His feet were standing on what appeared to be dull gray metal. When he tried to focus on the featureless surface, it twisted away, as if there were something separating his boot soles from the physical structure. His biononic field scan function revealed massive forces starting to stir around him, rising up out of the strange floor.

“Are you ready?” ANA:Governance asked.

Kazimir gritted his teeth. “Do it.”

As Kazimir had assured both Gore and Paula, the deterrence fleet was no bluff. It represented the peak of ANA’s technological ability and was at least a match for the ships of the warrior Raiel. However, he did concede that calling it a fleet was a slight exaggeration.

The problem, inevitably, was who to trust with such an enormous array of firepower. The more crew involved, the greater the chance of misuse or leakage to a faction. Ironically, the technology itself provided the answer. It required only a single controlling consciousness. ANA declined to assume command on ethical grounds, refusing to ascend to essential omnipotence. Therefore, the task always fell upon the Chief Admiral.

The forces within the base swarmed around him, rushing in like a tidal wave, reading him at a quantum level and then converting the memory. Kazimir transformed: His purely physical structure shifted to an equivalent energy function encapsulated within a single point that intruded into spacetime. His “bulk,” the energy signature he had become, was folded deep within the quantum fields, utilizing a construction principle similar to that of ANA itself. It contained his mind and memories, along with some basic manipulator and sensory abilities, and unlike ANA, it wasn’t a fixed point.