"Rememberer Anton, I cannot protect you anymore-not against threats like this. You must leave Ildira. Go with the King and Queen when they return to Theroc." She cocked her head toward Osira'h and Reyn. "You too, Prince Reynald. You must all go."

CHAPTER.

113.

ORLI COVITZ.

Orli had never felt such despair. After Tom Rom left her in the Proud Mary, she fumbled with the med kit and slapped a pad of coagulant gauze on the inside of her arm where he'd been so rough taking his blood and tissue samples.

Her mind was filled with recriminations. She never should have given him the chance to come near her. She knew that Tom Rom was a relentless extremist, and he had explained what he wanted from her. She should have taken the time to rig her ship for self-destruct when he'd first started to pursue her.

BO and the other clan Reeves compies in the derelict city had been so brave. DD would have been just as brave. The thought of sending a final message to Rlinda, of delivering all that valuable scientific data-those had just been excuses. Excuses! And now that madman was in possession of the deadly alien plague. She had clung to a last few days of life, and now that decision might cost billions of lives if the disease ever got loose.

She hauled herself to the cockpit, barely able to stay on her feet, and collapsed into the pilot chair. She stared across the shadowed crater and watched the lights on the other ship brighten as Tom Rom went back inside with his prize. The stardrive engines glowed, and with a graceful leap the ship lifted from the crater floor and rose away from the asteroid. It ducked over the foreshortened horizon and streaked off, dwindling until it became lost among the other stars.

Orli slumped back, sobbing. Tom Rom was gone. He had vials of the plague. What sort of twisted employer would take such extraordinary actions to obtain a deadly microorganism, if he or she had no intention of using it? A collector?

It was too late.

She heard the outer airlock door activate and the hatch slide aside. Instantly alert, she scrambled for her hand jazer ... but Tom Rom had taken the weapon as well. Orli felt yet another degree of helplessness. But when the inner hatch opened, it was only DD stepping into the main compartment.

The compy looked scuffed and covered with grit from tumbling against the crater wall and then trudging across the loose crater floor. His polymer body was also smudged with soot and charred lubricant from his repair work on the Proud Mary.

She nearly collapsed with relief, and he seemed just as pleased to see her. "Orli, I am so glad that man didn't kill you. I was concerned."

"He didn't need me dead because the plague is going to kill me in another few days. Maybe he left me alive because he knows there's absolutely nothing I can do about him. Bastard!"

She lifted herself from the pilot chair and staggered over to the compy like a little girl seeking comfort. She needed DD like this more often than she wanted to remember, and he had always been there to soothe her. The last time she'd cried on his shoulder was when Matthew had told her he was leaving. Now, that seemed like such a trivial thing to cry about.

Seeing her sway on her feet, DD met her halfway, put his polymer-coated arms around her waist, and hugged her close. Her tears now flowed in full streams. "It's all right, DD. You tried. Don't feel guilty that you couldn't stop him."

"Would this be a good time for me to tell you good news, Orli?" DD said.

She sniffled and laughed, but it was an odd almost hysterical sound. "Yes, now would be a good time for that."

"You instructed me to stop Tom Rom. You told me to find any way. I was not able to fight him physically. So I found another way."

Orli stared at the compy. "What did you do?"

"Earlier, you had me download the full module of starship engine design and principles. While Tom Rom was in here with you, I accessed his ship's engines from outside and made several important modifications to them."

Orli blinked. "You ... sabotaged his ship?"

"According to my context database, 'sabotage' has negative connotations. I believe what I did was a good thing. Once he took off, a silent timer was activated that will build a feedback loop in the exhaust system and pipe the heat back into his ekti-reactor chamber. Once the process begins, he cannot stop it. I believe I succeeded in locking his diagnostic sensors so they will continue to display optimal readings, regardless of the actual measurements. The overload should be well under way by the time he detects anything out of the ordinary."

Orli felt dizzy. Her head pounded, and she hoped she wasn't hallucinating. "What will that do? Will it shut down his engines? Strand him in space?"

"No, Orli, it will cause the engines to explode. His ship and everything aboard will be sterilized. Including the plague vials."

Orli couldn't believe what she had heard. "So the explosion will kill him?"

"That would be the obvious consequence of the ship vaporizing."

"How did your programming even allow you to consider that? Your core routines don't allow you to harm a human."

"It was an extreme conundrum, Orli, but I ran an analysis of the situation. My core programming forbids me to harm a human. These strictures also require that I not allow a human to come to harm through my own inactions. In the end, I was able to apply context. If I allowed Tom Rom to escape with viable samples of a disease that is known to be one hundred percent fatal to human beings, I concluded that my inaction would result in far more deaths than my action would. I did the calculations and I made the proper choice."

Orli went back into her piloting chair and collapsed into it. She felt as if her bones had turned to water.

DD came to stand beside her chair. He looked concerned, even shy. "Did I do a good job, Orli?"

She laughed with relief. "Yes, DD. You did a good job."

CHAPTER.

114.

TOM ROM.

Tom Rom never patted himself on the back to celebrate his own success. He did a job and took satisfaction in his work, glad that he had not let Zoe down. He would never let her be disappointed in him.

After returning to his ship on the crater floor, he stripped off his environment suit and quickly set the glass sample vials in a temporary bin on the counter inside the self-contained isolation chamber. The glass tubes had been sterilized, of course, and he would do the full isolation lockdown during the flight back to Pergamus.

First, though, he had to get away from the asteroid with all possible speed. He didn't trust that woman. There was something about Orli's eyes, the determination on her dying face. She was desperate enough, resourceful enough that she just might do something unexpected. Her ship's damaged engine was dismantled, and once he left the asteroid she couldn't come after him-at least not soon enough to catch him. She had nothing.

And yet ...

He guided his ship out of the asteroid field and set course for Pergamus, where he would make sure that the repairs and upgrades to his ship were completed this time. Back at the research facility, he would happily endure the many hours of successive decontamination procedures so he could spend time with Zoe. Finally, he would stay long enough that they could have a meal together, talk about life, maybe about their past, maybe about their future.

Tom Rom would say little, and even Zoe would keep the conversation to a minimum, but they would be together-just as they had been in their last few years of caring for the dying Adam Alakis at the watchtower station on Vaconda. At least he would provide genuine companionship, a small reminder to help Zoe hold on to her humanity.

When he was safely on course with the autopilot secured, he went into the isolation chamber to inspect the sample vials. Orli Covitz's blood looked as red as any normal blood, but he knew it was swarming with deadly microorganisms, possibly the last specimens of their kind in existence. Zoe and her research teams would be ecstatic. Within a few days he would be back at Pergamus.

The ship sailed on ... but something didn't feel right. He knew the ship's vibration. His instincts were attuned to its lifeblood, its rhythms, the unscientific feel of its systems. He returned to the cockpit and studied the control panels. According to readings from the engines, the exhaust train, the power blocks, the numbers were exactly as expected. Before takeoff, he had done a cursory check out of habit and noted no anomalies.

Now he sat perfectly still, let his eyes fall half closed, and walked backward into his memory, trying to recall precisely what the readings had said. It was an exercise he had learned long ago.

His breaths were shallow, his focus complete, and at last he remembered the numbers. They were exactly the same as what showed now. All of them. Very unlikely. There should have been some variation between takeoff and now, hours later.

He touched fingertips against the control panel, drew deeper breaths as if trying to connect telepathically with his ship. There had been slight differences after the temporary repairs he had made on Vaconda, as if the engines were a fraction out of tune ... but the vibrations felt different and were increasing in intensity.

He pressed his hands flat on the panel and thought he sensed the vibration jumping. The sound of the engines was too loud, but the diagnostic screens read exactly as they should. Exactly-like a textbook. He purged the diagnostics, reset the sensors, and took new readings.

That's when he discovered an overload was imminent.

Automated alarms rattled through the cockpit. He muted them immediately so he could concentrate. The ship's systems were damaged. The exhaust train was dumping massive amounts of thermal energy back into the reactor, and the containment was nearing collapse. Temperature spikes had already caused several systems to fail.

His fingers flew over the controls, trying to shut down or at least reroute the failures, but the ship's controls were nonresponsive. The damage was already too great. The overload was building to critical levels.

His mouth went dry, and he froze with just a moment of indecision, which was completely unlike him. This could not possibly be the result of normal damage.

Sabotage.

Somehow Orli Covitz had rigged an overload in his engines ... but she had never left the Proud Mary. How could she possibly...?

The compy must have done it.

Seconds after understanding what was going wrong, he concluded that he would be unable to stop it. Overload and vaporization would occur in less than two minutes.

Tom Rom disengaged the stardrive, dropping the ship out of lightspeed to increase his chances of survival, then took a moment at the controls to perform a data backup, dumping all his records into the secondary systems. This took fifteen seconds longer than expected, and he watched the thermal spikes.

If his vessel had been fully repaired, the systems might have been stable enough to give him an extra minute, but they were breaking down. When he saw a suddenly increasing gamma cascade, he knew the reactor was failing.

He dove into the isolation chamber. The self-contained compartment would also serve as a lifepod. It was his only chance. He triggered the emergency launch, bypassed all safety systems.

The hatch slammed shut with the speed of a falling guillotine blade. It would have amputated his legs if he had been an instant slower. The explosive bolts severed the connectors from the main ship, flinging hull plates away. Tom Rom threw himself against the wall and held on as the escape engines ignited, launching him like a rock from a catapult.

Then the main ship exploded. The shock wave struck the escape pod like a vicious slap, sending it tumbling. The pod's engines valiantly struggled to outrace the detonation-but they could not. A wash of light, radiation, and high-velocity debris battered the pod.

In theory, the containment chamber's shielding would be sufficient to protect him against the external radiation bath. Even more important, he didn't want the samples of the plague virus to be destroyed by a bombardment of X-rays and gamma radiation.

The pod continued to reel out of control in open space. Disoriented, hand over hand, he pulled himself along until he found the inset control panel and activated the stabilization thrusters. Finally, he turned on the artificial gravity.

Debris inside the escape pod tumbled down to what was now defined as the deck. As weight returned, he felt sharp pains in his body. He had been battered, and he took a moment to touch the sore spots, flex his arms and legs, press against his ribs. Taking inventory. He determined that nothing was, in fact, broken.

The containment chamber had its own short-range stardrive. Once he recalculated his position using navigational interpolation, he could make his way to a nearby system, acquire other transportation. He had planned for emergencies such as this. His ship had everything he needed in the short term, until he could limp back to Pergamus and present Zoe with an extremely valuable item for her collection.

With a start, he recalled that he had left the vials of Orli's blood in the open bin on the counter. Unsecured items had flown in all directions during the buffeting.

He scrounged around, looking for the three vials. He found loose records, an empty specimen pack, then one of the vials, still intact and sealed, which he retrieved and placed in the cabinet where it should have gone in the first place.

Under a tumbled analysis tray and a pair of protective gloves, he found the second vial, also sealed. But the third proved elusive. As the evacuation pod continued to stabilize itself and the automated navigation sensors mapped the stars around him to determine his position, Tom Rom scoured the chamber.

He looked in corners, in between storage and analysis decks. Two rectangular system boxes had shifted apart during the explosion, leaving a narrow gap, and as Tom Rom crouched he saw a glint of the blunt end of a sample tube. He reached into the cranny to pull out the last vial, but when his fingers touched it, he felt the tiny bite of broken glass, a jagged edge.

He pulled the tube out. His fingers were covered with blood-Orli's spilled blood, and his own from a small cut. With a detached analysis that was parsecs away from panic, he realized he was also infected now.

He was going to have much less time to get back to Zoe Alakis than he had expected.

CHAPTER.

115.

EXXOS.

Exxos relished the fact that humans and Ildirans knew they would soon become an extinct species. Impatient, he wished the Shana Rei would simply unfold and strike huge population centers, destroy Ildira and the traitorous Mage-Imperator, crush the human capital, and then methodically wipe out one settlement after another. For the creatures of darkness, it should be as simple as snuffing out candle flames. Extinguishing the clamorous disruption of intelligent life bit by bit would ease their pain.

But the chaotic inkblot creatures chose their own targets and rarely listened to Exxos. The Shana Rei refused to explain why they had chosen to manifest a shadow cloud out here, so far from any known inhabited system. Why worry about a minor industrial outpost, when they could be destroying Ildira instead? What could be interesting about this place?

But when he objected, the pulsing inkblots turned their singular, glowing eyes toward him. "It calls us."

"What calls you?" Exxos asked. "What is here? I demand to know."

The Shana Rei did not answer for a long moment, then the voices echoed around him in the entropy bubble, a thrumming cacophony. "We do not know."

The creatures of darkness had their own goals. They were uncontrollable, unpredictable. Exxos knew that would be problematic once they finished the extended plan to exterminate all intelligent life. What if they reneged on their promise to create a pocket universe for the robots to inhabit and rule? Would the Shana Rei turn against the black robots?

Of course they would.

Exxos and his comrades had already pooled their calculating power. Planning, always planning, they began to consider alternatives for how they might defeat the creatures of darkness. Fortunately, they would have plenty of time. The annihilation of all other life would take time.

As they emerged into the normal universe again, the Shana Rei pulled matter out of nothingness in order to create their hex battleships. The effort caused them enormous agony, as if they were flagellating themselves by creating matter-yet they endured, so they could continue to destroy. A paradox.

When the shadow cloud began its attack on the ekti-extraction field, Exxos and his companions experienced a wrench of disorientation. Then they found themselves on the control decks of their re-created fighting ships. Several of their enhanced war vessels had been destroyed at Plumas, but the Shana Rei simply remade them now, as if nothing had happened.

Individual robots could not be replaced. The memories of those unmade by the Shana Rei were already lost, but the stored experiences of the remaining ones could be duplicated and shared. As their numbers dwindled, Exxos commanded that all of his companions act as backup for one another, with himself as a primary repository of their existence. He designated himself as the baseline entity.

Now the gigantic hex ships emerged from the cloud. Even Exxos did not know what sort of weapons the ebony vessels possessed. They projected an entropic field that disrupted or destroyed technological systems, but that was a passive weapon. He hoped the Shana Rei would cease to be passive.

When the attack began, Exxos commanded the newly manifested robot ships to launch out and destroy, but he was curious to discover what had drawn the Shana Rei to this particular place. He had to understand, had to stay one step ahead of the creatures of darkness, if he intended to continue his bluff.

He observed the island of strange nodules, the flurry of human activity, bright facilities and equipment that drifted among the cluster. Not impressive. The human population here would be small, and Exxos would annihilate them easily-another wasteful exercise, not sufficiently important, in his opinion, to merit the effort. If the Shana Rei suffered so to create their ships for this particular attack, why would they consider the tiny outpost a worthwhile target?

What was here?

He had never seen anything like the strange nodules, an odd anomaly, and the humans were exploiting them somehow. The operations had drained and discarded hundreds of the sacks, while continuing to work on the hundreds that remained.

The ebony Shana Rei ships hung over the largest complex, but did not move, as if something caused them to hesitate. The creatures of darkness didn't attack, even though the human ships flurried in a seemingly disorganized evacuation. Many were escaping, but the Shana Rei did not seem concerned.

Knowing he couldn't count on the shadow creatures to do what was necessary, Exxos transmitted an order to his robots. "Commence full attack!" Like a flock of black vultures, they streaked into the industrial complex.