The field around the Apocryphos reached to the edge of the Immigrant Fleet now, a planetoid of distortion swelling outward on its own momentum. The Federation ship raced ahead of the expanding tide and accelerated clear of it, and then the wave slowed and pulled back into itself, contracting toward the purple-black spiral of the fortress at its center.

Juli staggered to keep her footing as the ship banked too sharply for the artificial gravity to correct and the deck heaved beneath her feet. She caught her balance against a console and folded over, her heart beating a hollow in her chest.

From the monitors on the bridge, she watched as shadows poured out of the fortress like ink spilled in water, assuming transient and terrible shapes inside the sphere of distortion.

"The shadow network is building temporary structures in real space," one of the 100 series called out. "Its behavior and waveforms are becoming increasingly Gnosis-like."

Juli stared into the boiling, writhing mass on the screen. It gathered like the pressure building in her chest, and she didn't know whether her voice would emerge as a scream or a sob, so she willed herself to stay silent. This can't happen again. Not here. Not now. The words became an unspoken mantra, as involuntary as breathing. It can't happen, it won't. Not after everything we've done. Not while they're still out there. Not while my daughter and the man who said he'd spend the rest of his life with me are ....

Beside her, Miyuki let out a high-pitched gasp. "Oh my god! What's it doing now?"

A dull red glow had started at the center of the mass, and as they watched it spread and kindled and grew outward, turning from deep red to bright red to orange to gold to white, spiraling out into petals of white-gold flame.

A white flash seared through the bridge. Miyuki screamed. Juli ducked away from the console, shielding her eyes, and then the monitors went blank.

∞

The light faded.

MOMO sat in a cold sweat, in a trance, gripping the restraints of the co-pilot's seat, her operating system strained to its limits as it staggered to process the new data exploding across the AMN, the mingled interference of the virus and the shadow network. Out of the noise grew form and structure, self-assembling from particles and fragments, branching across imaginary space like veins outlined in light against the black of closed eyelids--connections growing out the disorder, diverting it, rewriting it into the lapses between pathways and the gaps in space.

"MOMO, can you hear me? MOMO!"

With effort, she diverted her attention from the network. "Sorry, I just--"

Doctus sighed, as much in exasperation as in relief. "I thought you might've shut down for a minute there. Can you tell what's going on?"

"Something's happening to the AMN," said MOMO. She could see it on her sensors when she closed her eyes, the new connections developing faster than she could trace them. "It looks as though the infrastructure is being reorganized at an incredible rate to handle all the data. Secondary axes are forming all over the matrix between real and imaginary space. The informational capacity of the network has already increased exponentially, and it's still expanding." Her heart raced. Was this partly her doing, the result of her work with the programming team? What had they done? What had she done? This hadn't been part of the plan. "Someone or something is trying to prevent the AMN from shutting down. Who could be doing this?"

"Not who," said Doctus, staring at a cascade of screens in front of her. "Those pathways are developing organically. It's sooner than we expected, but it's beginning just as we predicted it would--the AMN itself is evolving."

"But I thought that wasn't supposed to happen yet!" MOMO shook her head in dismay. The second phase of development wasn't supposed to begin until they had restored connections to all the previous UMN sites. "This isn't right, it's too soon. Something must have triggered it prematurely."

"So it would seem. On the other hand, maybe it occurred at exactly the right time."

"What do you think is causing it?" She didn't want to ask, but she had to find out. She had to know.

Doctus hesitated, giving a kind of mental shrug. "Well, for starters, I suppose it could have been your cute little sabotage program," she said with more than a hint of scorn, confirming MOMO's worst fears immediately. "Or it could have been triggered when the Apocryphos formed a direct link between the two domains--a kind of chain reaction that led to spontaneous links across the entire network. It might even have had something to do with the shadow network itself, or with the program we wrote to patch the source code--the simple act of making the AMN aware of its counterpart. Or it may have been another set of factors we don't even know about. But in any case, it's out of our hands now."

MOMO stared back into the shifting field created by the spatial distortion, where the Apocryphos had vanished along with the gold-white rose of fire. Another movement began at the edges of the shadow--a shimmering like the scatter of light across water, dim and fragmentary at first, but as she watched, the light spread and took on increasingly complex forms and patterns, manifesting like the structures that had begun to develop spontaneously throughout virtual space. "Doctus, look over there! Is that the AMN too? What's happening to it now?"

"You're the observational Realian. Why don't you tell me?"

"I don't understand," said MOMO. "It's doing something to the shadow network, it's--" She searched for the right term: not fighting, not merging, but something like both at once, and neither. And it wasn't just happening around the Apocryphos; it was visible there because of the link between the real and imaginary domains, because the shadow network had begun to emerge at that point. But it was the same as what was happening, invisibly, across the entire reach of the AMN. "It's undergoing some kind of transformation," she said at last, settling on the only word she could find to describe it. "The shadow network is breaking down and reforming inside the AMN."

"Huh." Doctus sounded impressed. "Well, I certainly wasn't expecting that, but it makes sense."

"What do you mean?"

She was silent again for a while. "MOMO," she said at last, "you understand why it's dangerous to leave the operation of a system like the UMN or the AMN entirely within the collective unconscious, don't you?"

"I--I think so. I'm not sure I got all of it, but ...."

"Well, think of it this way. The collective unconscious is home to forces that have tremendous power over the fate of the universe and our own history. Existences like the Gnosis and U-DO, while not strictly limited to that domain, made contact with humans through the UMN, and there may be others like them--some we may not even have encountered yet, and others we've begun to understand only recently. The unconscious forces that reside in the imaginary domain represent the whole range of unrealized human potential; they may hold the key to our survival, but if we're not careful, they could also bring about our downfall. That's why there needs to be a ... well, some sort of conscious drive to balance out those forces, to use them in a constructive manner. The real-number superstructure we built during the first phase is part of that, but it's only the beginning. The AMN itself will have to become self-aware."

"Is that what we were building? A network that has its own will?" She tried to remember the early planning sessions of the AMN Development Committee and her own conversation with Juli before the meeting on the Dämmerung. "But what did Voyager have to do with all of this? Was he opposing it somehow?"

"There's something you need to understand about Voyager," said Doctus. "When he first appeared about a hundred years ago, he was our civilized society's worst nightmare. A criminal who knew our own technologies better than we did, and used them to carry out a reign of terror against us. It was like seeing our own faces laughing at us from an abyss. As a result of his actions, some of the people who lived during that time became disillusioned with humanity's blind faith in the UMN. They saw a darker side amid all the lights and dazzle, and they dedicated themselves to finding out the truth. Many of them, including someone you and I both know very well, suffered or died for what they found. Others were simply disbelieved, or ridiculed, or ignored." She raised her head, and the reflected lights of the control panel slid around the rims of her glasses like water droplets.

"As for Voyager," Doctus went on, "I think he saw himself as a prophet of his time, the messenger of a truth not many of us were ready to hear. He's always played on the aspects of human nature that our civilization has spent thousands of years trying to suppress: the lust for power and pleasure, the madness of religious fervor, the rejection of reason. That's what makes him so powerful, and so dangerous. I suppose he may have reappeared now as a kind of warning, to remind us that for all we've learned in the last century, there's still a lot we don't know about the universe. Or about ourselves, if it's worth making the distinction. Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit. Even those of us who'd like to think we've figured it all out, we don't have all the answers yet either. But if we just go forward blindly, we're no better than the followers of Ormus, like children dancing along to a tune we don't understand."

Doctus fell silent abruptly, and after a few minutes she resumed as if talking to herself. "I wonder if that's what he meant when he called himself the Executor of the Will. Maybe he thought he was carrying out one final task for his previous master, trying to challenge us one more time, to see if we were ready to determine our own fate."

MOMO watched the last glimmers of light along the shrinking edge of the spatial distortion. "Do you think we're ready now?"

But that must have been one of the answers Doctus didn't have, or else she hadn't heard MOMO's question. They were both quiet for a long time afterward, while the traffic on the local network trickled away like flood waters after a storm.

"And it seems we're back on-line," said Doctus with abrupt cheerfulness. "I'll broadcast a signal to the Dämmerung and the Spec Ops unit. Someone's bound to come looking for us after the fighting stops."

MOMO kept gazing into the empty space where the Apocryphos had vanished. "What about ... Mommy and the others?" She had been about to say something else, and the name she hadn't spoken rang loud in the silence.

"You know," said Doctus, "not to change the subject or anything, but I bet we can track the AEWS' signal on the AMN from here."

"Oh! You're right!" She checked the radar screen, holding her breath until she found it--a solitary point of light drifting apart from the other signals. Her pulse leapt into her throat, making her voice waver. "I think he might be over there. Is it safe to go out in the open at our current damage levels?"

"Well, he's not too far off from us," said Doctus as they headed out past the Immigrant Fleet vessels hanging uncertainly around the place where the object of their pilgrimage had last appeared. MOMO watched on edge until the smaller craft appeared as a glimmer on the main screen.

"There!" she cried, but Doctus had already seen it and pushed forward, closing the remaining distance and catching the AEWS by an arm as it tumbled away from them.

Doctus switched on the intercom. "Are you okay in there?"

They both waited in silence, listening to the hiss of white noise.

"There must be something wrong with the connection," said MOMO. She didn't understand why she suddenly felt like crying again, but maybe it was from relief. "Are you sure it's on the right channel, Doctus? Maybe it got reset when--"

Doctus reached out slowly and turned off the intercom. "Let's just get him somewhere safe for now."

"But he's okay, right?" MOMO had just picked up a signal from inside the AEWS, so faint she hadn't noticed it at first. "He's alive, I can tell!"

"Can you really? Your sensors are better than mine, then." Doctus tried to act nonchalant, but MOMO thought she sounded relieved too. "Well, he's not going to be too happy when he finds out we had to rescue him after all. But we can worry about that after we get back to the Dämmerung."

"Wait a minute!" MOMO twisted around in her seat. "I'm detecting another signal. Something's behind us!"

Doctus swore and punched the controls. The Astraea swerved in time to deflect the blast from the auto-tech's beam weapon, but the burden of carrying the AEWS made it difficult to maneuver. "That thing must have intercepted our distress signal."

"But why are they still attacking us? The Apocryphos is gone!"

"Apparently no one thought to inform the auto-techs." A moment later they both tensed as a second blast grazed the Astraea's side, setting off a renewed cascade of warning screens. MOMO fired a few shots in return as they pulled back. "Damn it, we can't hold out like this," said Doctus. "How's he doing in there?"

MOMO panicked; she had lost track of Ziggy's life signs, and for a few seconds she was afraid he had been harmed in the attack. But his signal was still there, a slow quiet pulse buried under the other input from her observational equipment, and she let out her breath in a rush. "He's still okay."

"That's good, because--" Doctus didn't get to finish. The auto-tech fired a round of missiles, and she barely had time to steer the Astraea out of the way before one of the missiles veered toward them and exploded in front of the cockpit.

MOMO ducked instinctively, shielding her face from the blast. Damage readings flooded her sensors, and at first she didn't notice when the auto-tech's signal flickered out. When she raised her head from her arms she saw only a few scraps of debris and machine parts drifting away from the place where the auto-tech had last stood.

Doctus folded her arms and leaned back in the pilot's seat, with an appreciative nod at the holographic panel that had just opened in front of her. "Good timing, ladies. Next time try showing up before we get hit."

MOMO recognized the miniature figures on the screen and had to stop herself from crying out in relief.

"Hey, we did our best." Miyuki shrugged. "We got here as soon as we picked up your signal--well, after we met up with Captain Roman here. Did my AWESOME come in handy?"

"Doctus!" said Juli breathlessly, edging Miyuki out of the way. "Is MOMO still with you?" Juli seemed even more tired than she had the last time they had spoken, the way she appeared on certain mornings when MOMO knew she had been working in her office all night. MOMO had never been happier to see her.

"We're all here, Mommy. We're all safe." MOMO felt her eyes fill again, and she didn't know whether to cry or laugh. "Except ... Ziggy is ...."

"He's probably going to need a little maintenance," said Doctus sharply. "So if you needed an excuse to finish that conversation you were having, Dr. Mizrahi--"

"You know, I believe Jan has very strong opinions about eavesdropping," said Juli. MOMO didn't understand what they were talking about, but she recognized the tone of her mother's voice, a lightness that concealed menace like a silk cloth draped over knives. "But never mind," she went on, deftly withdrawing the knives from under the softness. "We'll drop our guard for a minute, so we should appear on your radar now. If you turn to your right, you'll probably see us."

The Astraea turned, still carrying the AEWS, and the green-tinged blur of the ship resolved above the curve of Second Miltia's horizon.