That Cardinal appears as acolytes and altar boys help divest me of my garments.

“We have received a Gideon-drone courier, Your Holiness.”

“From which front?” I inquire.

“Not from the fleet, Holy Father,” says the Cardinal, frowning at a hardcopy message that he holds in his fat hands.

“From where then?” I say, holding out my hand impatiently. The message is written on thin vellum.

I look up at my Secretary of State. “Can you stop the fleet, Simon Augustino?”

His jowls seem to quiver. “No, Your Holiness. They made the jump more than twenty-four hours ago. They should be almost finished with their accelerated resurrection schedule and commencing the attack within moments. We cannot outfit a drone and send it in time to recall them.”

I realize that my hand is shaking. I give the message back to Cardinal Lourdusamy.

“Call in Marusyn and the other fleet commanders,” I say. “Tell them to bring every remaining capital fighting ship back to Pacem System. Immediately.”

“But Your Holiness,” says Lourdusamy, his voice urgent, “there are so many important task force missions under way at the present…”

“Immediately!” I snap.

Lourdusamy bows. “Immediately, Your Holiness.”

As I turn away, the pain in my chest and the shortness in my breath are like warnings from God that time is short.

“Aenea! The Pope…”

“Easy, my love. I’m here.”

“I was with the Pope… Lenar Hoyt… but he’s not dead, is he?”

“You are also learning the language of the living, Raul. Incredible that your first contact with another living person’s memories is with him. I think…”

“No time, Aenea! No time. His cardinal… Lourdusamy… brought your message. The Pope tried to recall the fleet, but Lourdusamy said that it was too late… that they jumped twenty-four hours ago and would be attacking any moment. That could be here, Aenea. It could be the fleet massing at Lacaille 9352…”

“No!” Aenea’s cry brings me out of the cacophony of images and voices, memories and sense overlays, not banishing them completely, but making them recede to something not unlike loud music in an adjoining room.

Aenea has summoned a comlog unit from the cubby shelf and is calling both our ship and Navson Hamnim at the same time.

I try to focus on my friend and the moment, pulling clothes on as I do so, but like a person emerging from a vivid dream, the murmur of voices and other memories is still with me.

Father Captain Federico de Soya kneeling in prayer in his private cubby pod on the treeship Yggdrasill, only de Soya no longer thinks of himself as “Father-Captain,” but simply as “Father.” And he is unsure of even this title as he kneels and prays, prays as he has for hours this night, and longer hours in the days and nights since the cruciform was removed from his chest and body by the communion with Aenea’s blood. Father de Soya prays for forgiveness of which—he knows beyond doubt—he is unworthy. He prays for forgiveness for his years as a Pax Fleet captain, his many battles, the lives he has taken, the beautiful works of man and God he has destroyed. Father Federico de Soya kneels in the one-sixth-g silence of his cubby and asks his Lord and Savior… the God of Mercy in which he had learned to believe and which he now doubts… to forgive him, not for his own sake, but so that his thoughts and actions in the months and years to come, or hours if his life is to be that short, might better serve his Lord… I pull away from this contact with the sudden revulsion of someone realizing that he is becoming a voyeur. I understand immediately that if Aenea has known this “language of the living” for years, for her entire life, that she has almost certainly spent more energy denying it—avoiding these unsolicited entries into other people’s lives—than mastering it.

Aenea has irised an opening in the pod wall and taken the comlog out to the organic tuft of balcony there. I float through and join her, floating down to the balcony’s surface under the gentle one-tenth-g pull of the containment field there. There are several faces floating above the diskey of the comlog—Het Masteen’s, Ket Rosteen’s, and Navson Hamnim’s—but all are looking away from the visual pickups, as is Aenea.

It takes me a second to look up at what she is seeing.

Blazing streaks are cutting through the Startree past beautiful rosettes of orange and red flame. For an instant I think that it is just leafturn sunrise along the inner curve of the Biosphere, squids and angels and watering comets catching the light the way Aenea and I had hours earlier when riding the heliosphere matrix, but then I realize what I am seeing.

Pax ships cutting through the Startree in a hundred places, their fusion tails slicing away branches and trunk like cold, bright knives.

Explosions of leaves and debris hundreds of thousands of kilometers away sending earthquake tremors through the branch and pod and balcony on which we stand.

Bright confusion. Energy lances leaping through space, visible because of the billions of particles of escaping atmosphere, pulverized organic matter, burning leaves, and Ouster and Templar blood. Lances cutting and burning everything they touch.

More explosions blossom outward within a few kilometers. The containment field still holds and sound pounds us back against the pod wall that ripples like the flesh of an injured beast.

Aenea’s comlog goes off at the same instant the Startree curve above us bursts into flame and explodes into silent space. There are shouts and screams and roars audible, but I know that within seconds the containment field must fail and Aenea and I will be sucked out into space with the other tons of debris flying past us.

I try to pull her back into the pod, which is sealing itself in a vain attempt to survive.

“No, Raul, look!”

I look to where she points. Above us, then beneath us, around us, the Startree is burning and exploding, vines and branches snapping, Ouster angels consumed in flame, ten-klick worker squids imploding, treeships burning as they attempt to get under way.

“They’re killing the ergs!” shouts Aenea above the wind roar and explosions. I pound on the pod wall, shouting commands. The door irises open for just a second, but long enough for me to pull my beloved inside.

There is no shelter here. The plasma blasts are visible through the polarized pod walls.

Aenea has pulled her pack out of the cubby and tugged it on. I grab mine, thrust my sheath knife in my belt as if it would help fight off the marauders.

“We have to get to the Yggdrasill!” cries Aenea.

We kick off to the stemway wall, but the pod will not let us out. There is a roaring through the pod hull.

“Stemway’s breached,” gasps Aenea. She still carries the comlog—I see that it is the ancient one from the Consul’s ship—and is calling up data from the Startree grid. “Bridges are out. We have to get to the treeship.”

I look through the wall. Orange blossoms of flame. The Yggdrasill is ten klicks up and inner surface—east of us. With the swaying bridges and stemways gone, it might as well be a thousand light-years away.

“Send the ship for us,” I say. “The Consul’s ship.”

Aenea shakes her head. “Het Masteen is getting the Yggdrasill under way now… no time to undock our ship. We have to be there in the next three or four minutes or… What about the Ouster skinsuits? We can fly over.”

It is my turn for headshaking. “They’re not here. When we got out of them at the landing platform, I had A. Bettik carry both of them to the treeship.”

The pod shakes wildly and Aenea turns away to look. The pod wall is a bright red, melting.

I pull open my storage cubby, throw clothes and gear aside, and pull out the one extraneous artifact I own, tugging it out of its leather storage tube. Father Captain de Soya’s gift.