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Tah’s crew, Mavtok was healthy, a perfect specimen of robust and nurturing Tokhood.

And at the sight, 4236 Xavix felt a stirring need within, a need generated by the nearness of death, the weakness in his body. In actuality, the Tok Lord was a parasitic hermaphroditerather than male, but one of the whip-slender manipulatory tentacles growing from the base of his body now sprouted a curvedstinger—his, or, rather, technically her—ovipositor.

“Put those others to work, Mavtok,” Xavix said. “And when you have done so, approach me and assume the breeding position beforeme.”

“No,” Mavtok said.

The refusal stunned 4236 Xavix. “What?”

“There have been . . . changes, Lord,” Mavtok replied. “A number of us have been reconsidering the relationship between theTok and the Tok Iad.”

“What is there to reconsider? We give you orders, you carry them out. Now come here!” He would punish this insolence by impregnatingthe Tok slowly.

Need . . . The need burned.

Mavtok Chah hesitated, then lumbered closer, towering over the shrunken, tentacled form on its command dais. His fellows crowdedalong behind, spreading out to surround Xavix’s seat.

“Wait! All of you—wait! What are you doing?”

“We live for the Tok, not for the Tok Iad.”

Hinged appendages snapped out, many of them . . . pummeling, crushing, breaking, smashing.

And 4236 Xavix died.

He did not wake up.

 

SAR Tug Heracles

Approaching Lunar Orbit

1228 hours, FST

Julia Adams watched from the surgical observation area, a compartment overlooking the main operating theater. The medidocsurgeons leaned over the comatose figure below, taking him apart.

I should have been down there. Her fist closed, then beat soundlessly against the transparency. I should have been down there . . .

But America’s psych department had failed to clear her for combat deployment after the Marines had brought her back from the Moskva. Her interrogation over there had left her . . . not broken, exactly, but shaking at the thought of climbing into a Starbladeagain. It would take time, they said.

But in the meantime, America’s fighter squadrons had scrambled and launched, and she’d watched Don leading the Black Demons into the fight. Linked inthrough the carrier’s comm network, she’d been at least able to watch the CGI display of over a hundred fighters descendingon the ruin of the Nungiirtok planetoid.

She’d agonized with fear as he’d turned back into the battle with empty bays; the idiot was offering himself as a target togive his own people a better chance.

No!

She’d screamed when the green icon marking Gregory’s fighter had switched over to red. He’d been hit—badly—and the Starblade’swreckage was drifting free in deep space.

In due course, America’s search-and-rescue tugs had been deployed as they always were in the aftermath of a battle. Fighters that had been crippleddrifted on the last headings they’d held when they were hit, some with living pilots, others not. Julia had asked—no, demanded—tobe allowed to accompany SAR tug Heracles on its rescue run, had demanded that they check the drifting bit of flotsam that was Don Gregory’s crushed Starblade.

And incredibly, Don was alive.

Alive!

The Nungie gravitic fist had closed on his Starblade just as he tried to twist away. He’d very nearly made it, but the collapsingspacetime field aft of his ship had caught his Starblade’s aft section and crushed it out of existence.

Donald’s legs had been mangled almost beyond recognition.

But he’d lived. His suit had sealed off the damage, preventing further loss of air and blood. His emergency medical systemhad punctured him in half a dozen places, taking him down into a deep coma, slowing his metabolism, pumping him full of healingmedinano to begin rebuilding his shattered bones and tissue. By the time the Heracles had caught up to him, he was stable . . . but only just. Robots had gentled him into the Heracles’s main bay, and the meditechs had carried him to the OR immediately.

It should have been me.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant Adams,” the surgical robot’s voice spoke in her mind. “There may be more we can do with him when weget him to Earth, and he should live . . .”

“But?”

“But his legs are beyond reconstruction, his pelvis is crushed, and his lower spine has been badly compromised, as have hisintestines. He may have to undergo a procedure to graft his torso into a robotic undercarriage of some sort.”

“Whatever it takes,” she said. “Whatever it goddamn takes!”

If he lived . . .

Well, then so would she.

 

Koenig

The Godstream

1312 hours, FST

Koenig walked among the worlds, marveling at the richness, the sheer inventiveness of the virtual universes exploding into being around him. Human minds continued to flood into the Godstream from elsewhere.

He recognized the immensity of religious belief drawing in Mind from across Earth, from the orbital complexes, and even fromthe moon. He was not himself a believer, but he was familiar with many of the flavors of religious thought and ideology. FundamentalistChristians, he knew—at least many of them—believed in something called “the Rapture,” an end-times transformation when believerswould be caught up into the air to be with their God, and what was happening here was indeed very much like that. The surprise,he thought with wry humor, would come when they realized that they were not alone in heaven.

For Muslims, too, were entering the Godstream in increasing numbers, triumphant in their Yawm al-Qiyamah, the Day of Resurrection, as were Buddhists convinced they were entering nirvana and Hindus who believed the evil age ofKali Yuga was ending, ushering in a new and golden cycle of the Satya Yuga. That paradise was more an unfolding of human and AI technology than of divine intervention didn’t seem to matter, at leastto most.

A few, like Koenig, had begun to explore and were learning that rigid theology and ideological walls had not prepared themfor the reality. They were letting in anybody.

For a majority of humans, though, the transition had less to do with religious belief than it did with an ecstatic embraceof technology, a fulfillment of technology’s promise which had driven the ever-increasing pace of human innovation since thedawn of the Neolithic. The first to ascend were people connected with the Godstream at the moment of death, those like Koenigwho died . . . then awoke transformed. As more and more minds linked in, however, humans could simply access the Godstreamand step through, ascending by