“Just predicting,” Killeen said evenly.

—and as he finished saying it he clenched his jaw solidly shut against a sudden boiling turmoil inside. The wedge at the back of his mind was a swelling sore. Pressure bulged through him. His vision narrowed down to a tight blue cone centered on the swarthy face of the strutting little man.

His Supremacy raised a hand and his guard stopped. He licked his lips and assessed the gathering crowd of Bishops. Killeen wondered if the man had the stomach for a shootout at close quarters. If so, a lot of people would die very quickly.

But then the curious vacant look came into His Supremacy’ s eyes and Killeen saw that the man would try to talk himself out of this.

Talk. Endless empty talk. All Killeen’s buried anger and sorrow rushed into his throat. Bile stung his mouth. A storm swept from the jellied presence at the back of his mind, blowing through him.

His Supremacy went on, “We are marching to meet again the bountiful grace of God as it descends from heaven. I say to all you brethren, turn away from these decriers of the immaculate path. Your Cap’n Jocelyn has erred gravely. She caused you many, many tragic losses upon the exalted battlefield. Be rid of her. Let—”

—and compressed rage ripped the air like a scalding release. Killeen felt a squeezing pulse of electromagnetic energy hum past his shoulder. It refracted the air with its wake and struck His Supremacy solidly in the head.

Killeen dove sidewise and hit the ground. The Cyber pulse had come from above and his first thought was to find the source. But as he rolled to his left he felt a sudden sweet dwindling of the heavy wedge behind his head. He realized in a rush that it was his Cyber who had fired the bolt. He sat up amid cries and shouts.

The little man who called himself His Supremacy was down. Killeen somehow knew there was no more danger. He stood up and walked to the crumpled form.

Tribe members gaped at their fallen leader. Confusion swept them. They looked for the source of this assassination and saw nothing.

The madman seemed even smaller in death. In repose Killeen could see that the face had carried its expression of dignity and power through sheer effort of will. Relaxed, it was an ordinary, bland face. But that was not what caught his eye. The pulse had fried away a big section of His Supremacy’s temples where the comm gear and sensorium were lodged. The violence of the overheating had blown the entire molding material out of the head, revealing something beneath.

All along the skull lining lay an elaborately gridded inset. The heavy mesh was embedded below the ordinary gear.

Killeen knelt and plucked at it. Through his enhanced nerves he felt a repellent strumming sensation. The reek struck solidly at his memories.

“Mechtech,” he said. He peeled back more skin.

Shibo squatted next to him. Her eyes widened when she saw the intricate sheath all around the crown of the head. It tapped into the brain directly with myriad connections. “Micro’tronics.”

“No scars on the scalp. Been in here awhile, I’d judge,” Killeen said tightly.

“What… what could it…” Shibo said.

“They must’ve got him before the Cybers ever came here. He was leadin’ the Tribe by then and this must’ve been how he got that high.”

“They could give orders directly this way.”

“Yeasay. And be sure they were followed.” Killeen looked cautiously at the Tribe members nearby but they all seemed in shock. They stared at the shattered head in confusion. He wondered what this would do to their precious faith.

Shibo said, “I guess when the Cybers came, mechs turned him against them.”

“Yeasay. That’s why he wouldn’t allow anything but attack, never mind the cost.”

“This…” She seemed unable to say the words. “Humans run by mechs…”

“We’re just pawns here.”

“It must have been awful. He was trapped inside there.”

“Poor bastard. He wasn’t just crazy after all.”

EIGHTEEN

Quath squeezed her shot cleanly between the Noughts. The narrow spike struck soundly against the strange mech-ridden Nought. She felt the inner mech presence disintegrate, fragments and figments whirling off into emptiness. Good.

Her plan, hatched all through the smoldering night, hung only moments from completion. Until minutes ago, the Noughts had been perfectly arranged. She had only to act.

But then had come this squabble among the Noughts. And far worse, the arrival of Beq’qdahl nearby. Quath could feel her elegant plan slipping away.

Time slowed for her. Her subminds sorted and arrayed the flashflood of implications.

The mech parasite had been cleverly concealed. Quath had fleetingly felt it before, on the mountaintop. But the muggy Nought minds had obscured the steel-edged intelligence that scurried shadow-thin whenever Quath probed.

In the instant of killing, the mech lurker splashed open. Quath caught the maggot essence of it, the delicate, mosaic power. It had cleverly fastened upon a Nought weakness. Quath stretched and snared the scent of that Nought flaw: a black, festering need, heavy and clogged with bloodknot pain.

Yes! With monumental irony, this poisoning soft spot hinged upon the Noughts’ great strength. Their wisdom, she knew, flowered forth from their keening sense of mortality. That gave them the sure grasp of each passing moment as unique and, if one peered remorselessly into it, luminescent.

Yet from that bedrock strength many Noughts fled. Their dewy fever drew them to fantasies of being not Noughts at all, but instead the most powerful of agencies, somehow linked with the embodiment of all nature itself. Madness! Surely wisdom meant accepting your station in a hierarchy of life and intelligence. To claim grotesquely huge powers belied all that life taught.

But in grasping this Nought facet Quath saw that her own podia were equally foolish. The Verities, the Synthesis—were they any different? To claim a connectedness between self and inert matter. To intone beliefs in unseen powers.

Clever mechs, to see this Nought vulnerability. A bitter chill ran through Quath as she realized that the mechs must then fathom the deepest motivations of the podia, as well.

After such knowledge, the mechs must have enormous advantage over the podia. Why, then, had they allowed podia to seize this planet so easily?

Quath felt the very ground slipping away beneath her, all in the fractional instant that her minds knitted together thin threads of suspicion that had been waiting for so long.

Yes!—there was more to the mechs than the podia had ever guessed. Her subminds rattled off long-smoldering riddles:

Their introduction of these Noughts and the ancient ship into the struggle with the podia.

The strange mech experiments near pulsars, never explained.

Their defense of Galactic Center against all lifeforms, for unknown purposes.

Of course, one of Quath’s subminds argued, energy densities were great here. Mechs were supreme at harnessing the raw flux of currents and photons. Life was more vulnerable to such hard energies. In the natural scheme of matters, organic life would not naturally be drawn to dwell near the all-gnawing appetite of the black hole. Even the podia, encrusted with ceramics and tough alloys, suffered from the ripping hail of protons in deep space. The soft Noughts were far more threatened by the endless sleeting effusions of the hole.

Yet they came. Why? Quath had never pondered this mystery to its depths—indeed, until this moment, had not seen it as a profound puzzle.

All life, whether swaddled in bone or carapace or filmy flesh, seemed to feel that Galactic Center held a goal, a secret. A clue, perhaps, to the meaning of their brief passage.