In the hour before dawn, only moments before the call to morning prayer, light returned to Murkworld. The blackout which had spread like the waves of an earthquake from the epicenter of the Oracle's Mount was overcome in patches as the Controllers in the Booth transferred lighting control from the damaged BrainChild to the Lahab-u-Din. This made no one happy. Not the Controllers who had counted on a certain Ibrahim Wilson Smith to mirror the Park Management System's functions in the carrier's mainframe before shut-down, and who, as a result of his dismal failure, now scrambled to recreate the functionality of the Park Management System on-the-fly. Not the ghazi datapushers who looked to be burdened with double and triple shifts for the foreseeable future and, to make matters worse, were forced to work with the private-sector prima donnas of the Booth.

One of those prima donnas stood at something like attention beside Ibrahim as Lieutenant First Class Ahmed al-Mutawwali divided his attention between ranting at them and watching the slow restoration of order planetside on the dataport of the Booth's Control Center. Although he had no direct authority over them - the Park World and its employees being under the sole jurisdiction of Misr Interstellar Educational Simulations -- the ghazi held primary responsibility for ensuring that the Park World's shutdown came off as smoothly as possible.

Losing power over the bulk of the planet could not, even in the eternally optimistic rhetoric of the military, be described as "smooth".

"So, you don't have authorization to go use those access codes on the BrainChild, am I right Mr. Singh?"

"No, sir, but I didn't…."

"Asked and answered!" the Lieutenant snapped. Ibrahim wondered just how many of the dramas the man had pulled off of the 'Tainment Net starred crusty but fair drill sergeants with hearts of gold. Or just crusty and heart-free.

Then the ghazi brought his steely eyes to bear on Ibrahim himself, and that part of the mind that roams while other people are talking decided it might not be a bad time to just settle down.

"You, sir. You are a Park Warden?"

"Yessir." Ibrahim felt his hands starting to shake and thrust them into the pockets of his dress khamees to hide them. Realizing he'd never seen a soldier standing at attention with his hands in his pockets, he pulled them out again. Lieutenant al-Mutawwali's eyes flicked down at the flurry of activity then locked onto Ibrahim's own again.

"There's some sort of oath associated with that post, isn't there?"

Dead, Ibrahim thought. Dead or a janitor. "Yes," he croaked.

"And wouldn't that oath preclude granting non-authorized personnel access to a restricted-access system?"

"Yes. Yes, but Mr. Singh didn't…."

"Asked and answered!"

"Yessir!" Ibrahim felt the all-too-familiar tightening in his chest that promised a fit of hiccups as surely as lightning promised thunder. Before the storm could break, another of the Booth's prima donnas burst out with a very unmilitary shout of surprise. The ghazi lieutenant spun at the sound, and Ibrahim took the opportunity to swallow several lungfuls of air. The tightness in his chest relaxed slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Raver trying to catch his attention so he might offer up another scowl of indignation at being blamed for the disaster planet-side. Ibrahim studiously ignored him.

The dataport showed artificial light continuing to flower across Murkworld. Nothing there seemed to merit the terminal operator's panicked cry. But when the ghazi leaned over the woman's shoulder to examine the readouts on her dataport, the lieutenant let the smallest gasp of surprise escape his own lips. Straightening up, he gazed about the room, his face slack with a sort of stunned confusion. Then his gaze landed on Ibrahim.

"Warden! Get over here!"

Ibrahim scrambled across the room, weaving awkwardly between workstations and nearly taking a header over a junction box.

The lieutenant graced him with an contemptuous glare when Ibrahim finally reached his side. "Need your codes, Warden."

His codes. Of course. After his years of service as a Warden, preceded by three years of fairly intensive training, and that preceded by his mandatory military service, that was what his usefulness ultimately came down to. His codes. He'd received basic training in thirty programming languages, advanced emergency medicine, basic electronics troubleshooting and systems repair and even martial arts (at which he'd been stunningly awful). He'd achieved fluency in three languages (Arabic Standard, English and Mandarin) and fluency enough to ask for the washroom or a cup of coffee in more than a dozen more. Yet in the end he was invariably called on because of the oath he'd sworn and the deep levels of access that he'd been granted in exchange.

Except, of course, when he'd been sent down to the Glory of the Ottomans - and every planet Up and Down the Fold knew what a spectacular disaster that had been.

Always the codes.

Ibrahim leaned over the terminal operator. Data flowed across the screen of her dataport, and it took him a moment to orient himself in the stream. Then he saw what she had seen. He glanced up at the planet sprawled across the main dataport, then back at the code on the screen.

The dataport received a direct current of information from the Lahab-u-Din's systems, describing in intricate detail the interaction between the carrier and Murkworld's grid.

According to the carrier, nearly half of the power systems just recently handed over to its control had now gone off-line again.

On the dataport screen, Murkworld was awash with artificial light. Not a single restored zone had gone dark.

Something had taken control of the power grid. Ibrahim's first thought was that it had to be the BrainChild. By some miracle, the computer had come back on-line.

"Excuse me," Ibrahim mumbled, pushing his way to the dataport even before the words had left his mouth. The woman whose station he'd commandeered pushed her seat back out of his way and then leaned forward to watch as he went to work. Taking up the datapad and stylus, he sketched out a series of symbols, all of them random nonsense except for one. That one scurried down the datalines and the twist transmitter to the planet below, where it should have opened a direct line of communication between the dataport and the BrainChild's user interface fields.

He waited for ten long seconds, in which time the connection could have been made a dozen times over. Nothing happened. Nothing, not even an angry raspberry, rose up from the planet in response. The BrainChild wasn't answering.

But something was busy down on the surface of Murkworld. Zone by zone something was taking control of the power grid away from Lahab-u-Din. There should have been nothing down there except the BrainChild capable of that.

A change of strategy: he scrawled the access signal which would allow him to poll the groundside station to see if a physical fault in the communication circuit might be causing the problem. Everything looked fine. The channels were all open - every signal transmitted from the dataport pinged back again. Another symbol scratched out on the datapad sent a stream of data across the dataport's screen. Unresponsive as they might have been to Ibrahim's polling, the groundside data channels were clogged with information.

Yep. Something was very, very busy on Murkworld.

"What's happening down there?" Lieutenant Al-Mutawwali barked in his ear. "The BrainChild's taken over, hasn't it? It's taken over the power grid. It’s gone sapient on us, hasn't it, Warden? Taken over the Park?"

"Impossible," Ibrahim mumbled, his eyes on the datastream flowing across screen. Sophisticated as the Park Management System was, its strength lay in coordination, multi-tasking and trouble-shooting. Its AI routines carried out those tasks with perfect precision, but the system had never shown any signs of the kind of sophistication it would take for even the sub-sentient problem solving of which some of the military-grade systems were capable. And even it had somehow managed to achieve sentience, or it had been biding its time since Misr stumbled on it, playing dumb, the interface which connected it to the rest of the Park had plenty of failsafes in place to snip away its ability to communicate with the rest of the Park. The BrainChild couldn’t steal control of the Murkworld grid away from the carrier's systems, nor could it somehow interfere with communications.

Ibrahim turned to the ghazi lieutenant. "There's no one else in orbit, is there? No one else transmitting to the planet, I mean."

The ghazi's eyes narrowed with frustration. "No. No, of course not. What are you saying, Smith?"

"If no one's doing that from up here, then someone must be down there. Someone's taken over the Murkworld control grid. Maybe gotten control of the BrainChild itself."

"Impossible!"

"No," said Raver, his voice hushed with something like awe. The programmer had crept up behind the lieutenant, and now stood watching the stream of data across the dataport's screen, transfixed. "No, Smith's right. The Brainchild’s just a very smart, very weird calculator. It doesn't have that kind of autonomy. Someone’s taken control of the Park Management System."

The ghazi's face went very pale, and all the 'tainment net drill sergeant went out of his voice. "Who could it be? Who's down there who could do this?"

Ibrahim and Raver exchanged a glance, knowing that the answer to that question was no answer at all.

"No one," they said together. "Misr’s operators," Ibrahim finished. "No one else has the codes. And they’re screened as carefully as Wardens, and paid about a thousand times better. They wouldn’t do this."

The lieutenant looked from Raver to Ibrahim to the befuddled dataport operator to the lighted face of Murkworld on the viewport screen. "Well hell," he said, his voice only just above a whisper. “What about someone from the outside?”

“All traffic in and of Murkworld’s monitored from the Booth,” Raver said. “Nothing gets by. I mean, look what happened when that Bedu buzzed us.”

"The Bedu…." Ibrahim blinked, the shadowy outlines of a thought resolving themselves before his mind's eye.

The lieutenant had been watching him intently. Just as the realization coalesced in his own mind the ghazi gave a little gasp of realization.

"Node records!" he belted out, all drill sergeant again once more. "Call up the records from the visual nodes for…Smith, what time did that Bedouin hit us?"

"I don't know…about an hour before Starsong 3000. 1800 hours, I guess."

The dataport operator pushed him aside. "I can search by keyword," she said, her stylus flying across the datapad. Although the sudden change in the status of the Murkworld grid might have thrown her for a loop, the ghazis didn't put amateurs aboard its carriers, and the woman was now all cool skill and efficiency.

The Bedouin ship appeared on the viewport in all its kaleidoscopic glory.

Lieutenant al-Mutawwali leaned forward. "Ignore that crazy bastard. Scan the lanes around the planet itself - any trajectory that could bring someone down on the continental mass." His eyes flashed across the screen as if they would be able to find what he was looking for unaided. Ibrahim knew better - his eyes were on the dataport's screen.

As the Swarmers lit up the Bedu's ship on the viewport, the data stream hiccuped. The station operator saw it at the same time as Ibrahim. Her stylus swept across her datapad and the image on the viewport reversed itself then froze. A red bulls-eye appeared on the face of Murkworld, a speck Ibrahim would bet was a ship at its center. The image leapt forward, the bulls-eyes swelling up as if the asteroid had entered a terminal orbit and was hurtling down toward the planet's surface.

Once the ship could be seen clearly, there was no doubt as to its identity, nor as to how its drives had escaped attention when it entered the Murkworld system.

It was a streamlined wedge of grey with tear-drop shaped bulges along its upper hull. Those bulges stored the micro-filament sails which, when deployed, could move the vessel along at a respectable clip, at least through in-system space, which was thick with solar wind. Faluka. Named for the sailing ships of Nubia in Upper Egypt by their developer, Muwasid Al-Misr, whose son currently ran and operated the Al-Misr group of companies, of which Misr Interstellar Educational Simulations was a small part.

The Bedu's run had been a diversion. While asteroid security had been busy trying to shoo him away, someone had just slipped right by the Booth, completely unnoticed.

The ship's hull glowed with shed heat, and the faluka disappeared into the cloud mass. The dataport operator tapped her datapad and the datascreen switched from visual to heat-tracking mode. The fluorescent spark that marked the intruder's position sped across the continent, then stopped. The glowing spark which marked the faluka's position faded and died as the ship's hull cooled.

Ibrahim whistled softly. "The Mount of the Oracle. They’re in the Mount."

"They've taken over the BrainChild," the dataport operator said quietly.

“No. That’s impossible,” Ibrahim said.

“Impossible,” Raver agreed. ““There’re still something like ten thousand Guests down there.”

“Something being bad doesn’t make it impossible,” the dataport operator said.

Ibrahim couldn’t disagree with her. Something was happening on Murkworld. And it was bad. Bad, bad bad.