In the fifty-plus years of the System campaign, the six months of constant combat made Rikel the longest single battle yet.

  Cato-Rikel had known there would be contention over the world, as his opponents would be expecting him to arrive in force once the annexation became public knowledge. The very fact that the emergence had been suppressed demonstrated they were learning, though he was hardly unprepared. Every Cato was ready to fight for their world, and the preparations only grew over time.

  The virtual war room showed the enormous spread of war materiel swarming above Rikel’s atmosphere, stretching from well outside the orbit of the moon down to where the System’s reality forbade proper technology. Raine was managing the actual orbital defenses while Cato was trying to sneak deliveries past the Azoths. Even with so many craft, it took some degree of luck and misdirection to get past the enormous field of destruction generated by the System types.

  Leese was piloting a frame down on the surface keeping an eye on the staging area. The world on the other side was taken care of; one Lineage in a Jager Frame had already crossed over, and even managed to get one of the oversized spears into orbit. Cato had given that particular operation rather long odds, but a momentary intensification of the assault on Rikel had at least temporarily drawn away the watching Azoths. The tiny window of diversion had been enough, and it seemed like that Lineage was well on the way to crashing the System there. Of course, it would be months before there was anything near enough infrastructure for it, but all that was ever needed was a foothold in the orbitals.

  Rikel, on the other hand, was absorbing everything Cato could safely throw at it, and he’d had eleven years to build up. Enough time to establish manufactories through the heliosphere, primarily in a metal-rich asteroid belt that featured four dwarf planets almost the size of Ceres. If anything, sourcing the lighter elements was harder, having to pull virtually all of his helium and oxygen supplies from a series of hot gas dwarfs deeper in-system. Methane and ammonia came from several large icy bodies in the outer system, and were mostly cracked for their component elements. That made his logistics system months long from end to end, as mass drivers sent their packages to a rendezvous at the edge of Rikel’s sphere of influence, but once established he’d been able to build a very large force indeed.

  Millions of Big Bad Bug Bombs, billions of tons of war materiel including hundreds of particle beams and antimatter-shot fighter craft, enough warframes to saturate the entire surface, and observation satellites backed by enough computronium to keep track of every single individual on the surface. Yet for all that, he hadn’t been able to actually drive the System off Rikel.

  “Got one!” Raine crowed, far less concerned about the overall strategic situation, at least in the moment. Despite their advantages, actually scoring hits on attacking Azoths was a difficult process, as ballistic denial alone wasn’t enough to deal with man-sized targets and every single one had to be hit with either antimatter or a particle beam to make any difference at all. At the distances involved, even the best targeting algorithms had trouble accounting for erratic movements — though some of the Azoths clearly didn’t understand the purpose of random walk dodging and those barely made it out of the atmosphere.

  “He’ll be back,” Cato sighed. One thing they had found was that just killing an Azoth wasn’t sufficient. Even if the methodology was outside of System specifications, it turned out that the extra lives that Azoths could earn applied just as well to his weapons as anything within the System. Not every Azoth returned, but enough did that the only way to treat each kill was as a temporary victory, not a permanent one.

  “Resurrections aren’t easy to come by, according to what we’ve gotten from the Sydean Lineage,” Leese said. “So maybe not. We’ll run them out of lives in the end.”

  “Unless one of the System-Gods can just grant them more,” Cato said, since even now it wasn’t clear how many of the System’s rules were unbreakable. Initik and Mii-Es, even combined with debriefing the independent gods he’d freed, hadn’t shed much light on the System’s architecture for the simple reason of hierarchy. What Core Deities could do was far, far different from what ordinary World Deities were allowed, in the same way that a superuser or administrator had an entirely different console than an ordinary client.

  The exterminatus had to originate from that superuser interface, and Cato believed that virtually all the gameified benefits could be adjusted by anyone who had sufficient reason. There was no reason they wouldn’t give any Azoths who were fighting Cato unlimited lives, or offset the costs incurred by unlimited extras taken from some central repository or conjured from nothing. The mobile System zone was one example of that, as the Sydean Lineage hadn’t run into anything that would grant such an ability.

  “I just wish I could get Muar,” Raine said sourly.

  “Even if you did, I bet he’s got dozens of resurrections,” Cato sighed. He had not been at all surprised to find Muar involved in Rikel’s defense, nor had he been shocked that Muar was nearly unkillable. Eight total hits with a particle beam over the past months, three of them dead-on, hadn’t managed to remove the guy, though of all people Cato was sure Muar had resurrections in reserve. As the head of the [Crusade] against Cato, there was no way he didn’t have some special consideration.

  “Maybe, but I’d sure feel better,” Raine grumbled. Leese just laughed, though she wasn’t particularly happy with the situation either. It would have been easier if they’d been able to get to the dungeons and start the process of severing Rikel, but the dungeons had been locked down, both on Rikel proper and several worlds out to keep him from reproducing his strategy with Gogri.

  “I wonder how long they’ll keep this up?” Leese pondered aloud, her frame waving a hand through one of the locked dungeon portals. “We know it’s expensive, but if they’ve got help from the Core…”

  “Yeah,” Cato sighed. “I think they’ve stopped caring about the expense.” Thanks to Mii-Es and Initik, as well as the debriefed Interfaces, they knew that locking dungeons was a massive drain on essence — for a single planet, anyway. The issue was that the rest of the System could offset it, which only left the option of escalating and capturing worlds far upstream. He didn’t yet know if it was worth it to try and sever Rikel, either, and he didn’t want to spark another war, so he was stuck in a holding pattern.

  He really wanted to find out more about what was on the other end before ramping up the attacks. It was another century or so before they expected to hear anything from the last annexed world, thanks to the purges, so this annexation was the only realistic way to gather intelligence and prepare for another.

  Unfortunately, without orbital surveillance that was difficult. Planets were large, even for Platinums, and while so far the Jager Frame hadn’t found any non-System signs of civilization, that meant little. There could have been a hunter-gatherer society like Initik’s, or a more robust civilization simply confined to a relatively small geographic area. Or they could have been wiped out entirely.

  No matter what had happened, Cato could not have stopped it. That helplessness only made it harder to just let the System fester on that planet and not use everything he had to crack the System there. While the crimes of the System were always at a low simmer, the expansion turned his background dislike into something more fiery. He ached to just hammer the System and the insane psychopaths that ran it with the wildest fever dreams in the Summer Civilization archive. By now he might actually have done so, if it weren’t for the few bright spots of people who were genuinely interested in leaving it. That alone kept him from seriously contemplating a more incendiary approach. Yet.

  Rikel had shown that he still needed better tools to deal with the System, to sidestep and undercut the resistance the System could put together to prevent him from landing materiel or warframes. Something more subtle, more pervasive, along the lines of the Big Bad Bug Bombs and Chill Out but on a larger scale.

  He delved into his more restricted databases and handed off the templates for something appropriate to the collective in general and Leese in particular. A subtle, world-swaddling and interconnected organism meant to produce bioweaponry products, something that had been euphemistically called The Phage. It could be tooled for terraforming, to wipe out a specific species, to annihilate or alter the entire biosphere, and everything in between.

  It still wouldn’t be enough to affect the higher ranks, but it would mean he could instantly incapacitate the lower ranks and generate swarms of Bug Bomb style insects without needing to drop them from orbit. If anything, he mused, it was past due that he use something like The Phage. It might not be necessary on Rikel itself; that remained to be seen. But any world might become a battleground, and until Cato was ready to take on the core itself, he needed to be prepared.

  ***

  Misse put down the memory crystal, slotting it neatly back into the case, her fingers working on their own while her mind was somewhere else. When Cato had appeared on Rikel so quickly, she suspected there was something odd going on, something that let him move so rapidly. Or worse — he already had forces there, and perhaps elsewhere. So she had hired the only available sensory Alum to find out.

  The results were unacceptable. Cato’s forces were on every single one of the Inner Worlds. Every one, without exception, showed signs of his artifice out in the deep dark beyond the System’s reach. Until Cato had come she had never considered that there was anything out there, not really. Those with extremely good senses could see other worlds drifting here and there in the heavens, but the relevance of such things had hardly seemed to matter. Something for the esoteric faithful to quibble over, not something relevant to the contentions of the clans and the control of worlds. Now those excess worlds to be the breeding ground for Cato’s creations, and that very much did matter, as it seemed that arcane marginalia had suddenly become relevant.

  Her fingers tapped aimlessly at her desk as she considered. She had left such useless and counterproductive things as panic far behind her, but there was no use in denying that what she had thought was a minor inconvenience was far more than that. Cato wasn’t some skirmisher, opportunistically attacking worlds according to arbitrary plans and opportunism. He was, in Muar’s words, a disease, one that had spread much further than she had thought possible.

  Now that she knew that both the frontier and the Inner Worlds were compromised, the question was how to solve the problem. The frontier was politically important, as the vast majority of Clan gods administered those worlds, but so far as resources went it could be abandoned with no great loss. The Inner Worlds, on the other hand, were not something she could simply condemn in the same way as the more distant and less useful worlds.

  World-purging was useful in some circumstances, especially against the recalcitrant independent gods or hopelessly inadequate clan members, but not when it came to any place of real value. If it were only one world, perhaps it could be done as it had been with Tornok, but with every world even revealing the problem was a danger. If nothing else, it would undermine her assurances that the campaign against Cato was in fine form and it was only a matter of time before he was expunged.

  The revelation would have to be kept completely secret, for now. She considered assigning a quest or warning to the Alum who had provided the information, but ultimately rejected it. She knew what Alums were like, so easily distracted by their own petty pursuits, that it was better to leave her request as one of the vagaries of the gods rather than imply what had been found was genuinely interesting. That was an easy enough decision, but harder ones required more effort to grapple with properly.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do – that was not a situation ever to be admitted to even the outermost layers of thought – but Misse felt that another mind might clarify the situation. She reached out to her Chosen, requesting Muar to join her in her Estate. Certainly he was busy with the defense of Rikel, but that was a battle that was well in hand, a slow grinding thing with little surprise on either end. He could be spared for a consultation.

  Soon enough she could feel his presence as he arrived through the special Skill given only to Chosen, his divine-aspect Domain crystalline and ordered as always. It didn’t take him long to find her, traversing the halls to where she sat in her office, offering her a small bow as he arrived. It was almost affectionate, but still held genuine respect, a balance that she might have thought impossible before.

  “We have a problem, Muar,” Misse said, waving for him to take a seat. “I have done an investigation and it’s unmistakable. Cato has a presence on every single one of the Inner Worlds.”

  “I see,” Muar said, not panicking or casting blame, merely curling his tail and considering. “That makes it very difficult to dislodge him, but we know that he cannot operate freely within the System, he needs a without. Is there a way to simply expand the System’s grasp throughout the Inner Worlds?”

  “Not a simple way, no,” Misse said, once again glad she had raised him up to her side. Any lesser being might have been overwhelmed or embittered by her news, rather than helpful. “The System’s influence grows naturally until a world may be taken into the Core itself. If there is any way to speed that process, it would lie beyond even the Vestibule, in the True Core itself.”

  “Then to the True Core we must go,” Muar said, as if he were not aware how impossible that was. Misse opened her mouth to say so, then stopped, because a tiny spark of a thought made her consider that, perhaps, Muar was not wrong. She had indeed been thinking that the answer would have to lie in obscure realms of the System’s operation, and the mechanisms of the True Core were certainly that.

  Nobody had been to the True Core in living memory; nobody dared to breach the threshold to where the ultimate rulers of the System dwelt. As Deities they had been entrusted with the care of worlds and annexations, of bringing the lower ranks up and ensuring that essence flowed freely. The deeper workings of the System were only accessed by communing at the Vestibule, but even there, the options for petitioning were distinctly itemized. Never before had Misse found a problem that honest and earnest meditation at the Vestibule could not solve, but that would be exactly why the True Core existed. For times such as these.

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  “Perhaps you are right,” Misse said instead, rising from behind her desk. “In which case, there is no reason to delay.” She flipped her hand, opening a portal out to where the Core World Eln Estate had its connection with the Vestibule. “Prepare yourself. My Domain will protect you, but the potency of essence in the True Core far surpasses even the realms of the Deities.”

  “I am ready,” Muar replied, visibly drawing himself up. The two them crossed over to the portal, through which the richer, denser essence of the True Core could be felt, the Vestibule visible beyond. Misse didn’t bother going to her father or collaborating with the other Elders. She couldn’t trust their reaction to the knowledge of how deeply compromised the Inner Worlds were, yet she couldn’t see any of them approving of crossing into the True Core.

  It wasn’t that they were cowardly – she definitely couldn’t think that of her own father – but they were simply too used to how things had always been. They’d built the Eln clan up from nothing to a powerhouse of the Core Worlds something like a million years ago, and had distinct ideas on how things worked. Convincing any of them would turn into an endless circle of roundabout discussion, stretching on for years, no doubt. Muar had reminded her that not everything moved at that languid pace, and Misse would be remiss in her duties to let Cato’s threat go unanswered for so long.

  The Vestibule did have an Elder inside it, communing with the System’s advanced functions, but that was not a problem. The Vestibule itself was massive, and by custom there was a certain degree of privacy afforded to anyone who approached the inner wall of the True Core. Simply breaking line of sight by circling around – which was, admittedly, a trip of hundreds of thousands of miles – was enough to shield her and Muar from any prying eyes.

  The inner sphere of the Vestibule was miles high and composed of solid crystal, but was not at all featureless. Swooping lines of metal and glowing circles of some unknown material interrupted the sheer surface the sphere, though whether it was decoration or some deeper function of the Vestibule nobody knew. The metal lines continued down to the floor, describing the points of meditation used to commune with the True Core, and while there was no obvious door in the Vestibule’s inner wall, that hardly mattered. She did not believe that passage to the True Core was accomplished by simply stepping through a mere doorway.

  Beside her, Muar moved stiffly but otherwise showed no difficulty with the increased density and quality of the essence. Her Domain shielded them both from any scrutiny as they used movement Skills to approach the inner wall, and she reached out to touch it directly. Connecting with the True Core took a certain degree of concentration and considerable knowledge of divine Skills, as only those with true devotion and ability were permitted.

  The options and offerings of the True Core were difficult to understand at the best of times, filtered as it was through a combination of Skills and Interface, but Misse ignored the usual and focused on her query. A way into the True Core. Permission to enter, for herself and her Chosen.

  Though there was no physical response, she could feel something great and powerful wake up and look at her though the link she had formed by communing with the Vestibule. Not a person; it didn’t feel like that. More like an Interface, but one that was ranked like an Elder Deity, the sort of Interface she would expect from someone in the True Core. She felt oddly naked before it, as if it could see through all her Skills and Domain, down to the very core of who she was — and then it withdrew, leaving her shaken.

  She had thought that passage would not be simple, and so it was not. It was absolutely clear to her that this great thing, this True Core intellect, sat in judgement of her worth and that of her cause. The True Core would admit nothing less than the pinnacle, and she could only pray that her life and deeds were enough to reach such rarefied heights. There was a breathless moment, and then a portion of the vast crystal wall in front of her shimmered, the incredible essence swirling into a portal of a type she’d never seen before.

  “We are admitted,” Misse muttered to Muar, and together they stepped through. Instantly they found themselves on the planet in the heart of the True Core, at the center of a broad circle of stone around which were trees and flowers. Birds chirped and the wind blew, carrying a sweet halcyon scent, redolent of things Misse could not name. The sky was dominated by the great pylons of the True Core’s structure, and beyond them the War Worlds with their attendant Core Worlds, all of which were brought closer by some mechanism of the True Core’s ineffable operation.

  In front of them, at the far end of a path stretching from the circle, was a tower of blue and white stone, clearly different from normal System constructs, studded with crystal and paned with many circular windows. It was only as tall as a normal capital city Nexus, but seemed far more solid, each brick wrought of some grade of essence even beyond Deity, and was impermeable to her senses. Nor could she sense any people around; even if her sensory Skills did not reach as far as they did in her own Estate, there did not seem to be any people in the expansive gardens and lakes. What she could sense was a great flow of essence from every direction in toward the tower, like rivers running into the sea.

  “I suppose it’s obvious where we go,” Muar said, when nobody – servant or Deity – emerged to greet them.

  “So it would seem,” Misse replied, falling in step with Muar as the two of them walked along the path. The door to the tower opened in front of them as they approached, but the interior was just as deserted as the outside. There were scry-views set into the walls of various parts of the Core Worlds, and stairs leading both up and down, but nothing beyond that, and the lack of any inhabitants was starting to give Misse an uneasy feeling.

  With no indication of where they should go, she decided to follow the flow of essence, which seemed to be concentrated somewhere above them at the top of the tower. With a small nudge she directed Muar toward the stairs that led above. The steps themselves were long and shallow, not quite natural for their stride, leading up the tower’s interior in a manner reminiscent of the offices for World Administrators, but not quite.

  Reaching the top, they found that it was not some small office, but a massive sunlit ring of stone, miles wide and surmounted by a glass dome. It was clear that it was a true sun, not the false suns generally created for Domains, but the sky only held her attention for a moment. At the center of the ring, floating between two rings of crystal pylons, was something that Misse had never before seen. Raw essence so dense that it had taken physical form.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Muar asked, voice hushed in respect for where they were. Misse nodded. The liquid sphere was not just a collection of essence, but a font of it. One set of pylons was clearly sending essence in, presumably gathered from elsewhere in the System, but another was pulling essence out, because they could both feel the spontaneous generation of more essence from that incredible vortex of power.

  With no clearer destination, the two of them crossed the expanse of clean blue and white stone. When they reached the inner ring, Misse’s Interface chirped at her, and the sound was so unexpected it nearly made her jump. For a moment she was irritated, then she wondered what was so urgent that someone would page her, but all of her assumptions fell away when she actually checked it.

  [Core Interface —

  6.7 Million Years since last accessed.

  Ownership has lapsed.

  Protections have lapsed.

  Administrative functions reset.

  Do you wish to claim?]

  Misse stared at the prompt, feeling behind it the gaze of the unimaginable Interface-like intelligence, and then selected the only choice imaginable. It was obvious that the elder gods of the True Core had left long ago, perhaps intending for some worthy Deity of the Core Worlds to claim their place. Why that had not happened, she did not know, but perhaps the incredible Interface was simply waiting for someone like her to muster the courage to trespass into the holiest of realms.

  Or perhaps she had been judged as worthy. Few enough of the various Deities who had access to the True Core had the drive and vision to see anything beyond their own Clan, and not even her own father was exempt from that sort of blindness. Certainly there were none she would trust to answer the threat that was Cato, aside from Muar himself — and he had not yet ascended.

  Of course, access had not actually been needed until now, and the answers and actions given by the Vestibule had seemed like reasonable responses to their petitions. Someone had to have guessed that the gods of the True Core were no longer there — but it was simply accepted wisdom that they were not to be disturbed ever since she had ascended herself.

  The mantle of [True Deity] settled onto her as her Interface merged with the vast intelligence, options scrolling outward, offering her powers and possibilities. Misse took one moment to look, then snapped it shut. It was clear that actually finding out what she could do with her authority – let alone deciding what should be done – would take some time. But she certainly would do something, and hopefully not alone.

  “You need to get back to ranking up,” Misse said, turning to Muar and displaying her new title. “I need you to ascend to Deity as soon as possible.”

  ***

  Marus slipped away from the table where various deities were managing the defense of Rikel. It had been easy enough to talk himself into having a seat; he’d been present at the last annexation, after all, and was an unlamented expert on Cato. At the same time, a mere presence was all he was given; nobody believed he was particularly competent anymore, even if it had been amply proven that Cato was a difficult foe to combat.

  That lack of regard was just fine in this one instance, for he didn’t want anyone paying attention to him. While nobody really believed the rumors that all kinds of gods were working with and for Cato, the consequences would be dire if anyone caught Marus trying to reach out. More dire, at least, since he was already looking at a minimum of ten thousand years of being an unappreciated lackey, rather than a true deity.

  It wasn’t like Marus even wanted anything extravagant! Just an actual planet that befit his talents, and the respect that went with it. He wasn’t looking to be an Elder or manage an entire cluster. Just one world, and Cato seemed to have worlds to spare at this point.

  Marus stepped into his own Estate, temporarily anchored to Rikel as it was. A risk if Rikel itself abruptly fell, but so far that had never happened. Cato seemed to need to physically destroy dungeons and Nexus buildings, so there was always time to anticipate a need to leave. So far he hadn’t been able to land many of his forces, so the defense was going well enough, and there was time for Marus’ plan.

  Once again he examined the over-large slab of stone that he’d created, his Interface spinning out something the size of a Nexus wall. The carving had been done with Skills, as – just in case – he didn’t want any queries to his interface to reveal a request for words written on stone. Of course, the message itself didn’t betray much, as it didn’t mention either Marus or Cato at all. It was a simple request to pick up an item at a certain location on a certain planet.

  The method to have an Interface create a communications device that linked to the mortal world had started circulating a while back, which was one reason that Marus was certain some Deities were in league with Cato. He was the only one where that would be at all important, considering that Cato had no normal connection with the realm of the Deities. That Marus knew of, anyway.

  Marus had come up with the idea of directing Cato to send one of his own agents to such a device after observing how the strange foreign god had extremely good senses, to judge by the distances that his weapons operated and by the sheer ability to react to things everywhere around a world with no upper limit. The same wasn’t true for most gods or Azoths, especially since such senses would be specialized for combat. All Marus had to do was to spend the wince-inducing amount of essence it took to rip open a portal to the mortal world and drop the piece of stone in a region far away from any combat.

  This was by far the worst part of his whole plan. He didn’t know how long he should let it drift there, as he certainly didn’t want to let it be discovered or fall back down to Rikel, as it would eventually. Just because there was no combat in that area at the moment didn’t mean that it would be safe for hours.

  Despite his fretting he didn’t have to wait for long. No more than five minutes after he had delivered his message, the stone slab flashed in the scry-view, and Marus blinked to find that a single word had been inscribed at the bottom. Done. With another expenditure of essence, Marus retrieved the slab, examining the word but finding no lingering energy and that the carving was exceedingly precise. Another oddity but, considering everything else to do with Cato, one Marus was not curious enough to really worry about.

  The world where Marus had stashed the communicator was quite far away from Rikel, but Cato had quite well demonstrated distance was not an issue. Marus opened a new scry-view onto the sleepy little hunting world, one so far out onto the frontier that it didn’t even have a dedicated deity; rather, it was simply an adjunct for one of Clan Lundt’s minor members. Something he’d managed to finagle brief access to thanks to the pretense of the two clans working together.

  Nothing happened instantly, but within the hour he spotted someone walking straight up to the Copper-ranked dungeon where he’d simply stashed the communicator just out of sight by the entrance. The being was merely a Copper-ranked Kesk – one of the races that usually used the world – but he still went directly to the communicator. If Marus had been of a disposition to report all this, he was sure someone would find it useful, but for himself it was merely assurance he had made the right choice.

  “Am I speaking to Cato, or one of his agents?” Marus asked, shoving even more essence into the communicator. He was burning far more than he ever wanted to, but it wasn’t like his reserves would have lasted forever anyway. Slow or fast, he would lose it all and be forced to subsist on the minimum regardless.

  “This is Cato,” the being affirmed. “Which deity am I speaking to?”

  “My name is Marus Eln.” Not that he expected Cato to understand who he was or where in the hierarchy he stood — unless whatever other gods he’d suborned had supplied a lot of information. “I want out. Or, put another way, I want in to whatever you’re doing.”

  “I see,” Cato said, and cocked his head as if listening to something. “You’re the prior administrator of Sydea. Surprising to see you throw yourself on my mercy.”

  “I’ve seen your work and I would rather be on your side,” Marus told Cato, rushing out words that he’d practiced a thousand times. “There is very little for me here, and all I am asking for is a world to govern. Surely not a problem, considering your gains over the past few decades.” The last few words came out in a tumble as his mind caught up with his tongue and Marus realized that Cato did know who he was — and didn’t entirely approve.

  “So you would think,” Cato said, which was not a yes or a no. Instead he considered Marus through the projection, a contemplative pose that made Marus sweat, flat tail twitching uncertainly. “I think I can provide something like that, though there will be a price attached.”

  “Of course,” Marus acknowledged with relief. “But your public statements have said you wish to take everyone from the System, god or not, so I cannot imagine it is a great price.” Perhaps it was foolish to challenge what he hoped would be his way out of mediocrity, but he wanted to know exactly what sort of deal he was getting.

  “Yes, it’s true that I intend to welcome everyone I can, but some people have more of a debt than others,” Cato replied, lacing his claws together in a decidedly unnatural gesture for the Kesk. “I will need everything you know about the disposition of the gods at this moment, and after I have set you up outside the System, for you to speak to any others who might wish to join you, when they may appear, to reassure them of how you are being treated. And, related, anything you can do to allow me to contact other gods, independently.”

  “The first two are easy enough,” Marus said, glad that the requirements were so few, although at the same time finding the generosity suspicious. “The latter, I don’t see how you could without entering the Deity realm yourself. These communicators are one of the few ways we can easily speak with the mortal world.”

  “Then perhaps you can make a few dozen, or hundred, or thousand of these communicators and distribute them on a delay, to arrive after you have left,” Cato promptly suggested, with a speed that Marus thought meant that the idea was already there, just waiting for the proper time. Unfortunately, there was nothing particularly objectionable about it, at least not of substance.

  “Very well,” Marus said. “I will ensure that happens. Now, how do I leave the System?”

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