The link to Phelim closed, and Ethan looked at the rapidly cooling food on his plate. He pushed it away.

“You seem troubled, Conservator.”

Ethan started, twisting around in his chair to see where the voice had come from. His u-shadow was already calling for help from Cabinet Security.

The woman-thing walking calmly out of the shadows on the other side of the desk disturbed his sensibilities. “I believe you’re expecting me,” she said. She was naked, which only intensified Ethan’s censure; her body possessed no sexual characteristics. Her skin was some kind of artificial covering that produced a gray layer whose exact boundary was indeterminable. Far worse than that was her figure. It was as though her internal organs were too small for her frame, leaving the skin to curve in between the ribs. And her eyes didn’t help, little patches of pink moonlight that never revealed exactly what she was looking at. There was a gold circle just below her neck from which sprouted two long streamers of dark scarlet cloth. The fabric was draped across her shoulders to float horizontally through the air for several meters behind her. It rippled with the sluggish fluidity of an embryo sac.

Five armored guards burst in through the main doors, their fat weapons raised. The Higher woman cocked her head to one side while the gaiafield revealed a steely politeness in her mind.

Ethan held up a finger. “Hold,” he instructed the guards. “Did Marius send you?”

A narrow mouth opened to reveal shiny metal teeth. “Marius has been moved to other duties. I am Valean, his replacement. I am here to help sort out our mutual problem with the ANA starship orbiting above you.”

Ethan waved the guards out, suspecting they wouldn’t have lasted long against her. “What do you want?”

She walked toward him, the scarlet streamers wavering sinuously behind her. Ethan saw that her heels ended in long tapering cones, as if her feet had grown their own stilettos. “I require access to the Agra wormhole generator. Please inform the operations staff I am to be given full cooperation.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Prevent the ANA agent from retrieving any more fragments.”

“I can’t afford any kind of conflict with ANA. Some in the Senate are eager for the flimsiest legal grounds to authorize navy intervention.”

“We are expecting that any such concerns will soon be irrelevant. Rest assured, Cleric Conservator, there will be no physical clash here.”

“Very well. I will see that you have full clearance.”

“Thank you.” She inclined her head and turned for the main doors.

“Please tell your faction leaders I would prefer to deal with Marius,” he said.

Valean didn’t even turn around. “I will certainly tell them.” There was no trace of irony in her thoughts; the facade of politeness remained intact.

The doors shut behind her. Ethan let out a long breath of apprehension; he felt as if he’d finally been shown what awaited the lost souls who fell to Honious.

Preliminary sensor analysis of the debris cloud indicated there were one thousand three hundred twelve critical fragments, defined as anything over five centimeters across. When Chatfield’s starship exploded, over a third of them had been thrown down toward Ellezelin on trajectories that would see them burning up in the atmosphere within half an hour. The rest were whirling rapidly along wildly different orbital tracks. Recovery would be a bitch.

Digby was quietly pleased at the way the Columbia505’s smartcore was handling the collection operation. Modified ingrav drive emissions were pulling fragments out of their terminal trajectories; sensors had identified several particles that had exotic matter constituents and were tracking them constantly. The sleek ultradrive ship was darting about, drawing the first chunks into the midhold, where they were embedded in a stabilizer field. ANA:Governance had assured him a forensic team would be arriving within ten hours. Digby hoped so. Stabilizer fields weren’t designed to preserve exotic matter; a lot of it was decaying right in front of him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

His exovision suddenly threw up warnings he never expected to see. A very large wormhole was intruding into space not three kilometers from the Columbia505.

“What the hell?”

The smartcore tracked several chunks of wreckage tumbling down the wormhole’s throat. Then the wormhole shifted exit coordinates, reappearing five kilometers away. More junk was sucked down. Exoimage displays showed him it was the wormhole that normally linked Ellezelin to Agra. Somebody was redirecting it with unnerving skill, scooping up precious evidence. His u-shadow connected him directly into the planetary cybersphere and tried to access the generator net. “It’s been isolated,” the u-shadow reported. “I can’t even gain access to the building net. Whoever’s in there, they’ve sealed themselves in tight.”

Columbia505’s sensors swept across the generator complex on the outskirts of Riasi, seven thousand kilometers away around the curvature of the planet. A force field was protecting the whole area. “Crap.” Digby ordered the smartcore to distort the wormhole’s pseudo structure. Negative energy fluxes reached out from the starship’s drive, attempting to destabilize the wormhole’s integrity. But the planetary generators had too much power available compared with the starship. It was a struggle Digby was doomed to lose.

“Take us down,” he ordered the smartcore. “Fast.” As the starship dived down into the atmosphere, he called ANA:Governance and explained what was happening.

“I will call the Cleric Conservator,” ANA:Governance said. “He must be made to understand that he cannot act against us with impunity.”

Digby was pretty sure the Cleric Conservator knew that but held his counsel. It was long gone midnight in Makkathran2, which meant that Riasi was just slipping across the terminator line into daylight. Columbia505 was decelerating at fifteen gees when it hit the stratosphere above the Sinkang continent, upon whose northern coast the ex-capital city was sited. The ship scorched its way down through the lower atmosphere like a splinter carved from a star’s corona. It braked to a halt five hundred meters directly above the Agra wormhole generator’s force field. The hypersonic shock wave of its passage slammed past it, shattering all unprotected panes of glass within a three-kilometer radius. Nearby regrav capsules tumbled through the air like leaves in a blizzard as their smartnets used emergency power to try to right them. Local traffic control was screaming warnings at Digby on every frequency. Metropolitan police cruisers curved around to intercept. He sent out a blanket broadcast to be picked up by every cybersphere node and macrocellular cluster surrounding the force field.

“Everyone in the generator complex, switch off the force field and deactivate the wormhole. You are violating an ANA-sanctioned operation. I am authorized to use extreme force to end your transgression.”

As he suspected, there was no reply. There never would be, he knew. Every moment he waited, playing the good guy, was another moment spent eradicating the precious evidence in orbit. All that left him with was the problem of knocking out the force field without flattening half the city.

Eight slender atomic distortion beams stabbed out from the starship to the top of the force field dome, ripping the air molecules apart in a blaze of incandescence. Monstrous static discharges flared away into the heaving atmosphere. The force field began to glow a pale purple, as if it were growing a bruise. A cluster of dump webs skittered down from the Columbia505. They struck the force field, kicking out blooms of dusky ripples. The darkness around them intensified, expanding rapidly. Under such an assault, overload was only a matter of time. The force field collapsed amid a deluge of wild energy flares and superheated shock waves that battered the surrounding buildings. Columbia505 received a heavy buffeting, which the smartcore fought to counter and hold stable above the circle of glaring ion flames that were eating into the generator building. Sensors reported the wormhole had failed. Digby was worried about how much evidence it had already cleared away.