Hunt’s basset-hound face is white. “Good God, Severn. I never heard of tuberculosis.” He raises his wrist as if to consult his comlog memory but the wrist is bare.

I return his instrument. “Tuberculosis has been absent for centuries. Cured. But John Keats had it. Died of it. And this cybrid body belongs to Keats.”

Hunt stands as if ready to rush out the door seeking help. “Surely the Core will allow us to return now! They can’t keep you here on this empty world where there’s no medical assistance!”

I lay my head back in the soft pillows, feeling the feathers under the ticking. “That may be precisely why I am being kept here. We’ll see tomorrow when we arrive in Rome.”

“But you can’t travel! We won’t be going anywhere in the morning.”

“We’ll see,” I say, and close my eyes. “We’ll see.”

In the morning a vettum, a small carriage, is waiting outside the inn. The horse is a large gray mare, and it rolls its eyes at us as we approach. The creature’s breath rises in the chill morning air.

“Do you know what that is?” says Hunt.

“A horse.”

Hunt raises a hand toward the animal as if it will pop and disappear like a soap bubble when he touches its flank. It does not. Hunt snatches his hand back as the mare’s tail flicks.

“Horses are extinct,” he says. “They’ve never been ARNied back into existence.”

“This one looks real enough,” I say, climbing into the carriage and sitting on the narrow bench there.

Hunt gingerly takes his seat beside me, his long fingers twitching with anxiety. “Who drives?” he says. “Where are the controls?”

There are no reins, and the coachman’s scat is quite empty. “Let’s see if the horse knows the way,” I suggest, and at that instant we start moving at a leisurely pace, the springless carriage jolting over the stones and furrows of the rough road.

“This is some sort of joke, isn’t it?” asks Hunt, staring at the flawless blue sky and distant fields.

I cough as lightly and briefly as possible into a handkerchief I have made from a towel borrowed from the inn. “Possibly,” I say. “But then, what isn’t?”

Hunt ignores my sophistry, and we rumble on, jolting and bouncing toward whatever destination and destiny await.

“Where are Hunt and Severn?” asked Meina Gladstone.

Sedeptra Akasi, the young black woman who was Gladstone’s second most important aide, leaned closer so as not to interrupt the flow of the military briefing. “Still no word, M. Executive.”

“That’s impossible. Severn had a tracer and Leigh stepped through to Pacem almost an hour ago. Where the hell are they?”

Akasi glanced toward the faxpad she had unfolded on the tabletop.

“Security can’t find them. The transit police can’t locate them. The farcaster unit recorded only that they coded TC²—here—stepped through, but did not arrive.”

“I think it’s impossible.”

“Yes, M. Executive.”

“I want to talk to Albedo or one of the other AI Councilors as soon as this meeting is over.”

“Yes.”

Both women returned their attention to the briefing. The Government House Tactical Center had been joined to the Olympus Command Center War Room and to the largest Senate briefing room with fifteen-meter-square, visually open portals so that the three spaces created one cavernous and asymetrical conference area. The War Room holos seemed to rise into infinity on the display end of the space, and columns of data floated everywhere along the walls.

“Four minutes until cislunar incursion,” said Admiral Singh.

“Their long-range weapons could have opened up on Heaven’s Gate long before this,” said General Morpurgo. “They seem to be showing some restraint.”

“They didn’t show much restraint toward our torchships,” said Garion Persov of Diplomacy. The group had been assembled an hour earlier when the sortie of the hastily assembled fleet of a dozen Hegemony torchships had been summarily destroyed by the advancing Swarm.

Long-range sensors had relayed the briefest image of that Swarm—a cluster of embers with cometlike fusion tails—before the torchships and their remotes quit broadcasting. There had been many, many embers.

“Those were warships,” said General Morpurgo. “We’ve been broadcasting for hours now that Heaven’s Gate is an open planet. We can hope for restraint.”

The holographic images of Heaven’s Gate surrounded them: the quiet streets of Mudflat, airborne images of the coastline, orbital images of the gray-brown world with its constant cloud cover, cislunar images of the baroque dodecahedron of the singularity sphere which tied together all farcasters, and space-aimed telescopic, UV, and X-ray images of the advancing Swarm—much larger than specks or embers now, at less than one AU. Gladstone looked up at the fusion tails of Ouster warships, the tumbling, containment-field-shimmering massiveness of their asteroid farms and bubble worlds, their complex and oddly nonhuman zero-gravity city complexes, and she thought. What if I am wrong?

The lives of billions rested on her belief that the Ousters would not wantonly destroy Hegemony worlds.

“Two minutes until incursion,” Singh said in his professional warrior’s monotone.

“Admiral,” said Gladstone, “is it absolutely necessary to destroy the singularity sphere as soon as the Ousters have penetrated our cordon sanitaire? Couldn’t we wait another few minutes to judge their intentions?”

“No, CEO,” answered the Admiral promptly. “The farcaster link must be destroyed as soon as they are within quick assault range.”

“But if your remaining torchships don’t do it, Admiral, we still have the in-system links, the fatline relays, and the timed devices, don’t we?”

“Yes, M. Executive, but we must assure that all farcaster capability is removed before the Ousters overrun the system. There can be no compromising this already slim safety margin.”

Gladstone nodded. She understood the need for absolute caution. If only there were more time.

“Fifteen seconds until incursion and singularity destruction,” said Singh. “Ten… seven…”

Suddenly all of the torchship and cislunar remote holos glowed violet, red, and white.

Gladstone leaned forward. “Was that the singularity sphere going?”

The military men buzzed amongst themselves, calling up further data, switching images on the holos and screens. “No, CEO,” answered Morpurgo. “The torchships are under attack. What you’re seeing is their defensive fields overloading. The… ah… there.”

A central image, possibly from a low orbital relay ship, showed an enhanced image of the dodecahedronal singularity containment sphere, its thirty thousand square meters of surface still intact, still glowing in the harsh light of Heaven’s Gate’s sun. Then, suddenly, the glow increased, the nearest face of the structure seemed to become incandescent and sag in upon itself, and less than three seconds later the sphere expanded as the caged singularity there escaped and devoured itself as well as everything within a six-hundred-kilometer radius.

At the same instant, most of the visual images and many of the data columns went blank.

“All farcaster connections terminated,” announced Singh. “In-system data now relayed by fatline transmitters only.”

There was a buzz of approval and relief from the military people, something closer to a sigh and soft moan from the dozens of senators and political advisors present. The world of Heaven’s Gate had just been amputated from the Web… the first such loss of a Hegemony world in more than four centuries.

Gladstone turned to Sedeptra Akasi. “What is travel time to Heaven’s Gate from the Web now?”

“By Hawking drive, seven months onboard,” said the aide without a pause to access, “a little over nine years time-debt.”

Gladstone nodded. Heaven’s Gate was now nine years distant from the nearest Web world.