“How badly has it spread?”

“Not at all, so far. It will, obviously.” Korchow smiled thinly. “Some people actually proposed letting it loose on the Motais on purpose, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed. So it’s quarantine for now, and a race to find a splice for the virus before the quarantine breaks down.”

“So if we can’t go home,” Arkady asked, “where do we go?”

Korchow shifted in his seat, pulled a spinstream monitor from his pocket, flicked it into motion, and handed it to Arkady to look at.

He peered into the little screen and saw brilliantly white sunlight flashing on the terminator line of a planet that he only slowly identified as Novalis.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Something you need to know about. It’s spinfeed from the tacticals on Novalis. Long out-of-date, of course. We only got it a week or so ago.”

The tacticals’ feed was disorienting; most of what they were pulling into the spinstream was navigational data instead of straight visuals. But after a moment Arkady realized he was seeing the launch of an orbit-to-surface troop transport.

The view cut to groundside, though it was still readouts from the tacticals, not standard spinfeed. The tacticals’ readouts gave a somewhat artificial feel to the unfolding battle—if battlewas the right word for it. Because as Arkady watched the months-old recorded and dispatched satellite feed ticking through its time frames, the word that came more readily to mind was massacre.

The tacticals had arrived at the other landing party’s base camp just after dawn, and had obviously roused them from unsuspecting sleep. The whole thing made Arkady’s skin crawl: the tacticals advancing on the camp, its inhabitants rushing around in bewildered confusion, the jumble of tents and bags and equipment turning the tacticals’ visual feed into outright chaos.

But then, just as it seemed the worst was upon them, something happened that would put this segment of spinfeed on the greatest-hits parade of intelligence services, newspins, and theoretical physicists all over UN and Syndicate space.

The figures milling around the base camp vanished.

Not vanished as in faded off into the surrounding forest.

Not vanished the way a hologram sputters out and fades into white noise when a generator goes down.

Not vanished with the clanking cumbersome apparatus of Bose-Einstein transport.

Just…vanished.

And in the moment of their vanishing—the last moment in which either the tacticals or the orbital satellite supporting them or any other piece of Syndicate equipment in-system relayed any data out to the BE buoy—something extremely problematic appeared on the spinfeed from the orbital satellite.

Most of the experts eventually agreed that it was a ship. But that was more or less the only thing they did agree on.

It was vast and sleek. It had a wedgelike shape that led a slim majority of the experts to argue that it was designed to withstand atmospheric flight—and the rest of the experts to argue that it was merely designed to resemble atmospheric craft for aesthetic reasons. They never got a full view of the ship; just an ant’s-eye view of its massive undercarriage. There were no markings or numbers on the part of the hull they could see; only the faint and shadowy outline of a flying hunter, its claws and pinions fully extended. Some of the experts identified it as a crow. Others insisted it was a hawk or an eagle or a dragon. A few dissenters, not given much mileage, even argued that the shadowy silhouette was the image of some beast utterly unknown to human myth or science.

The satellite feed wasn’t really good enough to say anything about the ship with any certainty. And the satellite feed was all they ever got; because the moment after the base camp’s inhabitants vanished, the ship also vanished.

“What does this mean?” Arkady breathed, staring at the now-dark screen.

“We don’t know. We don’t even know if they’re human.”

“So…there never was any UN team there. The contrail we were all so terrified about was them, not the Peacekeepers. And Arkasha was right all along; the virus was a terraforming tool. Theirterraforming tool.”

“So it seems.”

“Which must mean that Novalis was theirs?”

“Whoever they are. Whateverthey are.”

“Did they destroy the Bose-Einstein buoy too?”

“No. We’re not even sure they realized it was out there. Perhaps they did but just dismissed it as garbage. They obviously have some form of transport that makes quantum-assisted spinfoam transit look like smoke signals. We sent a second team back in—KnowlesSyndicate this time. But of course it’ll be another four months before we even know if they got there in one piece.”

“So…have you told UNSec? This has to be the end of any fighting between us and them. Or them and Earth, for that matter.”

Korchow smiled, looking a little like his old acerbic self again. “I’m glad to see you’re still the same dewy-eyed optimist you were when we began our acquaintance.”

“You think I’m wrong? You think anyone would keep fighting in the face of this?”

“Maybe not. I couldn’t say, really.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. “You’ve cured me of trying to predict what anyonewill do.”

Arkady handed back the monitor. Korchow shut it off and tucked it carefully back into his pocket. He sighed and stared out of the view-port. Then he laughed softly.

“What?” Arkady asked.

“I was just thinking. Remember what I told you back in Jerusalem about smallpox-infested blankets? Well, I lay down to sleep the night before that spinfeed came in thinking I was Pizarro handing out smallpox-infested blankets to the Incas. And by the time I lay down to sleep again I knew exactly how the last Emperor of the Incas must have felt when he watched the Spaniards ride into Cuzco.”

“You don’t know that,” Arkady pointed out. “As you said, it’s a war of diseases, not a war of cultures. And maybe in this case they’rethe small, isolated population.”

“Arkady!”

“What?”

“That’s a horrible, devious, ruthless, completely amoral thing to say.” A slow grin spread across Korchow’s craggy face. “If you’re going to make a habit of saying things like that, I might actually learn to likeworking with you.”

The first hint Cohen had that Li was waking up was the silver flutter of the fingers on her left hand.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” She smiled uncertainly at him. “Are you still you?”

“Mm. That’s complicated.”

Her smile broadened. “You’re still you,” she said. And that appeared to be all she had to say about the subject. Cohen felt a twinge of rebellion, but then he decided that maybe she was right. He was here. He wanted to be here. What did it matter if he was also in other places, inhabiting other lives and other memories?

“How does the hand feel?” he asked her.

“Strange…amazing. Did you know I can feel heat and cold through it? I still can’t figure out how that works.”

“It’s…oh, never mind. It was just an idea, you know. You don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it.”

The hand lay on the sheet between them, palm up, fingers folded like a glittering flower. It was a perfect replica of the hand of the Automatic Chessplayer…except that this hand was made of vacuum-milled ceramsteel, not brass, wood, and buckram. And the filigreed gears and pulleys concealed an intricate tracery of spintronics that Von Kempelen could never have dreamed of. It was a beautiful toy, and Cohen had spared no expense on it. Partly guilt. Partly a morose suspicion that it was going to turn out to be a farewell present.

“Fortuné was here while you were asleep,” he told her. “He wouldn’t leave a message.”

“That was silly of him.”

“You’re actually going to do it, aren’t you?”