The Spike was in the middle of the Hot Ring. It was an alien artifact whose main structure was a slim triangle that curved gently around its long axis, which measured eleven thousand kilometers from the top to an indeterminate base. There was no way to determine the exact position of the base because that part of the Spike was still buried within some dimensional twist. To the navy exploration vessel that had found it in 3072, it was as if a planet-sized starship had tried to erupt out of hyperspace with only partial success, the nose slicing out cleanly into spacetime while the tail section was still lost amid the intricate folds of the universe’s underlying quantum fields. The only thing that ruined that big-aerodynamic-starship image was the sheer size of the brute. On top of the triangle was a five-kilometer-diameter spire that was a further two thousand kilometers in length-function unknown.

Contrary to all natural orbital mechanics, the Spike remained oriented in one direction, with the tip pointing straight out of the Hot Ring ecliptic. Its concave curve also tracked the star as it traveled along its perfectly circular orbit like some heliotactic sail-shaped flower always following the light. Thus, the anchoring twist that held its base amid the whirling rocky particles was obviously active, although its mechanism was somewhere within the unreachable base. Few people still believed it was a ship, though the notion remained among the romantically inclined elements of the Commonwealth’s scientific community and the more excitable Raiel/Void conspiracy theorists.

Contact with the fourteen known alien species living inside, which was remarkably easy, didn’t advance the exploration starship’s understanding of the Spike’s origin or purpose one byte. All the species who’d found a home among the myriad habitation chambers had arrived there relatively recently, the Chikoya longest ago at four and a half thousand years. They, along with all those who had found a home in the Spike over the millennia, had made their adaptations and alterations to the basic structure to a point where it was difficult to know what was original anymore.

When the Lindau emerged from hyperspace again, they were eight hundred kilometers sunward and level with the top of the Spike, so that the massive spire stabbed up into the southern starfield above them. The smartcore accelerated them in, matching the massive structure’s errant velocity vector. Ahead of them the curved inner surface was segmented by crystalline chambers like a skin of bubbles. The smallest extended over a hundred kilometers wide, while the largest, an Ilodi settlement, stretched out to a full three hundred kilometers in diameter. Eight tubes wove around and through the chambers, each of them a convoluted loop with a diameter of thirty kilometers, acting as the Spike’s internal transport routes. Seven of them had an H-congruous oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere; the eighth supported a high-temperature methane/nitrogen environment.

Aaron directed them into a metal mushroom sprouting from one of the H-congruous tubes. There were hundreds of similar landing pads scattered randomly along all the tubes. Some of them were crude, little more than slabs of metal with a basic airlock tunnel fused onto the tube. When the Lindau settled on it, a localized artificial gravity field took over, holding the starship down at about a tenth of a gee.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn were standing behind Aaron in the starship’s small bridge compartment, images of the Spike projecting out of a half dozen portals all around them. They could see a lot of movement on the surface. A huge variety of drones were crawling, rolling, sliding, skating, and hopping along the tubes and chambers, performing various repair and maintenance functions. All of them were operated by the controlling AI, itself a patchwork of processor cores that had been grafted onto the original management network by the residents who had come and gone over the millennia.

“The effect’s no stronger here than when it first hit us. It must be uniform,” Corrie-Lyn said wonderingly as she tried to sort through the multitude of foreign sensations that Ozzie’s telepathy effect were allowing to impact on her mind. She could feel Inigo’s mind as before and the odd unemotional threads buzzing through Aaron’s brain, but beyond them was a sensory aurora not too dissimilar to the gaiafield. Human minds were present, though she wasn’t sure how many, probably no more than a few thousand. Alien minds were also intruding that were intriguingly weird, possessing a different intensity and emotions that were subtly different.

“What I’m feeling can’t represent everyone on the Spike,” Inigo said, perceiving her interest. “For a start, there’s over a million of the Ba’rine-sect Chikoya, who settled here after they got kicked off their homeworld. They’re aggressive in their beliefs and not afraid to show it. That level of animosity is absent. Then there’s the Flam-gi and their whole nasty little speciesism superiority-they’re definitely not sharing. And Honious alone knows who or what’s in some of the sealed chambers.”

“So they’re not all part of Ozzie’s dream, then?”

“It would seem not.”

“Why?” Even as she asked it, she could sense his dismissal.

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to ask him. Aaron, do you know where he is?”

“No.” The agent’s head didn’t move; he was studying a projection of the Spike’s entire inner surface. Some kind of mapping program was active, sending flashes of color across sections and down tubes. “The controlling AI has no information on him. U-shadow-based data retrieval routines do not function effectively in the network, and some compartment sections are blocked; I cannot check the data with any accuracy.”

“Reasonable enough,” Inigo said. “There’s no overall government as such. From what I remember, you just turn up and find somewhere that supports your biochemistry and move in.”

“So what now?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“We will visit the largest human settlement and ask them for Isaacs’s location.”

“And if they don’t know?” Inigo asked.

“He is renowned. Someone will know.”

“But he already knows we’re here,” Inigo said.

Aaron turned to stare at him. “Have you signaled him?”

“No. But this telepathy effect exposes everything to everybody. That’s what he came here to do. Therefore, he is aware of our arrival.”

“Can you determine the source of the effect?”

“No.”

“Very well. Come with me now.” Aaron walked out into the companionway.

Inigo gave Corrie-Lyn a bemused shrug, and the two of them followed meekly behind Aaron as he went into the scoutship’s main airlock.

The landing pad had extruded a malmetal cylinder that was compatible with the starship’s seal. The outer door expanded, showing the cylinder curving down. Aaron stepped through and glided forward in the low gravity. The cylinder bent in a sharp double curve to take them through the tube wall. They passed through a translucent pressure curtain that shivered around them, and then they were inside a small blue metal building with open archways. The temperature and humidity rose sharply to subtropical levels. They walked through the arches onto a broad paved area. The tube’s inner surface was covered in lush pink-tinged grasses and long meandering gray-blue forests. Fifteen kilometers above their heads, a sliver of dazzling white light ran along the axis of the tube, shining through the thick smears of helical cloud that drifted along the interior. As soon as they’d stepped through the pressure curtain, Corrie-Lyn had felt the gravity rise to about two-thirds Earth standard, which gave her the visual impression of standing at the bottom of a cylinder where anything moving on the solid roof above her should fall straight down, though intellectually she knew damn well that every point of the landscape arching above her had the same gravity.