When Juli arrived in her office at SOCE headquarters later that morning, she found her work awaiting her as usual. Although she lent her presence regularly to some half a dozen government agencies and made less frequent contributions to many others, Juli still identified herself primarily as a member of the Contact Subcommittee, and she still carried out most of her work from office in the SOCE complex in downtown Fifth Jerusalem.

The Subcommittee itself had undergone an organization-wide identity crisis in the last two years. At first, with no new reports of Gnosis encounters anywhere in the galaxy, the SOCE appeared to have outlived the reason for its existence, and when the government first reconvened there had been talk of disbanding it. But Juli and the other Subcommittee members had argued to keep their positions, citing a number of bizarre non-Gnosis incidents occurring in the aftermath of the disappearance phenomenon--events that had fallen well within the Subcommittee's unique realm of expertise--and at last the Federation Parliament had voted to expand the role of the SOCE to include investigations of all Gnosis-like activity, meaning any abnormal phenomena that originated in the imaginary domain.

Juli and her colleagues had investigated more than a few previously unheard-of occurrences since then, incidents that appeared to stem from changes in the relationship between real and imaginary space brought about by the AMN project. Reports of paranormal activity had increased significantly, and the Subcommittee had to take even the most outlandish claims seriously because they no longer had any idea what to expect. As a result the SOCE had proven its usefulness many times over, to the extent that Juli wished they had a little less work to do. Between Subcommittee business and her other responsibilities, she hardly had any free time.

Not that this situation was new to her, or, if she were honest with herself, entirely unpleasant. She had always thrived on the pressures of commitments and deadlines, and enjoyed pushing herself to take on more responsibility than she thought she could handle; when it wasn't infuriating, it could be exhilarating. But sometimes all she got out of a day's work was a headache and a short temper.

By mid-afternoon, she had reason to suspect that today was going to be one of those days. Then her connection gear announced an incoming message, and a glance at the sender's ID confirmed her suspicion. Reluctantly she accepted the call; she had hoped to put off having to think about this for a while longer. "Yes, Doctus?"

"Good afternoon, Dr. Mizrahi. I did some research on the data you sent me the other day. If you have a minute, I'll go over the results."

"Go ahead." If she hadn't already been seated, Juli would have felt compelled to sit down; she could already tell from Doctus' tone that the news wouldn't be good.

"It seems your contact in the military was correct in attributing the words to an ancient religious text. Are you familiar at all with the Book of Revelation?"

"Yes, I ...." Juli hesitated. Joachim had taken an interest in it shortly before the Miltia Conflict began. The passages he quoted to her, full of incomprehensible horrors and inscrutable yet menacing omens, had made her feel uneasy even before she knew what was happening on Miltia. In retrospect, she wondered if he had hoped to receive some sort of insight into the impending catastrophe by studying the nightmares of the past. "... I've heard of it."

Doctus seemed impressed. "The verse in question comes from a chapter referring to ... well, if you'll pardon the phrase, a figure known as the whore of Babylon. There are a number of different interpretations, but for our purposes, it would seem to be a warning of some kind, or possibly a threat."

"Babylon?" said Juli. At times like this, she got the impression that Doctus was hiding something behind the shaded glasses and the wry half-smile she always wore. "What do you mean, a warning? I presume you're referring to more than their immediate intention to destroy the peacekeeping fleet."

"Well, obviously." Doctus' expression hadn't changed, but for a moment Juli detected slightly more than the usual level of sarcasm in her tone. "The 'Babylon' of the Book of Revelation was a society consumed by decadence and corruption, condemned for persecuting religious believers--a comparison that seems particularly appropriate given the political climate of the last few years."

Juli felt her throat tighten. "The anti-Ormus hearings. Well I suppose they have every reason to be angry with us. In our enthusiasm to rid the world of a false religion, we became just as fanatical as they were."

"Those are surprisingly tolerant words from a member of the Federation government, Dr. Mizrahi."

"You forget that I was also on the receiving end of the government's 'persecution.' So you'll have to forgive me if I seem a little jaded."

"Sorry to offend you." But again the tone of Doctus' voice, the upturn at the corners of her mouth, suggested otherwise.

Juli pretended she hadn't noticed. "Have you found out anything else? What about the possibility that these organizations have been using some sort of underground network to coordinate their attacks?"

"Nothing yet, but we're looking into it. If we do find anything, you'll be the first person outside of Scientia to know."

"Thank you," said Juli. "I'll be waiting."

Doctus gave a brief nod and signed off, and Juli stared at the blank screen of her connection gear. She had sent the data from Captain Roman to Scientia for analysis because Doctus had been the AMN Committee's expert in residence on ancient symbolism. It had been Scientia's idea to call the new network axis mundi, the axis of the world; as Doctus herself had explained, it signified a point at which opposing forces met and the heavens joined the earth, a fitting designation for a network that would unite real and imaginary space. Doctus had also designed the AMN insignia, a dual-serpent motif combining the former UMN logo with Scientia's infinity symbol: a small version of it hovered in the corner of the screen of Juli's connection gear.

Juli placed a call to Helmer, but he didn't answer--he must have been busy, or out of his office--so she left a message explaining what Doctus had just told her, then went back to the work she had been doing before the interruption. When she received another call about an hour later, she picked it up without thinking.

"Representative--" And then she stopped, realizing that the speaker on the other end of the line was someone else. "Oh. I'm sorry. I thought you were ...."

The woman, a Federation official and one of the co-founders of the Department of Interplanetary Reconciliation, brushed off her apology. "Dr. Mizrahi, I'm afraid there's been an incident with the Patmos Delegation. Your presence is requested at an emergency meeting of the DIRE to determine an immediate course of action."

"The Patmos Delegation?" Juli drew a blank for a moment, then remembered the team of government representatives and humanitarian aid workers dispatched last week to the planetary system of Patmos, which had only recently received access to the AMN. "What's going on?"

"The situation is extremely urgent; that's all I'm authorized to tell you." She hesitated, looking sheepish. "Actually, that's all I know right now. A full report will be given at the meeting, but until then it's strictly confidential."

"I see." She inclined her head slightly, contriving to look gracious and insulted at the same time. "And when is this meeting being held? Or is that also strictly confidential?"

"The, ah, meeting will begin when all required personnel have logged in to the Federation Parliament assembly interface," said the DIRE member, her face masklike with the effort of trying to appear unperturbed. Juli's gaze sometimes had the effect of making people squirm behind their businesslike façades. "That is to say, as soon as possible."

"Well then, I certainly won't delay you any longer." Juli executed a few keystrokes and turned her chair away from her desk as a bank of communication screens opened along the perimeter of the room. Although the Federation Parliament's assembly program could handle conferences between hundreds of thousands of members at once, the central decision-making board of the DIRE comprised only about two dozen individuals, Juli herself among them, so the virtual environment for their meeting today was a significantly scaled-down version. Most of the screens displayed holographic representations of the department members who had already arrived, but a few remained blank, showing only the double-serpent icon on a flat gray background.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Mizrahi," said the chairman of the department, a senior politician who had been appointed on the merits of his experience in handling postwar reparations after the Miltia Conflict. "Glad you could join us. We'll begin as soon as everyone's accounted for."

A few minutes later, all of the remaining vacant windows had been filled or, if the member in question was absent, closed down to make more room for the others.

The chairman looked around at the holographic assembly. "Is that everyone? All right, then, I think we can get started." He lowered his gaze for a moment, studying something off-screen. "As you have all been made aware, we just received word of a crisis in the Patmos system involving members of this very department. Our latest update on the situation indicates that the delegates' spacecraft was captured by anti-Federation terrorists shortly after gating out in Patmian space. Its crew and passengers have been taken hostage, and their captors have made certain demands in exchange for their safe return. Specifically, they've requested the access code to the sealed column linking Second Miltia with the galaxy of Lost Jerusalem. This information is considered proprietary and extremely sensitive, and must not be allowed to fall into the hands of forces hostile to the Federation. We are here to discuss a possible solution which minimizes the risk to the lives and safety of the hostages while preserving the secrecy of classified government information. You may now speak freely."

At his invitation they all began speaking at once--shouting, really. Juli stayed quiet, waiting for her unease to subside. Perhaps she had spent too much time turning over Lapis Roman's report in her mind, but now Juli understood why Roman and Helmer had suspected a conspiracy. She was beginning to suspect one herself after the events of the last few days.

"Pardon me, chairman," said Juli, raising her voice above the noise. "Is there anything else we should know regarding the incident?" She paused; the other members of the Department had begun to fall silent, turning their attention on her. "I presume the terrorists made some sort of broadcast stating their demands. If so, it might be relevant to our investigation to review the content of that transmission before we proceed any further."

The chairman stared at her with the look of a professor confronted by an unexpectedly well-prepared student. "As a matter of fact, there was such a broadcast. We received it about an hour ago, shortly after we learned of the incident."

"Can you replay it?"

"Yes, but it's rather ... well, you'll see. Just a moment, please." He typed something into a keyboard off-screen. "The voice in this broadcast has been identified as belonging to one of the delegates, but he appears to have been coerced into speaking."

The message began with a hiss of white noise, followed by a young male voice shakily reciting the terrorists' demands. Then the tone of his voice changed, became pitched and frantic, like a street-corner evangelist announcing the end of the world. "So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns .... And on her forehead a name was written ...."

The transmission ended abruptly in a shrill burst of static; a few members of the DIRE winced or covered their ears.

"As you can see," said the chairman, "the first part of the message is fairly straightforward. But our analysts have been trying to make sense of the last part since we received it."

"It sounds like some kind of religious message," said one of the department members. "Is this another one of those lunatic post-Ormus cults?"

"It certainly seems that way," Juli said. "In fact, the message ...." She hesitated. The attack on the Federation Fleet in Third Alexandria hadn't been revealed to the public yet, or even to most of the civilian government, and she had the feeling Helmer and Lapis Roman wanted to keep it that way for now. Besides, her own intuition told her not to let on how much she already knew.

"Chairman, isn't this all rather irrelevant?" said the woman who had notified Juli of the meeting. "With all due respect to Dr. Mizrahi, let's not forget that there are more important matters at hand than trying to decipher the meaning of a few lines about some ancient hallucination. As we all saw from the broadcast footage, innocent lives are at stake, and every moment we waste puts them in greater danger. I strongly recommend we devote our energies to developing a solution." She settled back in her chair with a look of vindictive satisfaction, meeting Juli's eyes just long enough to make the unspoken message clear.

As in most Federation agencies, the DIRE had its own internal politics, its own invisible hierarchy, and its own history of disputes and disagreements and contests to determine which of its members held the most influence; sometimes the internal conflicts dwarfed whatever issues the agency had been formed to address. Juli didn't exactly enjoy participating in those kinds of games, and the irony of rampant infighting in an organization ostensibly dedicated to resolving conflicts wasn't lost on her, but she had to maintain her own status if she wanted her opinion to be taken seriously in the future. While the other department members proposed solutions, Juli sat in silent fury. They might pretend to ignore the exchange now, but they'd all have noticed and kept score.

"I suppose a conventional military strike is out of the question?" said one of the members, sounding as if he hoped to be contradicted.

The chairman nodded, and the other man looked crestfallen. "The overt use of force is neither advisable nor practical under the circumstances. Besides, I doubt we'd be able to obtain authorization for such an action on short notice, even under the Emergency Powers Act."

Another member spoke up. "What about the Federation Police?"

"Unfortunately, this is out of their jurisdiction," said the chairman. "Patmos hasn't agreed to rejoin the Federation yet. That's what our delegates were going there to discuss before they were captured. And the new Patmian government has been notoriously hard to work with--they don't trust the Federation. We've already sent them a message requesting special permission to send the GFPD or the military's special forces, and they haven't responded. If we proceed anyway, it could jeopardize our relations with Patmos."

"Then we'll have to go in covertly," said Juli. Her pride still ached from the other woman's rebuke, and Juli was anxious to reassert her influence. "We'll need to send one of our own agents to infiltrate the base and evacuate the hostages without being detected by either the terrorists or the Patmian government. As for the legal implications, we'll sort that out when the delegates are safe. It'll be dangerous, but if it succeeds, I believe you'll find that it meets both of the requirements outlined at the beginning of this discussion, Chairman."

The chairman raised an eyebrow. "And I assume you have someone in mind for the job?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," said Juli, regretting the words as she spoke them, but it was too late to back out. She had the attention of the entire assembly; if she failed to provide a solution, her credibility and her reputation would suffer. Biting her tongue, she stared out at the rest of the department from the corner she'd backed herself into. Even before she said it, she hated herself for what she was about to say. "And if you'll excuse me for a moment, I may be able to contact him right now."