The Novus Ordo Seclorum research complex on Fifth Jerusalem had served as his base of operations for over a year. He appreciated the security as much as the opportunity to return to his work without the Federation breathing down his neck.

According to official records, Dr. Sellers no longer existed. Reports had confirmed his disappearance at the time Abel's Ark consumed the tactical warship Merkabah two years ago. But if that were true, he had been awfully busy for a nonexistent person.

Dmitri Yuriev had sent him to the Merkabah to create a diversion without providing any means for his escape. A different sort of person might have interpreted the directive as a death sentence and gone down with the ship, but Sellers valued his life and his research more than he valued his loyalties. Since he hadn't received any further instructions from Yuriev, he had gone ahead and planned his own escape route. He knew of a certain U-TIC agent who had infiltrated the Federation Fleet under the command of the Salvator faction, and as Sellers already held a great deal of influence with Ormus, he had no difficulty arranging for a Federation vessel to slip in amidst the confusion of the surrounding battle and retrieve him from the Merkabah.

It was the aftermath that had proven difficult. The Federation ship that had rescued him barely escaped the disappearance phenomenon, and when the UMN collapsed they had ended up stranded hundreds of light-years away from the nearest settled planet. During the months of isolation that followed, some of the Federation soldiers on board, convinced they were the only survivors of the end of the world, had gone insane with despair, killing themselves or their comrades in wanton eruptions of violence. Sellers had managed to survive because he lived on the edge of madness anyway, and learning how to balance there had prevented him from being pushed over.

Eventually he'd led a mutiny against the ship's commander, the same U-TIC agent who had saved his life on the Merkabah. The agent had outlived his usefulness, and Sellers felt no great remorse at eliminating him and taking over the ship himself; after that, it was only a matter of time before they were rescued by another division of the Fleet. As soon as the necessary transfer columns were reestablished, the Federation had sent out the remaining fraction of its military in search of survivors. Sellers managed to disguise his identity until he could make contact with another group of Ormus sympathizers in the government, and he had spent the rest of that year on the run, evading detection and traveling from one Ormus safe house to the next.

When he received the offer from Nov-OS in the midst of the anti-Ormus hearings, he had accepted it without a second thought. He would just as soon have accepted an offer from Vector or the government, if they'd promised to grant him amnesty. The identity of his employer didn't concern him as long as he got to continue his research, and the fugitive lifestyle he had led for the past year had rendered that impossible. Nov-OS was a relatively new company, at least in its present configuration. It had formed as the result of a merger between the remnants of Hyams and certain other companies previously owned by Vector, and rumor held that the company had already developed its own UMN-based network while the AMN was still in its prototype stage. At any rate, the NSN--Nov-OS's internal corporate network--was now among the largest registered networks in the Federation, even though only a fraction of its true extent had been disclosed to the AMN Administrative Bureau and the regulating agencies in Parliament. The undisclosed portion extended much further; only Sellers and one or two other members of Nov-OS's board of directors had any idea how far. They concealed it because it extended well beyond the limits on network size set out by the AMN Bureau, and because revealing the full extent of the network would have been tantamount to revealing the company's true affiliation and intention.

Officially, Nov-OS was Vector's largest competitor; it had risen in opposition to Vector's centuries-long monopoly on nearly every marketable commodity in the star cluster, and it held the position that a corporation effectively run by the leaders of a former anti-UMN terrorist group like Scientia was no longer acting in the best interests of the public, even after Scientia began dismantling Vector's monopoly from within and distributing its non-essential holdings to smaller independent companies. As for Nov-OS's own ties with Vector, and by extension its former dealings with Ormus, the company's board of directors had disavowed all such connections, publicly expelling a few convenient scapegoats from their ranks in an act of corporate contrition. They had chosen a name--"the new order of the ages"--to signify their separation from the past as much as their commitment to rebuilding the world.

Unofficially, the company held to Vector's true objectives--those known only to Wilhelm and a few higher-ranking personnel--more faithfully than Vector did. Sellers didn't bother with those objectives, and concerned himself with company politics only insofar as they had a direct influence on his research. His current project was close to surpassing even Mizrahi's work: at last, after a lifetime of struggling in the shadow of that old dead madman, Sellers was about to cast his own shadow in the light of history.

He was analyzing the final reports from the Patmos facility when the Executor called.

Executor wasn't his official title within the company. On the board of directors, he was the Senior Network Adviser, a gross understatement of his actual role in creating the NSN. The Executor had constructed most of the network himself, using techniques unknown even to the former Vector programming staff who now formed the core of Nov-OS's communications department. Sellers had never met the Executor in person, and he knew of no one who had, so naturally rumors abounded. People speculated that the Executor had no physical form and existed only within the AMN or the NSN, that he was an artificial consciousness or one of the Designer Children engineered for affinity with the network. His refusal to confirm, deny, or acknowledge any of the rumors only strengthened their credibility, as did his insistence on remaining anonymous; he concealed his name and location from the public, and when his presence was required during board meetings, he modified the appearance of his holographic avatar to obscure his features.

The only thing he didn't keep secret were his present associations, incriminating as they were. It was common knowledge within the company that the Executor had been a protégé of Cardinal Heinlein and, like his predecessor, served a dual role as corporate and religious leader, coordinating the Ormus splinter groups that received aid from Nov-OS. The followers of Ormus placed him somewhere on the continuum between prophet, messiah, and god. He sometimes referred to himself as the "Executor of the Will," and although he had never specified whose will he intended to carry out, Sellers had a few good guesses.

"Dr. Sellers." The Executor appeared on the screen as a black silhouette edged with a dim violet glow, superimposed over the data from the Patmos report. Like all higher-ranking Nov-OS personnel, he could bypass normal calling procedures and broadcast his message directly to any terminal on the network, without waiting for the receiving party to accept the connection. Unlike the other personnel with that privilege, he used it by default instead of for urgent messages only. Sellers found the habit unnerving, and had the distinct impression that the Executor enjoyed catching him by surprise and eavesdropping on his files.

"What is it, Senior Network Adviser?" Personally, Sellers hated the Executor. There was something unpleasantly familiar about his condescending attitude and the God act, something that reminded Sellers of his last employer. For a while, Sellers had even suspected that the Executor was Yuriev himself; he wouldn't have put it beyond the stubborn bastard to find his way back to this dimension somehow, and he kept waiting for the Executor to reproach him for abandoning the Merkabah, but he never did. Whether that meant he didn't want to reveal his identity or he was someone else entirely, Sellers didn't know. For the sake of retaining his own position within the company, Sellers kept quiet and pretended to suspect nothing. If it was Yuriev's intention to announce his return, he would wait for the right moment to stage a dramatic entrance, and Sellers had no intention of interfering. Especially since he didn't know whether Yuriev had achieved his goals, or what kind of power he had now.

But he still wasn't convinced it was Yuriev, either. Skulking around on the network and consorting with Ormus--it didn't seem like Yuriev's style.

"I see you received the reports from Patmos." The voice, at least, wasn't Yuriev's, although it did sound like the voice of someone who enjoyed hearing himself speak--a street preacher who had become enraptured with his own sermon, so absorbed in his own convictions that anyone who stood around listening risked conversion. But then, Sellers amended himself, hardly anyone preached on street corners anymore, not when they could reach a much larger congregation without even leaving their homes. "What's your opinion on the results?"

"I was in the process of analyzing them when you called," said Sellers, and against his better judgment added wryly, "as you can see."

The Executor gave a soft indulgent laugh. "Contact me when you've finished. In the meantime, I will require a status report on Project Apocryphos. I'll need you to complete it as soon as possible--sooner than we discussed."

Sellers grimaced. "I'm working as fast as I can. It isn't easy to coordinate production when one's facilities are spread across half the star cluster."

"I didn't ask you to make excuses, Sellers." A flash of fire and brimstone in the sermon now, just enough to make the warning clear. "Decentralizing the main production facilities was necessary in order to preserve the confidential nature of the operation. You should be well aware of that."

"How soon do you need the next status update?"

"As soon as possible. It seems the Patmos facility was infiltrated shortly before its termination; some of our plans may have leaked into the hands of the government. If so, we must be prepared to act."

"Infiltrated?" Sellers leaned forward in his hover-chair. "How?"

"By a Federation agent, most likely. They have special technology from Scientia, classified equipment we haven't been able to duplicate yet. It enables their spacecraft to evade detection by our systems. The intruder didn't show up on our radar until he was inside the base. It's possible he was sent only to retrieve the delegates, but if he happened to do any digging where he wasn't supposed to ...."

"Damn it," said Sellers flatly. "So you believe the Federation may have obtained information about the project."

"Perhaps. It also means they might be able to implicate Nov-OS for collaborating with Ormus. But don't let that concern you," and the voice took on a note of mockery, as if its owner already knew Sellers wouldn't stay concerned for long. "Concentrate on finishing the project. I'll take care of the Federation."

The silhouette vanished from the screen as suddenly as it had appeared, terminating the call before Sellers could answer, yet he understood the Executor's meaning well enough: there were to be no further questions. Sellers frowned, rubbing his forehead. Somehow he always ended up working for people whose grasp on sanity made him question his own.

He glanced at the reports from Patmos. So far, his preliminary analysis of the test data indicated that the remote-linking experiments had achieved results on par with those they had obtained using Mizrahi's emulators seventeen years ago. That meant the emulator he had constructed--asleep for now, in its cage beneath the research complex--was at least as powerful as Mizrahi's, and far superior to the spare unit Sellers had previously tried to build. None of them came anywhere near the true potential of the Zohar, but the new emulator should suffice for their purposes until they had access to the relics on Lost Jerusalem.

Leaving the analysis running in the background, Sellers opened the main file on Project Apocryphos. The experiments in Patmos had been part of it, an integral part--so important it had been necessary to destroy the test subjects along with the rest of the evidence, once they had extracted the data they needed--but the research taking place in the hundreds of other laboratories hidden across the star cluster was equally important. And the Executor's insistence on completing the project as soon as possible had worried him, more than he was willing to let on. If the Federation had already discovered their research, they might not have time to finish it before the government took action against them, and Sellers dreaded the thought. He was so close, now, to achieving his lifelong goal--too close to let a bunch of Federation dogs wrangle it away from him. He didn't know how the Executor intended to handle the Federation, but Sellers had no intention of letting them shut down the project either. Not until he had blotted out Mizrahi's name from the annals of history and written his own in its place.

Sellers didn't care whether he went down as a savior, a destroyer, or both, as long as his reputation lasted through the ages. This time, if he succeeded, he would never again be known as the pale imitation of a great and terrible man; he would become greater, and more terrible.