Under her direction the smartcore ran a final check on all drive systems. With the exception of the ultradrive, they were all working at above eighty percent efficiency; glitches were minimal.

“Take us down,” Justine told the smartcore. The starship began its final deceleration phase. That left her just one thing to decide, a decision she’d admittedly been putting off since arriving in orbit. Do I take a weapon? She was reasonably confident she could ward off any animal with her third hand, but what if a whole pack of dogs or fastfoxes rushed at her? So much time had passed that the dogs would have lost any trace of domesticity. And it wasn’t just animals. She had no idea who was going to arrive at Makkathran over the next few weeks, or years, or decades-however long she was going to have to spend there before Gore’s plan became apparent.

Files of schematics flowed across her exovision. She chose one and shunted the blueprints into the replicator. Two minutes later out slid a semiautomatic pistol with a guaranteed jam-free mechanism. Next came five replacement magazines and five boxes of bullets, which really should be enough.

Ingrav had killed the Silverbird’s orbital velocity, allowing it to drop vertically. The starship hit the upper atmosphere, whose thin molecules started a faint scream from the buffeting impact. A long wavering trail of lambent ions stretched out behind the craft as it fell deeper and deeper.

Amber exovision alerts began to appear, warning Justine the force fields were edging close to overload. She shared her desperate desire that their generators would hold with the confluence nest, willing them to succeed. The amber alerts blinked off.

Regrav took over at fifteen kilometers of altitude, slowing the descent. She began to study the city as the visual images built up. Deeper sensor scans were hazed as they began to probe the surrounding rock, denying her a clear picture of whatever lay beneath Makkathran, though she could just make out the faint threads of several travel tunnels radiating out through the ancient lava field that was the Iguru plain.

So I still don’t know what it is, she thought in mild annoyance. But anything that could manipulate gravity, as it used to do to propel Edeard along the tunnels, had to be a high-technology intruder into this universe. The city’s thoughts had admitted as much to Edeard when it told him about the Void’s reset ability. The night Salrana betrayed him, she remembered, wishing the thwarted lovers didn’t bother her quite so much. Come on, girl, it was thousands of years ago. Their bodies are dust, and their souls are partying in the Heart.

Again, not the most comforting of thoughts. If I die here, I’ll either wither away wandering through space or be absorbed by the Heart. Or Honious.

Cross with herself for showing such weaknesses, she concentrated on the city that was expanding across the projections. A landing site was her priority now. There were so many places she wanted to see. And she would, but they were all in built-up areas. She could make out the larger buildings now, the domes of the Orchard Palace in Anemone, the odd twisting towers of Eyrie standing guard around the Lady’s church. Her eyes darted toward Sampalok, and sure enough, there in the central square was the six-sided building Edeard had created out of the ruins of Bise’s mansion.

“Oh, holy crap,” she muttered. “It is real.”

Fright or determination, she didn’t know which, made her concentrate properly now. The thick band of meadowland between the crystal wall and the outer ring of canals that made up High Moat, Low Moat, Tycho, and Andromeda was a likely candidate, though it was terribly overgrown. She could see clumps of trees down there that certainly hadn’t been growing in Edeard’s time. According to the radar sweep and mass scans, what looked like grass from altitude was mostly bushes and vines.

Golden Park, then. The old flat fields within the pristine white pillars were as shaggy as the meadows outside and the original avenues of huge martoz trees had multiplied and grown wild, but radar showed there were plenty of relatively level patches.

Silverbird continued its descent, twisting slightly to align itself over the westernmost part of the park, between the curves of Upper Grove Canal and Champ Canal.

Two warning icons appeared, telling her the regrav units were having to draw extra power to maintain a steady rate of descent. It was as if gravity was increasing, pulling the starship down.

And how do you wish gravity was less?

More warnings began to appear, reporting glitches in secondary systems. She felt a faint vibration starting to build up and ordered her chair to grip her tightly. It responded sluggishly.

“Oh, crap, here we go,” she groaned.

The starship was only a kilometer above the city as its started to pick up speed. Nothing fatal, she told herself. Not yet. The landing legs bulged out of the fuselage. So something wants me to land okay. Velocity was increasing more than she was comfortable with. She sent a series of instructions into the smartcore, composing her own procedures for a Void-style landing.

Five hundred meters and the Silverbird was ass down as it should be, with the nose tracing a slight arc in the sky as it wobbled. The exact landing spot she’d picked received a final radar sweep, confirming it was solid and stable.

Her thoughts slammed into the confluence nest, demanding normality. Power from the reserve D-sinks was channeled into the regrav units, pushing them up to their safety margins. She saw the towers of Eyrie come level with the starship, and beyond them, over in Tosella, the tip of the Blue Tower was now higher than she was.

Silverbird’s last hundred meters was a perfect landing profile, slowing to relative zero velocity ten meters above the wild vegetation. Then a half-meter-a-second descent until the landing legs touched. Spongy layers of leaves and moss and grass compressed, and only then, when the base of each leg registered and confirmed solid contact, did the regrav units shut off.

As if in sympathy, power dropouts bloomed all over the starship. Justine really didn’t care. This had been nothing like as traumatic or dramatic as her touchdown on the replica Mount Herculaneum.

“Houston,” she said solemnly to the silent cabin. “This is Golden Park base. The Silverbird has landed.”

ARAMINTA HAD REMAINED on the observation deck of the Lady’s Light right from the start of the Pilgrimage. The room was as big as the Malfit Hall back in the Orchard Palace and twice as high. Its floor was empty apart from a chair and a bed that had been brought in at her request. Araminta used the chair as little as possible, preferring to stand and stare ahead through the vast transparent section of fuselage. There was nothing to see; there hadn’t been since hyperspace had enfolded the massive ship. It was blank outside, with the occasional cascade of blue sparks slipping across the surrounding pseudofabric their ultradrive was creating. Imperfections within the quantum field interstice, Taranse had explained when she’d asked what they were. What caused such imperfections he didn’t say and probably didn’t know. She rather liked them; they provided the illusion that some material substance was outside, with the twinkling flaws registering their progress through it.

For five days she watched the nothingness flow past, gifting it to the billions of her followers back in the Greater Commonwealth. On the sixth day Araminta began to cry. Tears rolled down her cheeks as her shoulders quaked. The sorrow she radiated out into the gaiafield was so profound that the majority of beholders began to weep in sympathy. They were aghast, flooding the gaiafield with concern. “What’s wrong?” they asked in their bewildered billions, for nothing and nobody was in the observation deck with her. “We love you, Dreamer.” “Can we help?” “Let us help, please.”