“Hey ho, I used to be one of the Commonwealth’s rulers, you know. Check your database to confirm. That means I had full access to its pre-postphysical technology. Of course I have superweapons with me, dude.” He pushed a starburst of sincerity and determination into his mind and held it there. “I don’t want any more of your herd to be hurt or killed by his soldiers, so please, if you find him, please call me. I can squash him like a Kantr under a Folippian.” Whatever they are.

“We will inform you if he is troublesome.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind.” Ozzie smiled again at the monster’s helmet and walked around it into the plaza. The other Chikoya let him pass. His macrocellular clusters reported a quick surge in encrypted data between the big aliens. They began to holster their weapons.

Oh, yeah. Still the man.

That was exactly what he’d come to the Spike to get away from. He went over to one of the triage teams. “Hi, Max.”

“Uh? Oh, hi, Ozzie,” the medic replied. He was kneeling beside an unconscious woman who’d suffered a lot of burns.

“So what happened?”

“The guy was a fucking lunatic. He took on a whole army of Chikoya by himself.”

“Did you see it?” Ozzie asked.

“Just the end.” Max applied some pale-green derm3 to the woman’s black and red legs. The jelly spread out evenly over the terrible damage and began to bubble like sluggish champagne. “And I had to wait until that was over before I landed. Anything moving down here got trashed. I guess weapon enrichments have come on some since I left the Commonwealth.”

“Yeah, looks like it.” Ozzie’s field scan told him the Chikoya were starting to teleport out.

Coleen, the medic working with Max, broke off from implementing the stem support module she’d applied to the woman’s throat. “What the hell is Inigo doing coming here?”

“Sounds like he wants to talk to me,” Ozzie admitted.

“Why?”

“Don’t know for sure, but just a wild guess here: the Void.”

Max had cut away the smoldering fabric of the woman’s dress and started applying the derm3 to the side of her abdomen. “Can you stop it?”

Ozzie gave him a bitter laugh. “No. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Then why-”

“Dunno, man.” Ozzie spread his arms wide in surrender. “She going to be all right?”

“She’s not Higher,” Coleen said. “But she should be able to avoid re-life. I think she’s stable enough to make the trip to the hospital now.”

“I’ll take her,” Max said.

“How many hurt?” Ozzie asked. He didn’t want to know, but his conscience was prodding him. That was something that hadn’t happened in a long time. And it shouldn’t be happening now, damnit.

“Eleven got bodylossed,” Coleen said. “We’ve shipped eight live criticals back to the hospital, and there’s another five bad ones waiting. Maybe two dozen more with minor injuries.”

Ozzie gave a tight nod. “Could have been worse.”

“The Chikoya aren’t going to get over this in a hurry,” she said.

“I know.”

“They think the Spike belongs to them.”

“It doesn’t.”

“But this …”

“They’ll get over it. We’ve all got to get along.”

“So you keep saying,” she said.

Ozzie was disappointed by the amount of bitterness and resentment in her mind, even though Coleen was good at toning down her feelings.

“I’ll sort this out,” he assured her.

“Good.” She hurried off to another victim, her boots squelching through the crystalfoam.

Max gave Ozzie a sympathetic look. “I don’t blame you.”

“Very big.”

“But it’s Inigo, Ozzie! The Dreamer himself. Things have to be bad if he’s come to you.”

“I know.”

“And that bodyguard-”

Ozzie held his hand up, palms outward. “I’m on it, man.” He turned and walked slowly back to the capsule, stopping briefly to study the broken buildings. No doubt about it, they were going to have to rebuild the whole center of town. “Connect me to him,” he told his u-shadow.

The code embedded in the general message made a connection instantly. “This is Ozzie.”

“You are the eighth person to claim this.”

“That’s gotta be a bummer for you. And what if I’ve cloned myself? Would any of us brothers do, or did you want the original?” He waited for a reply, slightly mystified by the delay.

“I need the original.”

“Then this is your lucky day, pal.” Ozzie’s u-shadow informed him that a very sophisticated infiltrator was trying to take over the capsule’s smartnet. “Let it in,” he told the u-shadow. “But if we land in deep shit, I want to be able to wipe it.”

“Confirmed,” his u-shadow reported. An exovision display showed him the infiltrator’s progress.

“I will require DNA verification that you are Oswald Fernandez Isaacs.”

“Nobody calls me that.”

“That is your name.”

“It was my name.” Even after all the re-life procedures and biononic regenerations he’d undergone in the last fifteen hundred years, with all their associated memory edits, he’d never quite let go of the childhood persecution that name had brought down upon him. “Now I’m just Ozzie; always have been, always will be.”

“Very well, Ozzie, I am loading a coordinate into your capsule. Please do not attempt to deviate from the route.”

“Dude, wouldn’t dream of it.”

A map of Octoron compartment flipped up, with his u-shadow showing him the route the infiltrator was preparing to fly. Ozzie studied it, but the destination was a nowhere, a remote stretch of land past one of the water columns, about thirty kilometers away. Just the kind of nowhere outlaws would choose to lie low in, in a decent Western.

The capsule lifted silently and curved around over the town. Ozzie watched the buildings shrink away while the resentment built in his mind. The Spike was his escape from the shitty vibes of life in the Greater Commonwealth, and Inigo was the one man who’d subverted and ruined his hopes for the gaiafield.

Nigel Sheldon had offered Ozzie another way out, a berth on the Sheldon family armada of colony starships. They weren’t just going to the other side of the galaxy to set up a new society. Oh, no, not Nigel; he was off to a whole new galaxy to begin again. A noble quest, restarting human civilization in a fresh part of the universe. Then in another thousand years a new generation of colony ships might spread to further galaxies. After all, as he’d pointed out, this one is ultimately doomed with the Void at the center, so we need somewhere that’s got a long-term future. Ozzie grabbed the logic even as he argued back that humans would have gone postphysical long before the Void would ever present a tangible threat.

Ha! Yeah, right. Goddamn Nigel, always gets the last laugh.

The Spike had been a kind of compromise for Ozzie. A withdrawal from Commonwealth life for sure but not a complete retreat the way Nigel had chosen-not that he saw it as a retreat. He did it because there was a slight chance he could still turn things around and reclaim the dream that he’d lost to Inigo, Edeard, and the insidious Void.

He had intended the gaiafield to allow humans and aliens to understand each other better, eliminating conflict and confusion across the galaxy. The oldest liberal dream of all: If we just keep talking … And now the gaiafield could back up the talk with sincerity and understanding. Except, as always, the human race had found a way to fuck it up and turn it into the carrier wave of the latest and stupidest of all religions. So he came to the Spike with an idea of how to make something bigger than the gaiafield and commune with the Silfen Motherholme, a wonderful union of the mind that couldn’t be subverted by selective, edited thoughts like Inigo’s seditious dreams with their sole purpose of entrapping people.

Mindspace was a good start, except it worked better with human thoughts than with anyone else’s, especially the ratty little Ilodi. But the Chikoya were coming around to accepting the state, even though the stupid monsters were hanging on it a whole load of religious connotations of the “all-perception realm,” which had sparked some old dumbass racial lore.