The jolt of impact was enough to cause a momentary blackout. Her tormented flesh was already at its limit. When she recovered, she was still barreling forward, but her speed was sluggish even with the ingrav and regrav units operating at their maximum. The force field was heading toward overload, and she was only five kilometers deep. Blood was pouring out of her nose. A small medical icon in her exovision reported she was also bleeding from her ears; there were internal lacerations, too.

The Cat’s ship sliced cleanly through the hydrogen zone until she was directly above the Alexis Denken. Eight missiles curved elegantly down toward the smog, spreading out in an exemplary spider-leg dispersal pattern. They’d act like old-fashioned depth charges, Paula realized. If they didn’t force her up and out into the open, the pressure pulse would crush the fuselage. Perfect!

From somewhere deep inside the star, oblivion was surging up through the superdense matter. The planetary FTL device had triggered a terminal mass energy explosion sequence far below the photosphere whose gigantic shock pulse was now slowly flowing down toward the core, creating an unsustainable fusion surge as it went. Energy levels were building fast from the accelerated reactions. Not even the enormous gravity gradient and ultracompressed hydrogen of the star’s interior could contain it.

But as the runaway energy thrust its languid way upward, other, stranger forces came into play as the device’s exotic matter functions began to blossom, fed by the star’s own amplified output. Like a parasite growing larger as it consumed more of its host, the device exerted an intolerable stress on an infinitesimal point of spacetime, which promptly ruptured. The throat of the wormhole opened. Behind it, the corona began to darken as more and more power was drained away through hyperspace to sustain the new exotic energy manifestation. The wormhole’s terminus began to strain for its designated emergence coordinate over twenty-eight thousand light-years distant. Half of the rapidly expanding photosphere was now falling into darkness as the wormhole usurped more and more of its escalating output.

Troblum actually smiled at the sensor image as the Mellanie’s Redemption emerged into spacetime. The starship’s curving fins glowed a strong magenta as they threw off the heat that was still seeping through the force fields. Directly ahead, the surface of the violated star was being distorted by the imminent nova eruption. Yet the very pinnacle of the distortion was cascading into night as mass and energy vanished through a dimensional rift. In the middle of that emptiness a tiny indigo star was shining as Cherenkov radiation gleamed out from the exotic matter of the wormhole’s pseudofabric.

“It’s stabilizing,” he gasped.

“How long will that hold for?” Inigo asked gently.

Troblum shook himself. “Not long,” he admitted. For a moment he regretted not using the original configuration, a wormhole wide enough to swallow a gas giant. This was only a kilometer across. But it did extend for twenty-eight thousand light-years.

It works. I was right. I was right about everything. The Anomine, the Raiel. Everything.

“I win,” he said softly, then shouted it. “I fucking win! And the universe knows it.”

“Take us through,” Aaron said.

Troblum wiped his sleeve across his eyes, getting rid of the moisture. “Right,” he acknowledged. The Mellanie’s Redemption slipped forward, accelerating hard as it passed into the wormhole’s haze.

– -

The Cat’s exovision showed her the eight quantumbusters activating fifty kilometers below the surface of the compressed-hydrocarbon ocean. Their titanic pressure waves inflated, merging.

Hysradar scanned incessantly, trying to discern the Alexis Denken amid the turmoil. But hydrocarbon fluid at that density was strange stuff, and the massive energy deformation didn’t help. If Paula didn’t make a dash for freedom up to the hydrogen layer, she’d be dead. No starship could withstand the kind of force currently cascading through the hydrocarbon.

Still nothing.

The smog rippled apart as the hydrocarbon eruption began. It was like seeing a perfectly round volcano erupt. The cone kept rising-five, ten, twenty kilometers high. As it lifted up into the hydrogen zone where the pressure was far lower, it began to boil violently, spewing out great columns of spray like rocket exhausts that just kept thundering upward. Within seconds the hydrogen zone for hundreds of kilometers was clotted by the weird chemical fug. Optical band imagery was reduced to zero as the greasy vapor surged around her starship. Regrav units strained to hold position as the gales rushed past.

“So fuck you, then,” the Cat told Paula’s cold, gigantic funeral pyre.

Sensors showed her that the upsurge was still growing, which was surprising but hardly threatening. The crest reached a full hundred kilometers, drawing down a barrage of almighty lightning strikes from the belly of the cloud layer far above.

Mountainous waves began to gush ponderously down the eruption’s flanks to the ocean below. The Cat still couldn’t see anything, but the starship’s sensors provided her an excellent graphics-profile image. The hydrocarbon was draining away from something solid, something vast that was still impossibly rising upward.

“What the-” she sputtered. Then the profile began to resolve. Fourteen mushroom shapes were shrugging off their cloak of glutinous liquid and filthy gas to expose the crystalline domes that roofed them. They were attached to the main bulk of the thing, which measured just over sixty kilometers long.

High Angel cleared the unstable cleft in the hydrocarbon ocean, shedding a tempest of seething smog.

A communication channel opened without any authorization from the Cat’s u-shadow. “Hello, Catherine Stewart,” Qatux said.

“Fuck.” She sent her starship into a seventy-gee climb, not even able to scream against the abysmal force crushing her body. Bones snapped; flesh and membranes tore.

“You don’t remember my wife, do you?” Qatux asked.

“Your wife? No!”

“Nor will you ever.”

Exovision showed the Cat an energy pulse blasting straight up from the High Angel. It struck her starship-

The shot was powerful enough to warp spacetime in a very specific fashion, so that although the starship was blown apart in milliseconds, time within the explosion stretched on and on and on … To the Cat the utterly excruciating instant of her death lasted for hour after long terrible hour. Though she never realized it, it was exactly the same amount of time it had taken Tiger Pansy to die one thousand one hundred ninety-nine years ago.

Nine thousand light-years from the boundary of the Void and five light-years from the closest star, a wormhole terminus swirled open, spilling its gentle indigo light out into interstellar space. Thirty seconds later the streamlined shape of the Mellanie’s Redemption flew out.

“FucktheLady,” Corrie-Lyn exclaimed. “We made it.” She smiled incredulously and kissed Troblum before he could stop her.

Behind them, the weak light faded away as the wormhole closed, leaving them as isolated and alone as any humans had ever been. Comprehension of their status quickly spread through the cabin, amplified and reinforced by the tiny self-generated gaiafield. It drained away any sense of elation.

Inigo gave Corrie-Lyn a quick hug in the uncomfortable silence that followed.

“What do you think happened?” Araminta-two asked.

“The important thing is that deranged bitch didn’t follow us,” Oscar said.

“And Paula?”

Oscar had to grin at that. “Trust me, if anyone in this universe can take care of herself, it’s Paula Myo.”