THE UNISPHERE had never been a homogeneous system, nor was it designed in accordance with logical principles. That was quite ironic considering the purely digital medium it dealt with. Instead it had grown and expanded in irregular spurts to accommodate the commercial and civil demands placed on it by a proliferating interstellar civilization. By definition, the unisphere was nothing more than the interface protocols between all the planetary cyberspheres, and they were incredibly diverse. Almost every hardware technology the human race had developed was still in operation across the Greater Commonwealth worlds, from old-fashioned macroarrays running Restricted Intelligence (RI) programs, to semiorganic kubes, quantum wire blocks, smartneural webs, and photonic crystals, all the way up to ANA, which technically was just another routing junction. The interstellar linkages were equally varied, with the Central Commonwealth worlds still using their original zero-width wormholes, whereas the External worlds used a combination of zero-width and hyperspace modulation. Transdimensional channels were becoming more common, especially among the latest generation of External worlds. Starships also were able to link in provided that they were in range of a star system’s spacewatch network.

The massive gulf between technologies and capacities within the unisphere meant that the management software had swollen over the centuries to accommodate every new advance and application. With effectively infinite storage capacity, the upgrades, adapters, retrocryptors, and interpreters had accumulated like binary onion layers around each node. They had the ability to communicate with every other chunk of hardware to come online since the end of the twenty-first century, but with such a complex procedure dealing with every interface, the problem of security increased proportionally. It was relatively easy for a specialist e-head to incorporate siphoning and echoclone routines quietly amid centuries’ worth of augmentation files. The problem was one that all the users got around by using their own encryption.

However, to decrypt a secure message, the receiver had to be in possession of the appropriate key. Ultrasecure keys never were sent via the unisphere; they were exchanged physically in advance, a common method for financial transactions. A less secure method was for a user’s u-shadow to dispatch a key by using one route and then call on another. Given the phenomenal number of randomly designated routes available within the unisphere, most of the people who even considered it regarded that as sufficient. It would, after all, require a colossal amount of computing power to monitor every route established to a specific address code for a key and then follow up by intercepting the message.

Of course, that assumption had been made in the early centuries, prior to ANA. For any individual downloaded into ANA, access to that quantity of processing capacity was an everyday occurrence. The Advancer Faction routinely ran a scan of all messages to ANA: Governance to check if any of its own activities had been noticed and reported.

When the faction’s monitor routine detected a starship TD connection established to Wohlen’s spacewatch network downloading a key fragment to ANA: Governance’s security division, an alert was flagged. Over the next two point three seconds, the remaining seven key fragments arrived via routes from seven different planets, and the monitor acknowledged that someone was trying to establish a very secure link. There was nothing too out of the ordinary in that; it was the security division, after all. However, all eight planets were within twenty-five light-years of the Advancer Faction’s secret manufacturing station. That bumped the alert up to grade one.

Three seconds later, Ilanthe’s elevated mentality was observing the secure call itself, placed through the ninth planet, Loznica, which was seventeen light-years from the station.

“Yes, Troblum?” ANA: Governance asked.

“I need to see someone. Someone special.”

“I will be happy to facilitate any request in relation to Commonwealth security. Could you please be more specific?”

“I work for the Advancer Faction. Make that worked. I have information, very important information, concerning their activities.”

“I will be happy to receive your data.”

“No. I don’t trust you. Not anymore. Parts of you are bad. I don’t know how far the contamination has spread.”

“I can assure you that ANA: Governance retains its integrity both in structural essence and morally.”

“Like you’d say different. I can’t even be sure if I’m talking to ANA: Governance.”

“Skepticism is healthy providing it does not escalate into paranoia. So given you don’t trust me, what can I do for you?”

“I’m entitled to be paranoid after what I’ve seen.”

“What have you seen?”

“Not you. I’ll tell Paula Myo. She’s the only person left that I trust. Route this call to her.”

“I will ask if she will be willing to listen to you.”

Fifteen seconds later, Paula Myo came online. “What do you want?” she asked.

“There’s something you need to know. Something you’ll understand.”

“Then tell me.”

“I need to be certain it’s you. Where are you?”

“In space.”

“Can you get to Sholapur?”

“Why would I want to?”

“I’ll tell you everything I know about their plans for fusion, all the hardware they’ve built, all the people involved. All that, if you’ll just listen to me. You have to listen; you’re the only person left who’ll deal with it.”

“With what?”

“Come to Sholapur.”

“Very well. I can be there in five days.”

“Don’t stealth your starship. I’ll contact you.”

The connection ended.

 

As ANA and its abilities were to the unisphere, so there were hierarchal levels within ANA. Discrete levels of ability surreptitiously established by a few of the humans who had founded ANA, abilities only they could utilize. They could not corrupt ANA: Governance or use the navy warships for their own ends. That magnitude of intervention would be easily detectable. But there was a back door into several of ANA’s communication sections, allowing them to watch the watchers without the kind of effort the Advancers had to make to get the same intelligence. And as they had gotten there first, they also had observed the Advancers and other factions spread their monitors into the unisphere nodes as their campaigns and reach grew. They knew which messages the Advancers intercepted.

“Ilanthe is going to go apeshit over that kind of betrayal,” Gore said.

“At least we know Troblum is still alive,” Nelson replied.

“Yeah, for the next five seconds.”

“Until he gets to Sholapur at the very least. And never ever underestimate Paula.”

“I don’t. If anyone can collect him in one piece, she can.”

“So we might just be able to sit back and relax if Paula does bring back information on what the Advancers are up to. Hardware, Troblum said. That has to be the planet-shifting FTL engine.”

“Maybe so,” Gore said. “But he was offering that as a bribe to make sure Paula listened to something else, something big and scary enough to get him really worried. Now, what the fuck could that be?”

Marius sprinted down the corridor. It was not something the universe got to see very often. With his Higher field functions reinforcing his body, the speed was phenomenal. Malmetal doors had to roll aside very quickly or face complete disintegration. His dark toga suit flapped about in the slipstream, for once ruining the eerie gliding effect he always portrayed. Marius did not care about appearance right now. He was furious.

Ilanthe’s brief call had been very unsettling. He’d never failed her before. The implications were terrible, as she had managed to explain in remarkably few words. He only wished he had time to make Troblum suffer for his crime.

He streaked through the three-way junction that put him in sector 7-B-5. Some idiot technician was walking down the middle of the corridor, going back to her suite after a long shift. Marius charged past her, clipping her arm, which broke instantly from the impact. She was spun around, slamming into the wall. She screamed as she crumpled to the floor.

The door to Troblum’s suite was dead ahead, locked as of two minutes ago with Marius’s own nine-level certificate to prevent the little shit from leaving. The suite’s internal sensors showed Troblum sitting at a table slurping his way disgustingly through a late-night “snack.”

Marius began to slow as his u-shadow unlocked the door. It expanded as he arrived, and he coasted through. Troblum’s head lifted, crumbs of a burger dropping from the corner of his mouth. Despite bulging cheeks, he still managed a startled expression.

A disrupter pulse slammed into him, producing a ghost-green phosphorescent flare in the suite’s air. Marius followed it up immediately with a jelly gun shot. He would obliterate the memorycell in a few seconds; that would leave just Troblum’s secure store back on Arevalo.

Instead of disintegrating into a collapsing globule of gore, Troblum simply popped like a soap bubble. A rivulet of metal dust spewed out from the wall behind the table where the jelly gun shot had hit. Marius froze in shock, his field scan functions sweeping the room. It had not been Troblum. No biological matter was in the room. His eyes found a half-melted electronic module on the seat, ruined by the disrupter blast.

A solido projector.

Marius was perfectly still as he stared at it.

“What happened?” Neskia asked as she strode into the suite. Her long neck curved so that her head could see around Marius.

“It would appear Troblum isn’t quite the fat fool I’d taken him for.”

“We’ll find him. It won’t take long. This station isn’t that big.”

Marius whipped around, the wide irises in his green eyes narrowing to minute intimidating slits. “Where’s his ship?” he demanded.

“Sitting in the airlock,” she replied calmly. “Nobody enters or leaves without my authorization.”

“It better be,” Marius spit.

“Every centimeter of this station is covered by some sensor or other. We’ll find him.”

Marius’s u-shadow ordered the smartcore to show him the airlock. The Mellanie’s Redemption was sitting passively at the center of the large white chamber. Visually it was there; the airlock radar produced a return from the hull. The umbilical management programs reported a steady drain of housekeeping power through the cables plugged into its base. He queried the ship’s smartcore. There was no response.

Marius and Neskia stared at each other. “Shit!”

Four minutes later they walked into the airlock. Marius glowered at the long cone-shaped ship with its stupid curving tail fins. His field scan swept out. It was an illusion produced by a small module on the airlock floor. He smashed a disrupter pulse into the solido projector, and the starship image shivered, shrinking down to a beautiful, naked young girl with blond hair that hung halfway down her back. “Oh, Howard,” she moaned sensually, running her hands up her body. “Do that again.”

Marius let out an incoherent cry and shot the projector again. It burst into smoldering fragments, and the girl vanished.

“How in Ozzie’s name did he do that?” Neskia said. There was a hint of admiration in her voice. “He must have flown right past the defense cruisers as well. They never even saw him.”

Marius took a moment to compose himself. “Troblum helped design and build the defense cruisers. Either he infiltrated their smartcores back then or he knows a method of circumventing their sensor systems.”

“He compromised the station smartcore, too. It should never have let Mellanie’s Redemption out.”

“Indeed,” Marius said. “You will find the corruption and purge it. This operation must not suffer any further compromise.”

“It was not me who compromised this station,” she said with equal chill. “You brought him here.”

“You had twenty years to discover the bugs he planted. That you failed is unforgivable.”

“Don’t try to play the blame game with me. This is your foul-up, and I will make that very clear to Ilanthe.”

Marius turned on a heel and walked back to the airlock chamber’s entrance. His dark toga suit adjusted itself around him, once more giving off a narrow black shimmer that concealed his feet. He glided with serpentine poise down the corridor toward the airlock chamber that contained his own starship.

His u-shadow opened a secure link to the Cat’s ship.

“It’s so nice to be popular again,” she said.

“We have a problem. I want you to find Troblum. Eliminate that shit from this universe. In fact, I want him erased from all of history.”

“That sounds personal, Marius, dear. Always a bad thing. Messes with your judgment.”

“He’s heading for Sholapur. In five days’ time he will meet with an ANA representative there and explain what we have been doing. His ship has some kind of advanced stealth ability we didn’t know about.”

“Gave you the slip, huh?”

“I’m sure you’ll be more capable of rectifying our mistake.”

“What do you want me to do about Aaron? He’s still down on the planet’s surface.”

“Is there any sign of Inigo?”

“Darling, the sensors can barely make out continents. I’ve no idea what’s going on down there.”

“Do as you see fit.”

“I thought this was all critical to your plans.”

“If Troblum exposes us to ANA, there will be no plans; there probably won’t be an Advancer Faction anymore.”

“The strong always survive. That’s evolution.”

“Paula Myo is the representative ANA is sending to collect Troblum.”

“Oh, Marius, you’re too kind to me. Really.”

It should have been tempting. He was alone in a small starship with three amazingly fit men who probably would have been honored to got to bed with him. Oscar had been delighted when Tomansio had introduced his team. Liatris McPeierl was his lieutenant, a lot quieter than Tomansio, with a broad mouth that could flash a smile that was wickedly attractive. He would handle the technical aspects of the mission, Tomansio had said, including their armaments. Gazing at the pile of big cases on the regrav sled that followed Liatris about, Oscar had his first moment of doubt; he did not want to resort to violence, though he was realistic enough to know that it wasn’t his decision. Cheriton McOnna had been brought in to help because of his experience with the gaiafield; there was nothing about confluence nest operations that he didn’t know, Tomansio had claimed. Oscar was slightly surprised by Cheriton’s characteristics. They were almost Higher: He had altered his ears to simple circle craters, his nose was wide and flat, and his eyes were sparkling purple globes like multifaceted insect lenses. His bald skull had two low ridges reaching back from his eyebrows over his cranium to merge together at the nape of his neck.

“Multimacrocellular enrichment,” he explained. “And a hell of a lot of customized gaiamotes.” To prove it, he spun out a vision of some concert. For a moment Oscar was transported to a natural amphitheater, lost in a sea of people under a wild starry sky. On the stage far away, a pianist performed by himself, his soulful tune making Oscar sway in sympathy.

“Wow.” Oscar blinked, taking a half step back as the vision cleared. He’d almost been about to sing along; the song was familiar somehow—just not quite right.

“I composed it in your honor,” Cheriton said. “I remember you told Wilson Kime you liked old movies.”

Now Oscar remembered. “That’s right. ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ yeah?” He took care to reduce his gaiamotes’ reception level. Cheriton had produced a very strong emission. It made Oscar wonder if the gaiafield actually could be used in a harmful way.

“Yes.”

The last member of the team was Beckia McKratz, whose gaiafield giveaway made it very clear that she would like to bed him. She was equal to Anja in the beauty stakes, minus all the neurotic hang-ups. Oscar wasn’t interested, not even on that first morning when he had stumbled out of his tiny sleep cabin to find all four of them in the main lounge stripped to the waist and performing some strenuous ni-tng exercise. They moved in perfect synchronization, arms and legs rising gracefully to stick out in odd directions, limbs flexing, eyes closed, breathing deeply. From their gaiafield emanations, their minds seemed to be hibernating.

Aliens teleported into human bodies, carefully examining what they could do.

It was all very different from Oscar’s wake-up routine, which normally involved a lot of coffee and accessing the most trashy unisphere gossip shows he could find. That was the whole nonattraction problem. All that devotion to perfection and strength did not seem to leave them much time to be actually human. It was a big turnoff.

So he crept around the edge of the lounge to the culinary unit, snagged a large cup of coffee and a plate of buttered croissants, and sat quietly in a corner munching away as he watched the strange slow-motion ballet.

They came to rest position and took one last breath in unison before opening their eyes and smiling.

“Good morning, Oscar,” Tomansio said.

Oscar slurped down some more coffee. That morning routine also included no conversation until his third cup. The culinary unit was suddenly busy churning out plates with large portions of bacon and eggs with toast.

“Something wrong?” Liatris asked.

Oscar realized he was staring at the man as he ate. “Sorry. I assumed you’d all be vegetarians.”

They all exchanged an amused glance. “Why?”

“When we were flying the Carbon Goose across Half Way, I remember the Cat kicking up a big fuss about the onboard food. She refused to eat anything produced and processed on a Big15 planet.” His companions’ amusement evaporated. To Oscar it was as though he had been transformed into some kind of guru, steeped in wisdom.

“You did talk to her, then?” Beckia asked.

“Not much. It was almost as if she was bored with us. And I still don’t get why you idolize her the way you do.”

“We’re realistic about her,” Cheriton said. “But she accomplished so much.”

“She killed a lot of people.”

“As did you, Oscar,” Tomansio chided.

“Not deliberately. Not for enjoyment.”

“The whole Starflyer War happened because humanity was weak. Our strength had been sapped away by centuries of liberalism. Not anymore. The External worlds have the self-belief to strike out for themselves against the Central worlds. That’s thanks to Far Away’s leadership by example. And the Knights Guardian are the political force behind Far Away. Politicians don’t ignore strength anymore. It is celebrated on hundreds of worlds in a myriad of forms.”

That was the trouble with history, Oscar thought: Once the distance had grown long enough, any event could be seen favorably. The true horror faded with time, and ignorance replaced it. “I lived through those times. The Commonwealth was strong enough to prevail. Without the strength we showed then, you wouldn’t be alive today to complain about us and debate what might have been.”

“We don’t want to offend you, Oscar.”

Oscar downed the last of his coffee and told the culinary unit to produce more. “So sensibilities aren’t a weakness, then?”

Liatris laughed. “No. Respect and civility are high points of civilization. As much as personal independence and kindness. Strength comes in many guises, including laying down your life to give the human race its chance to survive. If the Knights Guardians have one regret, it is that your name is not as famous and revered as the others from your era.”

“Holy crap,” Oscar muttered, and collected his coffee. He knew his face was red. My era! “All right,” he said as he sank back onto the chair that the lounge extruded for him. “I can see we’re going to have fun times debating history and politics for the rest of the mission. In the meantime, we do have a very clear objective. My plan is quite a simple one, and I’d like some input from you as we shake it down into something workable. You guys are the experts in this field and this era. So for what it’s worth, there are several ANA factions extremely keen to find this poor old Second Dreamer, not to mention Living Dream, which has a very clear-cut agenda for him. Between them they have colossal resources which we can’t hope to equal, so what I propose is that we jump on their bandwagon and let them do the hard work. We should position ourselves to snatch him as soon as they locate him.”

“I like it,” Tomansio said. “The simpler it is, the better.”

“Which just leaves us with mere details,” Oscar said. “Everyone seems to think the Second Dreamer is on Viotia. We’ll be there in another seven hours.”

“Impressive flight time,” Cheriton said drily. “I’ve never been in an ultradrive ship before.”

Oscar ignored the jibe. Tomansio had never asked who was employing Oscar, but the ship was a huge giveaway. “Tomansio, how do we go about infiltrating the Living Dream operation there?”

“Direct insertion. We’ll hack their smartcore’s personnel files and assign Cheriton to the search operation. He’s savvy enough to pass as a dream master, right?”

“No problem,” Cheriton said. He sighed. “Reprofiling for me, then.” He ran a hand along one of his skull ridges.

“I’ll make you look almost human,” Beckia assured him.

Cheriton blew her a kiss. “Living Dream has been altering confluence nests all across the General Commonwealth to try and get a fix on his location,” he said. “It must be costing them a fortune, which is a good indicator of how desperate they are. It’s not a terribly accurate method, but once they narrow it down to a single nest, they’ll know the district at least.”

“How does that help?” Beckia asked. “A nest’s gaiafield can cover a big area. If it’s in a city, it can include millions.”

“If it were me, I’d surround the area with specialist nests and dream masters and try and triangulate the dream’s origin.”

“So we can be in the general area just like them,” Oscar said. “Then it’s all a matter of speed.”

“The factions will be running similar snatch operations,” Tomansio said. “We’ll be up against their agents as well as Living Dream.”

Oscar picked up on how enthused the Knights Guardian were by that prospect. “The faction agents will have biononic weapon enrichments, won’t they?”

“I hope so,” Tomansio said.

“You can match that?” Oscar asked nervously.

“Only one way to find out.”

It was a gentle valley carpeted by long dark grass that rippled in giant waves as the breeze from the mountains gusted down. There was a house nestled in a shallow dip in the ground, a lovely old place whose walls were all crumbling stone quarried out of the nearby hills. An overhanging thatch roof gave it a delightful unity with nature. Its interior was a technology completely at odds with its outward appearance, with replicators providing him with any physical requirement. T-sphere interstices provided his family with an interesting internal topology and any extra space they might want.

He stood facing it, holding his bamboo staff vertically in front of him, torso bare to the air and legs clad in simple black cotton dirukku pants. He was shutting down biononic field functions; attuning his perception to sight, sound, and sensation alone, feeling his surroundings. Nesting cobra: the foundation of self. He moved into sharp eagle and then twisted fast, assuming jumping cheetah. A breath. Opponent moving behind. Bring the bamboo down and sweep: the tiger’s claw. Spin jump as a coiled dragon. One arm bent into Spartan shield. Lunge: striking angel. Drop the staff and pull both curving daggers from their sheaths. Bend at the knees into woken phoenix.

A vibration in the air. Heavy feet crushing tender stalks of grass. He raised his head to see a line of black armored figures marching toward him. Long flames billowed from vents in their helmets as they roared their battle call. His breathing quickened as he tightened his grip on the daggers. The smell of charred meat rolled across the grassland. Aaron gagged on the terrible stench. Coughing violently, he sat up on the couch in the ground crawler’s cabin.

“Shit,” he sputtered, then coughed again, fighting for breath and doubling up. Exovision medical displays showed him his biononics assuming command of his lungs and airway, overriding his body’s struggling autonomic functions. He wheezed down a long breath and shook his head as the artificial organelles stabilized him.

Corrie-Lyn was gazing at him from her couch on the other side of the cabin. She had drawn her knees up under her chin and had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. For some reason she made him feel guilty. “What?” he snapped, all caffeine-deprived bad temper.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Those warriors represent being trapped, I think. But they came to you outside your home. You were unable to escape what you are, what you had grown into.”

“Oh, give me a break,” he growled, and tried to swing his feet off the couch. His blanket was wrapped around his legs. He pulled it off in an angry jerk.

Corrie-Lyn responded with a hurt scowl. “They could also be a representation of paranoia,” she said with brittle dignity.

“Fuck off.” He told the culinary unit to brew some herbal tea. To purge the soul. “Look,” he said with a sigh. “Someone has seriously screwed with my brain. I’m bound to have nightmares. Just leave it, okay.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“I am what I am. And I like it.”

“But you don’t know who you are.”

“I told you: Drop this.” He settled into one of the two forward seats and stared out of the thick windscreen slit. The ground crawler was lumbering forward, rocking about as if they were riding an ocean swell. Outside, the weather had not changed for the whole trip: a thin drizzle of ice particles blown along at high speed. High overhead, the dark underbelly of the cloud blanket seethed relentlessly, flickering with sheet lightning. They were traversing a drab landscape where flood streams had gouged out deep sharp gullies. Broad headlight beams slithered over the dunes of filthy snow that migrated across the permafrost. Occasionally the surface of iron-hard soil was distended by some ruins or stumps. Otherwise there was nothing to break the monotony.

Corrie-Lyn climbed off the couch without a word and went back to the little washroom compartment at the rear of the oblong cabin. She managed to slam the worn aluminum door.

Aaron rubbed his face, dismayed by how he had handled the situation. Something in his dreams was eating away at his composure. He hated to think that she was right, that his subconscious somehow had squirreled away a few precious true memories. The personality he had now was simple and straightforward, uncluttered by extraneous attachments or sentimentality. He didn’t want to lose that, not ever.

By way of apology, he started entering a whole load of instructions into the culinary unit. Thirty minutes later, when Corrie-Lyn emerged, her breakfast was waiting for her on a small table. She pouted at it.

“The crawler’s net reckons we’re about ninety minutes from the camp,” he said. “I thought you’d want to fortify yourself before we reached them.”

Corrie-Lyn was silent for a moment, then nodded in acknowledgment at the peace offering and sat at the table. “Has anyone been in contact?”

“From the camp? No.” They’d talked to someone called Ericilla the previous night, telling her their estimated arrival time. She had seemed interested, though she had laughed at the idea of any of her colleagues being an abandoned lover. “If you knew any of my teammates you’d know you’re wasting your time. Romantic they’re not.”

“We’re still connected to the beacon network,” Aaron said, sipping another herbal tea. “Nobody is owning up yet.”

“What do we do if he’s not there?”

Aaron resisted the impulse to look her up and down again. When she came out of the washroom, she’d changed into a pair of black trousers and a light green sweater with a V-neck. Her hair was washed and springy. No cosmetic scales were on her face, but her complexion glowed. Clearly she was ready for her chance to reignite some of the old passion should he be there. She had kept her gaiamotes closed fairly tight since leaving Kajaani, but the occasional lapse had allowed Aaron to sense a lot of anticipation fermenting in her mind.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Time isn’t in our favor.”

“And if he is there? What if he doesn’t want to be hauled back to Ellezelin?”

Just for an instant something stirred Aaron’s mind: certainty. He did know what was going to happen afterward. The knowledge was all there waiting for him, ready for the moment. “I’ll just tell him what I have to. After that, it’ll be up to him.”

Corrie-Lyn gave him a mildly doubtful stare before tucking in to her first bacon sandwich.

 

Camp, Aaron decided, was a rather grand description for the place where the team working in the Olhava province had set themselves up. A couple of ground crawlers were parked next to each other in the lee of some rugged foothills. Malmetal shelters had expanded out of their rear sections to provide the team with larger accommodation. But that was all.

Aaron parked a few meters away, and they pulled on their bulky surface suits. Once his bubble helmet had sealed, Aaron went into the tiny airlock and waited for the outside door to slide aside. He was hit immediately by the wind. Ice fragments swirled around him. He walked carefully down the ramp, holding the handrail tight. The wind was squally, but he could stand upright. There were enhancer systems built into the suit for when the storms really hit. The suit’s main purpose was to protect him from the radiation.

Although there wasn’t too much physical effort involved, he wished he had nudged their ground crawler closer to those of the team. It took nearly three minutes to cover the small gap and clamber into a decontamination airlock on the side of one of the shelters. Corrie-Lyn was grunting and cursing her way along behind him.

Ericilla, a short woman with a fringe of brown hair flecked with gray, was waiting for them in the closet-size suit room. She smirked as Corrie-Lyn wriggled out of her surface suit, licking her lips in merriment. “No man is worth this,” she announced.

“He is,” Corrie-Lyn assured her.

Aaron already had extended his field scan function, probing the whole camp. He had detected four people, including Ericilla. None of them was Higher.

Ericilla beckoned. “Come and meet the boys.”

Vilitar and Cytus were waiting for them, standing in the middle of the shelter’s cluttered lounge like an army of two on detention parade. Nerina, Vilitar’s husband, gave Corrie-Lyn a wary look.

“Oh, shit,” Corrie-Lyn said despondently.

Nerina poked Vilitar in the chest. “Well, that lets you off.”

The two men relaxed, grinning sheepishly. Aaron sensed the tension drain away. Suddenly everyone was smiling and happy to see them.

“I thought there were five in your team,” Aaron said.

“Earl is down in the dig,” Ericilla said. “The sensorbots picked up a promising signal last night. He said that was more important than, well…” The way she left it hanging told them she was on Earl’s side.

“I’d like to see him, please,” Corrie-Lyn said.

“Why not?” Ericilla said. “You’ve come this far.”

It was another trip outside. The entrance to the dig was on the other side of the shelters, a simple metal cube housing a small fusion generator and several power cells. An angled force field protected it from Hanko’s venomous elements. There was a decontamination airlock to keep the radioactive air out so that the team’s equipment could work without suffering contamination and degradation. Big filter units filled the rest of the entrance kube, maintaining the clean atmosphere. The temperature inside was still cold enough to keep the permafrost frozen. Aaron and Corrie-Lyn kept their helmets on.

Excavationbots had dug a passage down at forty-five degrees, hacking crude steps into the rocky ground. Thick blue air hoses were strung along the roof, clustered around a half-meter extraction tube that buzzed as it propelled grains of frozen mud along to be dumped on a pile half a kilometer away. Polyphoto strips hanging off the cables cast a slightly greenish glow. Aaron trod carefully as they went down. The solid ground around him blocked any detailed field scan.

The bottom of the crude stairs must have been seven meters below ground level. Ericilla explained that they’d cut into a lake bed that had filled with sediment during the postattack monsoons. There were several people from the surrounding area who had never made it to Anagaska.

The passage opened out into a chamber ten meters wide and three high, supported by force fields. Discarded arm-length bots were strewn over the floor with power cables snaking around them. A couple of hologram projectors filled it with a pervasive sparkly monochrome light. Ice crystals glinted in the sediment contained behind the force field.

There was an opening on the far side. Aaron’s field scan showed him another cavern with a great deal of electronic activity inside. Someone was in there. Someone who could shield his body from the scan.

“Holy Ozzie,” Aaron breathed.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a curious look and strode into the second chamber. It was larger than the first. A third of its wall surface was covered with excavatorbots that looked like a mass of giant maggots slowly wiggling their way forward into the gelid sediment. A huge lacework of tiny pipes emerging from their tails led back to the start of the extraction tube. Silver sensor discs floated through the air, bobbing about to take readings. Silhouetted by the retinue of cybernetic activity was a lone figure wearing a dark green surface suit. Corrie-Lyn took a couple of hesitant steps forward.

The man turned, lifting off his bubble helmet. His face had a Latin shading rather than Inigo’s northern European pallor, and the hair was dark brown rather than ginger. But apart from that, the features had not been altered much. Aaron thought it a particularly inferior disguise, as if he were wearing makeup and a bad wig.

“Inigo!” Corrie-Lyn whispered.

“Of all the Restoration projects on all the dead worlds in the galaxy, you had to walk into mine.”

Corrie-Lyn sank to her knees, sobbing helplessly.

“Hey, girl,” Inigo said sympathetically. He knelt down beside her and flipped the outer seals on her helmet.

“Where’ve you been, you bastard!” she screamed. Her fist smacked into his chest. “Why did you leave me? Why did you leave us?”

He wiped some of the tears from her cheeks, then leaned forward and kissed her. Corrie-Lyn almost fought against it; then she suddenly was wrapping her arms around him, kissing furiously. The fabric of their suits made scratching noises as they rubbed together.

Aaron waited a diplomatic minute, then unsealed his own helmet. The air was bitingly cold and held the strangest smell of rancid mint. His breath emerged in gray streamers. “You’re a hard man to find.”

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn broke apart.

“Don’t listen to him,” Corrie-Lyn said urgently. “Whatever he wants, refuse. He’s insane. He’s killed hundreds of people to find you.”

“Slight exaggeration,” Aaron said. “No more than twenty, surely.”

Inigo’s steel-gray eyes narrowed. “I can sense what you are. Who do you represent?”

“Ah.” Aaron gave a weak smile. “I’m not sure.” But we’re about to find out. He could feel the knowledge stirring in his mind again. He was about to know what to do next.

“I won’t go back,” Inigo said simply.

“What happened?” Corrie-Lyn pleaded.

Aaron’s u-shadow reported that a call was coming in from Director Ansan Purillar. It had been transferred across the hundreds of desolate kilometers from Kajaani by the small sturdy beacons to enter the camp, where it finally had trickled down into the excavation through a single strand of fiber-optic cable.

“Yes, Director?” Aaron said.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other a puzzled glance, then looked at Aaron.

“Do you have some colleagues following you?” Ansan Purillar asked.

“No.”

“Well, there’s a ship coming through the atmosphere above us, and it won’t respond to any of our signals.”

Aaron felt his blood chill. His combat routines came online as he instinctively shielded himself with the strongest force field his biononics could produce. “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out of the base. Everyone out. Now!”

“I think you’d better explain exactly what is going on.”

“Shit!” His u-shadow used the tenuous link to the base to establish a tiny channel to the Artful Dodger’s smartcore. “Tell them,” he yelled at Corrie-Lyn.

She flinched. “Director, please leave. We haven’t been honest with you.” She turned to Inigo. “Please?” she hissed.

He gave a reluctant sigh. “Ansan, this is Earl. Do as Aaron says. Get as many as you can into the starship. Everyone else will have to use the ground cruisers.”

“But—”

The Artful Dodger’s smartcore scanned the sky above Kajaani. Its sweep was hampered considerably by the protective force field over the base, but it showed Aaron a small mass thirty kilometers high, holding its position above the thick outer cloud blanket. “Come and get us,” he told the smartcore. “Fast.” His exovision showed him the starship powering up. Flight systems took barely a second to come online. Its force field hardened. Directly overhead, an enormously powerful gamma-ray laser struck the base’s force field. A scarlet corona flared around the puncture point, and the beam sliced into the generator building.

Complete force field failure was an emergency situation that had been incorporated into the base’s design. Secondary force fields snapped on over the cottages and science blocks almost in time to protect them from the first awesome pressure surge. Several sheets of ice crystals hammered against the walls, drilling holes in the grass. Staff members who were caught outside screamed and flung themselves down as the impacts battered them. It was over in seconds as the retrapped air stilled. When they looked up, they could see the parkland being scoured of grass and bushes by the victorious wind. Their starship had been cut in two by the gamma-laser strike; uneven sections lay twisted on the pad as the cold storm buffeted it about.

Beside it, the Artful Dodger rose into the maelstrom of radioactive destruction that cascaded across the base the instant the main force field vanished. Sensors showed it a pinprick of dazzling white light searing its way downward, accelerating at fifty gees. The ship’s smartcore blasted away at the weapon with neutron lasers and quantum distortion pulses. Nothing happened. The smartcore started to change course, but it wasn’t fast enough. The lightpoint struck the Artful Dodger amidships, unaffected by the force field. Enormous tidal forces tore at the ship’s structure, destroying its integrity. Even spars reinforced by bonding fields were ripped out of alignment. Ordinary components were mangled beyond recognition. The entire hull buckled and imploded to a third of its original size. Then the Hawking m-sink punched through the other side of the ship and streaked onward into the ground. Its intense spark of light vanished. The surrounding ground heaved as if Kajaani had been hit by a massive earthquake, annihilating the remaining buildings and structures. All the secondary force fields died, leaving the collapsing cottages and science blocks exposed to the planet’s malignant atmosphere.

The wreckage of the Artful Dodger tumbled out of the hurricane to smash into the ruins of the base.

Aaron’s contact with the starship was lost as soon as the Hawking m-sink had penetrated the hull, when every microcircuit and kube was physically distorted and ruptured.

A couple of Kajaani’s sensors had caught the last moments of the star that had bolted out of the churning naked sky. Its speed was such that human eyes registered it as a single line of light, like a perfectly straight lightning bolt. Radiation monitor records showed a swift peak that went off the scale.

“What the hell just happened?” Corrie-Lyn demanded.

Aaron was too stunned to reply immediately. His u-shadow confirmed that the beacon relay now ended two kilometers short of the base’s perimeter.

“They fired on the base,” Inigo said quietly. “Lady, they were completely unarmed.” He glared at Aaron. “Was that one of the factions?”

“Could be. It might even have been the Cleric Conservator making sure of his tenure.”

“There’s a place in the depths of Honious reserved for your kind. I hope you reach it quickly.”

“Where?” Aaron asked.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave him an identical snort of disgust.

“We’d better get back up to the shelter,” Inigo said. “I expect they’ll want to get to Kajaani right away. We are one of the closest camps.”

 

As soon as they came through the cramped suit room, Ericilla pointed an accusing finger at Aaron. “That was you,” she yelled in fury. “You’re responsible. You told them to get clear. You knew who that was. You brought them here.”

“I didn’t bring them here. Those people were going to catch up with us eventually. The location was…unfortunate.”

“Un-fucking-fortunate?” Vilitar spit. “There were nearly two hundred people there. We don’t know how many of them are still alive, but even if some of them survived the attack, they’ll be dying from the radiation. My friends. Slaughtered.”

“They’ll be re-lifed,” Aaron said impassively.

“You bastard,” Cytus stepped forward, his fist raised.

“Enough,” Inigo said. “This won’t help.”

Cytus paused for a moment, then turned away, his face contorted with disgust and anger.

“You knew, Earl,” Nerina said. “You warned Ansan as well. What the hell is going on? Do you know these people?”

“I’m the one they’re looking for. I didn’t know about the attack.”

The rest of the team started at one another in mute bewilderment.

“We’re going to Kajaani,” Ericilla said. “We can help recover the bodies before the winds blow them too far.”

“How long before your organization sends another ship?” Aaron asked.

“Like you care!”

“How long? Please.”

“Too long,” Nerina said. “Hanko isn’t part of the unisphere. We can’t just yell for help. Our only link to the Commonwealth was the hyperspace link in the starship, which was connected to our headquarters back on Anagaska. Without that we’re completely cut off. Anagaska will assume there was some kind of equipment failure; then, after we haven’t repaired it in a week, they’ll probably investigate. If I remember right, we’re due a scheduled flight in two weeks, anyway. They’ll probably wait until then. Budget considerations.” She snapped it out with contempt.

“By which time radiation poisoning will have killed everyone exposed to the atmosphere,” Vilitar said. “We don’t have enough medical facilities to help them all. Congratulations.” He stared challengingly at Aaron.

“We need to get moving,” Ericilla said. “The medical systems on our ground crawlers can help a couple of them, maybe more.” She pushed her way past Aaron, not looking at him. Cytus managed to knock Aaron’s elbow as he went into the suit room.

“You coming, Earl?” Nerina asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve done enough already,” Vilitar said. “Whoever the fuck you really are. I thought—” He snarled incoherently and hurried into the suit room.

“We’ll come with you,” Corrie-Lyn said. “We can help.”

“The Asiatic glacier is half a day from here,” Nerina said. “The far end has mile-high cliffs. Why don’t you help us by driving off them.” She went into the suit room and closed the door.

“Then there were three,” Aaron said.

“We’d better get going,” Inigo said. He faced Aaron. “You know they’ll probably close the Restoration project down because of this.”

“Do you think the next galaxy along will mount a Restoration project for all the species which the Void devourment phase exterminates?”

For a moment Aaron thought Inigo might activate his biononics in an aggressor mode. “You know nothing,” the lost messiah whispered.

“I hope something, though.”

“What?”

“That you have a starship stashed away. Preferably close by.”

“I don’t.”

“Really? I find that mighty curious. You took all this trouble to stay lost, yet you have no escape route if someone came along to expose you.”

“Obviously not. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here waiting for you.”

“You wouldn’t have been waiting around here if it had just been me,” Aaron said. He gestured at Corrie-Lyn. “But her? That’s different. Seventy years is a long time to be alone. She stayed in love for that long. Did you?”

Corrie-Lyn moved close to Inigo. “Did you?” she asked in a quiet voice.

A mournful smile flickered over his lips. “I’m glad it was you. Is that enough?”

“Yeah.” She rested her head on his shoulder.

“No ship,” Inigo told Aaron. “And the only way I go anywhere with you is in a bag as small lumps of charcoal.”

“That’s a shame, because I know what weapon they used to take out my starship and the base.”

“Is that supposed to impress me? I expect you know a great deal about weapons and violence. Men like you always do.”

“It was a Hawking m-sink,” Aaron said. “Do you know what that is? No? They’re new and highly dangerous. Even ANA gets nervous around them. Basically, it’s a very small black hole, but cranked up with an outsize event horizon to help absorption. It starts off as a little core of neutronium about the size of an atomic nucleus.”

Corrie-Lyn caught the emphasis. “Starts off?”

“Yes. Its gravity field is strong enough to pull in any atoms it comes into contact with. They’re then also compressed into neutronium and merge with its core. With each atom, it gets a little bit bigger. Not by much admittedly, not to begin with. But the larger the surface area, the more matter it can absorb. And after it tore through the Artful Dodger, it hit the planet. Right now it is sinking through the mantle, eating every atom it encounters. It’ll stop at the center of the planet. Then it just sits there and grows.”

“How big will it get?” she asked anxiously.

Aaron shot Inigo a look. “Black holes have no theoretical size limit. We used to think that was what the Void was.”

“But…Hanko?”

“It’ll take about two weeks to devour the entire mass of an H-congruous world. Except we’ll be dead long before that. Hanko will start to disintegrate as it’s consumed from within. The continents will collapse in three or four days. So, once more, with an awful lot of feeling, do you have a starship hidden nearby?”

Araminta kissed three of hims as they sat at a table under a gazebo of flowering yisanthal in his garden. “I missed that,” she told the rugged Oriental one.

Mr. Bovey smiled in unison. Hes raised his glasses. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.” She sipped her white wine.

“So?” asked the one she had had their first dinner with.

Araminta steeled herself. “If your offer is still open, I’d like to accept.”

She even heard cheering coming from the big house as well as the racket that the three under the gazebo made.

“You’ve made some old men very happy.”

“Us young ones, too.”

Araminta laughed. “And I have absolutely no idea how to go about this. The first three apartments will be ready in another week. I’ve accepted a deposit on the fourth.”

“Congratulations.”

“But until I’ve completed it and the tenants are in, I won’t see a profit. I need money to buy bodies.”

“Not as expensive as you might think. A friend, one of us, runs a clinic expressly for that purpose. She always gives a discount to a first expander.”

“Okay.” She took another drink to calm her shudders. It was momentous, sort of like accepting two proposals at once.

The young Celtic one squeezed her arm. “You all right?” he asked, all full of sympathy.

“I guess so.” She knew she was smiling like an idiot. But this does feel right.

Two of hims came hurrying out of the house. One of them who seemed about seventeen went down on his knee beside her. A slim athletic build, she saw, with a wild shock of blond hair. He proffered a small box, which opened to show her an antique diamond engagement ring.

“I bought it just in case,” he told her.

Araminta slipped it onto her finger, then dashed away the tears.

“Oh, come here,” the youngster exclaimed.

His arms went around her, hugging her tight, and she was laughing through the tears. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m a slavedriver to me.”

She put her palms on his cheeks and kissed him thoroughly. “I would like you to be one of tonight’s.”

“My considerable pleasure.”

“I believe you said I still have several of yous to get to know.”

“Oh, trust me, you’ll know all of mes before our wedding day.”

“And I don’t mind and won’t complain about other women until I have enough bodies to cope. Just…I don’t want to meet them.”

“I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, I promise.”

“Thanks,” she whispered gratefully.

“Now, what sort of bodies are you going to go for?”

“Gosh, I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted. “What do you like?”

“Got to be a tall blond Amazon type. Always popular.”

“Oh, and very black as well. Let’s cover all the old ethnicities, I have—almost.”

“And one of you has to have huge breasts.”

“More than one!”

She slapped at him, feigning shocked dismay. “You’re appalling. I’m not doing anything like that.”

“That’s not what you usually say in bed.”

Araminta laughed. She really had missed this. I made the right decision.

 

Araminta lay on the big bed, listening to three of hims sleeping. Two on the bed with her and one on the couch, curled up in a quilt, all breathing softly, not quite in sync. This time she had refused any aerosols, wanting to try out Likan’s program to make sure it worked with other people, that he hadn’t loaded in a hidden expiry key.

It worked.

And how.

Mr. Bovey had been surprised and then very appreciative at how much more responsive her body had become. As she had suspected, a night in bed with hims had been a lot better than it had been with Likan and the harem. Always nice to have confirmation.

Now she could not sleep. Not that she wasn’t tired, she grinned to herself, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the engagement and embracing a multiple lifestyle. It was such an upheaval. Everything was going to change for her, so much so that she was more than a little apprehensive. Her mind was churning over the same questions again and again, unable to find answers because she didn’t actually know about being multiple. The only way to find out was to become one.

She turned her head to look at the young red-haired him who was nestled cozily beside her. He’d help her through the transition, she knew. Mr. Bovey loved her. That was enough to take her through the next few months. They hadn’t set a date. He had said he would like at least two hers to register the marriage with him, which was fair enough. She really needed to finish the apartments. This day’s events had made that even more urgent.

Araminta settled back onto the soft mattress and closed her eyes. She used the program to still her whirling thoughts, emptying her mind. Her body started to calm as she found and slowed its natural rhythms, cycling down. Instead of sleep, the emptiness opening within made her aware of the images that lurked just below conscious thought. There was not just one but a whole range, all tasting and feeling very different. They twisted out of the infinite distance, a connection she now finally understood belonged to her. Instinctively she knew how to focus on whichever images she wanted. Some were Mr. Bovey’s dreams; she was familiar enough with him to recognize his mental scent. She sighed fondly as she experienced his presence; part of his mind was so wound up, the poor man. She also felt his happiness—her own face slithered in and out of his thoughts. One of the connections was completely alien yet comfortably warm in the way a parent was with a child. Her lips lifted in a serene smile. The Silfen Motherholme. So Cressida had been telling the truth, in which case that oh-so busy chorus of multicolored shadows must be the gaiafield.

Araminta embraced the quiet one, the most tenuous connection of all, and found herself gliding through space far from any star. The Void’s nebulae glimmered lush and glorious behind her as she rose to the darkness of the outer regions.

“Hello,” she said.

And the Skylord answered.

Justine had expected to feel a lot of excitement as her starship, the Silverbird, descended toward Centurion Station. Five hundred hours alone in a small cabin with no unisphere connection had left her unexpectedly strung out. Intellectually, she knew it was nonsense, a quirk of her primitive body’s biochemistry and neurological weakness. But it was still real.

Now here she was, at her destination, and all she could think about was the identical boring trip back. I must have been crazy to do this.

The Silverbird touched down on the lava field that acted as a spaceport for the human section of Centurion Station. Five other starships were sitting there, all of them bigger than hers. The smartcore reported several discreet sensor scans probing at the ship. The tall Ethox tower was the worst offender, using quite aggressive quantum signature detectors. More subtle scans came from the dour domes of the Forleene. There was even a quick burst of investigative activity from the observatory facilities in the human section. She smiled at that as her thin spacesuit squeezed up against her body, expelling all the air pockets to form an outer protective skin. She locked the helmet on.

It was a short walk over the sandy lava to the main airlock. Justine needed it for the sense of space and normality it gave her. She could not believe how much she felt reassured by the sight of a planetary horizon, even one as drab as this. When she stopped to look up, angry ion storms fluoresced the sky for light-years in every direction: pale mockeries of the nebulae inside the Void.

Director Lehr Trachtenberg was waiting for her in the reception hall beyond the airlock, a formidably sized man who reminded her of Ramon, one of her old husbands. Standing in front of him, shaking his hand in greeting, and tipping her head back to see his face was another reminder of how negligible her physical body was. Of course, that Ramon connection did shunt her mind back to the possibility of sex.

“This is a considerable honor,” Lehr Trachtenberg was saying. “ANA has never sent a representative here before.”

“Given the political circumstances back in the Commonwealth, it was deemed appropriate to examine the data from the Void firsthand.”

The director licked his lips slowly. “Distance makes no difference to data, Justine. We do send the entire range of our findings directly back to the navy’s exploration division and the Raiel.”

“Nonetheless, I’d like the opportunity to review your operation.”

“I wasn’t about to refuse you anything, especially after the trip you’ve just made. To my knowledge no one has ever traveled so far by themselves. How did you stand the isolation?”

She suspected that he suspected the Silverbird had an ultradrive but chose to gloss over the actual journey time. “With difficulty and a lot of sensory dramas.”

“I can imagine.” He gestured at the five-seater cab that was waiting at the end of the reception hall. “I’ve assigned you a suite in the Mexico accommodation block.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m also throwing a welcome party for you in three hours. Everyone is very keen to meet you.”

“I suppose they are,” she said. “Fine. I’ll be there. I could do with some company after that trip.”

They climbed into the little cab, which immediately shot into the transport tunnel. “I should warn you that nearly a third of our observation staff are Living Dream followers,” the director said.

“I reviewed personnel files before I came.”

“As long as you know.”

“Is it a problem?”

“Hopefully not. But as you implied, it’s a volatile situation right now.”

“Don’t worry, I can do diplomatic when I have to.”

Her suite was equal to any luxury hotel she had stayed in. The only thing missing was human staff, but the number of modern bots more than made up for it. The navy clearly had spared no effort in making the station as cozy as possible for the scientists. The main room even had a long window looking out over the alien sections of the station. Justine stared at them for a while, then opaqued the glass. Her u-shadow established itself in the room’s net. “No visitors or calls,” she told it.

Justine settled back onto the bed and opened her mind to the local gaiafield. The darkened room filled with phantoms, with their colors glinting amid the deeper shadows. Voices whispered. There was laughter. She felt drawn to various emotional states that promised to immerse her in their enticing soulful sensations.

Resisting temptation, she focused her attention on the source of the whimsy: the confluence nest itself, a quasi-biological neural module that simultaneously stored and emitted every thought released into its field. It had memories like a human brain, only with a much, much larger capacity. Justine formed her own images, offering them up to the nest. It responded with association. Naturally, it contained every one of Inigo’s dreams; Living Dream had made sure of that. She ignored the vivid spectacle of the Waterwalker’s life, brushing those memories aside as she refined her own fancy for a different recollection of life inside the Void. The nest was full of enigmas, the mental poetry left behind by observers baffled by the terrible dark heart of the galaxy. There were compositions of how a life might be lived for anyone fortunate to pass inside—wish fulfilment, easy to differentiate from the real thing. They were the promise-prayers that Living Dream’s followers made every night to their mystic goal. All were imprinted on the nest, but nothing else: no other glimpse into another life lived on Querencia, no grand mellow thoughts originating from a Skylord.

 

The garden dome at the middle of the human section boasted trees over two hundred fifty years old. Oaks with thick trunks sent out thick crinkled boughs, acting as lush canopies above the tables where the station staff was gathering. Up on a rustic tree house platform, an enthusiastic amateur band was playing songs from different eras stretching back across several centuries and was keen for requests. It was dusk inside, allowing the sharp violet light of the Wall stars to dominate the sky overhead.

Justine admired the broad patch of eye-searing scintillations with the kind of wariness she reserved for dangerous animals. Her arrival in the garden dome had created quite a ripple of interest. She liked to think that was due at least partly to the little black cocktail dress she had chosen. It certainly seemed to have the required effect on Director Trachtenberg, who was becoming quite flirtatious as he fussed around, offering her various drinks and selections of the finger food.

Everyone she was introduced to was keen to know exactly what ANA’s interest was in them at this time. She repeated the official line a dozen times: She was visiting just to ascertain the current status of the observation.

“Unchanged,” complained Graffal Ehasz, the observation department chief. “We don’t learn anything these days apart from ion storm patterns in the gulf on the other side of the Wall stars. That tells us nothing about the nature of the beast. We should be trying to send probes inside.”

“I thought nothing could get through the barrier,” she said.

“Which is why we need a much more detailed study. You can’t do that with remote probes fifty light-years away.”

“The Raiel don’t like us getting closer,” Trachtenberg said.

“When you get home, you might ask ANA why we still need their permission just to fart around here,” Ehasz said. “It’s fucking insulting.”

“I’ll remember,” Justine said. The party was only twenty minutes old; she wondered how many aerosols Ehasz had inhaled.

The director took her by the arm and politely guided her away.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “There’s not a lot of opportunity to blow off steam around here. I run a pretty tight schedule. This is an expensive installation and phenomenally important. We need to extract the best information we can with what we’ve got.”

“I understand.”

“It’s Ehasz’s third stint out here. He tends to get frustrated by the lack of progress. I’ve seen it before. First time you’re all swept along by the wonder of it all. Then, when that fades away, you begin to realize how passive the observation actually is.”

“How many times have you been here?”

He grinned. “This is my seventh. But then, I’m a lot older and wiser than Ehasz.”

“So would you like to join the Pilgrimage?”

“Not really. As far as three hundred years of direct observation has shown us, you touch the barrier, you die. Actually, you die a long time before you reach the barrier. I just don’t see how they hope to get through.”

“Somebody did, once.”

“Yeah, that’s the really annoying part.”

“So what do—” Justine stopped as the ground heaved, almost knocking her feet out from under her. She tensed, dropping to a crouch like just about everyone else. Her integral force field came on. The local net was shrieking out all sorts of alarms. The huge oak boughs creaked dangerously, their leaves rustling as if tickled by a gust of wind.

“Hoshit,” Trachtenberg yelped.

Justine’s u-shadow established a link to the Silverbird’s smartcore. “Stand by,” she told it. “Keep a fix on my position.” When she scanned the dome, it was still intact. Then she looked at the horizon, which appeared to be perfectly level. She had been expecting big cracks to be splitting the lava plain open at the very least. The ground tilted again. Nothing moved! “What is happening?” she demanded aloud. Some kind of quake? But this planet was a dead husk, completely inactive in any respect.

“I’m not sure.” The director waved an annoyed hand to shush her.

The members of the band were clambering down out of the tree house as fast as they could go, jumping the last meter off the wooden steps. They had abandoned their instruments. Justine stared at the drink in her hand as the ground shifted again. The wine sloshed from one side of the glass to the other, yet she was holding it perfectly still.

“Holy Ozzie,” Trachtenberg exclaimed. “It’s gravity.”

“What?”

“Gravity waves. Fucking colossal ones.”

Ehasz hurried over to them, swaying badly as the ground seemed to tilt again. “Are you accessing the long-range sensors?” he yelled at Trachtenberg.

“What have they got?”

“The boundary! There are distortion ripples light-years long moving across it. And the damn thing is growing. The sensors in the gulf can actually see it move. Do you realize what that means? The expansion is superluminal. This is an Ozzie-fucking devourment phase.”

The ground quivered badly. Water running along the little streams sloshed about, shooting up small jets of spray. For a moment, Justine actually felt her weight reduce. Then it came back, and the neat stacks of crockery and glasses on the tables crashed onto the grass. She stumbled away from the oak tree as it emitted a nasty splintering sound. Emergency force fields were coming on, reinforcing the dome. Around the rim, the doors to safety bunkers rippled open.

“I want everyone to move to evacuation stage one,” Trachtenberg announced. “Navy personnel, report direct to your ships. Observation team, I need a precise picture of what is happening out there. We probably don’t have much time, so we must do as much as we can before we’re forced off.” He flinched as another gravity wave crossed the station. This time the upward force was so strong that Justine felt like she was going to lift off.

“Is that gravity coming from the Void?” she asked. The prospect was terrifying, as they were hundreds of light-years away.

“No,” Ehasz cried. “This is something local.” He looked up, studying the intricate luminescent sky above the dome. “There!”

Justine watched two azure moons traverse the sparkling smear of Wall stars. They were in very strange orbits and moving impossibly fast—actually accelerating. “Oh, my God,” she gasped. The Raiel’s planet-size DF machines were flying into new positions.

“The Raiel are getting ready for the last fight,” Ehasz said numbly. “If they lose, that monster will consume the whole galaxy.”

This can’t be happening, Justine thought. Living Dream hasn’t even begun the Pilgrimage yet. “You can’t!” she shouted up at the ancient invisible enemy as human hormones and feelings took complete control of her body and mind. “This isn’t fair. It’s not fair!”

A mere five hours after the new dream had flooded into the gaiafield, over fifty thousand of the devout had gathered in Golden Park, seeking guidance from the Cleric Conservator. They exerted their wish through their gaiamotes. The unanimous desire of fifty thousand people was an astonishing force.

Ethan was only too aware of it as Councillor Phelim supported him on the long painful walk out of the Mayor’s offices, where the doctors had set up an intensive care bay. He limped across the floor of Liliala Hall while the ceiling displayed surges of thick cumulus clouds arrayed in mare’s tails and clad in shimmering strands of lightning. Even though he had closed himself to the gaiafield, the power of the crowd’s craving was leaking into his bruised brain.

Phelim continued to support him as they crossed the smaller Toral Hall. Its midnight ceiling showed the Ku nebula with its twinkling gold sparks swimming within fat undulating jade and sapphire nimbi.

“You should have called them to your bed,” Phelim said.

“No,” Ethan grunted. For this occasion he would not, could not, show weakness.

They went through the carved doors to the Orchard Palace’s Upper Council chamber. Its cross-vault ceiling was supported by broad fan pillars. Dominating the apex of the central segment, a fuzzy copper star shone brightly, its light shimmering off a slowly rotating accretion disc. Moon-size fireball comets circled the outer band in high-inclination orbits. None of Makkathran’s enthusiastic astronomers had ever spied its location in the Void.

The Cleric Council waited for him in their scarlet-and-black robes, standing silently at the long table that ran across the middle of the chamber. Phelim stayed by Ethan’s side until they reached the dais, and then Ethan insisted on walking to his gold-embossed throne by himself. He eased himself onto the thin cushions with a grimace. The pain in his head nearly made him cry out as he sank down. He took a moment to recover as his body shuddered. Ever since he had regained consciousness, any sudden movement was agony.

The Councillors sat, trying to avert their eyes from the liverlike semiorganic nodules affixed to his skull, which were only half-hidden by his white robe’s voluminous hood.

“Thank you for attending,” Ethan said to them.

“We are relieved to see you recovered, Cleric Conservator,” Rincenso said formally.

Ethan knew the contempt of the other Councillors toward his supporter without needing the gaiafield; he felt it himself. “Not quite recovered yet,” he said, and tapped one of the glistening nodules. “But my neural structure should be fully reestablished in another week. Until then the auxiliaries will suffice.”

“How could such a thing happen?” Councillor DeLouis asked. “Gaiamotes have been perfectly safe for centuries.”

“It wasn’t the gaiamotes,” Phelim said. “The dream masters who set up the interception believe the Second Dreamer’s panic triggered a neural spasm within the Cleric Conservator’s brain. They were attuned to a degree rarely achieved outside a couple’s most intimate dreamsharing. The circumstances will not arise again.”

“The gaiafield and the unisphere are rife with rumors that the Second Dreamer is a genuine telepath, that he can kill with a single thought.”

“Rubbish,” Phelim said. His skeletal face turned to DeLouis. For an instant a dangerous anger could be glimpsed in his mind.

DeLouis could not meet his stare.

“In any case it is irrelevant,” Ethan said. “The dream masters assure me that such a backlash can be nullified now that they understand its nature. Any future contact with the Second Dreamer will be conducted with”—he smiled grimly—“a safety cutout, as they call it.”

“You’re going to talk to him again?” Councillor Falven asked.

“I believe the situation requires it,” Ethan said. “Don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“I received his latest dream along with the rest of you. It was strong, at least as clear as those of the Dreamer Inigo himself. However, the crucial change within this dream was the conversation the Second Dreamer had with the Skylord.” The communication had shocked Ethan more than the pristine clarity of the new dream had.

“I come to find you,” the Skylord had replied to the Second Dreamer’s greetings.

“We are far beyond the edge of your universe.”

“Yet I felt your longing. You wish to join with us.”

“Not I. But others do, yes.”

“All are welcome.”

“We can’t get in. It’s very dangerous.”

“I can greet you. I can guide you. It is my purpose.”

“No.”

And with that finality the dream had ended. Before it had faded completely, there was a hint of agitation from the Skylord’s mind. It clearly had not expected rejection.

And it’s hardly alone in that.

“The Skylord believes it can bring us to Querencia,” Ethan said. “That is the final testimony we have been waiting and praying for. Our Pilgrimage will be blessed with success.”

“Not without the Second Dreamer,” Councillor Tosyne said. “Your pardon, Conservator, but he is not willing to lead us into the Void. Without him there can be no Pilgrimage.”

“He is distressed,” Ethan replied. “Until now he didn’t even know he was the Second Dreamer. To discover you are the hope of billions is not an easy thing. Ultimately, Inigo himself found it too great to bear. So we can forgive the Second Dreamer his frailty and offer support and guidance.”

“He might realize who and what he is now,” Councillor Tosyne said. “But we don’t even know where he is.”

“Actually, we do,” Phelim announced. “Colwyn City on Viotia.”

“Excellent news,” Ethan said in a predatory fashion. He watched in amusement as the protest in Tosyne’s mind withered away. “We should welcome him and thank Viotia for the gift it has brought us.” His gaze turned expectantly on Rincenso.

“I would like to propose bringing Viotia fully into the Free Trade Zone,” Rincenso said. “And promote it to core planet status.”

“Seconded,” Falven said.

The rest of the Cleric Council responded with bemusement.

“You can’t do that,” Tosyne said. “They’ll resist; the Commonwealth Senate will move to censure us. We’ll lose every diplomatic advantage we have.” He glanced around the table, seeking support.

“It’s not just our ambition,” Phelim said. He gestured at the empty end of the table opposite Ethan’s dais. His u-shadow established the ultrasecure link, and a portal projected an image of Likan standing just beyond the table.

Likan bowed politely. “Conservator, I am honored.”

“Thank you,” Ethan said. “I believe you are acting as an unofficial emissary for your government.”

“Yes, sir. I have just finished talking with our Prime Minister. It is her wish to accept Ellezelin’s generous offer to elevate us to core world status within the Free Trade Zone.”

“That’s wonderful news. I will inform Ellezelin’s cabinet of your decision.”

“The acceptance comes with the understanding that a zero-tariff regime will be part of the accord,” Likan said.

“Of course. Full trade will commence as soon as the Second Dreamer joins us here in Makkathran2.”

“Understood. The Prime Minister will award the treaty her certificate of office as soon as it is sent.” Likan’s image vanished.

“I believe,” Ethan said into the startled silence, “that we were about to take a vote. Those in favor?” He watched the hands being raised. It was unanimous. In moments such as this he almost missed Corrie-Lyn’s presence on the Council; she never would have let such a Soviet-style outcome go unchallenged. “Thank you. I find your support of my policies to be humbling. There is no further business.”

Phelim remained seated as the others filed out. Flecks of light slid across his expressionless face as the comets orbited ceaselessly overhead.

“That was easy,” Ethan remarked.

“They don’t know what to do,” Phelim said. “They’re just the same as the devout gathering outside: bewildered and hurt that the Second Dreamer would reject the Skylord. They’re in need of strong, positive leadership. You provide that. You have the solution. Naturally they turn to you.”

“When can we open the wormhole?”

“I’ll have your government office send the treaty to Viotia’s Prime Minister immediately. If Likan doesn’t let us down, it’ll come straight back. The wormhole can be opened within two hours. We’ve prepared a number of sites for it to emerge.”

“I hope Colwyn City was one of them.”

“Yes. It has a dock complex that will serve us very nicely.”

“And our police forces?”

“Forty thousand ready for immediate dispatch, along with transport and riot suppression equipment. We can push them through within six hours of opening the wormhole. Another quarter of a million will follow over the next four days.”

“Excellent.”

“I hoped you’d approve.” Phelim hesitated. “We never planned on the Second Dreamer becoming aware of his ability in quite this fashion. It’ll take us a day to get our dream masters into position across Colwyn.”

“But you can shut down all capsule and starship traffic before then?”

“Yes. That’s our highest priority. We want to confine him within the city boundary.” Again the uncharacteristic hesitation. “But in order to locate him, he has to dream again. After tonight, he might not.”

Ethan closed his eyes and sank down onto the throne, enervated by his exertion. “He will. He doesn’t know what he’s done yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“An hour ago I received a call from Director Trachtenberg at the Centurion Station. He considered it important enough to reveal his affiliation to us and use the navy’s relay posts. Just after the Second Dreamer ended his contact with the Skylord, the Void began a devourment phase. That is not coincidence. It would seem the Skylord doesn’t take rejection lightly. Our reclusive friend will have to placate it, or we’ll all wind up being consumed by the boundary. Quite an incentive, really.”