In every other way, it tried to kill itself. To ruin its nature and possibilities, tricks and deeply buried potentials.

The ultimate shadow—Death—very nearly claimed it.

And then, to its utter horror, it heard a voice.

“MY NAME IS Pamir,” he roared at the prisoner. He and his security team had shoved the most valuable pieces of the body into the hold. Conrad was piloting their one-of-a-kind craft. Part skimmer and part starship, the vessel wore enough high-grade hyperfiber to have ridden thousands of kilometers through scorching rocket exhausts. The powerful engines first killed their momentum, and now they were building it up again, trying to outrace a dozen blows from the furious polypond. At any moment, they might be crippled or ensnared. Which gave this interrogation no time and an enormous importance.

“Did you hear me?” Pamir roared.

The ship bucked. The Remora changed course, and despite crush-webs and braces, every organic body inside the hold felt its bones shatter.

“We know what you want,” Pamir screamed.

Silence.

The air tasted burnt and toxic. His crumbled legs fought to heal themselves, and their ache made his voice dry and shrill.

“We’re going to stop you. Do you hear me, little pond?”

Some experts thought that might be a useful curse. Pamir was less sure, but he was willing to try anything now.

“Rough spot,” Conrad warned.

Again, their ship shook hard enough to break bones.

Somewhere below, a black thunder blossomed and collapsed into silence. Then with a delicate aim and a small measure of luck, Conrad dove through a newly made hatch above the polypond’s atmosphere, and the great engine quit its firing, leaving them streaking across the enormous bowl of the nozzle, their little vessel caught up in the magnetic envelopes, the envelopes turning the ship in an elaborate loop, carefully bleeding away its momentum.

“You can hear me,” Pamir decided, his crippled body shoved against one padded wall.

The scorched lump of neural tissue was alive, the links serviceable and neat. With a voice that sounded defiant but unsure, the creature inside said, “You are the Second Chair.”

“We know what you want,” Pamir repeated.

Silence.

“We can even guess how you’ll try to destroy us.”

“I will destroy nothing,” the entity corrected. “Since the universe is made of nothing and shadow.”

Pamir used silence now, waiting the prisoner out.

Finally, the voice said, “This piece of me knows nothing of substance. You can torture me all that you wish. You may study all of my pieces. But I have no special knowledge.”

“Good,” Pamir replied.

Then with a decidedly menacing tone, he added, “Innocence. I can’t think of any quality more useful than a little innocence.”

Thirty

“Still stuck at at home, are you?”

Ignoring the implication, O’Layle replied, “For the moment. And you?”

“The Master needs me here in the Happenstance.”

“Nice?”

“Enough.”

By decree, all public transmissions were minimal, leaving the bulk of the ship’s com-system free for the captains. What O’Layle could see was his ex-lover’s face and sweet body rendered in two dimensions, plus flat glimpses hinting at the delicious scenery, a rich greenish blue forest wrapped snug around some bottomless black lake. Ancient memories were dislodged, and suddenly O’Layle was transported into the past. He wasn’t named O’Layle, and the lover was a different woman, beautiful in her own peculiar ways. What was her name? With the millennia, he had lost the simple sound of it, but what he remembered was its rhythm. Its music. Like water spilling on a flat stone, wasn’t it?

“You’re smiling,” the woman observed.

Was he? O’Layle carefully laid a hand over his mouth, wiping away an expression that couldn’t have been more inappropriate.

“But of course you’re smiling,” she continued. “Your goddess is here. She’s come here to free you, you’re thinking. And I bet in your entire life, you’ve never felt happier.”

“No,” he sputtered.

“Don’t lie.”

Was that what he was doing?

“We know you,” she reminded him. “Don’t think we don’t. And we talk about you all the time, too.”

How was he supposed to respond?

“Look at me, O’Layle.”

He dropped his hand, revealing a grim expression.

“We’re dead.”

“No—”

“And you helped kill us,” she maintained. The Happenstance was not all that far beneath O’Layle’s prison cell, their communication nearly instantaneous. Eyes like black water stared at a point far beyond him. It was a dead stare matched by a dry, resigned voice—a ghost’s voice drained of its heat and rage—and with it she reminded him, “You told her about us. About the Great Ship and its secret cargo. You are the one. The reason, the impetus. The tiny nuclei that starts the catastrophic chain reaction—”

“No!”

“You shit,” she said.

What could he offer now?

The woman paused, breathing deeply for a moment. Then with a cold mocking voice, she asked, “Do you know why they spread us out across the ship?”

His old friends and lovers were everywhere.

“No,” he began. But then he realized that she didn’t mean just the people in their little orbit. For perhaps the first time in her life, the woman was referring to everyone, passengers and crew alike.

“Your goddess wants to kill our ship,” she reminded him.

The Blue World wasn’t his. The polypond and Inkwell did not belong to him. What he did and did not tell the enormous creature didn’t matter now, since she would have learned everything on her own, and with the same horrid, inevitable consequences. Just for two seconds, he wished people would stop repeating this empty nonsense.

“Your lover wants our ship destroyed, and she wants to free the monster in the middle. Which may well obliterate the known universe, it seems.” Her mouth clenched and her eyes grew larger. “The captains have let the news leak. That, or it’s just too big and awful … too much truth to keep it secret any longer …”

O’Layle glanced at a public feed. Through a hardened eye perched on one of the great nozzles, he could see the depleted but still-enormous spawn of the Blue World. She was the size of a moon, riding a great plume of radiation that continued to carry her on a collision course that began years ago. In another few days, she would pass that point where the Great Ship’s mass would accomplish as much as her muscular engine, and then she would accelerate farther, plunging into what was already herself.

“Your goddess has plenty of weapons,” the woman observed.

Separate feeds brought a catastrophic stew of images. The polypond churned and spat lightning and laser bolts, obliterating the bombs and skimmers sent out to injure her; tendrils and tritium charges were beginning to batter the ship’s engines, plainly trying to quiet them; and when their vessel was left drifting dead through space, what would happen … ?

“We still haven’t seen all her claws,” the woman offered.

“I’m not responsible,” O’Layle whispered.

“Then who is?”

“It could have been anyone.”

“It was you.”

“I should have stayed on board the ship,” he relented. “How many times do I have to say that?”

“But no, we were glad you ran. In fact, thrilled to be rid of you.” A brilliant, bitter smile washed away the blackness of the eyes. “Your mistake was ignoring some very long odds, O’Layle. You ignored them, and then despite the odds, you survived.”

He started to close down the line at his end.

“You won a temporary survival,” she growled.

He shook his head. “The captains have surprises waiting, I’m sure. And the Great Ship has proved … that it can ignore long odds, too.”

But the woman had already vanished, leaving him pleading with a flat and empty blackness.