>They said I would not feel the things that went in through my eyes but they lied.

>I think they forgot all about me and let me lie there on the floor while they worked on the others and finally decided to just use me for parts.

>I could see pretty well but looked down and there was no body, just my head on a pike they carried around with them, I figure to scare other members of my ’Sembly in battle, with me pleading and screaming most of the time but without lungs.

The Galactic Center was a collection of debris swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole. Its howling, riotous inner precincts were by this time well guarded by mech fleets.

But worms made it traversable. The first human expeditions through the wormhole mouth had been successful. It opened upon a site nearer to True Center. Paris himself had flown through it, darting in and back like a mouse dashing anxiously from its hole. And so they were—pests in the walls.

They flew through in order, then met on convergent asymptotes. Paris demanded and got a role in the assault. He was an accomplished pilot, easily able to angle in on the wormhole at high speeds, with a nudge here and a twist there.

Wormholes were fossils of the first split second of the universe. They were held open by onionskin layers of negative energy, sheets of anti-pressure made in that primordial convulsion. As natural resources, they had been gathered—by whom?—billions of years before and brought here, to serve as a transport nexus.

Quantum froth fizzed at the worm-mouth rim, a gaudy spray of burnt hues. These “struts” were of unimaginable density, but danger lurked only at the rim, where stresses would tear ordinary matter into virulent plasma. To hit the walls of the constantly shifting, oblong target, would be fatal, as several pilots had inadvertently proved.

The mouth was now an ellipsoid rimmed in quantum fire. He flew a pencil-thin ship, its insulation slight, safety buffers minimal. Yet he somehow felt no fear, only a serene certainty. Tidal stresses wrenched squeals from his ship as lightning curled in snakes of violet and gold—

—and he was tumbling out the other end, in a worm complex over a hundred light-years away.

A blue-green star majestically greeted the human fleet with a coronal plume. Nearby orbited a mech complex; picket craft policed it. With quick swerves the tiny human ships angled into a traffic-train headed for a large wormhole mouth. Fifty men and eighty-six women had died learning the route they would follow, gaining the override codes to pass through the mech complexes. But their disguises would withstand only a moment’s inspection; daily and they were dead.

Their second transit was through a spacious wormhole that left them racing in low orbit over a smoldering red dwarf. They could use their hard-won code-status perhaps a few more times before the mech complexes would catch on. They had to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get.

Wormholes could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the wormhole throats, which could vary from a finger’s length to a planet’s diameter. A jump through could leave one near mysteriously useless solar systems, or in virulent places that would fry a human in seconds.

Long before, presumably by brute-force interstellar hauling, someone—perhaps those who had made the earliest mechs?—had built an elaborate system at Galactic Center. Smaller worm mouths, massing perhaps as much as a mountain range, allowed only thin-ships to pass. These Paris and the other eighteen volunteers chose when they popped out in a mech complex. They never slowed; each network site was well policed, and speed was their only defense.

Shoot through a worm mouth, aim for a small worm mouth nearby, go. The snaky, shiny worm-walls zoomed by as Paris lay watching his displays and trying not to think of what was coming.

The tapering gray sheen of the throat flexed. Each worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten, the information flowing as a surge in the tension of the wormhole itself. Stress waves sent clenching oscillations, making the throat ripple like sausage links. If a sausage neck met him, tightened too fast, he would emerge as a rosy plume of ionized gas at the exit mouth.

From an elaborate wormhole calculus human theorists had worked out the route to follow. Between Isis and the space near True Center were a dozen wormhole jumps. Worse, some wormholes had multiple mouths, so the sleek throat split into choices—selections they had to make at immense speed.

Suns and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the distant blackness when they emerged. Behind the resplendent nebulae loomed the radiant promise of True Center. It seemed a strange contrast, to leap about the vast distances while boxed into a casket-size container.

Blink-quick, they jumped and dodged and jumped again.

Subtlety was wasted here; when a mech craft approached on a routine check, they destroyed it with kinetic energy bolts. Mechs never used such crude methods, so they were leaving behind clear signs that “vermin” had passed that way.

They emerged amid an eerie halo of white-dwarf stars, arranged in a hexagonal. Paris wondered why mechs would arrange such a pattern, which from simple orbital mechanics could not last. But like so many mech traits, this had no explanation, even in Arthur’s huge memory stores, nor any likelihood of one.

Ahead, the galactic disk stretched in luminous splendor. Lanes of clotted dust framed stars azure and crimson and emerald. This wormhole intersection afforded five branches: three black spheres orbited like circling lethal leopards, while two cubes blared bright with quantum rim radiation.

Their pencil ships thrust directly into a flat face of a cubic worm. The negative-energy-density struts that held the wormhole open were in the edges, so the faces were free of tidal forces. A flicker, a stomach-twisting wrench—and they were near True Center.

The inner disk glowed with fermenting scarlets and mean purples. Great funnels of magnetic field sucked and drew in interstellar dust clouds. Sullen cyclones narrowed toward the brilliant accretion disk.

Mech contrivance orbited everywhere here, filling a bowl of sky alive with activity. Vast gleaming grids and reflectors caught radiation from the friction and infalling of the great disk. This crop of raw photon energy was flushed into the waiting maws of wormholes, apparently moving the flux to distant worlds in need of cutting lances of light. For what—mech planet-shaping, world-raking, moon-carving?

They flitted into yet another wormhole mouth—

—and the spectacle made him hold his breath.

Magnetic filaments towered, so large the eye could not take them in. Through them shot immense luminous corridors alive with wriggling energies. These arches yawned over tens of light-years, their immense curves descending toward the white-hot True Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.

At True Center, three million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet. The arches were plainly artificial, orderly arrays of radiance a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years, as gauzy as a young girl’s hair as they churned with airy intricacy.

Could intelligence dwell here? There had been ancient stories, never confirmed. Emerald threads laced among tangled ruby spindles. He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order ascending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.

Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flow-couch. From behind, a torrent of malignant light.

They have detonated the worm! came a cry over comm.

Braking hard, veering left into a debris cloud—

Evidently mechs knew how to trigger the negative-energy-density struts inside a worm mouth—and would do so to catch vermin. Now their line of retreat was gone.