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Chapter 1

Riffan Naja existed, at present, as an electronic entity, a ghost inhabiting the virtual library of the outrider, Artemis. The library provided a simulation of physical existence so that he perceived himself as sitting alone, comfortably situated in a cozy chair within a reading room, the surrounding walls lined with stacked files. A tablet floated in front of him at perfect reading height. It displayed the text of an ancient academic paper: Experimental Social Systems of the Expansion Period. A fascinating topic! Or it would have been, if not for his simmering anxiety and pessimism as he waited for the Pilot to announce the next stage of the mission.

At last, the moment came. The Pilot's disembodied voice spoke directly into Riffan's sensorium: "Our initial alignment is complete. We are in position, and ready to attempt contact with Pytheas."

"Oh, finally." The tablet dodged out of his way as Riffan sprang to his feet. He was desperate to move forward, and yet he dreaded what he might find. "There are so few chances left," he murmured. "Let this be the one."

The Pilot, who had not been designed to engage on the level of human empathy, made no reply. Riffan had spent time enough in his company, that he did not expect one.

He turned to the reading room's door. It shimmered at his attention, then vanished, leaving an open portal that he stepped through, arriving on the boundless blue-gradient plain of the main library floor.

His arrival attracted the invisible presence of a Dull Intelligence. It hovered on the periphery of his sensorium, ready to fetch files or execute searches at his command. But he had not come to conduct research.

He turned instead to the waiting Apparatchiks, each isolated within a frameless window. Riffan had brought three of them: the Pilot, the Bio-mechanic, and the Engineer. He'd chosen them over a human companion, because as artificial entities they were more efficient in their use of Artemis's limited computational resources. The three together could operate in place of a single fully realized human ghost.

Riffan didn't regret choosing the Apparatchiks . . . not really. Still, he never felt easy in their presence, and they always appeared to be annoyed in his.

The Pilot reported, "We are an estimated 912.3 kilometers from Pytheas." As always, he presented himself as a mysterious figure, no more than a black silhouette against a background three-dimensional star map.

"Which means," the Bio-mechanic explained in a dull tone, "that at long last we are close enough to pinpoint Pytheas's receiving lens." His talents had not yet been required on the mission and his appearance reflected that. He'd faded within his frame, becoming translucent, almost invisible as he floated in a sea of motile tissue, as if to suggest he might soon wither away from boredom.

The Engineer had also been superfluous so far, but he at least remained solid and attentive. Dressed in tan, he stood with arms crossed, his brow creased in an impatient scowl. He said, "Our angle of view shows no external damage, and Pytheas's hull temperature is normal."

"Just as expected," Riffan said, knowing the damage would be on the inside.

During the fiery war for possession of the fleet's primary starship, Dragon, contact had been lost with all the outriders except Artemis. The war was successful in that the entity Lezuri was cast out, but Urban was lost too.

Urban!

He had been the soul of the starship, its commander, its very mind—until Lezuri's electronic predator wiped him out, erasing all the copies of his ghost that had existed aboard the courser. And then the predator had departed Dragon to destroy the archived ghosts Urban kept on every outrider in the vanguard of the fleet.

Riffan's mission was to determine whether or not the predator had succeeded. He'd begged for the privilege of undertaking that task. He saw it as a step toward atonement. He'd allowed his credentials to be appropriated by Lezuri—he still did not understand how that had happened—but it had happened, and Lezuri had used that access to introduce the predator into Dragon's network.

The Pilot, sounding impatient, summoned him back to the present moment, reminding him, "The next step is yours."

"Yes, of course."

Any of the Apparatchiks could have handled the next phase, but Riffan had reserved communications for himself.

He opened a small window, arranging it at a low angle so that it mimicked a physical console. A swift tap against a green button initiated a procedure that had come to feel routine. The first step: a burst from the communications laser. With no discernible delay, the data gate on Pytheas returned a responding code.

"Contact confirmed," Riffan said—unnecessarily, because the Apparatchiks had access to the same data he did. But saying it out loud made him feel part of a team. "Response code affirms the data gate is closed to inbound and outbound traffic. Sending safe-mode override, now." He touched the next green button.

Safe-mode allowed limited data transfers. Nothing so complex as a ghost or a predator would be able to slip through. "Safe mode confirmed," Riffan said, reading from his window. "Initiating diagnostic function."

He had already visited the outriders Elepaio, Khonsu, and Lam Lha. Like Pytheas, they had not deviated from their assigned course toward the Tanjiri star system, despite the loss of communications. Each had been located at its calculated position. Finding them had been a simple matter of catching up.

Simple, except that a gulf of roughly ninety light minutes separated each outrider from the next, leaving Riffan a total of 6.4 billion kilometers from his home aboard Dragon and from anything human—a distance further magnified because the fleet was no longer bound for Tanjiri.

Both Dragon and its companion courser Griffin had changed trajectories to pursue Lezuri to his home system of MSC-G-349809 and the ring-shaped world of Verilotus.

Riffan closed his eyes. He refocused his thoughts, knowing he had to be careful. It would be so easy to fall into a debilitating hyper-awareness of his own utter isolation.

Stay on task, you idiot.

He had run the diagnostic function on each of the first three outriders. Their data gates were vested with a hard-coded routine, used to analyze and inventory the associated computational strata. Every report had come back the same: Nothing found.

No archives. No files. No structure. No activity. No readable data, not even fragments. No hint of Urban's ghost. The mind and memory of each outrider had been wiped clean.

Riffan wanted to stay hopeful, but so far, nothing about Pytheas suggested its condition would be any different. Once the diagnostic report confirmed it, he would send a tool to wipe the computational strata a second time, and a third time after that, ensuring that if anything nasty remained scattered in the chaos of the empty strata, it would be denatured and utterly erased.

After that, he could safely open the data gate in standard mode, allowing essential systems to be copied over from Artemis. A Dull Intelligence would follow, and Pytheas would once again be endowed with cognitive life. The DI would undertake a thorough physical inspection, ensuring the outrider carried no functional alien matter. Only when that task was successfully completed would it adjust the outrider's course, returning it to the fleet.

Long before then, Riffan would be on his way, in pursuit of Fortuna, to repeat the process one last time. Such was the future he envisioned—but Pytheas shattered his gloomy expectations. It awoke, responding to the activity at the data gate by sending a request to establish full communications. The message brought Riffan a brief shock of hope—until he saw it was signed with the credentials of one Riffan Naja.

"Corruption take us!" he swore. "And chaos too."

From the Apparatchiks, a chorus of grim chuckles.

"It's you," the Bio-mechanic said in cynical amusement.

"Credentials out of date," the Engineer noted.

"We've found the predator," Riffan concluded as hope stirred deep within the architecture of his ghost. "The predator is here." And since every data gate's default protocol was to leave no copy of a transiting ghost behind—"That means it's not on Fortuna. Maybe it never reached Fortuna?"

If so, they were sure to find a copy of Urban's ghost cached on the last outrider!

The Engineer pointed out the flaw in this happy scenario. "If Fortuna avoided the predator and remained undamaged, it would have returned to the fleet when communication was lost. It did not. So something happened to it."

Hope collapsed, leaving Riffan teetering on the edge of a steep slide into despair. His shoulders rose and fell as if to draw in a deep calming breath, but a ghost did not breathe, and the action produced no relief. His anxiety ratcheted up instead, as a new thought intruded.

"We're lucky we found Pytheas at all. It's strange the predator didn't hijack it, and use it—"

To do what? Attack the fleet? Riffan rejected the idea. Clemantine would have destroyed Pytheas if it approached without proper credentials. Follow Lezuri, then? No, Lezuri surely would not care what happened to the predator once its job was done.

"It wasn't luck," the Bio-mechanic told him. "The predator is very likely a limited tool designed for a singular task."

"The task of erasing Urban from existence," Riffan said bitterly.

"Just so," the Pilot agreed. "Not a goal requiring general intelligence."

"I suppose not. So the predator has been trapped here? Is that the conclusion?"

"Trapped between here and Fortuna," the Engineer clarified.

Riffan winced at this reminder that he must not place any hope in Fortuna. "Alright then. Let's move on to the next task. We have to get rid of the predator."

The Bio-mechanic had developed a plan to do that. He would introduce an array of Makers to physically dis-assemble and then re-grow all of Pytheas's computational strata.

Contemplating this, Riffan found himself speaking his deepest fear aloud: "What if there's a copy of Urban's ghost still archived aboard Pytheas?"

"It will be erased," the Bio-mechanic answered.

"Yes, exactly," Riffan said.

"It has already been erased," the Engineer assured him. "The predator will have destroyed it."

"I agree that's likely, but the predator could not have wiped all the strata or it would have wiped itself. So it is possible a hidden archive has survived."

The Bio-mechanic shrugged. "If so, we cannot access it."

The Engineer nodded his agreement. "To try, would be to risk the predator gaining access to this ship, and once here—"

"It'll wipe us out too," Riffan concluded.

And if he allowed that to happen, then Artemis, Pytheas, and Fortuna would all be lost and no report would ever get back to the fleet.

Even so, Riffan felt reluctant to order the destruction of Pytheas's computational strata. Once done, it could not be undone—and if Fortuna did not harbor a copy of Urban's ghost, then Urban would be gone forever. Unrecoverable. Dead, in the ancient sense of the word. And Riffan would wonder forever if he had ordered the last copy to be erased along with the predator.

But wiping Pytheas was the only responsible decision, and in the end, he ordered it to be done.

<><><>

On to Fortuna:

Artemis accelerated, taking Riffan farther still from Dragon. He tried not to think about that or to succumb to doubt. He tried to be hopeful as they closed in on the coordinates where the Pilot calculated Fortuna must be.

Riffan set about hunting for the gravitational signature of its reef . . . but he could not find it. He used radar to search, but turned up nothing, not even a debris cloud to indicate Fortuna had been destroyed in a collision.

Eventually, he had to conclude, "It's not here."

A sense of wonder filled him. "It must have gone somewhere else. Fortuna ignored its directive to return to the fleet and it went somewhere else instead."

He turned to the Pilot. "Would Fortuna's DI have the capacity to undertake such an independent action?"

"No," the Pilot answered. "Only a fully realized ghost could have directed the outrider to follow a new course."

Riffan smiled in quiet triumph. "I thought so."

At last, he'd found evidence that Urban still existed.

Chapter 2

Before Lezuri, Urban had known optimism. He'd been driven by a spirit of discovery. Confidence hard-won from overcoming the threat of the alien Chenzeme had let him believe he could tackle the Hallowed Vasties next and unravel the mysteries of what had happened there.

Now all such hope was gone to bitter dust.

He'd been forced to flee Dragon in a running battle that left him isolated on Fortuna. And when he'd turned the outrider's telescope to look back, he'd seen the fallout of war: Dragon de-gassing within a cloud of debris and Griffin gone altogether.

While Dragon slowly self-repaired, the victor in that brief war remained unclear. But when the courser shifted its heading away from Tanjiri and toward the nameless star MSC-G-349809, Urban had to conclude Lezuri was in control. No one else could have known the significance of that destination—a conclusion reinforced when Dragon disappeared from view, the light of its luminous hull cells quenched as it entered stealth mode.

Had Lezuri allowed the ship's company to survive? The question haunted Urban. He wanted desperately to believe that when he recaptured Dragon he would find them still aboard. He had no way yet to recover the ship, but he hoped for a solution among the bizarre artificial structures of Lezuri's home system.

That system's star was similar to Earth's Sun, but instead of inner planets, it had the Blade. Lezuri claimed to have made it—a thin fracture in space-time, locked in a perfect circle, bleeding white light, and vast in size. Six hundred fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, the luminous ring moved in a stable orbit around its sun.

At the geometric center of the Blade, far smaller but still planetary in scale, was the ring-shaped artificial world of Verilotus. If Lezuri could be believed, time ran more swiftly there than in the wider Universe.

Urban intended to reach Verilotus and use every bonus minute that time differential allowed, to prepare for Lezuri's arrival.

<><><>

The Dull Intelligence that handled the details of Fortuna's operation could not suffer boredom, distraction, or despair, so Urban relied on it to continuously survey the MSC-G-349809 system throughout his years-long approach. He endured the time by switching off his consciousness for twelve hour intervals, staying awake only long enough to review any updates compiled by the DI and, rarely, to issue it new instructions.

Astronomical records recorded two gas giant planets in the outer system. The DI calculated their positions and quickly located them, but it could not find the tiny moons that should have been orbiting those worlds. This concerned Urban. Lezuri had spoken of a partner entity—a being as powerful, or more so, than him.

"If those moons still exist, I need to know where they are," he told the DI. "I need to locate every rogue planetoid and large asteroid in the system—anything resembling the Rock where I found Lezuri." If there really was another entity, it might be occupying a similar world.

"Understood," the DI responded. But it found nothing on a scale that Fortuna's single telescope could resolve.

Hungry for better data, Urban cannibalized some of Fortuna's limited mass, using it to assemble a trio of probes. As he neared the system, he sent them ahead, one at a time, boosting them to velocities he did not dare approach himself.

And he continued to watch.

The Blade never varied in size, but it did wax and wane in brightness. He guessed that it brightened when tiny amounts of matter contacted it and were converted to energy, or shed energy on the way to another reality. Lezuri had said the Blade was a mechanism used to invert gravity and slice apart worlds. Urban took that as a warning, and resolved to stay as far from it as he could, on his approach to Verilotus.

The probes radioed their findings at regular intervals. Their signals could not be hidden, but that was not an absolute disadvantage. If there was a defensive architecture in the system, he hoped it would detect the probes, react to them, and reveal itself.

Two hundred ninety-seven days after the first probe was launched, the DI woke his ghost early, informing him, "Alpha probe has failed to report as scheduled."

Urban had long ago limited the emotional range of his ghost, and still he felt a stirring of trepidation. "What about the others?"

"Beta and gamma continue to report as normal."

"Watch them," he instructed, suspecting alpha probe had crossed a perimeter and been hit by a laser or some other defensive weaponry.

For the next sixty days the telescope tracked the beta probe as it approached, and then passed beyond, alpha's last known position. Both beta and gamma continued to function normally. Eventually, Urban concluded the first probe was probably a victim of accident rather than malice—damaged or destroyed in a random collision.

The two surviving probes continued to converge on Verilotus, returning ever more detail on the ring-shaped world. For a body of its size, it rotated with astonishing speed: ten rotations for every day measured on a standard clock. Its shape was a lean torus, circular in cross section. Only the presence of an artificial gravity could explain how it kept its outer surface wrapped in atmosphere.

That surface was startlingly Earth-like. The outward-facing half of the torus was mostly land, with diverse terrain: mountains, rolling hills, great rivers, grassy plains, stretches of desert, and to the north and south, long coastlines, ice-locked and arctic where the land extended into polar regions.

The ring's inner surface was ocean: a shallow light-blue sea flecked with bright white floes of ice. A minor tilt in the ring's orientation allowed the inner wall to receive a measure of sunlight each day. Although days there were short, the ocean did not freeze over.

As the probes drew still closer to Verilotus, they sighted a large city. It stood in foothills at the edge of a desert, extending for over a hundred kilometers—the first visible indication of human habitation.

But when additional images came in, Urban wondered if it was a city after all. The new images clearly showed glass towers closely packed across the rolling hills, some of dizzying height, but their arrangement was chaotic, many had fallen, and drifts of broken glass clogged the spaces between them. At night, the supposed city was dark.

The probes also mapped thousands of small settlements, some with only one or two buildings, others with hundreds, but each settlement, regardless of size, was at least partly enclosed by a tall surrounding wall. Where the walls were incomplete, the probes detected no activity and observed no lights at night. Many of those with intact walls also appeared to be abandoned, but some were clearly occupied. Well-tended fields and orchards surrounded them, and lights came on each evening.

There was another kind of light that could be seen at night. A strange silvery glow, separate from any settlement. It appeared in branching streams, sometimes in smooth lakes. Urban observed it frequently in mountains, in a few hilly areas, and in the desert near the ruins of the great city. In other places it appeared only rarely or not at all.

Eventually, the probes distinguished vehicles moving on a simple network of roads linking the active settlements.

The DI mapped these roads. It counted the settlements. And it reported its conclusions to Urban: "The present population of this world appears to be very low, on the order of ten to twenty thousand, while the frequency of abandoned habitations indicates a higher population in the recent past, perhaps as high as one to two million."

If the DI was right, these people had endured a disastrous plunge in population. What had happened to them? And when?

The probes looked for activity above the surface of Verilotus, but found none. No elevator column or satellites or space stations. They did pick up radio transmissions, but the DI could not unscramble them.

How much did these people understand of the workings of their world? Urban had seen historical dramas set in societies where people held nonsensical beliefs, even fighting wars to defend them.

He pondered what his best approach might be . . . but that would depend on how much time he had. He contemplated the madly spinning world—ten rotations in every twenty-four hours—and concluded this represented the ratio of time passing on Verilotus.

It was not enough.

Ten days to each one that passed on the outside did not give him time to insert himself into a strange society, learn its ways, and make use of its technological knowledge. Compounding the problem, his study of Verilotus left him with serious doubts about the extent of that technological knowledge.

By this time, his observations had convinced him Verilotus was meant to be a beautiful world, a work of art, a tribute to the origin world of Earth that he knew only from history and dramas. But there was one feature on its surface that felt wrong, neither natural nor Earth-like.

In the great desert adjacent to the ruined city, his probes observed a huge, steep-sided crater, eighty kilometers across and sunk more than seven hundred meters deep in the desert's ruddy-brown plain. The crater was rimmed in black slag shot through with veins of colored minerals: purple and rose-pink, pale green, and electric blue.

Why would Lezuri create such a feature?

Urban suspected he had not. The crater looked too much like a wound. A scar of war.

War had erupted between Lezuri and his partner, his lover. It had been a conflict so violent, Lezuri barely survived it: She cast me away, shattering my mind with the force of her gesture. Lezuri had called her a goddess, but he did not know if she survived.

Urban watched the strange silvery light of Verilotus illuminate that crater on many nights—far more often than anywhere else—and he couldn't help thinking something was there. Something with secrets to tell.

Chapter 3

We stopped where the concrete highway crested a rise, my brother Jolly and me, some seventy miles from sanctuary at the Temple of the Sisters. We had seen no other traffic on the road all day.

The engines of our off-road bikes hummed softly, just audible over the soughing of a wind still warm with the afternoon's heat. That would change soon. In minutes the sun would be gone behind the distant plateau known as the Kalang Crescent, taking the day's warmth with it. In the vast desert of the Iraliad, nights were always cold.

I switched off my bike's engine, lowered the kickstand. Jolly's little dog, Moki, jumped down from where he rode in a bin between Jolly's knees. We all walked to stretch our legs. Beside me, my long, distorted shadow mocked my young-woman's figure as it flexed over the roadside's tumbled stone.

All around us lay the rough, reddish-brown mineral expanse of the Iraliad, an austere land of low ridges and steep gullies, supporting only pockets of brush and the occasional small tree. The ribbon of the white road ran through it, beneath a vast cloudless blue sky. Jolly and I had made excellent time on it all day. The last time I'd come this way, the road had not reached so far south.

"I wonder how long the road will hold out?" I mused aloud. I did not believe it would take us all the way to the Temple of the Sisters.

Jolly came to stand beside me, his sunglasses pushed up into his thick black hair and a water bottle in his hand. He was a handsome youth, not yet as tall as me, though I expected that within a year he would be.

He half closed his eyes. "There will be silver tonight. I can feel it already, gathering under the ground."

I did not doubt him, though his words did not stir fear in me as they once would have. "If the road holds out we'll get there well before the silver rises," I said.

He gave me a sideways look and a teasing smile. "And if not we'll push on anyway. I know you're in a hurry, Jubilee."

Indeed. It had been four long years since we'd said goodbye to my friend Emil and returned home from the Temple of the Sisters. And though I was still but twenty-one, Emil had been a very old man even then. Over the years I'd had a few messages from him, but none for some time, and I only hoped I would still find him there.

We put on jackets against the coming cold and set off again, doing a fast forty miles through the gathering twilight before the road ran out.

At its end we came across a black, vibrant, glittering carpet of road-building kobolds—thumb-sized, beetle-like mechanics working together to convert desert sand and stone into concrete, to extend the highway south. We rode around them, taking care not to crush any. We did not want to disturb their work.

After that we made our own way, riding on the backs of low ridges when we could. If the land had not changed, we would eventually reach a wide basin, flat and smooth as any road. I had hoped to come to it before the silver rose and then to run fast the rest of the way to the Sisters. But night came too quickly.

There is a special kind of silver existing in all players. We call it ha. In most players the ha is dormant; they don't even know it exists. I didn't know until four years ago, when my ha first awakened, but Jolly discovered it when he was still a child.

When the ha becomes active it is visible, appearing as tiny sparks dancing across the hands, whether in sunlight or in darkness. That evening, as twilight deepened, our ha sparkled ever more brightly as if to compete with the light of gathering stars. The thin glittering arc of the Bow of Heaven was also emerging. Already bright in the east, it grew fainter as it reached the apex of the sky, and to the west its gleam was still lost amid twilight's lingering glow. But full dark was not far off.

Through my ha I sensed the silver's imminent presence. I told myself I was not afraid. Still, my heart beat faster. I could feel the silver rising, feel it leaning against my awareness as if awaiting a command from me that I did not know how to give.

I signaled to Jolly to stop again. "We can wait here," I said when he pulled up beside me.

He nodded. "It's a good place."

We had reached the end of a low ridge, with dry washes to either side that were tributaries to a broader dry wash just ahead. All was still. No birds flew, and no breeze stirred the crisp night air. Moki chose to stay in his bin instead of climbing out as he usually did when we stopped. He looked around with pricked ears, anxious, his soft whine the only sound until Jolly comforted him with whispered words and a gentle touch.

We watched the low ground.

After a minute, it began. A faint silvery gleam in the sandy floor of the washes. Barely discernible. Brightening a moment later. For a fraction of a second there appeared to be a network of fine, glowing capillaries in the sand. Then that texture vanished as the silver flushed into existence, looking like a ground fog, but luminous, with a silvery light. It covered the floor of both washes. Only an inch deep at first but rising swiftly to knee height.

Moki's plaintive whine reflected my own quiet fear.

Our world was created out of silver, but that was long ago. Since that time, the silver had become an incoherent and unpredictable force, capable of both creation and destruction. Within the veil of its gleaming fog, the nature and constitution of objects could change—a wooden door transformed to jade, a wall of plain gray stone decorated with ancient sigils etched in gold—or an object might be dissolved and taken away altogether, only to be replicated and rebuilt someplace else, in some future time. Or the silver might change nothing. There was no way to know. The only certainty was that any player or animal that came in contact with it would be consumed . . . unless their ha was awake. Then it was possible to fend off the silver.

"That's all," Jolly said softly. "Not a deep flood this time."

I nodded. I too could sense through my ha that the silver would rise no higher. "Let's go on then," I said. "I want to see Emil . . . if he is still there."

<><><>

I led the way down from the ridge toward the gully floor where the silver had gathered, with Jolly following behind me.

Silver was heavy. If it chanced to arise on a slope, it would flow slowly downhill, pooling in low places. It was also active: swirling, flowing, filled with the restless memory of the world. As we drew near I saw currents of faintly greater or lesser luminescence running through it. Wisps arose from its surface and dissolved.

It would dissolve me too if I touched it. So I leaned on it with my mind and pushed. Through my ha I could communicate my will, at least for this simple task. Directly in front of me and for several feet ahead, the silver responded to my command and rolled back, revealing the sandy floor of the broad wash, opening a path for us to ride.

I rolled forward. The silver loomed knee-high on both sides of me as well as ahead. Its luminescence lit my path. I pushed and steadily extended that path—although not quickly.

As I advanced, I took great care, eyeing the sandy ground, the scattered stones. A fall would be fatal if it led to contact with the silver. Jolly stayed close, fending off the silver behind us, allowing it to wash back across our path only after he had passed.

In this way we crossed the wash and climbed again onto high ground where we were safe from the silver. But it was dark there, and the reach of my headlight was not enough to let me pick out a good path among the outcrops and deep cuts of that rough country. So I stopped again.

Full night was on us, the charcoal sky packed with stars and bisected by the pale white gleam of the Bow of Heaven. All around us, ridges and plateaus rose in dark silhouette above a silver flood that gleamed in every wash.

"I think we'll go faster if we stay in the washes," I told Jolly. Aware of my heart, quickening with nervous energy as I said it.

He sensed my fear and asked, "Jubilee, do you want me to go first?"

Jolly was not like other players. He'd been brought late into the game and the silver could not harm him. In some sense he was not a player at all but was instead an element introduced to the world deliberately to bring the game back into balance.

"I'll go first for now," I said, because even though I knew he was better at directing the silver, my fear would be less if I held it off myself.

So we went down again, and again I opened a path through the silver. In that way, we went on for another hour.

Then at last, as we climbed out of the silver and onto high ground again, I saw ahead of us a line of pinnacles—wind-sculpted towers of rock against a background of stars, deep black in the night except for the false stars glinting in the face of the central tower. Those were windows belonging to upper rooms in the Temple of the Sisters, a sanctuary long ago carved out of the living stone and inhabited now by scholars who studied the silver, among many other things.

The first time I visited the Temple of the Sisters, we'd come from the west and the pinnacles had been visible for miles. Now Jolly and I approached from the north. The north-south curve of the world made for a short horizon so even though the pinnacles stood tall, by the time we saw them, we were nearly there.

<><><>

Most temples are surrounded by high walls constructed to keep the silver out, but the Temple of the Sisters had no outlying wall, relying only on the native rock of the pinnacle, with great double doors of black onyx guarding the ground-floor entrance.

On that night there was nothing to guard against since the lofty pinnacles stood on high ground and were already well above the shallow silver flood.

My heart beat with anxious speed as we rode up the last slope, past long rectangles of light cast by bright upper windows. I looked for Emil's window and was encouraged to see a light there.

We rode our bikes all the way up to the broad stoop. Sweet vapors exuded by temple kobolds scented the night air. From the windows above, there came a murmur of conversation, and faintly, a melancholy tune skillfully played on a guitar.

I dropped my bike's kickstand, dismounted, and approached the double doors. The brass knocker was cold and heavy. I hammered it three times. The conversation ceased. The guitar went silent. A rustle from above and then a voice, fearful and uncertain, but also one that I knew well: "Who is there?"

I looked up. Saw her leaning out a window on the floor above. Maya Anyapah, the temple keeper. A stern woman, but honorable and not unkind.

"It is me, Maya," I said. My voice carried easily in the night's stillness. "Jubilee, with my brother Jolly."

"Ah," Maya sighed. "Of course it is you. Who else could it be? Who else could travel at night despite the risen silver? Come inside. Come in. You should know there is no lock on our door."

<><><>

We brought our bikes with us into the temple's large ground-floor room, parking them on a strip of stone floor alongside other bikes. A carpet of intricate design covered the rest of the floor. Low couches and scattered pillows were grouped around the room to facilitate conversation. Translucent quartz ceiling panels emitted a soothing low light.

No one was in sight, but I heard excited murmurings as the scholars descended the stairs or came from the kitchen to meet us. Maya appeared first. Moki ran to greet her, but I was right behind him.

I am no small woman, but Maya was a full head taller than me, slim and hard as desert stone. Like the other scholars, she was dressed in the desert fashion of loose-fitting tunic and trousers. Her face was thin and sharp-featured, lined by time, and darkened to deep brown by the desert sun. Her long gray hair hung loosely bound over one shoulder. As we embraced, I whispered, "Emil?"

Her soft chuckle banished my fear. "Emil has not left us yet," she said. "And now that you are here, I think his curiosity will anchor him in this life long enough to see the next chapter of your story."

I needed no more encouragement than that. I called a swift hello to the other scholars and then, leaving Jolly to explain our arrival, I raced up the stairs to see Emil.

His door stood partly open. I leaned inside, and there he was in his reclining chair, situated beside the tall window, with a light blanket spread across his lap and an open book resting atop it. He met my gaze with a pleased smile as if he'd been waiting for me to come, and here I was at last. But his first words belied this.

"Ah, Jubilee," he said in his low, soft, raspy voice. "I did not think to see you again in this life. Such a delight, to see you and to know this life still holds surprises."

A terrible pressure of tears in my eyes. I went to him, crouched at his side, kissed his cheek. "I am so glad you're—"

I caught myself, but not in time.

"Still alive?" he asked with a teasing smile. "Ah, but you see, I don't dare die yet! There are so few players left in the world that it will be much too long before I am born into my next life."

I sighed and kissed him again. What he said was true, though we both knew that even his endless curiosity could not hold him in this life forever.

He was even more fragile in appearance than when I'd last seen him. Too thin, and the skin of his hands and face so pale it seemed nearly translucent. Only wisps of white hair were left to him and his eyelids sagged, shrouding his nearly colorless eyes. But those eyes remained bright, glittering with an unabated interest in the world.

I asked after his health. He dismissed this inquiry with a wave of his graceful hand. "I am ever the same, though I will say it is a quandary of old age that with each year I should need less sleep though there are fewer and fewer things I can do to fill the hours." He tapped the book in his lap. "I still enjoy a good story."

I sighed and moved to sit on his bed. He had been such a friend to me when I'd visited the Sisters before. I had been sick, near death. Emil sat with me through that ordeal. And as I recovered, he kept me company, answering my questions and helping me to think about the world and why it is as it is—for all our hardship and sorrow, still a blessed place.

"I have a story to tell you, Emil."

He said, "I thought it might be so."

I had been so eager to see him, but now that I was there, I was unsure how to begin. Tentatively, I said, "You remember, I returned home to Kavasphir."

"Yes. I recall you described Kavasphir as a wild land, with verdant, rolling hills, open forests, and silver rising in the swales nearly every night, just as it does here."

I nodded and swallowed against an ache in my throat. A familiar grief, never far away. I said, "My mother had founded a family temple there. When we returned after the great floods, the temple was gone but the kobold well was still there, so we resolved to stay. We rebuilt the temple complex. First the wall, enclosing the orchard and the temple grounds, and then Temple Huacho itself. It took nearly four years to finish."

"A huge undertaking," Emil said.

I nodded, and then confessed, "We did not rebuild the wall exactly as it was before. I'd been told it was sometimes a custom to leave items for the silver to take or to change. It was my fancy to adopt this custom and my mother indulged me. We built niches in the outer face of the temple wall, flanking the gate. I thought it would be an entertainment for visitors to leave items and see what became of them."

"Ah," Emil said. "And did the silver participate in this entertainment?"

A flush warmed my cheeks. "Not at first. For three years the silver floods were so shallow they did not reach even the lowest niche. But that changed this past year. One night the silver rose almost to the top of the wall. I had not left anything in the niches, yet in the morning I found in one of them a little replica of Yaphet's flying machine."

I pulled the trinket from my pocket. Showed it to him. It was such a little thing, balanced in the center of my palm, perfectly made of a light, shiny metal that my mother said was aluminum. "Take it," I urged him.

The ha sparkled against my hand. Most players would be frightened at the sight, but Emil did not hesitate. He had seen my ha before and knew it wouldn't cause him any harm. He took the little flying machine. Turned it over in his beautiful, long-fingered hands. Studied the narrow, graceful wing, and the pilot's cradle and cargo baskets that hung beneath it.

"Is it just a memory?" I asked him.

He returned his kind gaze to me. "Do you suspect otherwise?"

I lowered my eyes, reached into my pocket again, pulled out the second token given to me by the silver. This one was heavier, made of several varieties of stone cleverly assembled into a tiny well-scaled model of a large temple and its surrounding high wall. I said, "I found this in the second niche. It is that ancient temple where I lost Yaphet."

Emil set the flying machine atop the book in his lap. Then he took up the little model. He turned it in his hands, round and round, a half-smile crinkling his ancient face. "I remember the great library you described, and I am imagining it rendered within this model in such perfection that if we could retrieve the books, we might read them with a microscope." He sighed and passed the model back to me, and the flying machine too. "It hurts my heart to know that library is lost."

I nodded. If Yaphet was still alive, he would be equally grieved.

"I feel he is calling out to me," I whispered.

Gently, Emil asked, "So you've resolved to seek for him?"

"I've come to look," I allowed. "And Jolly has agreed to come with me. My plan is to return to the Cenotaph and if I find nothing there I will climb into the mountains, to the site where the temple used to be." I added quickly, "I do not expect to find anything. I have never sensed his presence through the silver, as I should be able to do were he alive. Still, I need to be sure."

"To put your heart at ease?" Emil suggested.

"Yes. Just so."

I slipped both objects back into my pocket. He took my hands in his, smiling as the sparks of my ha moved to dance across the back of his own hands.

He could have told me that I was foolish to undertake this quest, that it was vain, that my lover Yaphet was dead and I would not meet him again in this life, and if Emil had told me those things, maybe I would have heeded him and turned back.

But Emil was wiser than that.

"Nothing is as it was," he reminded me. "I do not know what you will find, but I would like to hear that part of the story when it is done. So I will try to be here when you return."

"You had better be." I smiled and kissed his hands. For several seconds I let my gaze linger on his. Then I said, "There is one more thing." My heartbeat sped up in anticipation as I asked him, "Do you want me to awaken your ha? You were curious about it, and I've learned to do it, since the last time I saw you."

His brows rose, his eyes grew a bit wider beneath their heavy lids. "Truly?"

"Yes. I don't think it can hurt you . . . so long as you're cautious and don't call the silver in through your window." I said this last part with humor, but the hazard was real and Emil knew it. I'd told him a story of how Jolly had lost control of the silver when his ha came awake.

"A necessary warning," Emil agreed as he eyed the sparks surrounding our clasped hands. When he met my gaze again, he nodded. "Yes, Jubilee. Please, awaken my ha. Introduce me to this phenomenon you and your brother discovered."

I smiled, and without looking away I opened my mind to an awareness of the silver outside, and also the silver within Emil, linking them together in the way I'd learned, though I did not truly understand it.

Emil blinked. His pale lips parted in surprise and his hands trembled against mine.

"You feel it?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Help me to stand."

He turned to the window, and I pushed it open. We stood there in the chill night air, looking out at the great desert agleam with silver.

"Amazing," Emil murmured. "You have given me a new sense. I can perceive the silver—its presence, its movement . . . Oh, for youth! It must be wonderful, Jubilee, for you to venture in the Iraliad with this sense awake." He sighed, his shoulders rounding. "Well, there will be another life. In the meantime . . ." He gave me a wink. "This one has grown much more interesting."

Chapter 4

Riffan summoned the three Apparatchiks. They winked into existence within their frameless windows: the Pilot, the Bio-mechanic, and the Engineer.

Riffan told them: "I've come to a decision."

The Engineer leaned forward looking concerned. The Bio-Mechanic, faded almost to invisibility by boredom, brightened just a bit. The Pilot, an ever-mysterious silhouette, crossed his arms and said, "I thought all the decisions had been made."

Riffan shrugged. "It's an ongoing process. Constant reconsideration. A weighing of alternatives. All of that. I've decided that Artemis will not rejoin the fleet. Not immediately."

He hesitated, expecting to field a flurry of objections. None came. The three entities remained silent, awaiting further details.

"Right," Riffan said. "Here's what I'm thinking. Fortuna is missing. The most likely scenario is that Urban is aboard and in control . . . and that he believes Lezuri to be in control of Dragon. There can be no other reason why he failed to report in."

"This is a logical scenario," the Engineer observed.

Riffan nodded, both relieved and reassured at this positive assessment. He said, "The question that naturally follows—where has he gone? We did not find him along the expected trajectory to Tanjiri. What other destination might he conceive?"

"He has gone to Verilotus, of course," the Bio-mechanic answered in a dismissive tone, as if to suggest only a simpleton would fail to deduce such an obvious conclusion.

"Yes!" Riffan agreed eagerly. "Yes, exactly. It's not in Urban's nature to accept defeat. He believes Lezuri to be in control of Dragon and he knows Lezuri wishes to return to Verilotus. So he has gone ahead. Urban has gone ahead to prepare some defense, a trap or an ambush that will stop Dragon. And because he will be looking for Dragon, he won't see his enemy, our enemy, when Lezuri approaches in that tiny ship he made out of the containment capsule. Urban will have no warning . . . unless I warn him. Unless we do it." He looked hopefully at the Pilot. "Can we do it? Shift our trajectory, balance risk against need, and push Artemis to a high velocity?"

The Pilot gave no hint he'd been impressed by this speech. He still stood with arms crossed, his expression unseeable, unknowable within the darkness that contained him. "Of course we can," he said. "The question is whether you are willing to accept the risk, knowing that the higher our velocity, the greater our chance of fatal collision with some unforeseeable particle of debris."

Riffan was only a ghost and still the thought of such a fate left him queasy with fear. Despite it, he said, "Yes, I am willing. I understand we might not survive a hard run, but what of it? We all have copies aboard Dragon and Griffin, while Urban has no backup copy."

"Lezuri doesn't either," the Engineer said in a thoughtful tone. "None that matters to the current circumstance, anyway. For that reason he may seek to minimize his risk of collision by proceeding at the lowest velocity that will keep him safely ahead of Dragon."

"That makes sense," Riffan agreed. "And just like Urban, Lezuri will be looking for Dragon, deeming it the enemy. He won't know to look for us."

"I like this plan," the Bio-mechanic said. "I'll see to it our hull is fully stealthed."

"Yes, thank you," Riffan said gratefully.

He did not need the approval of the Apparatchiks, but he wanted it for the sake of his own confidence, knowing he'd let enthusiasm carry him past the point of good sense before. He turned to the Pilot. "Your thoughts?"

The Pilot snorted. "I do not support this plan."

Riffan was taken aback, thrown into confusion by this outright rejection. "But why not?"

The Pilot uncrossed his arms. His dark figure leaned forward. "Because we must report Fortuna's absence. That requires me to establish a communications link with Pytheas, and the only way to do that is to reduce the distance between us—in effect, to return to the fleet."

Riffan sighed in relief. He'd already confronted this issue, and he had an answer ready. "That's not the only way. We don't need to send a full data stream. A simple summary report will do, and that won't require a laser link. I mean to use directional radio instead."

"I find this feasible," the Engineer said.

"Do you?" Riffan asked, a little surprised, but appreciative of the Engineer's ongoing support. "Well, good. Let's do it, then." He turned again to the Pilot. "I'll leave it to you to work out a compromise velocity. We need a good chance of getting there, but we have to get there fast."

"I understand the parameters," the Pilot said acerbically.

"Good," Riffan said, bobbing his head. "And thank you."

Chapter 5

Urban searched for Dragon.

He'd calculated its likely path as it approached Verilotus, yet he could find no sign of it, either visually or through the lateral lines of Fortuna's gravitational sensor. Even so, he didn't doubt it was coming, bringing Lezuri home. He might have only days, maybe just hours, to devise a defense.

To gain time, he maintained his interstellar velocity as long as he could, and then he put Fortuna through a crushing deceleration. If he'd existed in physical form, he would not have survived it, but as a ghost he felt nothing.

As he approached the ring-shaped world, his two surviving probes entered into orbits around it, becoming satellites. One kept to a high but stable polar orbit that required only occasional correction. The other descended deep into the weird geometry of the world's gravity well—a feat that required it to repeatedly fire its attitude jets—but even as it brushed the atmosphere, it detected no change in the rate of passing time.

The time differential Lezuri had described proved to be real anyway.

The descending probe reported the length of each burn. The deeper it went, the greater the discrepancy between reported time and the time observed by the more distant probe, a result that told Urban the temporal boundary was gradual and that it could be successfully crossed, at least by a bio-mechanical object.

In the last hours of his voyage, Urban prepared for his own descent to Verilotus by initiating the growth of a physical avatar.

For Fortuna, the trip to the surface would be a one-way journey. Its propulsion reef could not survive within the gravity well and the little ship did not carry the mass to synthesize a chemical rocket sufficient to lift it free. If things went well, Urban was sure he could devise a means of escape, but for now he just needed to pull off a successful landing.

He felt confident as he dropped into atmosphere. He'd worked extensively with the DI, simulating the descent, testing each stage. He knew what to expect.

At first, Fortuna picked up radio transmissions like those detected earlier by the probes. Urban could not understand them. He wondered uneasily if they had anything to do with his arrival, but then he dismissed the concern. The probes—now operating as satellites—had observed no air or orbital traffic, so it seemed unlikely a system existed to track incoming vessels.

The transmissions disappeared as the sparse air, compressed by his descent, heated into a plasma curtain.

Gradually, his speed slowed. The hull cooled. Sensors emerged from the shelter of the bio-mechanical tissue to show him the dayside world below. He sped past forests, grasslands, rolling hills, rivers and lakes, and snow-capped mountains. A coastline off to the south.

Fortuna transformed, its bio-mechanical tissue shape-shifting to accommodate atmospheric flight. It sprouted tiny glider wings and a tail. As the ship's velocity continued to drop, the wings lengthened, and the tail's vertical stabilizer grew tall. Flaps formed, further slowing the ship, and enabling the DI to fly a pre-determined route toward the immense crater Urban had chosen as his landing site.

All was going well—until a flash of silver light blossomed across the nose of the craft and blazed against the leading edges of the wings.

"What the hell?"

Urban knew even before the DI answered. He felt it through the ship's sensors.

In a calm voice, the DI reported, "A molecular attack has commenced against isolated portions of the outer hull. Defensive Makers are responding. Conflict is presently localized—"

"Not anymore," Urban interrupted in a low growl.

He felt new hot zones erupting on the upper surfaces of the wings, on the sides of the ship, and on the vertical stabilizer of Fortuna's tail. The ship's defensive Makers responded by rapidly reproducing, ramping up their numbers to surround and confine the attacking force. But their defensive lines failed to hold. The hot zones rolled over them, spreading inward.

Fear like an electronic vapor rose in Urban's ghost mind.

Verilotus had exhibited no macro-scale defense to counter space-based attackers. Dragon could have destroyed it easily. And yet on the microscopic scale it wielded a fierce defense—and he'd fallen into the trap.

He felt an echo of the helplessness he'd known when Lezuri launched a molecular assault against him in the opening move of their duel for control of Dragon.

Would he fall so easily again? Be consumed by Lezuri's superior nanotech even before he reached the surface of this world?

No.

Not if he acted now.

He checked the time. Three minutes to touchdown.

A swift consultation with the DI. It issued new instructions to Fortuna's bio-mechanical tissue, ordering the assembly of a dense network of metallo-ceramic threads just beneath the ship's outer skin.

Such a simple structure required only seconds to complete.

Urban sent a current through it.

The threads grew white hot and then turned to ash—along with a layer of Fortuna's outer tissue. In the hurricane wind of descent, the ash sloughed away, hopefully taking the infestation with it. But Urban couldn't tell, because all of the hull sensors had been shed too.

Self-repair processes kicked in. New micro-scale sensors were assembled and pushed out to the hull. They reported hotspots still present on the leading edges of the wings.

Urban received this news with grim determination. He initiated the assembly of a new network of threads, preparing to shed another layer of Fortuna's skin, but he hesitated when the passing seconds showed the vigor of the infestation in steep decline. The hot spots lingered, but they weren't spreading. So he waited, unwilling to lose more bio-mechanical tissue.

Newly assembled macro-scale sensors were pushed out to clean zones on the hull, allowing Urban to see again.

Fortuna had flown from afternoon into early morning. The sun blazed behind the ship, appearing newly risen above the eastern horizon, while Fortuna glided only a hundred meters above the desert floor. Just ahead, the great crater. In seconds, the ship skimmed past the eastern rim. The ground fell away. Fortuna descended into the extended shadow of the crater's wall.

Urban felt a surge of activity at the hot spots. Both the macro- and micro-scale sensors started winking out, one after another.

Again, he tried to burn off Fortuna's skin, but this time the pulse of current failed to propagate—because the new network of threads was incomplete? Or because it had already been breached by the infestation? He couldn't tell.

His only option was to get the ship down fast and then to get out, hoping the destructive nanotech was designed to target artifacts and not living beings. A slim hope, unsupported by his lethal experience aboard Dragon, but he had to try.

The DI guided Fortuna through a steep descent as more sensors failed. Urban's scope of view narrowed as he dropped toward the flat, featureless white floor of the crater.

The last macro-sensor gave out in a flash of silvered light.

The DI announced the obvious: "All macro-sensors lost. There is no way to corroborate our precise position."

"Calculate it," Urban growled.

"Rates of forward speed and descent are estimates only, subject to variations in atmospheric currents."

"Do your best."

The entire descent had been unpowered—Fortuna did not have the resources to fuel real flight—but Urban had generated a reserve of propellant and equipped the ship with landing jets.

The DI chanted a declining estimate of speed, and height above the ground.

As their forward momentum approached zero, Fortuna began to fall.

"Landing jets triggered," the DI announced.

Seconds later, the fuel ran out.

Urban waited. Was the ship falling? Was he already down? As a ghost in the library he had no sense of momentum. He couldn't tell.

More seconds passed. He must be down—successfully down—a landing good enough that the library had survived the impact. The absence of alarms from internal sensors was encouraging too, indicating the ship remained intact and that the infestation had not penetrated deeply. Maybe there was still time to mount a fresh defense—but first he had to know what was going on.

"Get a fresh array of sensors out to the hull," he ordered the DI.

As the new sensors moved outward, they reported an increasing warmth, but none encountered hostile nanotech. When they reached the hull's surface, Urban felt the presence of sunlight, the soft friction of a gentle wind. He confirmed the atmosphere's Earth-standard composition, temperature 9.4º centigrade. It carried a fine dust and sparse microbial life . . . but no hostile nanotech.

"What happened to the assault?" he asked.

The DI sounded equally perplexed: "Unknown."

Maybe the phenomenon occurred only above a threshold of speed, or in the upper atmosphere . . . or maybe it had been triggered by the presence of his defensive Makers. That would explain why the attack had lost its vigor when the hull was wiped clean.

He looked around. The ship had set down on an expanse of flat ground, dusty white, though blackened in the immediate vicinity by the fire of the landing jets.

The seared ground radiated heat against Fortuna's belly. He heard the crackle of heated stone, the soughing of wind. Nothing else. No sign of macro-scale life. No one around.

Low rock formations to the west, many kilometers away.

On the north and east, the looming crater wall.

<><><>

Urban established an intermittent link with his two satellites. The geometry of Verilotus and his position, shadowed within the crater's high walls, combined to prevent continuous communication, but updates arrived as one or the other of the satellites passed overhead. Neither detected any response to his arrival on the artificial world.

He waited and watched as the ground cooled beneath him. Hours passed. He spent the time inventorying the microbial life that drifted onto the skin of the ship, identifying each type as Earth-descended. Nothing alien. None that presented a threat to him or conflicted with his biome, and he was no threat to this world. Even if he happened to shed a few of the Makers that maintained his physical body they would only break down into inactive fragments.

Nowhere among the dust and microbes did he detect any sign of hostile nanotech, or any artificial micro- or molecular-scale machines.

It was possible his emergence would trigger a renewal of hostilities, but that was a risk he'd have to take.

Time to wake his avatar.

<><><>

A rush of joy, of relief, as he returned to his physical self.

Cradled in a tiny chamber close to Fortuna's computational core, he took a few seconds to relish the sensations of his renewed existence. He took note of the silky touch of the resurrection gel, the comforting wash of cool air in his lungs, the faint scent of his newly made skin, the jewel-like glint of light within the chamber's snug walls. His emotions became more intense too. Memories of Clemantine welled up, bringing with them a tide of grief.

He closed his eyes, whispering, "Let her live." A plea or a prayer, addressed to the void.

Stop.

No time now to grieve. He needed to prepare for Lezuri's arrival. He would have ten full days to explore this world for each day that passed outside. He hoped Dragon was at least several days behind, but even if that proved true, a few tens of days was not much time to learn the secrets of a world.

He instructed Fortuna to expand the chamber that held him. Since the outrider would not fly again, its shape was no longer important. So he allowed the chamber to expand in height, past the hull of the ship, giving him room to stand.

The gravity here was far stronger than on Dragon's gee deck, reminding him of Deception Well.

He summoned clothing—a pull-over and trousers in a fabric that could shift to match the desert's tan and light-brown hues, along with sturdy brown boots. Then he ordered the chamber to open.

He stood facing north. The crater wall loomed before him, an incredible seven hundred meters high, its steep slope draped in loose flakes of stone and sharp-edged boulders. Only here and there, where the pitch went vertical, could he make out layers of solid mineral beneath the scree.

The eastern wall was more distant, but just as impressive. Fortuna's shadow stretched toward it, made long by the low angle of the late afternoon sun.

He jumped down a half meter to the smooth white ground, grunting at the impact and sending puffs of fine dust into the air. Dust scented the steady, cool wind that stroked his face. Seventeen centuries had passed since he'd last stood on a planet's surface. The only other planet he'd visited, Deception Well.

He looked up at a gorgeous, breathtaking blue sky that carried only a few high, feathery clouds. Then he lowered his gaze to the white plain surrounding him, his heart racing, half expecting to be struck down by some undetected hazard.

Nothing happened, though. No great beast or flesh-consuming nanotech stirred to action at his presence.

He turned to look at his ship, matte black and far darker than the long shadow it cast. He was accustomed to thinking of Fortuna as a tiny thing, but it did not look small now. Balanced on landing pods a half meter above the ground, its dorsal surface was well above his head. And though Fortuna had lost some length when he'd modified its shape, the ship was still fifty meters from nose to tail, and its tail rose high, while its delta wings gave it a large surface area. That, combined with its black color and the shadow it cast, made it far too easy to see from orbit.

A second problem: the propulsion reef was dying as the polyps wore themselves out against the unvarying gravitational field of the planetary surface.

He spoke to the DI through his atrium: *I'm going to need a new power source to maintain the computational core. Suggestions?

*The dorsal surface of the ship can be reengineered to serve as a solar energy collection system sufficient to power the core if other activity is minimized.

*Meaning the bio-mechanical tissue goes dormant?

*It can be hardened to eliminate all metabolic demands.

*That won't work. That would make it nonfunctional. I need to be able to generate equipment, maybe even another avatar, at need.

The DI offered another suggestion: *An alternative would be to allow the bio-mechanical tissue to feed on itself.

*How much time would that give me?

*With energy expenditure minimized, sixty-four days. Any draw on resources will reduce that time.

Urban intended to draw hard on resources, so he would not have nearly so much time, unless he found another energy source. *Do it, he said. *Convert the surface to collect solar energy. But camouflage it to match the surrounding terrain.

*This requested camouflage would reduce efficiency below an acceptable level.

By the Unknown God!

*What about a metamorphic system? he asked. *A camouflage mode that can be switched on at need?

*There will be an initial energy cost, the DI warned.

*Let's do it anyway.

What choice was there? Once Lezuri arrived, Fortuna would survive only if it went unnoticed.

*And dig the ship down into the ground, Urban added. *I don't want to cast a shadow.

*Understood.

Fortuna's tail assembly began to dissolve back into the body of the ship, and its landing pods shortened until it lay belly down on the ground. A low buzzing noise kicked in, barely discernible over the wind.

Urban touched the side of the ship, and felt a deep vibration. Dust puffed from underneath the hull. Just a little at first. The wind caught it, carried it away in a thin plume. More dust followed. Urban imagined a million tiny drills converting the desert hardpan to powder, cilia brushing the powder out from under the ship.

The dust plume thickened—a flag that would surely draw any watching gaze. He decided that didn't matter, not while Lezuri was still far away.

He drew a deep breath, shifting focus to the next priority.

On his way into the star system, he'd prepared scout-bots and aerial-bots to explore the region around his landing site. He summoned the three aerial-bots first, directing them to emerge through the softly illuminated walls of the open chamber.

As the first bot arrived, a blister formed on the chamber wall, then split, to reveal a triangular wing. Urban pulled the aerial-bot free of the softened tissue. It had a half-meter wingspan and felt solid in his hands, though it weighed almost nothing. Its upper surface was black to harvest solar radiation. Its underside used an adaptive-color function that would mimic the sky, and it carried an array of sensors. A rush of air against his palms assured him the hundreds of tiny pumps embedded in its surface were working to reduce its internal air pressure.

Turning, he released it. The bot lofted a few meters before the breeze caught it, sweeping it out over the flats, where it stabilized, finding an equilibrium against the wind. As it soared back, it climbed higher.

His plan called for the three aerial-bots to do a quick but detailed survey of the crater. Then he'd know if he'd gambled right in coming there. If the bots found nothing—no hint of Lezuri's partner entity or of a means to access the mechanism behind this artificial world—he would send them farther afield.

He sucked in a sharp breath as a shimmering play of light erupted across the aerial-bot's triangular silhouette. Sparks of silver, blazingly bright, had ignited across its surface. The sparks multiplied, while the bot continued to climb. Fifteen meters above the crater floor, it disappeared within a boiling silver cloud. Then, scarcely a second later, the cloud evaporated, leaving . . . nothing.

"By the Unknown God," Urban whispered, conscious of his heart thundering in his chest. "What was that?"

*Unknown, the DI answered.

But Urban knew. He'd seen it before. He remembered Lezuri's upturned palms, shimmering with silver sparks, prelude to a luminous fog that appeared from nowhere, enveloping his body and dissolving his physical existence.

Some kind of nanotech, levels beyond what Urban could command. He guessed it had been embedded in Lezuri's avatar, and here it was again, embedded in this world.

It occurred to him to wonder if this world could be a kind of avatar. A structure, a body that Lezuri could inhabit much as Urban inhabited the body of Fortuna—only on a vastly larger scale.

The thought sent a shiver through him.

He'd set himself against this being.

Lezuri had emerged from the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties as a kind of god. He had built this world. He'd created the Blade. He'd survived a war with an entity of similar power—and where was she anyway?

Looking out across the empty expanse of the crater floor, it was easy for him to believe that Lezuri's "goddess" was gone, wiped out somehow, maybe in the back blast of the cataclysm that had broken Lezuri.

The thought brought with it a stir of regret. She might have been an ally against Lezuri if she still lived . . .

But more likely, she would have been a second enemy.

Better to be on his own. Move forward without interference. He had only days to find his way, to discover the mechanism of this world, and maybe . . . to hijack it? Could he hijack it, the way he'd hijacked Dragon, and turn Verilotus against its creator? Was the silver the key to doing that?

He raised his hand, examined it, but there were no sparks. No shimmering warning of imminent dissolution.

Why had the silver attacked the bot and not him or Fortuna?

No, that was wrong. It had attacked Fortuna. Conflict had erupted all over the hull as the ship descended through the lower atmosphere. It had stopped only when Fortuna settled on the ground.

Urban wondered: Did the silver attack all active mechanical devices? A startling possibility.

He turned, looking into the chamber for the other two aerial-bots, half-expecting to see them enveloped in a consuming silver fog.

But there was no fog, not even a spark, as they rested on newly extruded shelves.

He reminded himself that his orbital survey had shown vehicles moving on the roads, and besides, Fortuna was an active mechanical device—a bio-mechanical device anyway—stirring up a plume of pale dust as it slowly burrowed into the packed soil.

He left the aerial-bots where they were, summoning three scout-bots instead—the same spider-like crawlers he'd used to explore the Rock.

The trio emerged as gray ovoids, but once released into the chamber they unfolded, extending four thin multiply-jointed legs that met at a central camera platform a few centimeters in size. Urban stood aside as the thigh-high scout-bots crawled past him, out of the chamber.

He ordered them away from the ship. If they were going to be consumed, he wanted them far away when it happened.

They moved swiftly, cartwheeling in different directions. He squinted against the glare, his jaw tense, watching them as they receded.

Nothing happened.

He ordered them to stop, as tentative understanding emerged. The people of this world used terrain vehicles, but no aerial vehicles. Fortuna had been attacked as it descended, but on the ground, it had been left alone. And his aerial-bot had incited no activity until it rose several meters into the air.

He commenced to experiment. Summoning an aerial-bot from the chamber, he instructed it to soar swiftly away from the ship in a straight line, half a meter above the ground.

Fifty meters out, it remained intact, with no sparks of silver glinting around it. He told it to stop. Then, to rise another meter and fly a slow circle.

It did so. No harm came to it.

He kept it out there, away from the ship. Kept it flying in circles, each a meter higher than the one before.

At fifteen meters elevation, the silver sparks appeared.

He ordered the bot to drop to the ground. The sparks winked out as it descended.

He repeated the experiment. This time the sparks appeared when the aerial-bot was seventeen meters above the ground. The next time it happened again at fifteen meters. In both instances, the sparks disappeared as the bot descended.

As the day waned, Urban continued to experiment, sending the bot farther afield until it reached the crater's steep wall. By keeping it close to the slope, he was able to guide it all the way to the rim without the silver consuming it. Proximity to terrain kept it safe.

He left the bot hovering at the rim, ten meters above the ground, where it would serve him as a watch post, and also a communications relay since it had a larger window to contact the orbiting satellites than he had within the crater.

During this time, he had assigned Fortuna's DI the task of assembling a low-mass habitat where he could comfortably sleep. The result was a large, heavy, tightly folded package.

He carried it out across the flat, upwind of Fortuna and the continuous dust plume. After setting it down, he retreated a safe distance, and then activated its assembly mechanism.

The package unfolded into a tent with transparent walls enclosing a space large enough to walk around in. Long, needle-thin screws pierced the ground to anchor it against the wind. Inside, a honey-combed pallet inflated to create a low bed. But there was no means to heat the interior and to Urban's consternation, the air was swiftly growing colder.

So he ordered a long coat with a color-shifting skin—gray-white to start, mimicking the landscape. The coat would monitor the local atmospheric temperature, heating and cooling to keep him comfortable.

The first three scout-bots he'd released had long since ventured off across the crater floor. He had seven more prepared. The sun was poised on the crater's rim when he finally sent them off, each in a different direction.

He freed the last aerial-bot too, sending it off to conduct a very low-elevation survey of the entire crater floor.

All the bots returned telemetry that included sight, sound, chemical analysis, and thermal measurements. The data fed into Fortuna's computational core, where it was assembled into a detailed model of the landscape.

That version of Urban that was a ghost in the library monitored the findings. Subminds shuttled between the library and his physical avatar, keeping his memories synced.

Restless, he circled the ship in the fading light. The ground crunched as he walked, and it glittered: a pale crystalline grit reflecting the lingering light. The wind had subsided and with its passing, an ethereal silence filled the crater. No bird calls. No insects trilling. Just the sound of his footsteps.

From the memories brought to him by his subminds, he knew that beyond the featureless flat where he had landed, the crater floor hosted bizarre formations, some possibly natural, but others objects of human design.

A scout-bot found a perfect circle of seven statues, four meters high, each the likeness of a woman, all regal and obese and dressed in flowing robes, but they were not the same woman. Each had a unique face and differing hairstyles and jewelry. Most were laughing; two scowled. Some looked badly worn by time, their features eroded. One was so bright and clean and polished it might have been set out only a day ago.

The aerial-bot circled a solid tower of glistening white concrete that looked as if it had dripped from overhead, bit by bit, in a semi-solid state, before hardening in place. The tower stood at the center of a maze a square kilometer in size, composed of low sinuous walls of eroded gray brick.

There was a series of stunningly detailed arches carved of some opaque purple material, each a half meter high, leading nowhere.

A long, straight stretch of . . . road? Paved in a polished, gold-veined brown stone. It went nowhere too.

Great cubes of layered and compressed rock, three times his height, with fossils of golden insects crumbling loose along the edges.

A broad mound, twelve meters high, built up from haphazardly piled flakes and fragments of a complex alloy, each piece a meter or more across and curved, as if they had once been part of a sphere. Surrounding the mound, offset by many meters, a field of fallen blocks and slender rods, none more than a meter and a half in length.

In many places the ground was littered with leaves of flat green stone marked with rows of lettering, or columns of symbols. Some of the lettering Urban recognized as characters from the alphabet he knew, although these letters were stretched and distorted and arranged in seemingly random order.

Fortuna's DI confirmed that other symbols were related to known writing systems, but like the alphabetical stones, they suffered from random placement and conveyed no meaning.

None of these wonders seemed purposeful. Looking at them through the senses of the bots, Urban felt he'd entered the chaotic terrain of dreams.

He strove to shake off a growing sense of dissociation, setting his mind to the tasks he still needed to complete.

He sent the roving aerial-bot up to the top of the opposite rim, to keep watch from there. At the same time, he instructed Fortuna to assemble the gear he expected to need over the next days, using designs he'd already selected from the library.

Since he could not fly, a small quad-bike with storage pods would be his means to get around—not quickly, but faster than on foot. A fully stocked portable fabricator, sized to fit in one of the storage pods, would ensure he continued to eat. He ordered spare cartridges for it.

Another essential: a signal booster that would allow his atrium to maintain two-way communication with the satellites and with Fortuna, regardless of how far away he wandered.

A change of clothes too, and another tent, small enough to take with him. The gear would be ready by morning.

The day's wispy clouds flushed pink, then grayed as the sky darkened. Stars emerged, and the shimmering arc of the Blade. The sight of it infused Urban with both wonder and fear. Lezuri had made this thing!

That was at the peak of his power. Urban's task was to ensure Lezuri never achieved that level of power again.

As night descended in full, he noticed on the periphery of his vision a faint, shimmering light. He turned toward it in curiosity and concern and discovered the lingering dust plume, gleaming faintly silver.

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