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She did take him in her arms then, drawing him close. “If you can feel the hurt of losing your humanity,” she told him, “then you’re still human.”

Hours later, the senior-ranking military personnel on New America discussed what they’d just seen—“experienced” would have been the better word—in the record from the DalRiss expedition firsthand.

“I think what we’re seeing in there,” Vic said, “is a war. A war being carried on against entropy itself.”

“Never cared much for entropy myself,” General Aimes said with a wry smile. “Messy. Turns a perfectly neat and ordered desk into a disaster in less time than it takes to say ‘chaos’!”

“If we can trust these records Dev Cameron managed to bring us,” Vic said, “then we have evidence of an intelligence who hates the idea a lot more than you do.”

They had entered the simulation together, joining Katya and Dev in that surreal landscape of tortured suns and whirling black holes at the Galaxy’s center. They’d seen the machine attack, first against the probe, then against the DalRiss fleet waiting outside the Stargate at Nova Aquila, and finally, again, at the nebula, after the
Sirghal’s
escape.

That saga of
Sirghal’s
return across the light years alone, Vic reflected, would have been worth volumes had anyone been recording the trek as a history. According to Dev,
Sirghal
had been separated from the other DalRiss ships when it jumped to the vicinity of the nebula.

What followed was a long and harrowing journey indeed. The machines from the Galactic Core had not followed them beyond the nebula, fortunately, but they’d needed to make a number of careful, short-ranged jumps to determine by parallax their position within the Galaxy, and the probable location of some part of space they were familiar with. Achievers worked by gaining an impression of a distant area of space, preferably an area they were familiar with in terms of magnetism, gravitational mass, and radiation of various wavelengths. They had a great deal of trouble jumping into unknown, unfamiliar space. Random jumps, such as the one that had taken
Sirghal
to the fringe of the nebula, could have unfortunate consequences.

It had taken over two months—part of that time spent while
Sirghal
stopped and literally grew and harvested another crop of Achievers in order to continue the journey—but at last they’d made it to a section of space where Dev had begun to recognize constellations. Orion, with its three-stars-in-a-row belt, had been his clue that they were nearing human-known space, and another jump in that direction had let them identify the twin Alyan suns, home system to the DalRiss.

With no other established rendezvous—the possibility that they would be so badly scattered seemed never to have occurred to the DalRiss—each of the lone city-ships must have come to the same conclusion, and the same destination. When
Sirghal
materialized inside the Alya B system and entered orbit over the DalRiss homeworld of GhegnuRish, they found twenty-two other cityships there ahead of them.

It was a logical rendezvous. With luck, more might eventually show up, though they were handicapped by not having Dev along to recognize star patterns. Since DalRiss without Perceivers could not see stars, they’d never developed, as either a science or an art, a way of identifying patterns of stars in their skies. The range of controlled Achiever-assisted jumps was limited by various factors; still, some of the DalRiss vessels, eventually, might be able to come close enough to known space that their Achievers could fold them back into the familiar territory of the homeworld’s system.

But Dev was still worried that the Web might be following them. There was no evidence that they’d been tracked beyond that first, wild jump away from the Stargate, true, but as Dev carefully explained to the Military Planning Board, there were no promises. In fact, it seemed probable that the Web now knew more about the human and DalRiss civilizations than they knew about the Web. Much information about Earth and the
Shichiju
would have been intact within the wreckage of the probe at the Galactic Core. A Naga could have absorbed and assimilated it; it seemed possible, even likely, that the Web could do the same. Too, fifty-two DalRiss cityships were missing, as yet unaccounted for. Some might yet reappear at GhegnuRish; some, perhaps most, were lost among the Cygnan star clouds and would never find their way back.

How many, though, had been pursued after they left the Nova Aquila system, how many had been disabled and their Naga communications centers plundered of all that they knew? The other cityships knew as much as did
Sirghal;
the various ships regularly shared their blocks of Naga patterns of memory, and within that stored data would be gigabyte upon gigabyte about DalRiss and human technologies. The Web might not be able to trace the location of Earth or the Alyan suns immediately, but it would be able to track them. All shared a knowledge of their carefully plotted track through space for the last twenty-five years. It had been a long and zigzagging journey, with countless stops along the way… but the record was there, broken only at the end by their emergency jump from Nova Aquila.

Dev had told them the entire story, allowing them to see and feel for themselves the impressions Katya had already experienced. They sat now at a conference table, in reality instead of ViRsimulation, discussing the next step. All were still somewhat stunned by the experience, a bit overwhelmed. Felicia Aimes’s jokes had for Vic the feel of a desperate, almost hysterical attempt to keep some measure of perspective after a deeply unsettling set of revelations.

The group gathered at the table included several high-ranking members of the ConMilCom Ops Planning staff. Besides Vic and Katya, there were Generals Aimes and Mendoza, Colonel Howell, and a half dozen other senior officers, all either with various ConMilCom departments or with the CMI. Also present, at Dev’s insistence, were two xenologists—Daren and Taki Oe. Both seemed entranced by the opportunity to examine records pertaining to a brand-new, unknown civilization. Both seemed a bit out of place among all of the military brass. The planning staff had grudgingly admitted Daren… but had nearly rebelled at the inclusion of Taki Oe. It had taken a threat by Katya to push through special legislation in the Senate to get them to include the Japanese-New American at the table, and there were still some ruffled feelings about the affair.

The Japanese, after all, were the
enemy.

That was a feeling that was going to have to change, Vic thought.

Dev was standing by, too, though not actually present at the group’s deliberations. While his downloaded mind still occupied the AI system at the University of Jefferson, the AI had opened a voice channel for him, so that he could participate in the continued deliberations. At the moment, though, the group had switched him off. Vic thought that the officers sitting at that table were still having some trouble accepting Dev as a real person. Even when they’d been with him in the simulated reality of the Nova Aquila system or the Galactic Core, they’d sometimes referred to him in the third person, as though discussing someone absent.

They’re more comfortable thinking of him as a kind of AI,
Vic thought. He remembered the old legal definition of AIs as “intelligent but of limited purview.”

That definition scarcely applied to Dev, though. Nor, for that matter, to those mechanical
things
swarming about the Galaxy’s core.

He glanced at Katya, worried about her. She’d seemed subdued ever since emerging from her private meeting with Dev, and he was pretty sure that there was more to her emotional state than the shock of the new and the very, very large.

A digitized image drawn from
Sirghal’s
Naga memory glowed above the holoprojector in the middle of the table, showing what had been found at Nova Aquila, two dwarf suns in miniature and the Device spinning at their center of gravity.

“So,” General Aimes said. “What do we have?” She palmed a control interface and the image they were watching changed, the camera angle zooming in to focus on the long, thin cylinder in as much detail as was available… a fast-spinning blur of quicksilver gray.

“We have an alien intelligence,” Colonel Howell said, “apparently very old, very advanced, and completely machine-based. It seems to be responsible for causing a nova in the star system we call Nova Aquila and, in the process, may have exterminated an intelligent race living on one of the planets in that system. They somehow manipulate matter on a scale so vast I’m still not sure I believe or understand it. They build stargates a thousand kilometers long with the mass of a fair-sized planet, use their rotation and gravitational mass to travel between the stars and to siphon away the substance of two exploded suns.

“This other information Cameron passed on… well, I’m not so sure what to think about it.”

“The interference patterns?” Aimes asked.

“That, and this whole concept of nested bubbles of light. I really can’t make out what he was saying about that. Anybody?”

“Cameron may be bringing his, ah, unusual point of view to this,” General Sergei Ulanov said. A brusque, bald man with a bushy mustache, Ulanov was, like Katya, originally from New America’s Ukrainian colony and tended to defer to her. “Senator? Can you elaborate on that?”

“Not very much. I don’t understand all of what he was saying either. Maybe, in time…”

“Could the fact that we don’t understand it all be a reflection of the advanced technology?” Taki Oe wondered.

Mendoza gave Taki a sour look. “More likely it means the message was garbled. Or incomplete.”

“I think we can trust the records,” Vic replied. He manipulated the controls from his tabletop interface. The Device hovering above the holoprojector vanished, replaced by a three-dimensional view of the granulated, glowing surface of one of the white dwarfs. A ship—they were thinking of them now as Starminers—emerged from the surface, a minute black speck trailing an arrowhead-shaped wake of roiling stellar atmosphere. “This is what amazes me,” he said quietly. “Think of it! To plumb the depths of a star! The technology that implies. My God! The surface gravity of a white dwarf must be in the tens of thousands of Gs, and the pressures in there are unimaginable! What these people are capable of…”

“What they are capable of,” Katya said with an almost rude abruptness, “is genocide. Worse than genocide. They annihilated an entire civilization, and as far as Dev could tell, they weren’t even aware of what they were doing.”

“Ah! But wouldn’t a deliberate act be worse?” Mendoza wanted to know. “If it was an accident—”

“Scary thought,” Vic said. “Wiping out a whole civilization by accident.”

“We nearly did it ourselves a time or two,” Daren said. “I wonder, though. If this Web is significantly more advanced than we are, perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of either deliberate genocide or accident as it was, well,
overlooking
that other civilization. If they were as far beyond us as we are beyond, say, cockroaches…”

“I would expect a civilization as advanced as that to have some corresponding advancement in their moral perceptions,” Aimes said stiffly. “Certain civilized concepts, such as vegetarianism on moral grounds, cannot develop without highly advanced—”

“We don’t all have your refined moral sense, General,” Mendoza said sarcastically. “Even those of us who may be superintelligent. Or highly advanced.”

Aimes bristled. “I eat vegetables and meat nanogrown from nonliving materials because I believe it
wrong
to eat animals. A moral decision, but one impossible if we were still savages.
That
is my point, not that I’m better than any of the rest of you.”

“However much she may believe that she is,” Mendoza added to Sandoval.

“Can we stick to the subject, please?” Vic said, interceding as General Aimes glowered across the table. Damn… humans were confronting Armageddon for the entire species… and here they were squabbling over vegetarianism and alien morals.…

“Somehow,” Katya said, “I doubt that the Web has the same moral perceptions we do. The DalRiss cherish life, remember, but they also use it as we use tools.”

“Maybe, to the Web, we
are
food animals,” Taki put in. “Or our stars are sources of raw materials for this, this incredible technology we’ve glimpsed. Or—”

“Such speculation is pointless right now,” Mendoza said.

“I disagree, General,” Katya said. “It is of vital importance that we know how the Web perceives us. What they
expect
of us.”

“What I want to know more than anything else,” Howell added, “is just exactly how reliable is our source?” He was addressing the room at large, but he was staring at Katya when he spoke.

Vic was about to answer for her, but she glanced at him and gave him a tiny shake of the head.

“The entity we call Dev Cameron,” she said carefully, “cannot any longer be regarded as human… not the way we use the word, at any rate.” She hesitated, then drew a deep breath, bracing herself. Vic could sense her struggle to keep her feelings about Dev under tight control. “The Naga and the DalRiss think differently than we do—I think we all understand that. They perceive their surroundings differently and with different senses, and because of those differences they form a different picture of the universe around them, a different worldview that does not always entirely correspond to our own.”

“You’re saying they’re alien,” Aimes said, and the others laughed.

“And Dev Cameron is alien now as well,” Katya said. “I’m not entirely sure just how alien he is, but he certainly does not perceive things the same way we do. But the important thing is that he still retains his basic identity with the human species. He identifies with
us.
He cares about what happens to us, as a species at any rate. I… I’m not sure if he
can
relate to us as individuals any longer, but he wants what is best for the human race as a whole.”

“What,” Admiral Bruce Roberts, of the Confederation Navy, said. “Even the Japanese?” He glanced at Taki, then shrugged. “Or the Imperials, I should say.”