A/N: I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and I hope that you all have a very happy New Year. Here's to next year being better than the last!

As always, much love to my biggest fan (and now editor and wife) Bladhaire, for all her help. Love you baby!


Parry laid her head back on the sofa, her eyes closed. She was tired but knew there was no chance of her slipping into sleep; not right now. There was too much on her mind.

Ray still sat beside her, half curled up against her shoulder. Parry was holding her hand, and as it always had been, it was warm and human.

She is human, she thought. She grew up as one of us, feels as one of us.

No, that was also wrong, and it wasn't fair. Ray wasn't human, but at the same time, she wasn't one of these quantum space beings either. Her life, living and growing up in a human body but with that alien mind-how could something like that not change a person? Make her neither of quantum space nor of the material world- neither alien nor human, but some mixture of the two?

When they'd first met, Parry and the others had been surprised at Ray's flight scores. Did she score so high because of her unconscious abilities? Maybe.

Was she able to endure her flight class and their cruelties to her without washing out because she just did not think or feel the way human beings did? Possibly.

Did losing her leg really just not bother her like it would have most people? Likely. It wasn't even her leg was it? Not really.

Did she love me because- Parry thought, and silently shook her head, trying to stop that thought from even forming. Instead, another one, just as unwelcome, came into her mind. Does she love me? Can she? Did she ever?

She started to wonder what the real Ray would have been like, the one that had been born in that body, had she had the chance to grow up. Frustrated with herself and these unwanted ideas that just would not stay out of her head, Parry leaned forward again, releasing Ray's hand and scrubbing her palms over her face.

She is the real Ray, goddamnit! In every single way that matters, for every single moment that you knew her, she's the real Ray. She's the same person she ever was, the same person that turned you on your head. The same one that put herself between you and a missile that would have killed you. The same one that kissed you.

"Are you ok?" Ray asked, and Parry dropped her hands to look at her. Seeing the hesitant self-doubt on Ray's face, the shadows of worry, Parry felt something inside her unknot again.

She's the same person she's always been, the one you fell in love with, and that is never going to change.

"I'm all right," she said, and took Ray's hand again.

"I know this is all so strange and confusing- "

"Yeah, it is," Parry told her. "For you as much as for us, right?"

"Yes," Ray admitted. "But for all that, it is a bit of relief. I always wondered why I was different, if something was wrong with me. It's a relief just to know. I am different, and no, there wasn't anything wrong with me. Isn't anything wrong with me."

"Never was," Parry agreed with a faint smile. Ray smiled back, and it was that same old smile that had hooked Parry to begin with.

"I did want to apologize again," Ray said, and Parry shook her head briefly.

"For what?"

"That last time that I went back to my home space, after I used Karfa's body to carry me to the tunnels. When I got back in -woke up, I guess, from the way you saw things- I kind of briefly…"

She trailed off, and Parry squeezed her hand. She remembered that odd blast of chaos, the momentary snapping sensation, and suspected she knew already. "You briefly…what?"

"I realized you were there, as I was getting back in," Ray said. "I kind of reached out and grabbed hold of you. I was so relieved to see you, to see you were there and alive, it was like a reflex. Only, I wasn't back in all the way yet, so when I grabbed hold of you, I accidentally grabbed you. The you inside, not your body. I pulled you out a little before I realized what I was doing, and let go."

Parry nodded, then knit her brows as the implications of this set in.

"Wait…Ray, are you saying there's another me? I mean, like there's another you? One inside my own body?"

Ray nodded with a vaguely confused look, as if this was not somehow obvious. "Sure. That's you. This body here is just your meat."

She gave Parry's hand a squeeze in demonstration.

"So human beings are like your people? We're just driving around these bodies like vehicles too?"

Parry's head spun as she tried to get hold of that idea- but Ray was already shaking her head.

"You're not like mine," she said. "And it's not really like you're driving those bodies around. They are you, the bodies. They're just not all of you. I mean, science still doesn't know what consciousness is, really is, and neither do my kind. I'm not saying that religions have it right or that there's a spirit or anything- I honestly don't know that. I don't think we can know that for sure. I just know that there is a part of you, let's just use consciousness for the lack of a better word, that is inside all this physical wrapping. Without that piece, the physical wrapping can't survive. My people, we're complete beings in quantum space- there is no physical wrapping because there is no physical anything there. Well, except the bodies of your kind that got lost there, and their ships. As complete beings we can get into your physical wrappings and join ourselves to them, but we only have that one connection. We can hop in and out without restraint so long as we don't sever that connection.

"But your kind, there isn't just one connection. You have millions of them, trillions even. Tiny as hairs, fine as nerve fibers. They connect your 'consciousness' to your body far more firmly than my connection binds me to this one. That's because mine is artificial. Yours is grown by nature, by the laws of physics of this material universe."

"So, could you have actually pulled me out? What would have happened if you had? I'd just die?"

"I couldn't have pulled you out all the way, no," Ray said. "It's hard enough to tear even our one artificial connection. It's kind of like yanking a plug out of a socket but doing so from the other end of the cord rather than at the plug itself. You have to kind of yank in different directions and apply a bit more force to get that plug out, rather than just gripping it and giving a light pull.

"But your connections, well. Imagine you were at the far end of millions of cords plugged into millions of sockets and without being able to get closer to any of the plugs you had to pull them all out. Doing them all at the same time would be completely impossible- "

"One at a time?"

"Each one would require the same effort as our single artificial one. You could do that one after another I suppose, but you wouldn't get through ten before the ones you unplugged just started plugging themselves in again. And the effort after just two or three would be enough to drain your energy. No. I don't think even the strongest of us could do something like that."

"Let's say that you could, just theoretically," Parry said. "What would happen if you pulled all my plugs?"

Ray shrugged. "Then yes. In that case, you'd die."

"So if one of you really wanted to kill one of us, and they were strong enough- "

Ray shook her head with a little laugh. "We can't just come to your space. When we try without any sort of connection to a material body, we just bounce back. If we somehow figured out how to not bounce back, we'd be quantum energy and without any memory. And I don't think we can survive long in material space without being connected to a material body, memory or no memory."

"What if they came like you did? What if they were attached to a physical body and grew like you did?"

"And wanted to kill one of you? Parry, then they'd just kill you. They wouldn't need to tear all those connections, they'd just shoot you, or something."

"Oh, yeah," Parry blinked and then laughed. Ray grinned at her and picked up the container of apple juice again, sipping at it. She offered it to Parry and she shook her head.

As Ray put it back down Parry asked, "So then what happens? I mean, in theory. If all our connections were broken? I know you said we'd die but, what happens to that inside part of ourselves? Our consciousness? Where does it go?"

"I have no idea," Ray said. "When your people came through into our space that's pretty much what happened. Something about our space just severed all the connections in a snap and wiped them out. But they didn't come out of their bodies and start looking around or anything. Not that we saw…I don't think?"

She tapped her lower lip thoughtfully and Parry lifted a brow. "You don't think?"

"Like I said, I don't know. We don't know. Not for sure. But now I wonder-…my people. We're not infinite. We don't die like you do, and we're not born like you are, but we're not infinite. I mean, as much as that term means anything somewhere with no concept of time. But linearly, at some point an individual of my people just sort of shows up, and at some other time, that same individual just kind of goes away. We don't know why, kind of like material beings don't know how a consciousness actually is born or where it goes when its meat dies but- knowing what I know now, I do wonder. Could we actually be you? Are we just the next form of the same energy, the same consciousness? When someone dies here, does that part of them go there? And then, at some point, go on from there into even yet another form, another space, we can't comprehend?"

Despite herself, Parry laughed a little. "I thought I was supposed to be the Angel," she teased. Ray grinned at her.

"I'm not saying that my space is the afterlife to your space or anything, we just simply don't know. There is so much that we don't know."

"So your people can't come here, but you said that you had help- making yourself visible, and with the jumps. How can they help you if they're over there still?"

"For the first, making me visible- they're stuck over there, it's true- but I'm not. So long as I'm connected to this body, I can bounce back and forth from my space to yours at will. All I had to do was stick a small portion of my being out and into that space, and the others on that side fed me energy through to this side. It took a lot of them, a lot of energy, even for that momentary visibility-but that's how we did it."

"And the jumps?"

"That's a little more complicated. When we open a Jump with Jump Gates, it tears through my space, makes holes. Causes havoc. It's dangerous. When I explained to them what your people on this side were really doing- trying to cross material time and space and why-they worked out a solution. One of us on this side- like me, for example-can coordinate with them. They know where I am in this space the moment I put any part of myself over the line back into that space. I let them know the coordinates of where I want to go, or show the memory of where I want to go, if I don't have the coordinates. They make the calculations on that end, which from our perspective is instant because- "

"Time and space don't matter there."

"Right. They give those calculations back to me, and the bit of me that's sticking in their space kind of grabs that new point in our space and joins the two into one material spacial plane and- "

"Yeah, that's more complicated," Parry said.

"Well, I know that the Kilrathi call the Jumps 'Folds' but this method is actually much closer to folding space than the wormholes ever really were. Remember the sponge demonstration, when we were learning this at the Academy?"

"Yeah, that's right. They demonstrated Jump tech with a sponge. One side of the sponge is where we are, the other is where we want to go. The jump gates squeeze the two sides together like our fingers would the sponge until those two points are pressed upon one another, then they used a pencil."

"Right, they poked a hole through the sponge to demonstrate the wormhole. Well, that was a more apt analogy than even they thought. The only problem is, the inside of the sponge was our space. Every time a Jump was opened our space was getting squeezed and then having a great big pencil jammed through it, leaving a hole. The holes would close up fairly quickly of course but that didn't make it any more pleasant. With our method, it's more like actually folding a piece of paper. Where I am is one corner of the paper, where I want to be is the other. On that side, they fasten a string with a little dab of glue to the corner that we want to go, and then give the other end of the string to me. I pull it, and that pulls the space over until they're at the same place; until I can grab the corner the string is attached to. Once I have the two points on the same spacial plane both in the material world and ours, I just shift the material matter to the side and that opens the way."

"Like brushing aside a curtain rather than punching a hole."

"Exactly. And as soon as I'm done, the curtain falls back into place with no trauma and no damage done to it."

"But there's damage to you," Parry said. "I mean, as soon as you came through you fainted dead away."

"Yeah, I wasn't really anticipating that. I didn't faint when I opened the tiny little Jump to land that data post on the President's conference table. That was Shadow's idea, by the way. Give them a little warning before we just suddenly jumped out of nowhere into a highly confidential and secure war conference."

"That probably wouldn't have ended well."

"No. But I also couldn't be sure that I could pass through the very jump that I was holding open, you know? Neither could I tell you what was happening because until you had special dispensation either of you could have been shot for breach of confidentiality. So, that's why I wanted you to remember the protocol name. It'd at least keep you alive until I could get another data post through with more information. Moot, I guess, because now we know I can go through a jump even if I'm the one holding it open.

"But it took a lot more energy opening a Jump big enough to walk through than it did with that little data post. As soon as I stepped through it's like all that energy went out of me in an instant. The size of the jump, it would seem, is a big factor."

That made sense, Parry thought. Clearly the distance of the jump did not matter-they were folding over that distance anyway, so that it was reduced from light years to centimeters. And the data post had traveled the same distance as they had in the later portal.

If opening the portal without punching through quantum space- like that demonstrative pencil through the sponge- was reliant on 'brushing' matter aside like a curtain to let them through, it would make sense that the more matter one had to brush aside (i.e. the larger the portal), the more effort it would take, and the more exhausting it would be.

"So, what are you going to do?" Parry asked after a moment. Ray looked at her quizzically for a moment.

"You mean what I said to the president? That we needed her help and we'll give her ours?"

"Yes. I mean, it's clear how we can help you- we just need to stop punching holes through your space. How are they going to help us in this war, if your people can't come through into our space without just rebounding back?"

Ray grinned. "Ah, but remember the rest? We can."


President Ndiaye frowned slightly, but it was a frown of serious contemplation rather than one of confusion.

It was the following day, just after noon. Ray, Jon and Parry- along with Ray's new pro tem negotiator Jean Forbes- had been talking all morning. The xenobiologist and head of Project: Lure had joined the discussions briefly, and neither were very pleased when Ray indulged them for only a few minutes and then asked them to leave.

To the xenobiologist she had promised he would have everything he wanted and more, but now was not the time. To the head of Project: Lure she only promised that if he left promptly, she would not feel the need to open a portal and drop him into the nearest sun.

Parry knew, of course, that Ray would never do that, but she understood the sentiment. Those in Project: Lure may not have known they were unwittingly experimenting on incapacitated members of an alien species, but they did know they were very wittingly experimenting on involuntary guinea pigs of their own species, and that was both unethical and immoral in Parry's book.

After filling Forbes in, they had then come to this meeting with the President and Joint Chiefs, many of the same men and women who had been in the conference room the night before. The intent on both sides- lay their cards down and see what they could do for one another to secure terms and a treaty.

Ndiaye had been standing but now, the frown still on her face, she slowly sat. To her right, Simon Torgund leaned in and whispered in her ear.

Simon Torgund had been known tongue-in-cheek in the media for decades as the 'Man with No Job'. His official title was as ambassador to the Kilrathi, and head of the Kilrah embassies on Earth. Of course, since the Kilrathi's first official greeting to mankind all those years ago had been to declare and immediately start waging open war with all things human, those embassies were gathering dust and his title was worth little more than the small stipend he made from the Confed treasury just for sending out occasional requests for peace talks to Kilrathi space.

These requests had always been answered with silence.

Now, he had a new title to go with the first, and new work he was eager to get to: advising the President in these negotiations as the new human ambassador to Ray's people.

After he finished whispering, the President nodded and her confusion seemed to clear a little. "Madame Ambassador," she said to Ray. "As I know you understand, time is not on our side. In only a matter of days the bulk of the Kilrathi Fleets will be entering our system, both by word of our own intelligences and by your word as well. We would need our demands to be met quickly."

"I do understand, and for Item One I would have it no other way," Ray said.

Parry wouldn't either. Item One had been almost the first thing spoken in these chambers and was also at the top of Parry's list for Things-That-Had-To-Happen-Fast; the rescue of the other human prisoners still in captivity by the Kilrah.

"I am willing to play my part as soon as conditions are met," Ray continued.

"I can have the necessary forces here this afternoon, but there may be a delay with your cousin."

"Madame President," Forbes said before Ray could speak. "Here I must remind you that by performing the experiments outlined in Project: Lure, and holding Ms. Conners against her will in any capacity, the Confed is technically guilty of the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment- without due process or justification of law- a member of an alien species. While we understand that it was not known what she was when she was first encountered, any retainment of Ms. Conners from this point moving forward constitutes at best, an act of bad faith; and at worst an act of war."

"I do understand, and I appreciate the reminder," Ndiaye said. "The very last thing I want- and the last thing the human race needs at this juncture- is war with yet another alien species. However, I am at a very uncomfortable crossroads with this request. Project: Lure was not instituted by this administration but by my predecessor. I will not lie and pretend that I was not fully briefed on the experiments that were being performed. I was made aware, and I bear any responsibility or consequence that may come upon myself for allowing it to continue once I learned of it. I am fully prepared to disclose as much to the public and to step down as President of the Terran Confederation. I will even commit to such in the very treaty we are working to write, in this room, as we speak; and will hold every one of my Chiefs of Staff and my Fleet Generals as witness to that fact.

"However, our colonies are in ruins. Billions of our people are dead, and the Kilrathi are breathing on Sol's very doorstep with- as the Ambassador herself has said- every intent of slaughtering the rest of the human race down to the last babe in cradle. I make no false promises and rattle no ego-driven sabers here when I say- without a very drastic change in our situation, we will lose. I will resign as President a thousand times over, even stand myself against a wall to be shot and kept by the annals of history as monster and a disgrace to the human race- if that is what it takes to save our species. Gladly. Enthusiastically. But only after that genocide has been averted. For me to stand down now, to have a change of administration at this juncture- "

"Madame President," Ray said. "I'm so sorry if anything I have said has indicated that I expect you to be stand against a wall and shot, or even that I hold you responsible for the atrocities of Project: Lure or the condition that my cousin is in. That is not the case at all. And I fully agree, a change of administration right now, with the Kilrathi breathing down our necks, would be an extremely unwise move. I'm also failing to see what any of this has to do with giving me my cousin back?"

"I simply seek assurances," Ndiaye said. "I meant what I said. I will take responsibility for Lure and for what happened to your cousin and the rest of your family, up to resignation or my own life if that is the cost that must be paid. But in return, I need assurances that this information- Lure, the human experimentation, Armin Ckinlin, even the very existence of your people-does not hit the general public until such time as this war is over, and I can make a formal announcement regarding such."

"Done," Ray said, even as Forbes opened her mouth. She gave a mildly irritated look at Ray but said nothing.

"We can have your cousin brought here immediately then. How far is the facility?" Ndiaye directed this last at Ghislin.

"I will notify the hospital administration immediately that she is to be transferred, I need not explain why. We can have her transported here within the next three hours."

"Three hours then," Ndiaye nodded. "At which we can proceed with Item One?"

"Item One, much as it pains me to say," Ray said, "cannot proceed until tomorrow morning. That is the soonest we dare attempt it. With my cousin's help of course, it will be much faster and easier, but I cannot be certain of her true condition until she is here, and I must be prepared in case her help is not forthcoming. For that I need to regain more of my energy. I understand the pressure of time; I feel it too. But much of this is new to me as well. I'm acting on a lot of guesswork here, and if I try something before I've at least gotten some more rest it may result in my inability to act at all to help stop this war."

"I understand," Ndiaye nodded. "I will make sure the teams are ready first thing in the morning."

"Both parties are in agreement then on Item One?" Torgund asked. Ray and Ndiaye both nodded.

"Then we move to Item Two. Ambassador Caruso, you have indicated that your people can help, in part, with Colonel Rochester's plan to-

"Actually, sorry to interrupt," Ray said, and all eyes fixed on her. "I just can't be the only one that finds this really awkward. Referring to my people as…well, 'my people' all the time. 'My people', 'your people', 'people in quantum space'…"

"My apologies, Ambassador," Torgund said. "However, you indicated at the beginning of this meeting that the name for- well, to use it again- 'your people' could not be pronounced or understood by material species."

"I know, and that's true. Our name is literally a particular vibration of energy. Even if I could somehow manage to produce an equivalent vibration of sound it would be nonsensical to you at best, ultrasonic and out of the range of your hearing anyway at worst. But I think I have a solution to that."

"Oh?" Ndiaye asked, curious.

"Yes. Something my friend said, earlier this morning," she replied, and smiled at Parry. "As you know, Madame President- Parry's callsign is Angel. I think I have come upon an appropriate name for my species that would be at least comfortable for material beings to say, and -when our existence is divulged to the public-it should be nonthreatening for most of them to hear. Coming out of a terrible war with the Kilrathi, many will not relish learning of yet another alien species hoping to knock on their door. Maybe a name that is somewhat familiar and nonaggressive will smooth that road a bit."

"You're not going to call your people 'angels', are you?" Jon asked with a smirk, and polite laughter rumbled through the room.

"No," Ray smiled back. "That would probably give entirely too much of the wrong impression. As it is, I'm hoping that with this name, the human race will see that we are tied with them; that there can be no 'us' here in this space without their help and their leave. I want them to realize that the first of us came to you as your children, in a way."

"Probably wise," Ndiaye said. "And I can certainly agree that the softer we can make the blow for the human race when confronted by this new unknown, the better. What name did you have in mind, Ambassador?"

"Madame President, Joint Chiefs, Ambassadors and delegates…friends," she smiled here at Jon and Parry. "You may call us the Nephilim."