Now Ra...could take many forms. But his power and the secret of it lay hidden in his name; but if he spoke other names, that which he named came into being. 'I am Khepera at the Dawn, Ra at noon, and Tem in the Evening,' he said." from: Ancient Egypt, the Mythology Copyright April Arnold

The forward-swept wings of the Crescent X-100s sliced through the smoke of Paris's burning. The tattered remnant of the Jacobin's command gathered on a hilltop near the Seine and watched as the birds of prey broke into and out of the cover of the smoke. They'd ceased firing only a few moments before, though Paris had been reduced to rubble hours ago. What targets they could possibly be finding in the ruin had been a topic of heated debate among the survivors.

All discussion ended now as a single craft dropped below the ceiling of smoke, a military-class dropship that was all sharp angles and jutting surfaces. Its landing jets blew up the rubbish of the battle field, dirt and ashes and what remained of the Sprites and men who had fought there.

The clump of survivors reconfigured itself, forming a vee with the tall, angular form of the Jacobin at its point. To the left of the still-stately leader of the revolution stood a slender youth in the military uniform of the French artillery, beside him a young black woman whose bearing belied the simple servant’s dress she wore. To his right, desperately fiddling with the brutish cylinder of his datakey, spectacles smeared with soot and what remained of his jacket hanging in tatters from his shoulders, stood the man responsible for the entire mess.

"Mouse, I think we have run out of time. You are ready?" The Jacobin's voice croaked, his throat raw from the smoke.

His poor Mouse nearly dropped the datakey. "Well, Mr. Jefferson…." The Mouse winced as the Forbidden Name escaped his lips. "Jacobin! Jacobin, sir. It seems there's a flux in the charge circuits, and . . . and . . . something, this smoke, grime or something, soot, is clogging the -- "

"There is time," said the woman. "Remain calm, Mr. Smith."

The Mouse offered Sally Hemmings a grateful glance, and leaned over to speak softly to her behind the Jacobin’s back. His words, however, were swept up into the swirling furnace of the skies by a last thrust of the dropship's jets. The craft settled on the ruined plain.

Its hatch popped open, releasing the ship's compressed atmosphere with an angry hiss, and the gangplank dropped down to rest on the charred plain.

Three men descended its length. The first was so tall and thin he looked to have been stretched on some primitive torture device; he wore on his tunic a winged solar disc, worked in silver and gold. The second was not much shorter than the first, but his was the square-shouldered, neckless body which would have marked him as a deep-space ghazi, one of the marines of the Caliphate, even without the evidence the shoulder-stripes on his flight-suit that marked him a First Lieutenant. The third, a squat pear of a man, wore the flowing thobe of the Officer's Corps, and his head was bound in the white imama which only one man of that Corps could wear without risking court-martial.

The Emir al-Ustul. The Commander of the Fleet. The Mouse's datakey clattered to the ground. When he stooped to retrieve it, his fumbling fingers dropped it twice more before successfully grabbing it.

"Easy, Mouse," the Jacobin murmured.

The Emir stepped forward and opened his mouth to speak, but the rebel cut him short.

"Would you care to suggest terms for surrender, sir?"

The Emir blinked, his expression more or less exactly the one he would have worn if a chair had suddenly started declaiming verses from Hafiz.

If the thin man at his side felt surprise at the Sprite’s boldness, he hid it well. "We offer no terms, Sprite." His voice was deep and cool as the damp under rocks. "You might not have noticed, but there's nothing left of your army but ashes and popped gutboxes. You’ll surrender to us without terms."

"You misunderstood me, sir." The Jacobin hesitated just long enough for the nearly frantic Mouse to produce a peculiar gulping sound in the back of his throat. "I was offering you the chance to suggest terms for your own surrender. If you do not, I will myself set the terms."

The Emir had by now recovered himself, and apparently meant to make up in volume for what he had earlier lacked in composure. "Surrender? To a Sprite? A Sprite?" He lifted his arms to encompass the desolation around them. "A Sprite with no army? No ships, no soldiers - without so much as a single plasma cannon?" The Emir shook his head, his jowls leaping furiously. "You, sir, will surrender yourself into our custody immediately. Surrender yourself - because you have nothing else left to surrender!"

As the Emir blustered, the ghazi at his side scrutinized each of the Jacobin's companions in turn. His search-light keen gaze fell on the Mouse, passed on, then returned, falling on the datakey in the man's hands. When the Mouse noticed his scrutiny the datakey nearly escaped him again. With another low gulp he clutched it resolutely with both shaking hands. His thumb found the transmit key, and hovered there.

"Emir. The man to his right." The ghazi spoke in the hushed tones of someone noticing a very dangerous, very angry looking animal hunkered down in his bathtub.

The Emir turned his attention abruptly to the trembling little man and the datakey in his hand. Curiosity and even a hint of alarm gave way to dawning recognition as he lifted his eyes from the datakey to the face of the man who held it.

"Warden Smith! What in name of Allah are you doing here?"

The attention of first the hard-edged ghazi and now of his commander-in-chief was too much for the Mouse. He jerked himself upright, almost to attention, and tried to gulp out a reply. "I…I…I…" was all he could manage.

The Emir took a step toward him. "We thought you were dead. Weren't you sent in to fix all of this? What for God's sake have you been doing? What's going on here? Why are you playing with that thing?"

The thin man laid a hand on the Emir's arm, only to have it shaken violently off. The thin man had spared the Mouse only the briefest of glances; otherwise, his eyes never strayed from the Jacobin. So he saw the triumph in the Sprite's eyes at the mention of the datakey.

"Sheikh Hassan," he said, his concern betrayed only by a certain tightening around his eyes. "It's a trap. The datakey's…somehow…a threat…"

The ghazi's eyes leapt up from the datakey and swept out over the wreckage of the Jacobin's army, trying to identify what possible threat the Warden’s key could possible pose. The planetary bombardment fields of the Crescents had wreaked havoc among the thousands of Sprites who had followed him into this madness. Flesh and bone had been incinerated to ash and cinders. Only the gutboxes remained, their shielding designed to preserve each Sprite's vital systems from whatever atrocities a Park guest might wish to visit upon them….

“The gutboxes.” A Park warden's datakey could do all sorts of things to a gutbox - that's what the infernal things were for. And those cells had a lot of juice….

The thin man nodded. “Their shielding will have protected their contents. Their power cells.”

"Ya Allah! He's going to blow the power cells!" The marine stepped forward to shield the Emir, though the best he could hope to do is burn first in the conflagration all those thousands of cells would unleash.

The Jacobin chuckled, the sound rolling deep in his throat. "Now, then. Let me tell you the terms under which I will accept your surrender."

The Emir stood owl-eyed as the Jacobin reached into his waistcoat and pulled out a smoke-smeared piece of parchment. "This, sir, is the Bill of Rights with which we propose you amend your Caliphate's constitution. It is, as I am sure you will find, reasonable, and does no more than extend to us the same rights with which the Creator has vested all sentient beings." The Jacobin cleared his throat, a nervous flush suffusing his face as he began. "It is a truth acceded to by all sentient beings that to be conscious is to be human, and so sentience, consciousness in whatever form it takes, whatever mortal shell holds it, is the defining criterion of humanity. We therefore hold this truth to be self-evident, that Sprites, as sentient beings, merit all the rights of -- "

The thin man interrupted him. "No need to finish. There will be no surrender here today. Not ours. Not yours. Lieutenant, once we’ve withdrawn, command your men to finish their work.”

"Namar!" The Emir's mouth gaped in a distinctly fishy way, though his eyes were still distinctly owlish in their horror. "Perhaps we should consider this more carefully - "

"Shut-up, Hassan."

The Emir looked ready to faint. "Namar! I don't care who you are - you can't address me that way! Not in front of my men!"

The thin man scarcely spared him a glance. "He's bluffing, Hassan. Are you completely ignorant of ancient history? This Sprite is the simulacrum of Thomas Jefferson – it has been programmed, conditioned and deep-coded to look like Jefferson, speak like Jefferson and think as the best historians believe Jefferson to have thought. He might be a radical, but he's no terrorist."

"'The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots,'" the Jacobin said softly, quoting his namesake. "How is that for radical? I would be honored to shed my blood at the foot of that sacred tree, here, today. Are you willing to sacrifice yours?"

"He won't do it," Namar insisted. "Jefferson kept himself out of the American Revolutionary War completely. As governor of Virginia, he abandoned Monticello to the British. He spent a night running around the woods, saving himself while the British ransacked his home. Jefferson was a man of words, not action. This Sprite can't change that – it’s hardcoded into its genes."

The Emir looked from the Sprite to the thin man. The Jacobin's eyes were locked on Namar's, and Namar didn't once look away from the Sprite. The ghazi's eyes flashed from the Jacobin to the Mouse and back again. Sally had moved to stand beside the mouse, her hand on his shoulder, watching the Jacobin, while the Mouse stood with his eyes glued to the datakey in his hands.

No one noticed the young man in the uniform of the French artillery slip back into the swirling smoke that hung over the battlefield. No one noticed he'd moved at all, not until he leapt from the darkness, shoved Namar to the side and leapt on the Emir. The ghazi hunkered down like a cat preparing to spring, but before he could attack the young man wrapped his arm around the Emir's neck and placed a fist against his windpipe. The Emir emitted a high-pitched squeal.

Namar stood and brushed at the ash now covering his tunic.

"Bravo, Corsican!" the Jacobin roared.

"Long live Liberty!" the youth cried.

"Let's all just take a deep breath," Namar said.

"Hold him," the Jacobin commanded. "As for you," he said to Namar, "I think it is time for us to discuss terms again." Rattling the parchment in his hand, he prepared to resume his declaration.

"Long live Liberty!" the youth shouted again, startling even his commander-in-chief. "Death to Her enemies!"

There struck then one of those eternal instants, a breathlessly still moment when everyone present realizes events have not so much spiraled out of control as taken a nosedive at Mach 8.

That something very bad is about to happen, and that nothing can be done to prevent it.

"Corsican! Just hold him - don't damage him," the Jacobin said in the soothing tones of a man shushing a skittish stallion. "As a corpse he is a victim - as a hostage the means to our delivery!"

The young man hesitated at that, but no one there seriously believed that words alone would stop what was about to happen. The flush in the youth's face, the glitter in his eyes, the wild joy in the twist of his lips - all said to anyone who could read such signs that the Corsican felt himself riding the crest of a wave of history.

A flurry of hiccups fluttered out of the Mouse. He sucked in air and shuddered it out again until they’d subsided.

"I'm going to fix things," he said to the Emir.

"I'm not a terrorist," he said to the ghazi.

"I'm sorry," he said to the Jacobin.

The Sprite's eyes widened as he grasped the import of his follower's words. "Traitor!" he hissed.

Then the Mouse's thumb depressed the datakey's transmit button. It emitted an invisible, silent burst of radio waves, a signal lasting a millisecond - less than a millisecond - and the Jacobin, Sally Hemmings and the Corsican - and, in fact, all of the Sprites still living in that part of the battlefield - folded their legs and gently collapsed onto the desolate earth. Unconscious. Shut down.

"Guh…guh…" the Emir said, clutching at his neck. The ghazi stood over the young Frenchman, as if expecting him to spring back to his feet at any instant.

Namar graced the Mouse with his cool regard. "Well done, Mr. Smith. Well done."

The Mouse, for his part, finally dropped his datakey.