself Adam. Adam represents the ultimate fear that drove us all to reject those Heretical Technologies. Adam is the temptation we tried to deny ourselves, power without any restraint or moral consideration. Adam represents the antithesis of humanity, the Adversary of every single faith, creed, or philosophy."

"How can you fight that?" Stavros whispered. "How can anyone fight something like that?"

"We have seen Evil, and it is not in the tools Adam uses. It is not in the technology. The Evil is Adam itself. The Evil that places any inhabitant of this universe on the level of its creator. The Evil is rule based on the whim of a would-be god. The Evil is in cancerous belief that would deny existence to any that do not adhere to it. Because of this, and with the authority God grants me and the Church, I herby grant absolution for all those who have used Heretical Technologies, and their progeny-specifically, the Proteans and their kin-who chose to follow the laws of God and man. Any who rise up now to resist this evil have my blessing and that of the Church."

"That is how you fight something like this," Mallory said.

God help us all, he thought.

Parvi knew about the Vatican's transmission before anyone from the Daedalus bothered to tell her. She was in the cockpit of the dropship, running last-minute diagnostics for the launch less than six hours away now.

While she worked, and shortly after the Vatican's tach-comm started repeating through Bakunin's star system, the comm array on the Khalid began lighting up. Not with the Vatican's message, but with sudden new interest in Mallory's upstart navy.

After the first hundred queries queued up in less than a minute, Parvi knew something was up. Once she read a couple of messages, she knew what it was.

She made her way across into the Daedalus, and entered the cockpit just as the pope's message was ending. Parvi broke the silence that followed by saying, "It looks as if you're getting your navy, Mallory."

One of the two Valentines said, "What do you mean?"

"Have you been paying attention to incoming queries while you were watching this?"

The Valentine by the console switched displays and showed a comm more active than the one on the Khalid. "Five hundred queries?"

"You were in that transmission," Parvi asked Mallory, "weren't you?"

"Yes, they got the tach-comm from Salmagundi."

"I think you're going to be very popular all of a sudden," Parvi said.

"Eight hundred queries, now."

The command staff met about thirty minutes later. They had just reviewed the Vatican's holo again, and to Parvi, the atmosphere in the cargo hold seemed to contain equal parts dread and optimism.

When the holo ended, Toni said, "The last numbers I have from Beth have a little under a thousand new vessels expressing interest in following Mallory's defense."

The Caliphate representative spoke, "W-We need to discuss what we are going to ask of them. H-How- " His voice choked up. Parvi felt for the man; she had felt the same sense of dislocation when Rubai fell. It had been intense enough that most of her comrades at the time had fought the Caliphate less out of duty than out of denial. How could the regime you were raised in, that you fought for, just one day cease to exist?

She had watched the colonel on the holo and saw in his eyes the familiar denial as the sky fell down around him. She saw it in Mallory's eyes, in the eyes of the stuttering Caliphate tech: the desperate clinging to the idea that there was something out there left for them to fight for.

The Salmagundi representative placed a hand on the man's shoulder, nodding in agreement. "We have a fleet," he said, "but we have few resources. Do we just wait for Adam to arrive? Can we negotiate with Proudhon to establish a base of operations? Force the issue with them?"

Mallory shook his head, "We can talk to the PSDC, but if they're recalcitrant I don't want to take any action that would damage their defensive position. Their orbital defenses will be the last line against Adam."

"Can they defend against what we've just seen?"

"The sheer mass of it..." The Caliphate representative trailed off.

"That might be the key here," Toni said. "Our point of attack."

"What do you mean?" Mallory asked.

"Mass," Toni said. "You described a ring fully around a planet. Enough vehicles entering the atmosphere to blot out the sky. This is a lot bigger than the super-carrier you were talking about."

"Yes?"

"Basic logistics question: where did the enemy forces come from?"

"You have an idea?" Parvi asked.

"There's only three choices," Toni said. "One, Adam uses his nanotech wizardry to re-purpose the mass he finds insystem when he arrives. I don't think that's likely given the time frames we're talking about. It's also bad strategy, leaving his forces vulnerable for at least a few hours before his attack is at full strength. Second, the attackers tach insystem full force all at once. This is probably technically possible for him, but requires a hellacious amount of energy-"

Parvi shook her head, "Adam took out the entire wormhole network, as far as we can tell. Is energy really a problem for him?"

"That attack consumed an entire star," Mallory said.

Toni nodded, "And if you track the path of the attack, it was precisely timed, and begun decades ago, hitting close to simultaneously. If Adam's resources were truly unlimited, he would be attacking every inhabited planet simultaneously as well. It is obvious from the Vatican's message that he didn't even attempt Earth and Khamsin at the same time."

Mallory nodded. "He's building his strength. With control of the Voice he could approach any Caliphate planet without an immediate challenge. He will only leave the Caliphate when he thinks he has the resources to defeat any possible opposition."

"You said three choices," Parvi said, fearing the answer.

"The most likely option," Toni said, "is that the bulk of Adam's force is already here."

"How can that be possible?" asked the Caliphate representative. "Perhaps Adam might close on Khamsin with a stolen spacecraft, but how could such a force arrive with no warning?"

"No," Toni said, "we had a massive warning that was impossible to ignore. So massive, that it obscured their arrival."