An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.

Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.

“Nigel?”

“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.

“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”

“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.

“Do you think they’re—”

Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.

Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.

“Now that’s what I call hellfire,” Ozzie mumbled.

Below the Charybdis the plasma had turned a lethal pellucid violet. Visual sensors could see each of the remaining three lattice spheres. The core remained an impenetrable haze.

“Do you think the inner lattice spheres can withstand another blast like that?” Mark asked.

“Who knows, but Nigel was right. We were going to do that anyway when we knock out the flare bomb. Nothing to lose by doing it twice.”

“Nigel Sheldon’s pretty smart, isn’t he?” Mark said admiringly.

“Yeah.” Ozzie’s smile tightened. “Pretty smart.” He fed power into the frigate’s secondary drive, and dived straight down toward the second lattice sphere at eight gees.

The fourth lattice shell was made from a material that appeared to be completely neutral, devoid of any detectable properties, it didn’t even have any mass as far as human sensors could discover. All that existed was its physical boundary. Like the upper three lattice spheres, it remained completely unaffected by the energy deluge from the quantumbuster. Ozzie piloted the Charybdis through it without any trouble. He decelerated to a velocity vector that kept them stationary relative to the core, and extended every sensor.

The rings were in turmoil. They oscillated and stretched, rising and falling in and out of alignment through the ecliptic. The black cables that held together the outermost ring, the daisy chain, were flexing like lengths of elastic as they strove to contain the wild fluctuations of the lenticular disks. Inside that, the green ring that had been so uniform when the Second Chance recorded it was now undergoing curious distensions; bulges would suddenly appear, sending out slow ripples across the surface. The silver braids were nearly breaking apart; while the one of scarlet light was contaminated by dark fissures.

It was the ring nicknamed Sparks that was the worst affected. The river of emerald and amber lights with their cometary tails were being flung out of their simple orbit by a single dark contortion, like ions waltzing around a magnetic anomaly. It took them almost an entire orbit to drop back into the plane, only to be slung out again.

“There’s our bad boy,” Ozzie murmured. The quantum scan showed him the pattern of elongated distortion fields radiating out from a single point as they spun slowly along through the coruscating ring. “A genuine spanner in the works.”

“Target loaded,” Mark said. “Effect field pattern selected. It’ll stand off five thousand kilometers and spike the heart of that bastard.”

“You’re the man,” Ozzie told him.

“Launching.”

The Charybdis gave the faintest shiver as the quantumbuster shot out of its launch tube. Ozzie turned the frigate around, and accelerated hard up through the lattice spheres.

***

Bradley landed in the shallow drainage ditch at the side of Highway One. The soil was damp and squishy, absorbing his impact. He folded himself into a cleft and froze. His suit’s external chromometic layer painted him with low-tone grays and greens to match the grass tufts and mud he’d settled in. Every other system powered down. Thermal batteries absorbed his body’s heat, allowing the suit skin to adopt the same temperature profile as the ditch. A tiny beam of light washed in through a slit in his visor, illuminating his eyes. Outside the armored cars were skidding around. One sounded in a bad way. Their engine noise dopplered away. His breathing was loud in his ears, challenged only by his heartbeat.

The light flickered. Soldier motiles were running past him, several splashing their way along the bottom of the ditch. They were centimeters away.

And fate—mine, the Starflyer, humanity, the Primes—is decided by that tiny distance. But then my fate has taken stranger turns than this in the past. Perhaps the dreaming heavens will smile upon me today.

The movement outside his suit ended. Bradley switched on a lone sensor, and scanned around. There was no immediate sign of the soldier motiles. He stood up, and watched the alien army charge away. Some distance farther along Highway One an armored car exploded.

Keeping the suit fully stealthed, Bradley hurried toward the giant alien starship. He opened passive sensors, knowing the signal he would receive.

Not a sound or an image, at first, more a mélange of feeling—to those who knew how to interpret it. The complex electronic song saturated the air waves, broadcast from every direction to engulf the valley. Together the harmonics that surrounded Bradley had a unity that was remarkable in its complexity. The tunes rose and fell, meshing into a cohesive mind. Bodies, alien and human, sharing every part of themselves: memories, thoughts, sensations. He moved among them, receiving their extended cognizance, drinking it in. Watching the three humans in armor suits running along the road as we chase after them—concern that the human warriors should not be able to interfere with the launch. Observing the many technological facets of the refurbished starship, adjusting the systems as they interact with each other—eager for the long exile to finally end. Maintaining the force field around the ship—determined that no weapon would penetrate. Reviewing the sensors covering the valley—alert for transgressions.

The location and purpose of each body were individual, yet their thoughts were homogenized, replicating their originator. Direction, purpose, came from only one source: the Starflyer.