Alternatives

Maria

The child Dara was not severely injured by her experience in the tunnel, and was sent back to her father after only an hour in Caliente City's medical center. The man, an agricultural specialist from Caliente's garden center, was quite angry with the situation, but he was unable to blame the Ghosts for what had happened to his child.

"These things have been happening ever since my wife died," he informed Icey in the medical center. "She's been breaking things. When she's upset she'll walk by something and it'll blow up. She... frequently suffers injury from these happenings."

Icey, who had suffered a rather nasty blow to the head during the incident, nodded in agreement, wincing as pain shot through his banged-up skull. "Her psi rating is nearly on par with mine..."

The man's interest sharpened. "Are you saying she's going to become a Ghost?"

Del, holding Icey's hand, shook her head. "To become a Ghost requires more than just the psi factor. There's be a million of us if that was all it was... Maria believes that our energy fields are organized differently from most people's, that we are able to have conscious, deliberate control over zero-point energy."

"I'm not a physicist," the man said flatly.

Maria came into the room, limping slightly as she traversed the distance from the door to the slab of stone that was the room's bed. "According to various interpretations of the place of human consciousness in the universe," she said in a quiet voice, "There is an infinite store of energy that permeates the entire universe at the submicron level. This is usually called the Planck energy, or zero-point energy. It is believed by some that human minds, rather than inhabiting the brain, exist as distortions of this energy field. Thus, those who have the right interface between physicality and the zero-point would be able to do things that would otherwise seem impossible."

"I see."

"The psi factor is a natural occurrence. It usually manifests as a subconscious awareness of one's own energy field, and sometimes as a subconscious ability to control said field."

"I see. So that's Dara's gift."

"Curse, more likely," Del muttered.

"Perhaps. I believe she will eventually gain conscious realization of these abilities, but I doubt she will ever be actually able to control them."

"Then what's the good of it?" the man said bitterly.

Maria shrugged. "Perhaps there isn't any. I don't know. I don't know either if these ghost manifestations are her doing, or if they sought her out because of her psi rating, or even if they will happen again... with more lethal result." Maria sighed. "I don't think so, but I cannot say for certain."

"So she could suffer another attack?" the man demanded, surging to his feet.

"She is still at risk," Maria said quietly. "She probably will be for the rest of her life."

"Can't you do something?"

"If we could, we already would have," Icey said quietly. "But not even knowing the cause of the first attack, how can we prevent a second?"

The man looked at him angrily, then got to his feet and stalked toward the door. "Then I'm wasting my time here." He turned and glared at Maria. "Don't let me catch you anywhere around my daughter again," he said coldly, and left,

Maria bowed her head. "As you wish," she said to the closing door.

"Maria, this isn't your fault," Icey said. "You're the one who saved her."

She gazed at him for a moment, shook her head. "Who will save her next time?"

-----

Maria played a nine of Shade to steal the biggest stack on the table. The stack consisted of eight cards of various suits, and had a total value higher than all the other stacks combined. Maria had waited for the Icey (playing Light) to place his eight there, and now was far and away winning the game.

At the next card draw, an Essence card came up. Annoyingly, it was the Sun, Light's Essence. Maria rolled her eyes disgustedly as Altas began removing all the cards from the table, wiping everything-- including Maria's lead-- clean.

"Here we go again," Del muttered, dropping a five of Life from her hand to the table. Paradigm was quite a frustrating game. Every time one of the four Essence cards came up, the playing field was wiped. One knew that the cards held in hand were the important part of the game, but there was no way to tell when the Essences would come up so planning was difficult. Usually the game was played by tallying the score at each shift, and the winner for each got one point while the winner at the end of the game got three points. That way, there was meaning to the game other than just who won the feeding frenzy when the last Essence was spent.

Maria countered the Life with a six of Shade, stealing the stack and gaining thirty points. Icey played a three, a four, and a five of Light, and Altas played a six of Death on the five, and a seven on Maria's stack, giving him two hundred and forty points. The next card was an eight of Shade, which Maria took and used to steal the pile back, giving her 1470 points. Icey grimaced; he was out of cards and there wasn't anything he could do until a Light popped up.

The next card was an Essence card: Life's Rose. Del stared at it, her eyes widened in distress, and set her cards down with shaking hands. "Love..." Icey began, but she ignored him and left the room quickly.

Maria stared after her. "I yield," she muttered, throwing her hand face down on the table. "Excuse me."

Altas and Icey shook their heads and returned to the game. Altas noted that Del's hand would have won her the game easily.

Maria entered the corridor to find Del gone. This was surprising, as there was no opening for dozens of meters and there was no way the other woman could have gotten that far in such a short time. "Del?" she called. The only response was the faint echo of her own voice.

Maria took off at a run northward, toward the bend in the corridor twenty meters away. She reached the bend and took the forty-five degree turn to northeastward, and stopped dead as she saw Del rolled up in a ball on the floor, huddled against the wall. Maria stood over her, with eyes narrowed sadly.

"I'm going to kill somebody..." Del said brokenly. "They took it from me and I'm going to kill them..."

"Kill who?" Maria asked levelly.

"The damned Fantasmans," Del cried. "They took my garden."

Maria understood. "Ah..."

"They said there was a, a bomb or something, hundreds of yeas ago. I should have been there. Why wasn't I there to stop it?" Del demanded in a loud voice, surging to her feet. "Why did I-"

Maria held up a hand for silence, and Del obeyed, despite her distress. "You were somewhere else you needed to be," Maria said reasonably. "You cannot fault yourself. Really, you cannot fault the Fantasmans either, since no one alive had anything to do with your garden."

"Don't you understand? My garden's dead!"

"Make a new one." Maria took Del's shoulder and studied her calmly. "If Death wins, surrender then wait for a rematch. That's what Life does. Besides, you still have your rose." Del began to cry, and Maria instantly saw that she had made a mistake. "Gone too, is it?" Maria said sympathetically.

"Everything is gone!" Del cried. "It's all dead, as if I'd never even brought it life!"

"Del... life does not last forever. The only way it can is for it to be reborn. Go tell the Fantasmans you're creating a new garden. Fill the entire city with it. But the old one is gone."

Del stopped crying, sniffled a bit. "But my rose..."

"You will plant new ones." Maria patted her shoulder, and took her arm. "Come. Let's finish the game."

"But I wanted the old roses..."

Maria studied her for a moment, brushing the edge of her thoughts, and she understood. Delithita herself didn't, but Maria knew what she had to do. "You'll get them," Maria said quietly.

-----

Much to the chagrin of the local authorities, Maria disappeared that evening, and of all the outgoing traffic the TCC tracked, no vehicle left with unaccounted-for passengers. The chief of security questioned the other Ghosts, not quite believing them when they said they didn't know either.

Something was wrong with the other Ghosts... or at least with Delithita. Maria frowned deeply as she studied the mirror on the wall. There was no image of herself in the mirror, nor of many of the items in the room. Mirrors did not reflect things that were not in the same universe as the mirror.

She looked up. Somewhere, fifty, sixty kilometers above in the hard, glazed rock sheets of the Caloris Basin, Caliente City sat beneath a blazing sun and flickering yellow auroras. But she knew that if she were to hold up a mirror, a true mirror and not one created from this incorrect universe, she would see little of the city there.

Something had happened. Something bad. And she knew it was all Del's fault.

Maria turned to look at the new Sanctum. It was a half-dome about twenty meters in diameter. Set into the corners, flat walls extended up about two meters, cutting off the rim of the dome. Wrapped around the Sanctum were rows of mirrors, and hanging like an unearthly chandelier a five-meter-wide spherical singularity slowly spun in the center of the room. She knew that the average human standing in the Sanctum would immediately become disoriented and probably start vomiting, It would be worse if they looked at the mirrored surface of the singularity. She'd tested that one; she pointed a small camera at the sphere, and the control interface immediately overloaded.

The floor and ceiling of the Sanctum were of dark, red-brown stone, a more iron-rich matrix than most parts of Mercury. The sparkle of crystalline iron shined dimly in the light of the singularity, the only light in the chamber. Looking at the outside ring of mirrors one saw the blackness of the subterranean chamber, the light from the singularity, and the red of the stone, simultaneously reflected and re-reflected from a near-infinite number of angles. It was unnerving, to say the least... especially when Maria called up a representation in the singularity, as she did now.

The Heartworlds, the fifteen inhabited planets in five systems, stared back at her with gold and red light. Her mind unable to consider the trillion rereflections of the five stars in the mirrors around her, she focused on the singularity itself, letting it fill her mind to the exclusion of all else.

The Heartworlds spun before her. The five stars were in closer proximity to each other than most, possibly the result of the subtle pull of the area's jumpgate. The farthest of the Heartworlds, the Waver system, was only three light years away. The next nearest stars were a trio of M-class red dwarves some eleven light years away, out of range of the singularity's current viewpoint.

She studied the center star, Mercury's Stardream, and shook her head. It was wrong. It was putting out a lot more light than it should be for this date, perhaps five percent more. There was a flare going on that shouldn't be.

Other things were wrong with the picture. The other planet in the system, Serenity, had suffered a minor storm in the northern hemisphere, which it should not have. The southern hemisphere was calmer than it should have been. The dust in orbit around the planet's reforming inner moon had the wrong spokes in its pattern.

And on Mercury, Fantasma City was calm, peaceful, and undamaged.

Something should have happened here. Delithita should have done something stupid. She should have found her rose, in the wrong place, and killed a few Brotherhood fighters. There should have been an explosion severe enough to rupture some of the city's buildings, and even now Del should have fled Mercury.

But something was wrong in Fantasma. Something had prevented the universe from flowing in the proper direction.

The bubble contracted, zooming in on Mercury's golden crescent. Mercury had cities now, and unlike those of Earth and other worlds, there were few small sprinkles of light in between. Mercury's nightside was a sheet of blackness with a number of randomly placed, fat dots of gold light. The only major road, the Transmercurian Highway, was a thin, glittering thread wrapping around the planet in a U-shape. It disappeared into the brilliance of the dayside, where Caliente currently was sitting beneath the blazing sun.

The field of view shrank again, and this time the lights of Fantasma filled the chamber. Three cities in one, Fantasma had the original underground, the half-sunburst protruding from the base of the cliff on the western plain, and a full spider web several kilometers across on the scarp's jagged top. It was the inside she was interested in right now, and she watched as the singularity flashed through the rocks in a blur of brown and black.

She came to a hollow in the rock, and found her target sitting on the bed in her quarters holding an ancient, stringed instrument. The haunting cry of the bow on the strings echoed through the singularity, and Maria bowed her head. Such pain in the music, from a soul that had forgotten pain or any other emotion. The woman had no appreciation for the beauty of her own work, and she knew it. It would hurt her even more if she could feel the futility of her efforts rather than just knowing it rationally.

The singularity caught on the tip of the bow and the woman stopped playing. She frowned at the instrument, wondering what it was that had stopped her.

“Estri...” Maria said quietly, and the other woman blinked and began to methodically search her room for another presence. “Estri? Can you hear me?”

“I do not speak to hallucinations,” the woman said bluntly, and began to play again.

Maria grimaced, and allowed the singularity to expand on the other end, letting Estri look back at her, into the Sanctum. She stopped playing immediately and set the instrument down as she stared into the distortion hovering a few centimeters above her floor. “This is no hallucination,” Maria said. “Step through.”

“I don't think so...”

“Step through at once!” Maria said in a commanding tone, and the other unwillingly obeyed.

Maria stepped back as Estri came through the singularity and flew past her at rather high speed. Maria wasn't able to dampen the delta v as much as she would have liked. Fortunately, the primary component of the velocity difference was the rotation of Mercury, which was very slow as planets go, so Estri only suffered a shock equivalent to a two-meter fall. “Sorry about that,” Maria murmured, extending a hand to help Estri up.

“Ghost Wolfe,” Estri noted. “What is this place?”

“Call me Maria. And this is the Ghosts' Sanctum. You visited one of these back in Fantasma.”

Estri looked around, unaffected by the nausea most would suffer. She studied her reflection, in which every part of her image was reflected from every part of the mirror. “The other was crude, but more hospitable...”

Maria smiled. “Only Ghosts ever enter the Sanctums, and we don't get nauseous that easily.”

Estri turned to her, and had no problem picking out the real Maria from the reflected ones. “I am not a Ghost.”

Maria looked up at the singularity, shrugged, and muttered to herself “This place needs chairs” as she flipped upside-down, tossed herself into the air, and came to rest sitting-upside-down-on the bottom of the singularity. She regarded Estri with her chin on her hands and her elbows on her knees, with perfect calm despite their odd relative positions. “And what makes you say that?”

Estri looked at her.

“Besides the fact you have not yet learned how to play with gravity,” Maria amended.

“I am not one of you. How could I be? I have none of the... odd abilities you people do.”

“Do you think I took my naps hanging from lightglobes when I was a baby?” Maria said reasonably.

Estri did not reply. “Why do you think I'm a Ghost?”

Maria sighed, waved one hand at the singularity, which had reverted to its view of the Heartworlds. The five stars were all rippling with distortions of spacetime, their light alternately red-shifting and blue-shifting. “Because you are destroying the universe.”

-----

“Del, Icey, Altas, meet Estri.”

Estri regarded the other Ghosts impassively as Maria gestured to each in turn. The others had changed little more than she had over the centuries, and she began charting the slight differences as she studied them. Icey weighed more and fine lines surrounded his eyes. Delithita had tattoos she had not possessed the last time Estri had seen her, and she had faint streaks of gray on her temples. These were obviously affected, since her face and body were identical. Altas was completely unchanged.

“Estri!” Icey said. “I remember you. You were in Maria's Sanctum back in... what was it, the year of the Shift.”

“I was.”

“She is also the first to see the new Sanctum,” Maria said with a nod. Icey's interest sharpened, and Del stiffened. Altas turned to study Estri with new interest.

“She's a Ghost?”

“Yes, Icey...”

Del immediately extended a hand to Estri with an angry expression. Maria looked away. Estri raised an eyebrow at the extended hand but made no move to take it.

“Take it, Estri,” Maria murmured.

Estri obeyed, stiffening as the she felt the shock of Del's anger firsthand. It was like a wave of burning red light, ripping through her flesh and circuits with equal fury, demanding access and examination of the minutest details of her being. When it was over, Del released her hand with considerably less force than she had taken it with and mumbled an apology.

Estri shuddered as she backed away. “They had to know,” Maria said quietly. Estri didn't respond. She was too busy trying to control her trembling. Icey moved to support her as she staggered, and through his touch she felt concern and the offer of comfort, which she grasped onto desperately. Maria was beside her, her hands clasped behind her back, regarding the trembling woman with the faintest of smiles. Altas seemed to be studying her with his infrared sensors; his eyes were narrowed.

“A Changeling,” he said with faint surprise.

Estri stood up straight and let go of Icey's arm, taking a deep breath. For the first time in centuries she had remembered what it was like to feel something. Tears sparkled in her eyes, magnifying the tiny spirals of sensor elements there, as she stepped back and dropped to one knee. Words came to her, words she had spoken to the Pack once upon a time, words that she said in a voice that shook with feeling. “If my service is of use to you, my sword, my honor, and my life are yours.”

-----

"What do you mean by 'destroying the universe'?" Del snapped sometime later in the Sanctum. Maria regarded the singularity, now displaying an image of the entire Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, plus whatever pieces of the Orion, Perseus, and Centaurus that poked into the edges of the image.

Maria turned to Del, silhouetted against the light of the Scorpius-Centaurus Association. "This universe is wrong," Maria said.

"Well I knew that much," Del muttered. "But why?"

The singularity zoomed in on the innermost edge of the Arm, toward a region of space dense with excited-medium clouds. "This is where the other end of our Web axis is located," Maria said. "It is nearby to the Sagittarius OB-four Association."

"I know that," Del said. The indicated location was at the centerward edge of the Tribes Frontier, some nine thousand light years from the Heartworlds and six thousand light years from the Empire. The region was rich in newm, hot blue stars, and was surrounded by various other associations and nebulae. The singularity shifted and other levels were revealed, including the intricate threads of the Hyperweb.

"This should be the only axis that connects to the Heartworlds. Unfortunately..."

Del stiffened. "You mean it isn't?"

"Unfortunately no." She gestured to another axis, and while the first passed through the Arm at an angle from Sag-OB4 to northwest to the Heartworlds to southeast, this other axis extended due west from the Heartworlds to a point twelve thousand light years away. "Cygnus-Stardream Axis. Unfortunately, this axis is supposed to be shifted four degrees in the X-Y, where it would not approach the Heartworlds closer than five hundred light years. Instead, it comes out within the boundaries of the Stardream system itself. Close enough, indeed, that a ship emerging from our end would be able to spot and recognize Mercury."

"But that area on the other end, the Cygnus region. It's two thousand light years past the Frontier and stuck in a good-sized tangle. No one would ever find that."

Maria sighed. "You would think not. Observe." The singularity zoomed in on the glittering thread from near the Heartworlds' end, and began sliding westward along it. Five thousand light years along, it stopped... revealing a small tangle of other axes attached to Cygnus-Stardream. "That node there," Maria said into Del's horrified silence, "is the problem. There are four other threads in that tangle. Two go to various points in Tribes space. One is in Imperial space." Del scowled. "And one is in Blood Eagle territory."

"And you say these aren't supposed to be here?"

"Correct. Only the Sagittarius-Stardream axis belongs here. The Cygnus axis should not be connecting the Heartworlds and the rest of human space."

"So why don't we fix it?" Del asked reasonably, but Maria immediately got a horrified look on her face and waved emphatically at the singularity.

"No! We must not alter the Hyperweb! It exists on too many different levels of reality for us to tamper with it. It is complex enough that any change here will do severe damage to the entire web... and the millions who travel it."

"Then what altered it in the first place?"

Maria stared into the singularity blankly for a moment. "The Hyperweb's structure is determined by gravitational and other force balances... as long as it's been active, no dimensional shears could have catastrophically altered the Web or it would have... torn, I guess you would say."

"Then how do you know this isn't how it's supposed to be?"

Maria sighed. "I can occasionally predict the future, as you know. Recently I predicted some events that did not happen, and as the time for the events passed, I got a feeling of wrongness."

"Such as?"

Maria opened her mouth to speak, but Icey and Altas popped through the singularity and landed nearby. "Don't mind us; we're just eavesdropping," Icey said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the mirrors on the outside of the room.

Maria nodded. "About a week ago, you, Del, should have been attacked by three Immortal Brotherhood members."

"I'd've kicked their asses," Del said with a snort, but Maria shook her head.

"You have no idea of their true capabilities," Maria said levelly. "Altas brought up a good point last week. They've been harvesting the neurotransmitters and other brain tissue of some of the ghost victims, to amplify their latent psi abilities."

Altas's interest sharpened. "That was conjecture," he said.

Maria nodded. "I have found it to be the truth. For several days later according to the other timeline, call it 3500b, an Immortal formerly of the Imperial Knights, now an independent Web explorer, blundered into the Sagittarius jumpgate. He and his Cybrid companion escaped us and reached the Mercurian surface, whereby he engaged us in battle... in his Minotaur."

Icey grunted. "So our vehicles still have some use?" Each of them still had some of their old HERCs and tanks stashed away in various locations on Mercury. The weapons that went with them were protected by forcefields, in case some well-meaning cops decided they were unnecessary and confiscated them.

"Yes. He fought three of us, and gave a good fight. We captured him and took him to what was left of Fantasma after Del destroyed half of it--" at this the other woman blinked-- "and at his debriefing, he provided us with information about an Imperial project to incorporate psi abilities into organomech brains..."

"Which is why the Brotherhood had been chasing after you," Altas said with a short nod. "At last it makes some sense."

"The project occurred on Earth, and the Knight had been a test subject. Petresun sent the Brotherhood after me because he knew I already had such abilities and wanted to use me as a control in his experiments. The Brotherhood members that came to Mercury already had the preliminary alterations made to their neurostructure, and he believed they would be able to easily capture me." Maria gave an ironic grin. "That was a miscalculation."

"But now they have been able to enhance their abilities by using stolen brain tissue--"

"Thus becoming a threat to us. All told, I estimate there are about fifteen of them on Mercury, and they are well the equal of those of us Ghosts that are on Mercury."

"So what happened?" Del demanded. "In this timeline you're talking about?"

"They fought us to a total stalemate," Maria said flatly. "Neither of us were able to inflict any kind of damage on the other... so they decided to fight dirty."

"Do they ever fight any other way?"

Maria grimaced. "Seeing that our defenses were too strong to breach, they incited the Mercurian population into a civil war. A bloody one."

"What?" Icey demanded. Del looked ready to kill something, and even Altas's impassive face managed to look horrified.

"They wanted us to go to the aid of the Mercurian population and thus weaken our resistance to their assaults."

"Did we?"

Maria shrugged. "I do not know. That timeline closed to me shortly after the beginning of the war, which was yesterday if the dates mean anything. And Del, there is something else you should know. When the Brotherhood first attacked you... they lured you to them with your rose."

Del blinked out of existance, blinked back in wearing full armor, carrying more weapons than a quad needed much less one person. Her face was suffused with blood and her eyes flashed red light. "They die," she announced, and disappeared.

Maria shook her head. "She will not be able to find them," she said quietly to Icey and Altas. "They hide too well. And as for the rose..."

The singularity shifted, revealing a darkened storage room somewhere on Level Five of Fantasma. Rows of shelves colored the flashing violet of active stasis fields filled the chamber. The singularity zoomed into a small cubicle on the top shelf, where a transparent cube caught the light of the stasis fields and threw it back. Maria reached into the singularity and withdrew the cube, her hands crackling as she reached through the stasis field (something the average human would die attempting.) She pulled the cube free of the singularity with a slight ripple in the air of the Sanctum, and held it in her two cupped hands.

"This thing carries more of Del's power than Del herself does," Maria murmured. "I can feel her essence in this rose as though she were standing next to me." Icey nodded, reaching out a hand to touch the box carefully. Maria held the cube in one hand and lifted it. With the sound of an explosion, the box exploded into a shower of splinters and preservative fluid, and rained down onto the floor of the Sanctum. Icey drew back in horror, but Maria just shook her head and held the naked rose up to the light of the singularity. She squeezed the stem with a quick motion, and moved the flower to her other hand as a drop of blood welled up from the thorn's puncture. She held that hand over the rose, and a drop of the golden, quicksilvery fluid dripped onto the rose's blossom. When it touched, it quickly spread out in a sheet of mirrorlike gold and enveloped the flower and its stem entirely, turning first translucent, then transparent. Maria touched the blossom, and when her finger met the transparent barrier of light, a fireball erupted from the point of contact. Satisfied, Maria nodded and flicked the rose into the singularity. "Though the universe itself should perish in flame, that rose at least will never be touched."

The flower tumbled through black space speckled with widely-dispersed stars, growing ever smaller against the black backdrop. Altas examined the star field with his telescopic lens, raising an eyebrow. "Those are not stars, they are galaxies."

"Yes," Maria said. "That's a Void, some hundred million light years in diameter."

Icey nodded, impressed. Voids, one of the largest structures in the universe, would forever hold the category of the Most Lonely Place in the cosmos. There might be one or two galaxies in some of the Voids; the rest was pure emptiness where only occasional strands of dark matter disturbed the purity of the vacuum. One could not contemplate the Voids without a certain feeling of awe, and even Altas did not seem immune.

Maria turned to Icey. "You have not developed your powers to your greatest potential," she said. "But now you will... because you are going to be the one to give Del her rose back when the time comes."

Icey blinked. Maria smiled.

Del reentered the room in a flash of light, hurling her sword with such force it was embedded to the hilt in the stone of the dome above the Sanctum. "Cowards," she spat. "My rose. Where is it?!"

"Icey is keeping it safe for you," Maria said. Del blinked, her rage forgotten, and looked at her beloved. He smiled faintly. She went to him and threw her arms around him.

"In the other timeline," Maria said quietly. "Things were pretty bad."

"Then why do you keep saying that this one is destroying the universe?" Del asked.

Maria looked at the singularity, which had changed focus to display the Heartworlds again, then looked at Del and Icey. Altas watched with interest as a quicksilver tear flowed from Maria's eye, tracing a slow path down her cheek before falling through the air and vanishing with a sparkle of light. "Because," she said in a whisper. "I have seen the future of this one."

-----

Tycho sizzled an oath at his pursuers as he sent full power to the warp drives of his small vessel, the Lootin' Pillage, doing his damndest to shake some of the best pilots the Diamond Sword's space force had to offer. He'd thought to expand their repertoire of confusing and annoying conundrums with a few pearls of his own, but they had not seemed interested... or amused by his effrontery. They didn't seem to understand that their mysterious "Master" had been a good bud of his back in the day, and also didn't realize that said bud had sent him on this task to begin with. While he tried to convince one of the new Masters that "A stitch in time had better have one damned careful tailor" and "The alcohol of the Deep End beats meditation any day" were useful tidbits to meditate on, his other pet project was underway, and at least that one had succeeded, thus explaining the Sworders' current rage.

Strategy was all well and good when one knew what was really going on, and fortunately for Tycho, the Sworders not only didn't, but they thought they did. Tycho's diversionary force, a set of disposable Blood Eagle shock troops he'd paid (don't even ask) had failed in their mission as intended, but they had taken the Sworders' eyes off their main compound on 1238 Sagittarius C-II long enough for him to drop in his secret weapon to do the real dirty work.

Tycho's secret weapon muttered something about not getting paid enough for this kind of work from the chair next to him, the copilot's chair. Tycho turned and looked into eyes that matched his own, shrugged helplessly. The double tapped a control, sending the vector calculations over to Tycho's console, and he instantly plotted a new course.

"Sorry, bud, bedtime," Tycho said, and blinked a few times as he drew the double back into himself. The moment's disorientation from remembering two different versions of his last half hour quickly passed, and he plotted yet another course, one that seemed suicidal and could very well turn out that way if he wasn't very, very careful.

The Lootin' decelerated into the waiting maw of the Diamond Sword formation, and tractor beams immediately snared the ship in a spider web of green beams. "Sword Leader Estef Glor orders your immediate surrender," a calm, female voice said.

"Tell her I said hi and that I'll swing by to have a chat when I have a spare minute," Tycho retorted, and activated his own tractor beams.

Unlike most ships which carried one or two tractor emitters, the Lootin' carried twelve arranged in a radial pattern around the ship's belly. All systems went dead as the massive drain sucked power from weapons, engines, life support, and every other system the ship could think of. A web of tractor beams grew from the vessel, latching onto the threat ships before they could deactivate their own tractors to compensate for the extra acceleration. The ships began to drift inward toward Lootin', and as their beams winked out, Tycho shifted power away from his tractors to the main engines, blasting a random course away from the enemy ships as they banged into each other with just enough speed to hurt but not destroy.

Free at last, Tycho activated the jumpgate spindles, twisting some of the Hyperweb's energy around the ship to facilitate passage through the network. And then he set a course home.

-----

"Contact at the jumpgate," Altas reported as the blaring alarm sounded in the lower reaches of Fantasma. He was there with Del and Maria, looking for traces of Brotherhood activities, when the lights began flashing red. Maria blinked; she was surprised no one had ever deprogrammed the colony's emergency protocols.

Maria waved a hand and the jumpgate appeared as an image in a tiny, glittering singularity. "Seems to be a heavily modified Imperial courier with some extra reactor space," Maria noted. Her gaze shifted to the black script on the silver bow, matched on the array of spindles that were now folding into the main hull as the vessel converted to sublight mode. "Who is that? Maria to Icey," she said into the singularity, sending a thread of light through the outer edge of the disturbance in the hope Icey would notice it and open his end of the contact. He did, blinking blearily at Maria.

"You never sleep do you?"

"Monthly, at least," Maria retorted. "Check this--"

"Tycho," Icey said.

Maria's eyebrows lifted. "Oh really! Excellent."

"He was running an errand for me. Disposing of some camera footage I didn't need to have enter Diamond Sword records."

Maria nodded. "So it was you after all."

Icey shrugged. "They're the sanest of the Tribes. Maybe someday they'll spread the sanity around and infect the others. And you aren't too inactive with the Tribes yourself, remember?"

Maria grimaced as the image of an arctic wolf entered her mind, accompanied by images of slaughter, truce, and eventual peace on a barren, icy world. "That was fifty years ago, and I've not influenced them in any way since then. They could have kept better records; they chose not to."

"Well the Sworders did, and I had to get rid of them. Someday I plan to meet up with them again, and it wouldn't be such a hot idea for them to remember me, huh?"

"I suppose not..."

Maria generated another string, this time pointing it into the cockpit chamber of Tycho's vessel. "Hello old friend," Maria said. "Heave to at one million klicks and we'll see how to slip you past traffic control."

"Hey Maria. How fares Mercury?"

"'Rock bottomed and copper sheathed,'" Maria quoted from some literature even she had forgotten the origin of. Tycho grinned.

"Screw Traffic," Tycho said. "Widen that wormhole so I can fit my fat gut through it."

Maria smiled and did so, and Tycho jumped through the portal to land at the base of the opposite wall. As he had been when their paths had last crossed, he was not fat but bearish. His moustache and beard he had allowed to grow salt-and-pepper, and with his hearty, roaring voice, coolant-stained coveralls, and overstuffed tool belt, he fit the bill of an old Scot engineer. This was an accurate enough of an affection, but misleading. Tycho was far more than a tinker.

"How many of me can you stuff in here?" Tycho said, laughing as another laughing Tycho appeared some two meters to his left. Maria raised an eyebrow at that translucent Tycho, and at the one who appeared to the original's left. The two spares went over to Icey and Altas and performed the relevant greetings while the central Tycho took Maria aside and said quietly, "I hear there's some trouble going on here."

Maria's quicksilver blood ran cold in her veins. "And whom," she said softly, emphasizing each word, "Did you hear this from?"

"The news on one of the Blood Eagle planets."

Maria sighed deeply. "And things were going so well," she said, her voice tinged with bitter irony.

-----

A tiny cluster of laser beams struck a microscopic cube of compressed, metallic hydrogen and the fires of Hell lit the two-centimeter-diameter chamber with the energies of a gamma-ray burst. A microsecond later, the combination of deuterium and tritium that resulted was ejected through a small hole in the chamber, compressed by finely-tuned magnetic fields, and rammed at high velocity into a second chamber.

In this chamber, more lasers, these fed partly from the energy of the first reaction, struck the microscopic ball of plasma, and the hydrogen isotopes became helium as their protons and neutrons were reshuffled. From this reaction was derived the energy to accelerate the plasma, now at temperatures of over ten million kelvins, through a mass driver whose magnetic fields compressed the plasma still farther...

With a release of energy that made the first two look miniscule by comparison, the ultradense gob of plasma struck a similar gob approaching down the mass driver's tube from the other direction. Nuclei slammed into each other and stuck, giving off gamma radiation that heated the interior of the driver to almost a hundred million kelvins just by radiative heating. The heat was absorbed all along the walls of the tube, and electrons were driven along en masse down the circuit that formed the ancient Apocalypse's main reactor core.

The electrons were fed into a chamber of superheated carbon (much of which came from the products from the final fusion reaction) where their energies were incorporated into the plasma's matrix for future use. A bare quarter of a second after the first laser pulse, the energy matrix reached its activation energy of ten megaJoules and began feeding its power into the metal and ceramic superconductive matrix of the vehicle.

A bit of this energy squeezed through a bank of semiconductors and monofilament computer matrices, pulsed along a series of printed, hardwired, and virtual-gate circuits and activated a chunk of electroptic receptor chemicals on the back of a transparent grid of similar receptors. The words “REACTION STABLE” blinked into existence there, and the vehicle's pilot smiled faintly.

Six hundred years and the vehicle was still battleworthy.

Energy flowed into new systems now: the main electronic countermeasures suite, the weapons, the engine and leg flexor controls. Maria activated the first of these, and several hundred kilojoules of energy became a convincing representation of solar static. The vehicle's white paint, blatant though it was visually, had a spectrum that fooled many sensors into thinking it was a particularly agile and rapidly-moving chunk of the local rock. The radio emissions from the vehicle were completely hidden under a blanket of interference that anyone not expecting her would interpret as a slightly enhanced background noise resulting from reradiation from the surrounding stone.

The visual element, the gigantic cross-section of white glare moving at some one hundred ten kilometers per hour, was annoying, but Maria was well used to it. That was what crater rims, crevasses, and ridges were for.

The vehicle's legs shrieked as metal infiltrated by centuries of micrometeoroid impacts ground against other elements of the vehicle's structure. She felt an instant of dismay, which immediately passed as the sound ceased when the vehicle began to walk slowly forward. The dust was shaken loose from the paint and powdered rock that covered the hull, and the vehicle's motion was as smooth as ever.

Maria triangulated off the sun, which was located on the northeastern horizon. At this high southern latitude, the sun never raised more than thirty degrees off the horizon, and the current position of the sun was almost directly in the direction she needed to go. She looked aside as the sunlight blazed into the transparent cockpit, as she turned the vehicle toward the rising sun and gunned the engines for the maximum speed the valiant old vehicle could sustain.

-----

Izabella was plying her trade as usual, and as usual she was doing well at it. One could have asked some of her customers and associates, but that would have been futile as the customers were not exactly forthcoming with their information, and the associates were rather incapable of testifying to Iza's skill, being dead.

Iza cleaned off the thin stiletto that had until a few seconds ago been embedded in the nasal cavity of her latest contract. It was too bad that said contract had tried to betray her trust and pay her too low a price for her skills. Of course, it was not too bad for Iza, after she had managed to... convince him to open his Imperial Bank account to her credit programs. Iza's credit bots were some of the best she'd ever seen (she and Altas had worked hard on them) and the fake accounts that they regularly set up on scores of Imperial planets were as elusive as the Ghosts themselves. Ghost money, she called it; money that somehow managed to stay hidden out of sight despite the Imperial Bank's constant banksphere purges and searches. Only once in a hundred years had one of Iza's accounts been intercepted by a bankbot, and the flaming destruction of that particular file testified to the functioning of Altas's failsafes. Just in case one of the accounts was noticed and infiltrated, Iza's central systems were dispersed through the computer networks of Earth, Delta Pavonis IV, 6378 Arae XII, and a number of less-populated worlds on the frontier.

Iza supposed the current Emperor might have more total credits at his disposal than she did, but she wasn't exactly sure whether she ranked in the top five or only the top twenty of the wealthiest humans in the Galaxy. Unfortunately, whatever her exact ranking, Delta Pav's Wall Street Journal would never list her in that prestigious roster of the rich'n'filthy.

It was too bad. She worked hard for her money.

She stuck the stiletto's tapered hilt into her sleeve where she could easily flick her arm and toss it with a quick burst of telekinesis, and wrapped the black veil around her face. Perhaps no one she ever encountered would know she was a Ghost or even what a Ghost was, but it paid to be careful, as the scar on her chin reminded her. That had occurred when, after a successful stalk and strike, she had stepped too close to her quarry before he was entirely dead. This was odd enough; her patented kinetically-accelerated-bladed-object-through-the-nasal-passage-into-the-brainstem attack was usually instantly fatal, and she had yet to see the armor or shield that could turn aside ten centimeters of electrically-charged neutronium traveling at a few hundred thousand kilometers per hour, and she had yet to see a person who found such a strike anything but The Ultimate Bad Thing, but there it was. The target had not been human, rather a Bioderm. Killing said Bioderm had alerted her to the presence of individuals that were structurally different from humans, and since they were all different from each other as well, she was uncertain how exactly to strike them to kill them as efficiently as she did humans.

That, then, was what the ten centimeters of burnished steel on her right forearm was for: rather than accelerating a small, solid object, she would point the weapon at her target and slam a droplet of her blood through the zero-point, where it came out the other end as an unstoppable spray of cee-fractional blood cells and water molecules. A two-meter spread of pure kinetic energy was enough to ruin even a Bioderm's day.

Her ship, the unarmed Silent Strike, was waiting at the docking port a block above the apartment complex that had witnessed the last will and testament of Commodore Rinch Selvus, late of the Imperial Navy, later of the Blood Eagle, last of all of the dead. She took the elevator to the port and waved a hand in front of the airlock, showing no reaction when the ship's computer opened the door for her rather than blasting her to bloody fragments like it would have anyone else. Iza noted with dispassion that some other poor fool had tried to access her ship, and how afoul he ran of the security system was evidenced by the diameter of spread of his various components and fluids on the deck. Iza's mocking sign, “Knock before entering,” blinked in silver letters on the airlock's manual control panel, and she smirked slightly.

The ship's power core whined to life instantly when she waved her hand in a particular pattern as she walked down the short corridor to the control room, the only actual room on the vessel. She entered the room and sat on the couch with a sigh as she watched the planet recede to a blue speck in the background.

Something was drawing her, she decided, as the ship entered the multicolored energy vortex of the local jumpgate. She gestured to a point on the wall, telling her ship's computer to pay attention to her, and then simply pointed in the direction she wanted her vessel to go upon leaving the gate. The Cygnus-Stardream Knot lay in that direction, a confusing tangle of anomalous threads of the Hyperweb. Beyond that lay the main axis of the C-S, and the Heartworlds.

The last time she had seen Mercury, there had been no Heartworlds. She had left in 2900, some time after Maria and Del had removed her implant with some careful surgery. She had missed two wars and countless people she would have been only too happy to assassinate, frozen in cryogenic suspension for sixty-six years. Annoyingly, her fellow Ghosts had not decided to make good use of her skills despite the obvious market for them, and after awhile she had wandered away. Del had encountered her briefly about ten years ago and filled her in on the latest goings-on in the Ghosts' region of space, and set her up with Altas.

It was Maria's idea, Altas told her later. The Ghosts needed some money in the Imperial and Tribal systems, and Iza's second-favorite pastime was tying whatever banks were nearby in knots... and siphoning off whatever surplus got tangled in the knots. Altas already had several accounts for the Ghosts (he rarely had any use for money of his own, being more of the bartering and looting sort than the mercantile) so he'd asked Iza to help him expand the assets.

Iza, whose art collection back on her home world of Delta Pavonis VI was worth about fifteen billion Imperial credits or maybe five billion scarps, was a good example of her rather useless possessions. She couldn't take it with her when she went anywhere, and she couldn't sell too many pieces of it without a visit from the cops, so she squirreled it away underground with the intention of keeping it for a couple thousand years and re-releasing it into the market of whatever groups still existed by that time. Her collection of HERCs was similar; these she kept on a Starwolf planet with whose leader she had an... understanding. She'd spent some fifteen billion scarps purchasing every antique HERC (and matching accessories) she could find in the Empire, restoring them and putting them in mothballs for future use. The Starwolf leader knew that if she tried to take any of the HERCs off BV-7 Virgonis IX, the entire lot of them would blow up and make an unpretty dent in the planet, so she just held onto them and used them to slaughter whatever Blood Eagle morons happened to drop in on them. The fools seemed to think the planet was worth losing whole legions to MFAC fire every couple months, and while BeeVee-Seven-Vee was richer in rare earths and other interesting elements than any other planet for hundreds of lightyears, nothing was worth that kind of loss.

But the Eagles always seemed to be born with more brawn than brains. And Iza was perfectly content knowing that her little collection was being put to good use...

Delithita did not seem to have much use for the Eagles either, and regularly visited destruction upon those of their planets that were close to the Cygnus-Stardream Tangle's three intersecting threads. Iza wouldn't mind having some fun there either, and she had made a note to go seek out some BE leaders and introduce them to fast-moving projectiles sometime. They had a warrant out for her arrest on murder charges (big surprise) and actually had the gall to think she would surrender at her last port-of-call in their space. She demonstrated this error by driving the Strike clean through one of their space stations at point-eight cee, parking in the center of the expanding cloud of debris, and launching a variant of her accelerated blood-cloud at the planet itself. A few tonnes of miscellaneous garbage was not too potent of a weapon until it was accelerated to relativistic velocities. While she normally did not engage in mass destruction, her assault on that particular base had been worth quite a few million credits.

Iza broke off her musings as the ship's alarm sounded: she fired the main engines with a quick gesture, and strained her kinetic abilities to the utmost as she tried to drag the vessel out of the sudden snarl in the Hyperweb's matrix. Grim determination warred with alarm and she let out a curse. The ship was not responding. It was as if her kinetic abilities were being ignored entirely.

The ship had not yet shaken apart, but Iza knew that could happen in a second if the snarl led to a major vortex or dimensional shear. She had heard of such things, even tricked the occasional opponent into flying into them, but they were rare enough and well-charted enough that falling into them in civilized spaces was unheard of. But here it was.

Another ship appeared suddenly, and it seemed to also be trapped in the snarl. Cascades of energy of every color of the spectrum from radio to x-ray lashed out over the crackling shield perimeter of the other ship. Iza fought to latch a tractor beam onto the other, but the terrible distortions of the local continuum bent her tractor beam like a piece of wet spaghetti.

”Get out, save yourself Iza,” a female voice, maddeningly familiar, crackled over the static-washed comm system.

Iza stared at the other ship, wondering just who out here could possibly know her name, her real name, not one of the thousand randomly generated ones she fed to people she had dealings with on the planets she worked on. Her eyes narrowed as the ship's computer began to remove distortions from the image on the viewscreen, bringing up a simulation of what the other ship would look like without being tangled in an arcing shield and wavering threads of space-time distortion.

Written on the bow was Mirror Dance, and Iza knew she had heard that name somewhere. Del had mentioned it...

She figured it out just as the other identified herself. ”Xena here. I'm stuck here and I hope you don't get too close. You might be able to...” There was a long, pregnant pause. ”Cancel that... you're trapped too.”

“Xena? Fellow Ghost? Lady Logic?”

A snort. ”Right. I've been stuck in this snarl for three years... and I have been unable to find any way to get out.”

“Great...” Iza muttered. “Just great.”

-----

Fantasma City had grown around the old Fantasma Colony, and while it was certainly very massive and filled an impressive volume of both rock and vacuum, it had not extended very far down from the top of the scarp. More levels were added under the existing colony, certainly, and three hundred meters or more of tunnels and chambers underlies the entire surface city, but below that there was nothing but rock.

Thus, it was no surprise to Maria to find that the main tunnel she had dug from a point several kilometers north of the colony, through the scarp, and into the bottom chamber of her Sanctum, was untouched. She rolled aside the heavy stone door by winching it to the HERC's leg, and closed it behind her in the same manner. Only the faint navigation lights on the HERC's nose illuminated the black tunnel, and it extended into an invisible distance only fifty meters ahead.

She carefully navigated the slopes, moving slowly enough the HERC would not disturb the rock and give the Fantasmans the opportunity to catch her on seismic sensors. She took half an hour to reach the Sanctum's basement and plug in the HERC's impressive computer system to her old one.

The basement computer had been massive, fast, and complex, and no one had ever known it was there to disconnect it from the Fantasma main network. They believed that the standby proxy chits the thing shot into the network on a regular basis came from the Sanctum itself, and the computer system there was very small and limited. Certainly it wasn't much of a security threat.

Maria ran a quick scan through the HERC's computer and the main computer that served as a net proxy. She was astonished when her carefully-crafted worm found what it was looking for.

The Immortal Brotherhood's primary record keeping was attached to MercNet!

This was insane, even if the proxy that connected their archives was durable and smart enough to keep out unauthorized access. The worm splattered against the proxy's defenses and Maria quickly sent a confuser worm to the proxy, to give it the idea that the attempted access was being done from a personal computer on Level Twelve. The proxy sent a rather vicious torrent of code back through the link, but the machine she was using was configured far differently from a PC and the attack did nothing.

She sent back a false code chunk suggesting that the target computer had been reduced to a chattering scrap heap talking backwards algorithms to itself, and the proxy grunted in computerized satisfaction and set to its own business again.

She sent another worm, this one configured by the basement system to respond to the proxy's own protocols. The failed attack would have smoked any computer if it had been coded right, but as it was it only told the basement system just how to work the proxy to its own advantage. The HERC's enhanced systems whined as they absorbed gigachapters of data from the suddenly cooperative proxy, shutting down just in time two seconds later as the enemy computer screamed with rage and smashed back.

The basement system was quickly reduced to a chattering scrap heap talking backwards algorithms to itself, and Maria felt a pang of regret as the system exploded into a shower of sparking metal.

Time to go.

She gunned the Apoc's engine and charged back up the tunnel at maximum speed, taking the entire length in only a few seconds. She blinked as the vehicle came into the sunlight again.

The vehicle ran due south along the Road for several kilometers and she opened a singularity in the windshield of the cockpit as her proximity alarm beeped. An instant later, the singularity expanded with a convulsive gulp, and the cityscape disappeared to be replaced by barren rock somewhere in the southern hemisphere. She had deliberately selected a random emergence point, and since she hadn't even known where she was going, the Brotherhood certainly couldn't have.

She brought the vehicle to a stop in the center of a deep crater, checked her suit, and jumped out. It would take days for a satellite to locate a single human somewhere on Mercury, and she began popping decoy singularities all over the southern hemisphere. There were now about thirty different Marias traversing the planet, and she had no intention of the Brotherhood identifying which was which before she got back to Caliente.

The real Maria turned northwestward and began to run, and all over the planet, her wraiths began running in random directions toward various other cities.

She was glad, damned glad, that her new body did not get tired easily...

-----

Back in Caliente, Maria studied Stryker's journals with a shaking of her head. He had glimpsed the truth... but only glimpsed. Some of the conclusions he had come to were simply wrong. The special interface that the Ghosts and apparently certain Brotherhood members had that granted them access to the higher dimensions were indeed natural... but they had nothing to do with trauma, and certainly the human race would not be "evolving" into Ghosts.

Evolution did not even work in a technological society. Those with survival advantages passed on their genes with little greater frequency than those that, in a non-technological society, would simply die. Natural selection no longer applied. Even social evolution had nothing to do with natural selection anymore, barring obliteration of an entire culture through warfare or other disaster.

Maria sighed as she read Stryker's estimation of her arrogance, and the Ghosts' ignorance of others of their kind. Stryker did not realize, it seemed, just how much data Maria had on them. His self-congratulatory air as he discussed all the intelligence he had gathered on the Ghosts notwithstanding, he had no idea what he was up against.

He was completely unaware of Maria's singularities, it seemed, unaware that she now had the exact location of the Brotherhood headquarters and data on the precise powers each of them possessed. With a sad sigh she perused said data and formulated a singularity near the large one hanging over the Sanctum.

Maria hated wanton destruction, hated civilian casualties even more, but there was no other option.

Icey, watching her read through the data on the screen, cleared his throat and she turned a portion of her attention to him without turning around. "I agree with your decision entirely," he informed her.

Maria knew that this was true... and that he was forcing her conscience to play devil's advocate. Her plan would obliterate the Brotherhood threat once and for all... at the expense of about two million civilians in Fantasma. Nothing could excuse such slaughter... Maria felt tears burning her eyes. They would call her Bloody Maria the Destroyer after this... and two million people...

Icey put a hand on your shoulder, and she shoved it off angrily. Comfort? Not even the friendship of her Ghosts could offer her that now. Nothing could erase the guilt of what she was about to do.*

She shut down the console and it vanished as she stood and stared at the second, smaller singularity. "You must leave now," Maria said softly.

"No," Icey said firmly, and even as Maria began trying to teleport him out, a barrier formed and Maria was unable to effect the transfer.

"Damnit Ice... Isn't the price high enough?"

He shrugged. "Once upon a time, back in that old hideout in Ibsen, I vowed to defend your life before my own. I stand by that vow."

"No, Ice..."

The barrier blazed brilliant blue as Maria renewed her attempt to penetrate it. She tried going back in time to before it was created, through the zero-point that sustained it, even tried to join with the barrier to wrest control away from him. Nothing worked. Each attempt was foiled by a careful sidestep before she had really even begun. Icey knew her too well.

"Begin it, Maria," Icey said quietly, gesturing to the singularity that displayed the interior of the Brotherhood's level in Fantasma. Maria gave him a stricken look, tears pouring from her eyes.

"I can't do this..."

"You must."

And he was right. She had already determined that, despite all the arguments with herself she had had. And she knew that if she were to go through the process again she would arrive at the same answer.

The singularity began to drift upward toward the larger singularity in the center of the Sanctum. Quickly, before they knew what was happening, those few Brotherhood members who were not in Fantasma appeared in the mirrored sphere and were dropped into the base in a tangled of swearing bodies.

Maria could not watch. The singularity, its path set, continued to rise slowly. Her eyes instead found Icey's, and he gave her a small smile. Reaching out desperately with her consciousness she infiltrated his, determined to take him along.

"Goodbye, my friend." The words sounded in her soul as a wrenching pressure assaulted her and she was torn away from him.

"No!" she cried, as the singularity touched the mirrored surface of the larger one and the universe was filled with blinding, infinite white light...

-----

Altas and Delithita were arguing as usual. Their ideas of music were not extremely compatible, and while Ajax was attempting to mediate, he was not doing a very good job of it.

"What's this eight-note crap you're doing anyway?" Del demanded. "Blasted Western music is so bland. I like the composition but why not expand it a bit?"

"It is the traditional--"

"Argh, tradition. I thought you were composing music--"

"Madam Delithita, perhaps you might be interested in--"

Del didn't hear. Altas watched in confusion as Del froze like a statue, and her mouth worked without sound. "What's wrong? Del?"

"Icey," Del whispered. And then she screamed.

-----

Maria was laying on the surface of some planet with a pale yellow sky and a sulfur-stinking atmosphere. But she didn't notice. The shadow of Icey that she held within her mind smiled faintly, and then vanished, leaving her grasping at an essence that no longer existed.

She could not call her time shifting abilities into play, and her tears distracted her and she was unable even to generate a singularity. Trying to delay her inevitable breakdown for as long as possible, she studied the star, reading its red-orange spectrum's finest lines and identifying the star as one of the shell twenty light years from the Heartworlds.

She began to cry.

At the edge of her awareness, the echo of a distant cry sounded in her mind, but she barely cared..

-----

Altas could not move, could not hear, could not even think as the terrible wail blistered the aether around him. He sent himself into emergency shutdown, or at least tried. Even that escape was denied him.

After a long, long time, the cry faded away, and when he could focus again Del was gone, and the chamber was filled with a terrible, echoing silence.

He searched the zero-point for traces that would tell him where Del had vanished to... and with growing horror he discovered that there weren't any.

She hadn't teleported anywhere.

She was gone.

With this realization he sat down heavily on the chair in front of the piano and began to play a piece in the high minors.

"What's this one titled?" Ajax said a moment later as he began recording and storing the piece in his archive.

"Grief," Altas whispered, and shut off all his processes except those that created the music.

-----

Date: 10 November 3500

"It's been three weeks since the scream that echoed through every city in the Heartworlds, that which was associated with the deaths of Ghost Delithita and Ghost Icey, and the disappearance of Ghost Wolfe. The destruction of Fantasma that immediately preceded the scream seems to have been total, and the search for survivors was officially terminated this morning.

"Scanning in the area is very difficult, the result of the intense infusion of energy in the rocks surrounding the fifty-kilometer crater. The leak of radiation to the Core has been contained with a set of absorbing forcefields and heavy metals that plugged the lifts between the Core and the surface. Traffic has naturally been limited to the accessways between the South Core and Brandenburg, and even that has been light because of the siege mentality the Underworlders have taken.

"The sudden acceleration of the ghost attacks in the surface cities has led to a complete severance between the Underworlders and the surface, except for the city of Brandenburg that seems somehow unaffected by the disturbances. Elsewhere, the death toll continues to rise. At last count, approximately fifty-eight thousand urban residents have been found dead, mostly in the cities of Caliente, Overlook, and Fur Elise.

"The destruction of the Heartworlds Council and the sudden severance of the primary communications links between the systems has led the new Interim council on Magneto to declare a state of federation-wide emergency.

"The last Ghost known to be extant on Mercury, Altas, surrendered to authorities two hours after the scream was heard and offered a tentative explanation of events, including the destruction of Fantasma and points north. The preliminary reports from the MercNet investigations conducted by Brandenburg security experts seems to verify his account. One must wonder how terrible the Immortal Brotherhood threat must have been for Ghost Wolfe to deem it necessary to visit such destruction upon this planet to save us from them.

"This will be the last report from Caliente NewsNet until the cause of the accelerated attacks is determined and eradicated. The surface of Mercury is being evacuated to the moons of Serenity as we speak. Altas is attempting to contact his fellow Ghosts in the hopes that they can end the plague, but to date, he has not been successful.

"This is Caliente NewsNet President Melis Dixi, reporting from Caloris Evac Center, signing off..."

-----

Beneath the concealing shroud of a beginning dust storm on the desert planet, beneath the large red star known as CZ-236, Maria stood and gazed into the sulfurous skies uncaring of the blowing dust and grit burning her eyes.

Soon enough one of the Ghosts would find her and insist she go somewhere, do something, return to the land of the living. She did not particularly care; neither did she care that it could be years, decades, until she was found.

She didn't care. In the meantime, she wept.

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