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a single shaft of artificial sunlight that shone down from yet another vaulted ceiling. It illuminated the enormous seat in which sat the greatest socio-political genius of recent history: His Honesty the Prophet Pyotr Sanchez.
    Sanchez was the man who’d answered the crucial question of their age: How do you unite the warring factions of a world that has been locked in violence for generations? His answer: by directing their attention towards a common enemy. The enemy he’d chosen was a good one, too: the capitalists who’d fled the world with as much money as they could carry when the ecology turned bad.
    The organisation Sanchez had founded, the Church of Truism, was a masterpiece of administrative science. It was part pyramid scheme, part army and part cult. There was room in it for every human ideology that existed, so long as it was prepared to support his cause and recognise his ultimate authority. Sanchez had truly changed the world.
    The Prophet’s features were barely visible at this distance, just an oval of tea-coloured skin for a face above a snowdrift of robes, but he sat at the apex of an impressive tableaux. On the step just below him stood Ramon the First, the King of the Nation of Man and formal leader of Earth’s military government. Ramon wore a gown covered from neck to toe with intricate heraldic symbols in the midnight-blue and gold of the Medellins – the favoured subsect he led. Beneath the king stood the Prophet’s favoured courtiers, arrayed in all their ludicrous finery, looking towards the door – watching Gustav’s approach.
    Gustav knelt. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then hidden speakers amplified the Prophet’s hoarse rattle to a Titan’s boom.
    ‘You may approach, my child.’
    Keeping his eyes carefully downcast, Gustav rose. He gathered the folds of his cumbersome robe of dark Reconsiderist brown and started the climb to the top of the pyramid. A sensation of profound unease grew in the pit of Gustav’s stomach as he ascended. He ignored it. The feeling was not his own, but rather the result of a bombardment of tailored infrasonics. It was well known that Sanchez had the best psycho-architectural consultants the planet could provide. The watching courtiers, the incredible opulence and the grand flight of stairs ahead of him were all intended to create a feeling of awe and reverence. The two emotions they created in Gustav, however, were annoyance and suspicion.
    Gustav reached the step below the king and knelt again. The step was fractionally too narrow to manage this comfortably. It drew one’s attention to how easy it would be to fall backwards, away from the throne, and shame oneself irretrievably in the process.
    The king spoke. ‘Your Honesty, may I present to you General Gustav Ulanu. It was his work that made the liberation of Memburi possible.’
    His voice was rich and round, just as a king’s should be, and Gustav could read nothing from it. He knew the king would prefer to see a Medellin do his job, but Gustav doubted that any of the Medellins’ pitiful scientific ranks could do what he did, even if they were given the chance.
    The role of king was another of Sanchez’s inspired inventions. By allowing the rulers of each faction that joined his church to retain power over their own people, Sanchez had created a highly volatile government. Many of the movements that had become Truist subsects were still fiercely acquisitive and held long-running grudges against each other. Sanchez had stopped them from knifing him in the back and taking power for themselves by giving the tangible reins of power to someone else. At the same time, he’d managed to make himself an indispensable symbol of authority for all.
    Which meant Ramon was expendable, and he knew it. His voice carried far less weight than he would have liked.
    ‘You may look upon me, General,’ said the Prophet. His amplified words boomed around the throne room.
    Gustav stared up into the