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that be?
    He is already leaping toward her, curving the fingers of each hand into hardened claws for the killing strike. A fraction of a second to cross the space between them as bullets snap by from above and either side, the noise scything past a long instant later, wow, wow, wow. Time hanging, disconnected from history. God’s hand. He is God’s hand, and this is what it must feel like to be in the presence of God Himself, this shimmering, endless, bright NOW…
    And then pain explodes through him and sets his nerves on fire and everything goes suddenly and irrevocably
    black.
    * * *
    Lamentation Kane wakes in a white room, the light from everywhere and nowhere. He is being watched, of course. Soon, the torture will begin.
    “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you… ” Those were the holy words Spirit whispered to him when he lay badly wounded in the hospital after capturing the last of the Holy Warrior infiltrators, another augmented soldier like himself, a bigger, stronger man who almost killed him before Kane managed to put a stiffened finger through his eyeball into his brain. Spirit recited the words to him again and again during his recuperation: “ But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory…when his glory….”
    To his horror, he cannot remember the rest of the passage from Peter.
    He cannot help thinking of the martyred young woman who gave her life so that he could fail so utterly. He will see her soon. Will he be able to meet her eye? Is there shame in Heaven?
    I will be strong, Kane promises her shade, no matter what they do to me.
    One of the cell’s walls turns from white to transparent. The room beyond is full of people, most of them in military uniforms or white medical smocks. Only two wear civilian clothing, a pale man and…her. Keeta Januari.
    “You may throw yourself against the glass if you want.” Her voice seems to come out of the air on all sides. “It is very, very thick and very, very strong.”
    He only stares. He will not make himself a beast, struggling to escape while they laugh. These people are the ones who think themselves related to animals. Animals! Kane knows that the Lord God has given his people dominion.
    “Over all the beasts and fowls of the earth,” he says out loud.
    “So,” says Prime Minister Januari. “So, this is the Angel of Death.”
    “That is not my name.”
    “We know your name, Kane. We have been watching you since you reached Archimedes.”
    A lie, surely. They would never have let him get so close.
    She narrows her eyes. “I would have expected an angel to look more…angelic.”
    “I’m no angel, as you almost found out.”
    “Ah, if you’re not, then you must be one of the ministers of grace.” She sees the look on his face. “How sad. I forgot that Shakespeare was banned by your mullahs. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ From Macbeth. It proceeds a murder.”
    “We Christians do not have mullahs,” he says as evenly as he can. He does not care about the rest of the nonsense she speaks. “Those are the people of the Crescent, our brothers of the Book.”
    She laughed. “I thought you would be smarter than the rest of your sort, Kane, but you parrot the same nonsense. Do you know that only a few generations back your ‘brothers’ as you call them set off a thermonuclear device, trying to kill your grandparents and the rest of the Christian and Zionist ‘brothers’?”
    “In the early days, before the Covenant, there was confusion.” Everyone knew the story. Did she think to shame him with old history, ancient quotations, banned playwrights from the wicked old days of Earth? If so, then both of them had underestimated each other as adversaries.
    Of course, at the moment she did hold a somewhat better position.
    “So, then, not an angel but a minister. But you don’t pray to be protected