Martin Silenus’s eyes twitched and opened like an owl’s.

“Hey,” he said, “do you know the fucking Shrike’s standing right behind you?”

Gladstone ’cast to her private apartments and went at once to her fatline cubicle. Two messages waited.

The first was from Hyperion space. Gladstone blinked as the soft voice of her former Governor-General on Hyperion, young Lane, gave a quick summary of the meeting with the Ouster Tribunal. Gladstone sat back in the leather seat and raised both fists to her cheeks as Lane repeated the Ouster denials. They were not the invaders. Lane completed the transmission with a brief description of the Swarm, his opinion that the Ousters were telling the truth, a comment that the Consul’s fate was still unknown, and a request for orders.

“Response?” asked the fatline computer.

“Acknowledge receipt of message,” said Gladstone. “Transmit 'Stand by' in diplomatic one-time code.”

Gladstone keyed the second message.

Admiral William Ajunta Lee appeared in a broken flat-image projection, his ship’s fatline transmitter obviously working on reduced energy.

Gladstone saw from the peripheral data columns that the squirt had been encrypted among standard fleet telemetry transmissions: FORCE technicians would eventually notice the check-sum discrepancies, but it might be hours or days from now.

Lee’s face was bloodied, and the background was obscured by smoke.

From the fuzzy black-and-white image, it appeared to Gladstone that the young man was transmitting from a docking bay of his cruiser. On a metal worktable behind him lay a corpse.

“…a complement of Marines managed to board one of their so-called lancers,” panted Lee. “They are manned—five to a ship—and they do look like Ousters, but watch what happens when we try to carry out an autopsy.” The picture shifted, and Gladstone realized that Lee was using a hand-held imager patched in through the cruiser’s fatline transmitter. Now Lee was gone, and she was looking down into the white, damaged face of a dead Ouster. From the bleeding at the eyes and ears, Gladstone guessed that the man had died of explosive decompression.

Lee’s hand appeared—recognizable by the admiral’s braid on the sleeve—holding a laser scalpel. The young commander did not bother to remove clothing before beginning a vertical incision starting at the breastbone and cutting downward.

The hand with the laser jerked away, and the camera steadied as something began to happen with the Ouster’s corpse. Broad patches began to smolder on the dead man’s chest, as if the laser had ignited clothing. Then the uniform burned through, and it was immediately apparent that the man’s chest was burning in widening, irregular holes, and from those holes shone a light so brilliant that the portable imager had to stop down receptivity. Patches of the corpse’s skull were burning through now, leaving afterimages on the fatline screen and Gladstone’s retinas.

The camera had pulled back before the corpse had been consumed, as if the heat were too great to bear. Lee’s face floated into focus. “You see, CEO, that’s been the case with all of the bodies. We captured none alive. We’ve found no center to the Swarm yet, just more warships, and I think that—”

The image disappeared and data columns said that the squirt had ceased in midtransmission.

“Response?”

Gladstone shook her head and unsealed the cubicle. In her study once again, she looked longingly at the long couch and sat behind her desk, knowing that if she closed her eyes for a second she would be asleep. Sedeptra buzzed on her private comlog frequency and said that General Morpurgo needed to see the CEO on an urgent matter.

The Lusian entered and began pacing back and forth in his agitation.

“M. Executive, I understand your reasoning in authorizing the use of this deathwand device, but I have to protest.”

“Why, Arthur?” she asked, calling him by name for the first time in weeks.

“Because we goddamn well don’t know the result. It’s too dangerous. And it’s… it’s immoral.”

Gladstone raised an eyebrow. “Losing billions of citizens in a protracted war of attrition would be moral, but using this thing to kill millions would be immoral? Is this the FORCE position, Arthur?”

“It’s my position, CEO.”

Gladstone nodded. “Understood and noted, Arthur. But the decision has been made and will be implemented.” She saw her old friend draw himself to attention, and before he could open his mouth to protest, or, more likely, offer his resignation, Gladstone said, “Would you take a walk with me, Arthur?”

The FORCE General was nonplussed. “A walk? Why?”

“We need the fresh air.” Without waiting for a further response, Gladstone crossed to her private farcaster, keyed the manual diskey, and stepped through.

Morpurgo stepped through the opaque portal, glared down at the gold grass which rose to his knees and spread to a distant horizon, and raised his face to a saffron yellow sky where bronze cumulus clouds rose in jagged spires. Behind him, the portal winked out of existence, its location marked only by the meter-high control diskey, the only man-made thing visible in the endless reach of gold grass and cloud-filled sky. “Where the hell are we?” he demanded.

Gladstone had pulled a long strand of grass and was chewing on it.

“Kastrop-Rauxel. It has no datasphere, no orbital devices, no human or mech habitations of any kind.”

Morpurgo snorted. “Probably no safer from Core surveillance than the places Byron Lamia used to take us, Meina.”

“Perhaps not,” said Gladstone. “Arthur, listen.” She activated the comlog recordings of the two fatline transmissions she had just heard.

When they were finished, when Lee’s face snapped out of existence, Morpurgo walked away through the high grass.

“Well?” asked Gladstone, hurrying to keep up.

“So these Ouster bodies self-destruct the same way cybrid corpses have been known to,” he said. “So what? Do you think the Senate or All Thing will accept this as proof that it’s the Core that’s behind the invasion?”

Gladstone sighed. The grass looked soft, inviting. She imagined lying there and sinking into a nap from which she would never have to return.

“It’s proof enough for us. For the group.” Gladstone did not have to elaborate. Since her early Senate days, they had kept in touch with their suspicions of the Core, their hope for true freedom from AI domination someday. When Senator Byron Lamia had led them… but that was long ago.

Morpurgo watched wind whip at the golden steppes. A curious type of ball lightning played inside the bronze clouds near the horizon. “So what? Knowing is useless unless we know where to strike.”

“We have three hours.”

Morpurgo looked at his comlog. “Two hours and forty-two minutes. Hardly time enough for a miracle, Meina.”

Gladstone did not smile. “Hardly time enough for anything else, Arthur.”

She touched the diskey, and the portal hummed to life.

“What can we do?” asked Morpurgo. “The Core AIs are briefing our technicians on that deathwand device right now. The torchship will be ready in an hour.”

“We detonate it where the effect will harm no one,” said Gladstone.

The General quit pacing and stared. “Where the hell is that? That fucker Nansen says that the device has a lethal radius of at least three light-years, but how can we trust him? We set off one device… near Hyperion or anywhere else… and we may be dooming human life everywhere.”

“I have an idea, but I want to sleep on it,” said Gladstone.

“Sleep on it?” growled General Morpurgo.

“I’m going to take a short nap, Arthur,” Gladstone said. “I suggest you do the same.” She stepped through the portal.

Morpurgo muttered a single obscenity, adjusted his cap, and walked through the farcaster with head up, back straight, and eyes forward: a soldier marching to his own execution.