“Get ready.”

Already he could detect no further shrinking in the wrecked face of New Bishop below. He must be near the top of his swing.

“Fire it!”

He felt the jetting pressure at his back. The glowing hoop-tube curled away like an opening funnel. Beyond he could see the gossamer surface generated by the globe-spanning cosmic string. It appeared now to wrap the world in a rib-bony stranglehold.

The venting at his spine gurgled to a stop.

Whuum-whuum-whuum, the magnetic rotor sang.

Vibrant, intense glow spread all around him. He wind-milled his arms and brought his boots down toward the golden surface. It pulsed with freshening energy.

He felt as though he were a fragile bird, vainly flailing its wings above a sheet of translucent, wispy gold. Falling toward it. Performing his own sort of experiment…

The impact slammed him hard. It jarred up through his boots like a rough, wrenching punch. He had crouched, letting his legs absorb the momentum. Suddenly he was shooting along the surface of the sheet.

It has conveyed impulse to you, an infinitesimal fraction of its spinning energy.

Killeen felt himself loft slightly higher. Then he came down toward the sheet again. He had shot sidewise, away from the polar axis, going out on a tangent like a coin flung off a merry-go-round.

He hit again. This time the jolt twisted his ankle. It felt like a hand grabbing at him, then losing its grip. But it gave him another push—outward.

I estimate you are gaining significant velocity from these encounters. It is difficult to calculate, but—

Killeen ignored the tiny piping Aspect. His ankle ached. Was it broken?

He had no time to bend over and feel it. The shimmering plain came rising toward him again, hard and flat.

He grunted with pain. The shock caught his feet and flung him off at a steep angle, twisting him with a sharp, wrenching stab.

You will have to be more careful as you set down upon it. It can convey spin, but if your velocity is not aligned with it, there is a vector coupling, a torque—

“Shut up!” He did not want to set down on the golden surface again, the ghostly curtain that could clutch and break him like a stick.

But the velocity he was picking up from the thing flung him sidewise, not up. Only his rebounding kept him above the flickering radiance. If he slipped, tumbled, went shooting across the damned thing as he spun out of control—

The flickering golden sheet rushed at him.

He struck solidly. This time his left leg shrieked with distress and he barely managed to kick free. The strobing glow seemed all around him. He was going to hit again.

He windmilled. This time the shock was not as great but the muscles of his left leg seized up in an agonizing spasm.

Blinking away sweat, a weakness came over him. His ears rang. He wearily spun himself again, slower this time because the motion hurt his leg.

He expected to hit quicker but the jolt did not come. He looked down and could not judge the distance. The glow had dimmed. It took a long moment before he realized that the sheet was curving farther away from him, wrapping down to follow the arc of the planet.

He was free. Out. In the clean and silent spaces.

We are on a highly elliptical orbit, I gather. It should take us at a significant angle with respect to this hoop-plain. I cannot calculate the details, so it may be that we will return within its volume.

“Never mind,” he said, panting.

We will need the information in due time, however, and—

“I doubt it. Look up.”

Obsessed with its own mathematics, the Aspect piped with surprise as it responded to what Killeen saw.

Above them floated the sleek metallic body of the cyborg.

SIX

Quath made her way cautiously through murky warrens.

After the buoyant vault of space, these tunnels and cramped corridors weighed heavily on her, their air clotted and musky. Around her surged the endless parade of working podia, bound on their relentless missions, clattering and banging against one another in their haste. Lesser beings of russet scabrous shells scampered underfoot, bound on their menial tasks. They had been hatched in the bodies of native animals, to save the Hive’s resources. Genetically programmed, they worked with fanatic purpose, as though they knew their own short lifespans.

Quath, though, went slowly. The presence inside her throbbed. The Nought kicked and fought, its puny jabs an irritant impossible to ignore. Her ceramic sensors saw it as a burning tangle of infrared deep in her guts.

But it was not this small nettling that bothered Quath. She knew what lay ahead of her, and so dawdled, picking at her cilia as though grooming herself. Some tiny hatchlings approached and Quath let them police her carapace. They caught microparasites, which were the inevitable inconvenience of strange worlds: native mites who had already learned to feast on the leaky joint sleeves and porous sheaths of the podia.

Soon, too soon, the great glowing cavern of the Tukar’ramin opened before her. Its murky mouth seemed to swallow all the certainties of her life.

*You have done well,* the Tukar’ramin greeted her from high in the glistening webs.

Quath preened at this ruby-flavored compliment, until she saw that Beq’qdahl had entered simultaneously from another of the innumerable tunnels that gave onto the Tukar’ramin’s underbowl. Beq’qdahl did an artful dance with her many legs, accepting the Tukar’ramin’s words as if they were directed at her alone.

<We did little more than your wiseness instructed,> Quath said, using the collective noun first for formality. Then, to irritate Beq’qdahl, she shifted to first person. <And I have captured one of the pernicious Noughts who infested the station.>

*What breed of Nought is this?*

<A soft-skinned, bilegged thing. Crafty for its size.>

*Doubtless so, for it engaged that station and co-opted the mechs there. I had understood that we had total control there. Yet these Noughts infested with humiliating ease.*

There was no doubt, from the grammatically past-imperative hormonal inflections, that Quath and Beq’qdahl were among those humiliated.

Quath suppressed the impulse to cock her pods into a gesture of total apology and mercy-plead. Instead, she quickly transmitted a set of images and sensory details of the thing. These were taken after she had stripped it of its suit and weapons, back inside their ship.

<Observe, please, from your lofty perspective,> Quath said reverently. <This thing displays obvious signs of recent evolution. Note the hair—atop its head and at the genitals only. The former for protection from sunlight, I believe. The latter—perhaps some primitive way of gathering attractive musk about the area it would most like to have revered by others?>

*Doubtless some such business. Absence of a pelt does suggest a highly sensory life, serving as it does to expose the surface nerves optimally.*

<Filthy creatures!> Beq’qdahl hissed severely.

<But effective.> Quath seized the chance to appear more shrewd. <I believe it had taken the shuttle ship to the vicinity of the Syphon in order to study it.>

<Nonsense!> Beq’qdahl jeered. <I directed that shuttle to leave the station, as soon as its inboard systems showed presence of Noughts. To harvest a sample.>

*We cannot be too careful here,* the Tukar’ramin said slowly. *This Nought may have intelligence and mastery beyond its apparent mawkishness.*

<I agree.> Quath ventured to release a scent of confidence, edged with dangling, frayed filigrees of mature concern. She was about to add that she had kept the sample Nought for further study, when the Tukar’ramin continued thoughtfully, plainly without registering Quath’s words.