“What?”

“Get into the memory layer, trace it down to the origin. Come on, son, you can do it.”

“Lean on me,” Inigo said. He gripped Edeard’s hand, suffusing him with strength and love. “I will help you.”

“And me, Waterwalker,” Corrie-Lyn said. Her firmness and fortitude made Edeard smile in gratitude.

Oscar came over, as did the Knights Guardian. “Whatever you need,” Tomansio promised sincerely, which made Edeard regret he hadn’t known the warrior longer. Justine, smiling and determined, added her essence, buoying him along. Even Troblum was there, dependable and resolute.

There was a memory layer in this place, wherever they were, and that surprised Edeard more than anything. Strangely uncluttered, it was easy to perceive, to follow back. He plunged into the past, saddened by how little had changed. Then abruptly the Heart wasn’t quite so large. This was the time before humans. He carried on back through it, pushing harder and harder.

There were many changes, coming eons apart, then further. Each alien species that had come to the Void had contributed to the expansion in its own fashion. None had brought true cohesion. He found that wrong somehow, that the amalgamation always acted in the contrary direction to the Heart’s purpose.

At the end he could think only of flying through the travel tunnels, soaring on into the unknown, content simply in the act of voyaging. He was quite surprised when it did finish. The memory layer grew thinner somehow, less cluttered. And there, right at the beginning of the Void, when the Heart was forming, were millions of connections to individual minds. They could communicate with the Heart. They were the link, the way in. He chased after one and embraced it, offering it up to the creation layer, perceiving the entity take form again.

Edeard drew a startled breath, shaking himself free of the memory layer and the intimacy of his new friends. Right in front of him, standing in the entrance to Zulmal Street, an alien twenty feet tall was unfolding its disturbingly sinuous limbs as its thoughts churned with surprise and suspicion.

“Oh, wow,” Oscar groaned, and took a step back. Even so, he was grinning effusively.

“A Firstlife,” Edeard announced simply. He had to own up to being intimidated by so many curving, pointed teeth at the top of its fat central trunk as it opened the glistening mouth membranes to whistle at a painful volume.

Then something moved in the nothingness outside the dome. A dark sphere beset with deep purple scintillations slipped smoothly overhead.

“What are you doing?” Ilanthe asked.

Marius had been fascinated by the Heart and the notions it sang of. There really was no other way to describe it. In a way he was relieved that it was so vast, so aloof. Gore’s stupid plan to talk to it, to make it see what he considered reason, would never transpire in such a milieu. The golden man was pissing in the wind.

Then he stood in Sampalok’s central square, observing through Justine as Gore told the Waterwalker to search back through the memory layer for a younger, more accessible Heart.

“No no no,” he chanted in dismay. His exovision brought up the starship’s weapons. He selected a couple of diverted energy function quantumbusters. They would activate in the photosphere, sending a huge exotic energy distortion wave smashing against the Delivery Man’s ship. Its Stardiver shielding would never survive such an impact. Whatever part of Gore’s scheme was being enacted down there in the convection zone would be obliterated. That would give Ilanthe the window of opportunity to enact Fusion.

The two missiles shot away, accelerating at one hundred fifty gees. His exovision display threw up a sensor image, showing a hyperspace anomaly erupting fifty thousand kilometers away from his own location. One of the huge borderguards materialized out of the spatial deformation. Its concentric shells of elliptical strands were ablaze with aggravated neon light. The outermost strands darkened from a lurid jade down to an irradiated carmine. Marius’s sensors showed the energy spectrum raging inside the borderguard leaping almost off the scale. It fired on the quantumbuster missiles, which burst into a dynamic vapor plume.

“Shit!” Marius discarded the dream altogether and sent his starship hurtling toward the borderguard at thirty-seven gees. Weapons locked onto the garish nimbus. He opened fire.

No matter how hard he cursed, how fast his expanded mind activated infiltration packages, Gore knew it was coming. There was nothing he could do about it. His wild boast about Commonwealth webheads had proved vain and hollow, and everything in the galaxy was going to die because of it.

Unless-

“Shit. Go for it,” he ordered the Delivery Man. “Initialize the wormhole. Shove some fucking power my way. Do it. Do it now.”

He ordered the packages to activate, to grab control.

Too late. Out of the city’s subdued background murmurings Gore perceived that cool consciousness rising once again. It observed its environment with a host of strange senses.

“This is an act of hostility,” the elevation mechanism said. “You are trying to steal my fundamental nature. It is not for you and your kind, and with good reason.”

“Yeah. So you said. And as I told you, the Void is about to expand and wipe this star system from existence.” The dream showed him the big Firstlife in Sampalok, shaking its thick beefy body furiously as it tried to orient itself. Then Ilanthe appeared overhead. “Oh, God-fuck, no!” Gore entreated. “No, not her, not now.” The defeat was as strong as any physical blow, striking him to his knees in the middle of the plaza. All around him the glistening black strands of the infiltration web began to smolder, filling the air with thin acrid smoke. “You’re killing us,” he screamed into the night. “All I needed to do was show the Heart, that’s all, just show the fucker there’s an alternative, prove it can evolve.”

Tyzak was approaching him cautiously, stepping gingerly over the sputtering web.

“Got it,” the Delivery Man called. “Siphon’s activated. Wormhole established. We did it!”

“Leave,” Gore told him flatly. “Fly to a fresh galaxy, one that isn’t cursed like this one. Don’t let the universe forget us.”

The third borderguard imploded amid a searing flare of violet Cherenkov radiation. Broken strands from the concentric shells twirled away, venting thick sparkling gases at high velocity. Marius detected another five materializing out of their distinctive hyperspatial rents. He brought the ship about in a fast curve, chasing the debris that was expanding out of the last implosion. The trouble with combat this close to the star was the lack of mass for quantumbusters to work with.

Sensors tracked the three largest chunks of the shells, and he launched missiles at each of them. Diverted energy function quantumbusters activated, converting the tumbling mass to energy. Exotic distortions slammed into two of the borderguards as they were still exiting hyperspace, wrenching at the exotic pseudofabric. Unbearable contortions crushed the borderguards down to neutronium density. The wreckage immediately detonated out of its impossible compression state, saturating local spacetime with an inordinately hard neutron storm.

Seven energy beams burned across the force fields protecting Marius’s starship. His exovision brought up severe overload warnings. He fired another nine Hawking M-sinks, which the surviving bodyguards had no defense against. So far. He watched in fury as the attackers opened up small wormholes, which swallowed five of the M-sinks. Another barrage of energy beams found his starship. Missiles were heading in toward him at ninety gees, and he still hadn’t managed to knock out the Delivery Man’s ship.