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quite understanding how he was feelingthat, or how he knew what it was.

“Welcome back to the Sol System, Admiral,” Konstantin told him. There was a slight time delay, about three seconds, the communicationslag caused by almost a million kilometers of distance between America and the Yorktown. “I am integrating your version of myself into my matrix. I see your mission was a success.”

“I . . . yes, it was. What the hell is going down up there?”

Again, the three-second delay dragged on the conversation. When Konstantin spoke again, it was to briefly sketch in the sequenceof recent events: the damage to the Nungiirtok super-ships, the arrival of a gestalt mind within the Godstream, and the hijackingof one of the planetoids using the Omega virus to peel open the alien defensive systems and enter the command and controlnetworks.

“Understood,” Gray said. His eyes narrowed. “Are you in touch with Target Alfa now?”

“Negative. Their communications . . .” There was a long pause. Then, “Alfa has just opened a communications channel, Admiral.They appear to wish to parlay.”

“Accept it, Konstantin. If we can get their formal surrender, we can stop this war right now.”

“Assuming they know what ‘surrender’ is, Admiral.”

“Well, they’d damn well better learn!”

“Comm channel open, Admiral. I have an entity calling itself 4236 Xavix on-line.”

“Let me talk with him, Konstantin. A live friend is better than a dead enemy any day.”

An in-head window opened, and Gray stared into the alien face of a Nungiirtok lord.

 

Crater Fast-doc

Columbus, Ohio

1050 hours, EST

Jo de Sailles was dying.

She’d come to her usual fast-doc intent on becoming something else. Anything else. Sometimes it seemed like life just refused to go her way, but she knew if she could find the right shape, the rightbod, she would find the right guy or gal and enter a serious relationship and stop having to worry about beatings from parentsand an unshakeable inability to land her own source of income.

So she’d stolen credit from home and went to see the fast-doc clinic where they promised a new body through direct geneticmanipulation. It was totally drune.

But something was happening, something not in the plan. She could hear technicians running around and shouting—someone crying,“She’s in seizure! Kick her heart!”

She felt herself slipping away. Damn it, this wasn’t supposed to happen! But before she could even register a protest, shedied.

She’d wanted to be a unicorn . . .

Then she woke up.

Chapter Twenty-two

28 April, 2429

Koenig

The Godstream

0945 hours, FST

The battle was over, but so suddenly it felt like anticlimax. Under Konstantin’s control, all three planetoids—the fourthby now was long gone—were being gentled back toward Earth. Koenig had suggested that the Nungiirtok ships be put in a parkingorbit around the moon where the combined fleets of Earth could keep a wary eye on them. Konstantin was now in full controlof all three alien vessels—as well as the ones still in orbit around Earth—and the Godstream Mind could disable them all instantlywith a thought.

What to do with several thousand surviving Nungiirtok and their Tok Iad lords was more problematic. During the Sh’daar War, the Nungies had been among the most implacable of the races making up the alien cooperative, and the most dangerous. Thousands of humans, both military and civilian, had been slaughtered on Osiris, and the hulking, bipedal monsters were notoriously difficult to negotiate with. The fourth Nungiirtok ship—Target Gamma—had escaped with relatively little damage. If it made it back to the Nungiirtok homeworld, it seemed unlikely that the Nungie leadership would accept this surrender and call off the war.

Earth, Koenig thought, was going to be in for some rough times.

To try to offset further hostilities, Koenig had ordered that Gray’s twenty-three Nungiirtok prisoners be repatriated to theAshtongtok Tah. The asteroid-ship’s crew needed all the help they could get just holding their battered rock together in one piece. Somethinglike nine-tenths of the asteroid’s habitable internal structure had been destroyed, and the survivors had all that they couldhandle and more keeping what was left of their ship alive.

Koenig spent the time returning home exploring the Godstream. He could sense . . . layers, whole worlds, and the teeming mindswithin them. What had started centuries ago as the Internet, growing into the Cloud, then Global Net was now something farvaster, more subtle, more far-reaching, a burgeoning hive of individual realities. Certainly Koenig had been aware of the Godstream before the fall of the space elevator, but that awareness had been a pale and tepid ghost of what he experiencednow.

And it was growing. Blossoming. Changing out of all recognition. As America and Yorktown neared the Earth-moon system, the Godstream seemed to unfold, revealing a universe, a metaverse unlike anything Koenig had ever experienced before. Untold millions of human minds were continuing to upload into the virtualrealities of the Godstream, flooding into the digital maze of networks, and they were creating . . . worlds. Dimensions. Heavens. A seemingly infinite diversity of alternate realities, some interlocking with one another, some cut off and closed, somestill openly connected with what Koenig still thought of as the “real world,” others so remote and so far removed as to beinaccessible.

Koenig moved among the worlds, glimpsing wonders within each. Most appeared both recognizable and comprehensible. There were cities, there were oceans, there were forests and mountains and hills. There were pleasure palaces, there were endless expanses of parkland. But besides the mundane there were realities beyond understanding, vistas of light and energy and matter and unexplored horizons. Koenig allowed himself to drift from one to another, an electronic ghost sampling myriad realities, knowing he could enter any of them with a thought, but choosing to stay aloof for the moment as he tried to understand what was happening.

Here was an entire universe consisting of mathematical principles and theory made manifest, occupied by legions of Mind unitedwithin a gestalt that was exploring . . . something. Koenig could barely grasp what was being probed within that hierarchy of equations and logic and fundamental truths, butknew it had to do with the ultimate nature of reality itself.

And there was something akin to the heaven of the Christians, a gleaming realm