“Good luck. I want you to try and turn this against her. They’ll be out there watching. Any chance you can detect them first?”

“We’ll certainly try.” He squinted at the industrial stations circling around High Angel, a slim sparkling silver bracelet against the starfield. “I heard about Ellezelin.”

“Yeah. Digby didn’t have any options. ANA is sending a forensic team. If they can work out what Chatfield was carrying, we might be able to haul the Accelerators into court before you reach the Ocisens.”

“I don’t think so. But I have some news for you.”

“Yes?”

“The Lindau has left the Hanko system.”

“Where is it heading?”

“That’s the interesting thing. As far as I can make out, they’re flying to the Spike.”

“The Spike? Are you sure?”

“That’s a projection of their current course. It’s held steady for seven hours now.”

“But that … No.”

“Why not?” Kazimir asked, obscurely amused by the investigator’s reaction.

“I simply don’t believe that Ozzie would intervene in the Commonwealth again, not like this. And he’d certainly never employ someone like Aaron.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that one. But there are other humans in the Spike.”

“Yes, there are. Care to name one?”

Kazimir gave up. “So what’s Ozzie’s connection?”

“I can’t think.”

“The Lindau isn’t flying as fast as it’s capable of. It probably got damaged on Hanko. You could easily get to the Spike ahead of them or even intercept.”

“Tempting, but I’m not going to risk it. I’ve wasted far too much time on my personal obsession already. I can’t risk another wild-goose chase at this point.”

“All right. Well, I’m going to be occupied for the next few days. If it’s a real emergency, you can contact me.”

“Thank you. My priority now has got to be securing the Second Dreamer.”

“Good luck with that.”

“And you, Kazimir. Godspeed.”

“Thank you.” He remained by the window for several seconds after he’d closed the link to Paula, then activated his biononic field interface function, which meshed with the navy’s T-sphere. He teleported to the wormhole terminus orbiting outside the gigantic alien arkship and through that emerged into the Kerensk terminus. One more teleport jump, and he was inside Hevelius Island, one of Earth’s T-sphere stations, floating seventy kilometers above the South Pacific.

“Ready,” he told ANA:Governance.

ANA opened the restricted wormhole to Proxima Centauri, four point three light-years away, and Kazimir stepped through. The Alpha Centauri system had been a big disappointment when Ozzie and Nigel opened their very first long-range wormhole there in 2053. Given that the binary, composed of G- and K-class stars and planets, had already been detected by standard astronomical procedures, everyone had fervently hoped to find a human-congruent world. There weren’t any. But given that they had successfully proved wormholes could be established across interstellar distances, Ozzie and Nigel went on to secure additional funding for the company that would rapidly evolve into Compression Space Transport and establish the Commonwealth. Nobody ever went back to Alpha Centauri, and nobody had ever even been to Proxima Centauri; with its small M-class star, it was never going to have an H-congruent planet. That made it the perfect location for ANA to construct and base the “deterrence fleet.”

Kazimir materialized at the center of a simple transparent dome measuring two kilometers across at the base. It was a tiny blister on the surface of a barren, airless planet, orbiting fifty million kilometers out from the diminutive red dwarf. Gravity was about two-thirds standard. Low hills all around created a rumpled horizon, the gray-brown regolith splashed a dreary maroon by Proxima’s ineffectual radiance.

His feet were standing on what appeared to be dull gray metal. When he tried to focus on the featureless surface, it twisted away, as if there were something separating his boot soles from the physical structure. His biononic field scan function revealed massive forces starting to stir around him, rising up out of the strange floor.

“Are you ready?” ANA:Governance asked.

Kazimir gritted his teeth. “Do it.”

As Kazimir had assured both Gore and Paula, the deterrence fleet was no bluff. It represented the peak of ANA’s technological ability and was at least a match for the ships of the warrior Raiel. However, he did concede that calling it a fleet was a slight exaggeration.

The problem, inevitably, was who to trust with such an enormous array of firepower. The more crew involved, the greater the chance of misuse or leakage to a faction. Ironically, the technology itself provided the answer. It required only a single controlling consciousness. ANA declined to assume command on ethical grounds, refusing to ascend to essential omnipotence. Therefore, the task always fell upon the Chief Admiral.

The forces within the base swarmed around him, rushing in like a tidal wave, reading him at a quantum level and then converting the memory. Kazimir transformed: His purely physical structure shifted to an equivalent energy function encapsulated within a single point that intruded into spacetime. His “bulk,” the energy signature he had become, was folded deep within the quantum fields, utilizing a construction principle similar to that of ANA itself. It contained his mind and memories, along with some basic manipulator and sensory abilities, and unlike ANA, it wasn’t a fixed point.

Kazimir used his new sensory inputs to examine the intraspacial lattice immediately surrounding him, reviewing the waiting array of transformed functions stored inside the dome’s complex exotic matter mechanisms. He started to select the ones he might need for the mission, incorporating them to his own signature; it was a process he always equated to some primitive soldier walking through an armory, pulling weapons and shields off the shelves.

Ultimately he incorporated eight hundred seventeen functions into his primary signature. Function twenty-seven was an FTL (faster than light) ability, allowing him to shift his entire energy signature through hyperspace. As he no longer retained any mass, the velocity he could achieve was orders of magnitude above an ultradrive.

Kazimir launched from the unnamed planet, heading for the Ocisen fleet at a hundred light-years an hour. Then he accelerated.

The Delivery Man smiled at the steward who came down the cabin collecting drinks from the passengers as the starship prepared to enter the planet’s atmosphere. It was a job much better suited to a bot or some inbuilt waste chute. Yet starliner companies always maintained a human crew. The vast majority of humans (non-Higher, anyway) relished that little personal contact during the voyage. Besides, human staff added a touch of refinement, the elegance of a bygone age.

He accessed the ship’s sensors as the atmosphere built up around them. It was raining on Fanallisto’s second largest southern continent. A huge gunmetal-gray mass of clouds powered their way inland, driven by winds that had built to an alarming velocity across the empty wastes of the Antarctic Ocean. Cities were activating their weather dome force fields, the rain was so heavy. Flood warnings were going out to the burgeoning agricultural zones.

Fanallisto was in its second century of development. A pleasant enough world, unremarkable in the firmament of External worlds, it had a population of tens of millions occupying relatively bland urban zones. Each had a Living Dream thane and a respectable number of followers. The prospect of Pilgrimage was creating a lot of tension and strife among the population, a situation that hadn’t been helped by recent events on Viotia. Acts of violence against the thanes had increased with each passing day of the crisis.