His u-shadow opened a link to Gore. “Washout,” he reported.

“Yeah, me, too.”

“I’m coming out.” There was little light in the vast cave, a few cold blue patches up amid the multitude of stalactites eighty meters above his head. The bottom quarter of the cave had been cut smooth and flat, leaving the natural rock formations above. Even two and a half thousand years ago, when the advanced Anomine had set it up, the cave couldn’t have been a terribly practical place. That was the thing with the Anomine; everything had an aesthetic aspect.

Water dripped out of the deep fissures and off the ends of the stalactites, creating long pungent algal ribbons down the rough walls. Drainage channels had clogged, leaving dank puddles spreading across the floor. The vortex carried on regardless; moisture and murky air were never going to affect its composition or function.

As he retraced his steps along the winding passage back out to the surface, the Delivery Man was puzzled by the lack of any communication system connected to the vortex. If it was an experiment, surely they would need to monitor the results; same for a control system. Or maybe I’m missing something, he thought wearily. Maybe there is an ultrasophisticated net covering the whole planet that biononic scans are simply too primitive to discover. He was grasping at straws and knew it. The Last Throw’s sensors were good. They’d detected a hundred twenty-four advanced devices still functional on the planet, of which the vortex was the eleventh they’d examined. If there was some kind of web linking them, Last Throw’s sensors would have revealed it.

A quarter of an hour later, the Delivery Man walked out into the evening sunlight. Tall cumulonimbus scurried through the darkening sky, splashed a pale rose gold by the vanishing sun. From his position high up a plateau wall, the countryside swept away to the southeast, its farthest fringes already turning to black. Several rivers traced bright silver threads across the mauve and jade vegetation. Then there was the city to the east, larger and more imposing than any of Earth’s cities even at the height of the population boom. A forest of tall towers stretched over a mile into the air; elaborate spiked spheres and curving pyramids filled the ground between the soaring spires like foothills. Lights were still shining through windows and open arches as the service machinery maintained the city in perfect readiness for occupation.

It was completely devoid of anyone, which he found strangely sad; it reminded him of a spurned lover. The remaining Anomine chose to live in their farm villages out in the open land. He could even see several of their little settlements amid the darkening land, flickering orange lights growing as the nightly fires were lit. He never did get that philosophy, living in the shadow of a past civilization, knowing that at any time they could simply move into the giant towers and live a life of unrivaled luxury, challenge their minds once again. Yet instead, they rejected any form of technology beyond labor-animal carts and plows, and filled their days tilling the fields and building huts.

The Last Throw came streaking in over the mountains behind him to finish up hovering a few centimeters above the succulent spiral grass-equivalent. He drifted up into the airlock.

“This is getting us nowhere fast,” Gore grumbled as the Delivery Man arrived in the main cabin.

“It’s your procedure. What else have we got? There’re not too many of these things to examine.”

“They’re all small scale. We have to look big.”

“We don’t know that, remember,” the Delivery Man chided as he settled in a broad leather-cushioned scoop chair. “We simply don’t know what it is. That vortex I just examined. It had to be linked with the elevation mechanism.”

“How?” Gore snapped.

“I think it was some kind of experiment, probing the local quantum structure. That kind of knowledge could only help contribute to going postphysical, surely.”

“Don’t call me Shirley.”

“What?”

Gore ran a hand over his forehead. “Yeah. Right. Whatever.”

The Delivery Man was mildly puzzled by Gore’s lack of focus. It wasn’t like him at all. “All right. So what I was thinking is that there has to be some kind of web and database in the cities.”

“There is. You can’t access it.”

“Why not?”

“The AIs are sentient. They won’t allow any information retrieval.”

“That’s stupid.”

“From our point of view, yes, but they’re the same as the borderguards: They maintain the homeworld’s sanctity; the AIs keep the Anomine’s information safe.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what the Anomine do; that’s what they are. They’re entitled to protect what they’ve built, same as anyone.”

“But we’re not damag-”

“I know!” Gore snarled. “I fucking know that, all right. We have to work around this. And listening to you sitting there whining twenty-four seven is no fucking help at all. Jezus, I should have lived a fucking normal twenty-first-century life and died properly. Why the hell do I fucking bother to help you moron supermen? Certainly not the gratitude.”

The Delivery Man only just stopped himself from opening his jaw to gawp at the gold-skinned man sitting in his antique orange shell chair. He was about to ask what the problem was, then realized. “She’ll be out of suspension soon,” he said sympathetically.

Gore grunted, shoving himself farther back in his chair’s cushioning. “She should’ve been there by now.”

“We don’t know. In the Void we just don’t know. Time flow there isn’t uniform.”

“Maybe.”

“The confluence nests are functioning. She will dream Makkathran for you; she’ll be there.”

“It’ll mean crap if we don’t find the mechanism.”

“I know. And we’ve still got Marius to deal with when we do.” The Delivery Man had been perturbed when the sensors showed them that Marius had gotten past the borderguard stations. The Accelerator agent’s ship had immediately dropped back into stealth mode once it was inside the cometary belt. Currently it was lurking amid the orbital debris cloud above the Anomine homeworld, watching them zip over the planet. It wouldn’t take much to work out what they were doing.

“Ha. That dick. We can take him whenever we want.”

“We don’t know that.”

“It takes smarter and tougher than him to catch me with my ass hanging out.”

The Delivery Man shook his head. He couldn’t decide if the machismo was worse than the insecurity. “Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Oh, yeah. Wishful thinking; that’s what keeps the universe ticking.”

The Delivery Man groaned and gave up.

Gore’s golden lips parted in a small smile. “The navy teams didn’t exactly push the AIs.”

“Uh huh,” the Delivery Man said warily.

“We’ve got another hundred or so of these tech high spots left to examine, right? So that’s not going to take more than four or five days if we hustle.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Then we do it. If we draw a blank, we go to plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Did you know I actually knew Ozzie?”

“I didn’t, but it doesn’t surprise me. You were contemporaries.”

“He pulled off two of the greatest thefts in human history.”

“Two? I knew there was some dispute with Nigel about taking the Charybdis.”

“Dispute? Jesus, do they even teach you people history these days? Nigel nearly killed him, and that’s not a metaphor.”

The Delivery Man ignored the “you people” crack. After two weeks cooped up in the Last Throw’s cabin with Gore, it was almost a compliment. “So what was the first crime?”

Gore grinned. “The great wormhole heist. The smart-ass bastard cleaned out the Vegas casinos, and nobody ever knew it was him. Not until after the war and Orion let it slip. Can you imagine that?”

“No, I truly cannot.”