In a few hours, MOMO had assembled the current and former members of the AMN Development Committee in one of the Dämmerung's conference rooms, where the first meetings had taken place two years ago. Many of those who had since left the AMN Division attended via holographic transmission; their screens lined the perimeter of the room, overlooking a formation of tables arranged around a platform at one end of the hall.

MOMO stood on the platform to direct the meeting. The larger screens behind her displayed placeholder images for now; when the conference began, she would use them for the diagrams and charts she had prepared. She was accustomed to the arrangement, having given progress reports every week before a similar assembly during the first year of the AMN Project; still, even from across the room Ziggy could tell she was nervous, not from stage fright but from the realization that the stakes this time were much higher than they had been. He and Juli had both tried to reassure her, but it was difficult to provide any comfort when they were at least as worried as she was.

She had just called the meeting to order when the door chimed at the opposite end of the room, and the last member of the Committee to be accounted for strolled in without ceremony, before MOMO or anyone else had a chance to respond.

"Well, it seems I'm fashionably late again," said Doctus. "I see no one bothered to save me a seat. But at least I'm not the only one standing." She nodded to Ziggy, who had taken up his accustomed posting against the wall. He preferred to stand apart from the proceedings because the detached perspective suited his role on the Committee, but mainly because he felt uncomfortable taking up leg room at one of the tables. "Hello, stranger," Doctus said in a lower voice, walking over to stand beside him. "You look surprised."

Ziggy hesitated, waiting for the attention that had accompanied her arrival to die down. Juli's eyes lingered on him a moment longer than anyone else's, but at last she looked away with a dismissive shake of her head, taking a sudden interest in some documents she had open on her connection gear. "I didn't expect to see you again so soon," he said, without looking at Doctus.

She forced a laugh under her breath. "Are you kidding? I've only been waiting a hundred years to bring this guy to justice."

"I see. Then it seems our objectives are the same." He kept staring straight ahead, afraid of what he'd see or give away if he looked in her direction. With those dark lenses she had an advantage, and he no longer trusted himself to keep his emotions from showing on his face.

"Nice of you to finally notice, Captain Obvious. Did they insulate your brain with lead when they brought you back to life?"

"On second thought ... you couldn't possibly be who I thought you were. My subordinates were respectful." Then he relaxed, shaking his head. "I don't know what happened to you, but it's good to have you back."

"Likewise." Settling against the wall, she turned her attention to the stage at the front of the room.

"You've all received a briefing on the situation," said MOMO, after she had called the meeting to order a second time, "so we'll start discussing our strategy right away, unless anyone has questions." When no one spoke up, she continued. "Our first priorities should be to protect Second Miltia and secure the entrance to the sealed column. We don't know how the enemy will try to attack, but we do know they're capable of striking from the real-number domain by manipulating Ormus, and from the imaginary-number domain via the shadow network. So we'll have to be prepared with a defense on both fronts. Now, I understand Scientia has been doing some independent research on the shadow network. Can someone give us a status report?"

"I can give you more than that, my dear." On that cue, Doctus got up and walked across the room. Producing a disk from a pocket inside her coat, she tossed it down on the table closest to the platform. "That's all the information I've been able to gather on Ormus' pet project, the Apocryphos. It wasn't easy to come by, I might add. I had to do some sneaking around inside one of the most heavily guarded corporate nets in the Federation, the Novus Ordo Seclorum Network." She shot a pointed look across the table at Juli, who had already risen from her seat.

"Novus Ordo Seclorum?" Juli braced herself against the table. "You mean Nov-OS is part of this after all?"

"Sure looks that way," said Doctus. "If you'll pardon the tired metaphor, you could say their network is the tip of the iceberg--a very large, very dangerous iceberg, lurking under the waters of the imaginary domain. The NSN shares the same access protocols as the shadow network, and they appear to be part of the same continuous structure. I hacked into the Nov-OS database on the NSN to see if I could dig up any useful information, and this is what I found." She swiped the disk off the table and brandished it as she stepped up to the platform. "MOMO, you mind if I take over for a minute?"

"Go right ahead." MOMO stepped aside--Ziggy thought she seemed a little nervous--and an awkward hush filled the room as Doctus took her place, fiddling with the controls on the projector unit until the blank screens behind her jumped to life in a cascading wall of data.

"As you can see here, Project Apocryphos is the designation for a top-secret plan to build a mobile fortress capable of taking on the superior forces of the Federation military. But that's just part of the story. Really, it's--"

"Wait a minute," said Togashi, pointing at the screen. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but are you saying they could undertake a project of that size without us noticing? Based on those specifications, it looks like something on the scale of the Merkabah--and I doubt the Federation could've kept that a secret even if they wanted to."

Doctus flashed a smile that could have indicated approval or reproach for the interruption; with her eyes concealed, it was impossible to tell. "Very good. You're right, they couldn't have kept it a secret if they'd built it all in one place. That's why they employed over three hundred separate production facilities--three hundred and sixty-five, to be exact--scattered among the outer regions. I would assume that they intend to assemble the weapon just prior to launching the attack."

Togashi lowered his arm and sank back into his seat with a grimace. "Then I guess we don't have much of a chance of stopping it before it's assembled."

"No, I should think not. And as I was saying, that's not the only thing we have to worry about. If it were just a conventional military weapon, that would be one thing. But it's much more than that."

"Is this the same Project Apocryphos that Dmitri Yuriev was working on with Voyager in the 4600s?" said Juli. "There wasn't much information in the report you gave us, but I gathered it had something to do with the Zohar and the Relics of God."

"Oh, so you read that." Doctus looked past her toward Ziggy, and he had the fleeting impression of her eyes meeting his, although he couldn't see them behind the lenses. "From what I've been able to piece together since I sent it to you, I'd have to concur. You're aware, I assume, that Joachim Mizrahi's research wasn't the first of its kind? Throughout history, there've been a number of other texts written about the Relics of God; some of them survived in complete or fragmentary form to the present day, but most of them were lost in ancient times. However, as we learned early on in our attempts to reconstruct the UMN, the imaginary domain contains a complete record of the works of humankind from the very beginning of history. None of the information entered into the collective unconscious is ever permanently deleted; it just gets buried for a while, and the deeper it's been suppressed the harder it is to retrieve. A lot of the data stored in the imaginary domain are still beyond the reach of our own technology, but to someone with a strong mental link to the network, it's theoretically possible to retrieve almost any piece of information; it's just a matter of how deep they're willing to dive."

"So you think Yuriev was using Voyager to search the UMN for information on the relics," said Ziggy. He didn't say it loudly, but a few people sitting nearby, including Juli, turned around and glanced in his direction. Because he rarely contributed much to the discourse in meetings like this one, and only spoke up when he had worked out something he felt was important, the rest of the AMN Committee tended to listen when he did speak. "And this ... Apocryphos was the result?"

Doctus nodded. "The name 'Apocryphos' just refers to something hidden or kept secret; it could mean any of the fragments of lost information Voyager discovered when he journeyed across the UMN. It seems he stumbled on the first of these fragments by accident, not long after he hacked into the UMN root structure and encountered U-DO. Somehow, Voyager's activities on the net came to Yuriev's attention, and Yuriev offered to support him if Voyager agreed to search for more information in return. It's quite possible that their partnership not only led to Voyager's interest in manipulating the People of Zohar, but also contributed to some of Yuriev's later research."

"I understand that," he said. "But why is Voyager using that information now? Is he trying to achieve the same goal as Yuriev?" Voyager, too, had expressed his intention to become a god, just as Yuriev had done when he seized the Zohar emulators two years ago. But the emulators had been destroyed, and the original Zohar had vanished with Michtam. Even if Voyager had reconstructed information that enabled him to use the Relics of God, it wouldn't be much use without the relics themselves. "How is he planning to use the Apocryphos if he doesn't have access to the Zohar?"

In front of him, he saw Juli's shoulders stiffen, heard her sharp intake of breath. "Damn it," she whispered. In a louder voice, she said, "That must be what Sellers meant when he said he'd surpassed my husband's research. He's found a way to power that thing without directly linking to the Zohar, or--"

"Or he's managed to build another emulator," said Doctus. "The plans for the Apocryphos fortress include a means of amplifying the energy from its power source, in this case the Zohar emulator--although they could achieve even better results if they got their hands on the real thing. And it's no coincidence that Voyager has been posing as a god to the followers of Ormus. Based on what Ziggurat 8 saw in the Patmos base, it looks like Voyager's trying to use the descendants of the Immigrant Fleet in conjunction with the emulator somehow."

"He's planning to kill them," said Ziggy under his breath, but somehow the people around him still heard. "He'll kill the people of the Immigrant Fleet and absorb their consciousnesses into himself. It's just like--" He shuddered, shook his head. "He's done this before. All of this, it's happened before. But it could be much worse this time. If he's using Second Miltia as well ...."

Juli had turned in her seat again and watched him as he spoke, and now she looked back toward the front of the room. "That's what I was afraid of. The majority of Second Miltia's population still consists of Immigrant Fleet descendants."

"What's he trying to do?" said MOMO, her voice shaking. While Doctus explained her findings, MOMO had stood quietly to one side, but Ziggy had observed her becoming increasingly agitated. "This can't .... How can we stop him?"

Across the room, Miyuki shrugged her shoulders in defeat. "I don't think we can do it alone." She had been staring at the readouts on the screens behind Doctus, studying the specifications for the Apocryphos fortress, and even her stubborn optimism seemed dampened now. "We're going to need the support of the Federation Fleet to stand up to that thing, that ... apocalypse machine or whatever you called it. And they're all busy fighting Ormus."

"I was afraid of that too," said Juli. "I suspected this war was part of their plan, and now I'm sure of it. Has anyone else been following the news? It's been unusually quiet in the outer regions for the last few days. The Fleet is still out there, but they've reported almost no new encounters with the enemy. I'd be surprised if they weren't planning something."

"Well, you know what they say about still water." Doctus stepped back from the center of the stage, leaving the Apocryphos data on the projector. "Aqua profunda--oh, forget it," she snapped, when a few people in the audience started to roll their eyes. The other Committee members had been exposed to enough of her quotations in the last few years to qualify for an education in classical Latin. Juli used to joke--and not entirely in good humor--that no meeting of the development team was complete until Doctus had recited something vaguely relevant in a dead language and sent everyone scrambling for a translation program. "Anyway, what about the fleet stationed in Second Miltia?" said Doctus. A division of the Second Miltian fleet had managed to evade deployment to the outer regions because Helmer had successfully convinced the Federation Parliament that it would be inadvisable to leave the sealed column unguarded. "They might have a tough time of it, but they should be able to hold out against this thing for a little while, until we can get some reinforcements sent over. And I'm sure the Federation will change its tune about staying the course in the outer regions once they get a look at the Apocryphos in action."

"That's right, the Second Miltian Fleet is still out there." Juli stared at the screen of her connection gear. "I'll talk to Helmer about it. Maybe he can pressure the military to send reinforcements."

"Can you do that now?" said MOMO, walking back out to the front of the platform where Doctus had been standing. "I mean, after the meeting is adjourned? I think maybe we should split up for now, so we can start working on different parts of the plan. I'd like to meet with all the members of the programming team to discuss how we're going to defend the AMN."

Juli stood ceremoniously and pushed in her chair. "That sounds like a good idea, MOMO. Why don't we reconvene in a few hours; with any luck, I'll have some good news by then."

"All right, then we're officially adjourned." MOMO hopped down from the stage and walked over to the table assigned to the main programming team, a group of Committee members who had worked with her to develop the code for the AMN operating system. While the rest of the Committee broke off into smaller groups, Doctus sauntered back over to the wall where Ziggy was standing.

"So what is it about still water?" he said when she had arrived within earshot.

Doctus shrugged. "It's deep."

"Oh." He had been expecting a more complicated explanation.

"Actually, in Latin it's the other way around. 'Deep water is still.' But it's the same thing, more or less. You could drown if you're not careful." She leaned back against the wall again, crossing one leg over the other nonchalantly, as if she'd just happened to come to rest there. "Anyway, it's nice to see everyone cooperating for once instead of screaming at each other."

"I'll say." He settled back and tried to look as relaxed as she did, but he couldn't calm the fears that had resurfaced, the restless noise in his mind that had always been there, even when it was so quiet he could barely detect it at all. It was the same as two years ago, the same as back then. The world might have changed, but he hadn't. And maybe it was his fate to watch himself make the same mistakes over and over, until once again he had nothing left to defend, and nothing to lose.

But this would be the last time, he realized now. Barring a miracle, regardless of whether he won or lost this battle, he wouldn't live long enough to confront Voyager again. Whatever the outcome, they wouldn't meet again--unless it was in hell, he thought with a bitter trace of irony. If there was a hell, he wouldn't put it beyond Erich to follow him there.

"Doctus?" Miyuki came running over to where they stood, interrupting his thoughts. "Oh, there you are. Listen, I was wondering if you could help me with something I've been working on."

Doctus inclined her head and stared at Miyuki with dispassionate interest. "It's possible. Depends what it is you need help with."

"Oh, um," said Miyuki, "actually, it's just a project I've been working on over in Second Division. It's almost complete, and it might come in handy pretty soon. I just need your advice on sort of a minor detail. I'll show you if you've got a minute."

"Fine with me. It's not like I've got a hot date or anything." She detached herself from the wall and followed Miyuki out of the room, and Ziggy stared after her in disbelief. No wonder he had never recognized her before. He may not have changed at all in a hundred years, but apparently she had. Still, she had sounded different in the message she had sent him a few days ago, more like her old self, so maybe the attitude was part of her persona--another elaborate contrivance, like the body she wore to disguise her real identity.

When Doctus and Miyuki had gone, Juli came up beside him and slipped her arm through his. "Catching up on old times?" she said, a little too pleasantly.

"Sorry, it's--" He looked down at her, then gave up trying to explain. "Don't worry about it."

"I'm not worried. What do I have to worry about?" Her hand found its way to his hand, her fingers meshed with his. She looked across the room, at MOMO and the programming team. "She really has grown up lately, hasn't she?"

"It would appear so." He gripped Juli's hand tighter, holding on while he still had the chance. While he still had time.