“Really? Bugs, at first. Nasty black-colored bugs, only edged…like Legos. But they…build up, assemble, aggregate into…” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Oh, shit, that explains it. The Reivers aren’t bugs, just tiny, machine-based life. And they serve as building blocks for all kinds of other, more complex and capable creatures. We’ve already run into one. That Long Legs anteater thing was a Reiver assembly.”

“Where do they come from?” Zhao said. “Did they grow here?”

“‘No,’” Yvonne said, still using that distant tone that suggested she was directly channeling the Architect. “‘They were…not scooped up. They invaded. They…can live almost anywhere, high pressure, vacuum. They attached themselves to another race, were hidden in them.’”

“All right then,” Zhao said. “We seem to have some idea of the problem. What can we possibly do to help? This is the control center, correct? You wanted us here?”

“‘Having you here was logical before the infection and invasion. System is already corrupted, failing. There is only one race that might provide assistance…their name is Skyphoi.’”

“Who are they? Yvonne, you were in the museum, too—”

“Yes, we saw them: the big gasbag jellyfish things—”

“And where are they?”

“‘The next habitat.’”

“Let’s go, then,” Zhao said. “Is the transport system still safe?”

“‘No system is uncorrupted,’” Yvonne said, “but I’m getting the clear impression we’re using the railcar.”

“We?” Pav said.

Before Yvonne could answer, the giant Architect began to move.

“Yes, we’re all going, and right now.”

“While we’re doing that,” Rachel said, “if you don’t mind, can you tell everyone back in the habitat that we’re alive and what we’re doing?”

GABRIEL

“I just don’t know what to do with her,” Harley Drake said, his voice tired, his eyes red with fatigue.

What passed for a Houston-Bangalore Council had gathered on the ground floor of the Temple. Harley Drake, Shane Weldon, Vikram Nayar, and Gabriel Jones were there with Sasha Blaine and the accused, Camilla.

To Gabriel, Harley, the crippled former astronaut and new mayor of HB, seemed worn and distracted, brightening only when turning to Sasha Blaine, who was sitting with Camilla, offering comfort while asking the girl a few gentle questions.

Neither activity was producing results. The only thing Camilla seemed capable of doing was reciting a few lines of doggerel in Portuguese.

Gabriel and Bynum excluded, all three adult males had taken turns trying to interrogate Camilla…. Had she “hurt” Chitran? Had she let the bugs into the habitat? If yes to either, why?

It had not gone well. Camilla seemed feverish, certainly skittish, understandably so. And, while Gabriel had been an inattentive and largely absent father, even his limited experience with his daughter, Yvonne, had educated him to the impossibility of getting a girl to do anything she didn’t want to do.

Also present, the Revenant Brent Bynum, largely silent, though Gabriel had watched him clutching himself, his head moving ever so slightly from side to side, as if engaged in an important internal conversation.

Which was likely.

Matters were complicated by a “war room” mood, too. Drake had dispatched Xavier Toutant and several other HBs to find out what the hell was going on elsewhere in the habitat. (It looked to Gabriel as though there were several fires.) They had not yet returned, adding to the general frustration.

The moment Harley Drake gave voice to his exasperation, Brent Bynum stood up. “You’re wasting your time with the girl,” he said. “I can tell you everything she knows.”

“Except what she did and why!” Drake snapped.

“I can tell you that these Reivers are the greatest threat we face,” Bynum said, persisting. “Not just to humans here in the habitat, but to the Architects and, frankly, everything we know in the universe.”

“Jesus Christ, Brent,” Harley Drake said. “I can see where they’d be pests. Maybe even a danger to our…fragile situation here. But a threat to the entire universe? I have a hard time with that.”

“That’s because you’re not allowing yourself to think on the proper scale, Drake. You’ve only interfaced with their most basic, but still lethal mode…They have several other modes, each one bigger, more capable, much nastier…right up to an aggregate the size of this planetoid. The universe is a strange place, or do you need further evidence? Look,” Bynum said, “think of the Reivers as intergalactic locusts, consuming all energy, useful matter and information in their path. They leave nothing behind. They can be any size, almost any form.”

“Von Neumann machines?” Nayar said. In case the others didn’t know, he added, “They act like self-replicating nanoprobes.”

“Which are completely theoretical,” Harley said.

As always, Weldon spoke to the practical matter. “Well, they’re here now. Can they be killed?”

“Since you think she knows, ask her!” Bynum pointed to Camilla.

“Hey, listen,” Sasha said, “we have a limited ability to communicate with this girl. I mean, I don’t give a shit if what you say is filling her head…. If she can’t tell us in our limited German, it’s useless. Second, she’s nine years old. She’s been through an incredible trauma—”

“I have some idea what it’s like,” Bynum said.

“You were an adult,” Sasha said. “And you woke up in a world where you already had some idea what had happened to you, where people spoke your language—” For a moment, Gabriel thought that the tall redhead was going to punch the newly reborn White House man.

But, Revenant or not, Brent Bynum still possessed the ability to read a situation, then adapt. “You’re right,” he said. “I apologize. I just…have this information boiling inside me. It’s like I have to tell you and right now, or I’ll just explode. And you’re supposed to act on it, too.”

“We are acting,” Weldon said. “In a few minutes, we’re going to eradicate those bugs,” he said, pointing out the front of the Temple. “Then we’ll get to dealing with the, ah, what did you call them? Larger aggregates?”

Harley turned to Nayar and Gabriel. “Could you gentlemen find out where our weapons program is?”

They headed for the ramp.

Gabriel Jones didn’t believe in magic. ESP, Tarot, or his particular bugaboo—astrology—none of those subjects had ever impressed him as worth a moment’s thought.

Not that he didn’t appreciate wonder, not that, in spite of a hard-won stone-cold atheism, he didn’t subscribe to the biblical preaching that there are “many mansions,” that there were things human beings did not know or understand about the universe—and maybe never would.

The real problem was that all these systems seemed too easy. Think it, do it. Turn over the right card and you know the future. Speak a few words and a woman falls in love with you.

Really? How? With no cost? No use of energy?

Nevertheless, like anyone who was fascinated by the universe as it existed, who had watched Star Trek, he had an appreciation for Arthur C. Clarke’s statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

By that standard, after a few hours’ exposure to the wonders of the Temple, Gabriel Jones was now an official believer in magic.

Just a few hours ago, he had been so out of it—so close to death—that he had no memory of how he had moved from his lonely corner of the first floor of the Temple to this third-story marvel…what now looked like a state-of-the-art chemical laboratory.

“We carried you,” Vikram Nayar told him.

He returned to wakefulness there, lying on a composite slab of some kind, one plasticlike tube sucking blood out of him, another feeding it back in, Jaidev Mahabala perched on the stool.

“Don’t tell me Bangalore had this stashed away,” he said, happy to be able to offer a lame but spirited joke.