“Now overlay this image with the pulsar map of Milkyway from our cartog computer,” said Faraerth.

Though still obviously mystified, Dayan quickly did as she was bid. Within moments, a second map formed on the screen, appearing transparently atop the first. The sensor-man massaged the two images until they were exactly alike in size and scale.

The two pulsar maps matched perfectly, point for point. Faraerth’s insides went nullgrav.

“The Rift’s other end really isinside Milkyway,” Helmrunner Baruclan whispered. He, too, had evidently speculated along such lines, which really wasn’t surprising. After all, scores of popular Neyel novelists and playwrights had advanced similar ideas for many oghencycles. But before today, no one had succeeded in putting the far-fetched notion to the test.

“It appears so,” Faraerth said, his hands clenched behind his back as though each were trying to contain the other’s excitement. With a flick of his tail, Faraerth pointed toward a flashing blue icon located near the edge of Milkyway’s simulated disk. “And note the approximate position of Aerth relative to the Rift’s terminus.”

Baruclan gasped. “It lies only about sixty-two pars’x from the Rift’s far end. Can it be?”

Faraerth laid a thick hand on the younger officer’s shoulder. He did it as much to moderate his own mounting enthusiasm as the lad’s. “Maybe. Maybe not. We will need to make many observations before we can be absolutely certain.”

[292] “Once we are, we may be able to actually reach Aerth,” said Dayan, her rugged eyeslits opened up wider than Faraerth had ever seen them before.

“And enfold it within the Neyel Hegemony, where it belongs,” Faraerth said, confident that he had completed her thought for her. Since he still had no words of his own, he quoted from the Sacred Writ. “ ‘The long-lost Coreworld from which all true sentients sprang, of which even Blue Oghen was never more than the palest of shadows.’ ”

An even older snippet of skiffy verse, which his grandfather had been fond of reciting, occurred to him then. It had been one of the very few pieces of digitized literature to have been recovered from the rad-stricken computers after Holy Vangar’s tumultuous passage from its origin point to the edges of M’jallan’s Cloud.

We pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave us birth;

Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Aerth.

Standing in silence, Faraerth marveled at how much closer the ancestral world had suddenly come. Sixty-two pars’x, he thought. To be sure, sixty-two pars’x was no mean distance. But it was as nothing compared to the yawning gulf of Blackempty that separated even the most edgeward Neyel outpost from Milkyway’s nearest spiral arm.

Faraerth’s musings were interrupted by the klaxon that began blaring from Dayan’s instrument array. She hastened back to her scanners to disable the intrusive sound, and immediately set about trying to determine what had triggered it.

“Well?” Faraerth asked, his impatience flaring like an old warwound.

The sensorman looked up from her readouts and displays. Confusion was written across her duty-roughened, [293] hullmetal-hued face. “I’ve just lost contact with the two farthest telly-eye probes.”

“Put Probe One’s visuals up on the viewer,” Faraerth said, still looking expectantly in Dayan’s direction.

“Perhaps thatis the reason for our difficulties,” the helmrunner said, pointing forward. Faraerth turned toward the viewer, surprised that Dayan had managed to carry out his last order so quickly.

Looking through Probe One’s unblinking telly-eye, Faraerth saw a trio of wedge-shaped, silver-and-scarlet spacecraft. Their precise size was impossible to determine. But the alacrity of their approach made their intent crystal clear.

“They’re heading straight for their side of the Rift,” Dayan reported, her voice quavering slightly. She, too, must have apprehended what they were about to face. “I’m picking up intense subspace interference from all three vessels. They must have either jammed our other telly-eye probes, or else they’ve destroyed them outright.”

“Do we fight them?” Baruclan wanted to know. Faraerth noted the dread in the helmrunner’s youthful eyes, a visual complement to the apprehension he could hear barely restrained behind Dayan’s voice.

The drech’tor chose to overlook his crew’s all-too-evident fear. It seemed perfectly rational, considering the nature of the monsters that now stalked them. Faraerth had never seen a Devil up close, but the few who’d survived such encounters had described them as crystalline killing machines, about as receptive to reason as the dead, dry stones of Oghen’s airless moons.

“Alert status,” Faraerth said, working hard to suffuse his voice with confidence. He hoped his crew would respond to it, draw strength and resolve from it. “Hard about, maximum Efti’el. Summon reinforcements from the fleet. The Hegemony will learn what we’ve discovered today about Milky-way and Aerth, but I don’t want it broadcast over the [294] subspace bands.” There was nothing to be gained by allowing an implacable enemy to learn that a Neyel crew had apparently found a means of reaching Aerth.

No one on the command deck wasted any time carrying out Faraerth’s orders. They all held fast to chairs or consoles, using feet, tails, or hands, as the velocity compensators labored to adjust to the ship’s rapid change in course and speed.

The Rift had just set a pack of Devils hard on Slicer’sheels.

And now they stand between us and Far Aerth,the drech’tor thought, his righteous anger swiftly growing as hot as the densely packed suns of M’jallan’s Core.

Chapter 26

2295. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar, the Neyel Coreworld of Oghen

The past oghencycle had been a most troubling one for Faraerth. His body had been rent asunder permanently; his right arm had stubbornly refused to grow back, despite repeated regeneration therapies. And ever since the day a Devil monofilament blade had maimed him and a Devil energy-net had crushed Slicer—killing most of Faraerth’s crew—the Neyel Hegemony itself had suffered injuries on a scale not seen since antiquity, when the Tuskers had beheaded the First Drech’tor and made martyrs of so many others.

The first Devils to emerge from the Riftmouth into Hegemony Space had done so in a single battered ship. A handful of others soon followed. Within the span of one scant oghencycle, the Devils began arriving in steadily escalating numbers. Dozens. Hundreds. The Hegemony Fleet’s drech’tors now likened them to clouds of Oghen cropshearers, the dread insects that had descended upon the Cultivations during the worst of the Coreworld’s early famine years.

The fleet joined the battle immediately, for Neyel spacers were nothing if not ready and willing to defend their territory. Despite the suddenness and ferocity of the Devil [296] assault, the ships and weaponry of both races quickly reached a rough parity. These days, neither side seemed able to maintain an advantage over the other for very long.

But during recent days, Faraerth had watched with his own eyes as the balance of power slowly tipped against the Neyel. Even now, the Devils continued to come across the Rift in ever-increasing numbers, apparently as determined as ever to kill as wantonly as the Tuskers of old had done, despite their apparent lack of language, culture, or any other observable evidence of sentience.

Save,Faraerth often thought, despite the horrors the Devils had visited upon him and his shipmates, their ships and weaponry.These, of course, the Alien Contact experts had always dismissed as the handiworks of other races, taken by the shrewd machinations of a ruthless, cunning, yet subsapient and instinct-driven species.