There was an opening on the far side. Aaron's field scan showed him another cavern with a great deal of electronic activity inside. Someone was in there. Someone who could shield his body from the scan.

"Holy Ozzie," Aaron breathed.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a curious look and strode into the second chamber. It was larger than the first. A third of its wall surface was covered with excavatorbots that looked like a mass of giant maggots slowly wiggling their way forward into the gelid sediment. A huge lacework of tiny pipes emerging from their tails led back to the start of the extraction tube. Silver sensor discs floated through the air, bobbing about to take readings. Silhouetted by the retinue of cybernetic activity was a lone figure wearing a dark green surface suit. Corrie-Lyn took a couple of hesitant steps forward.

The man turned, lifting off his bubble helmet. His face had a Latin shading rather than Inigo's northern European pallor, and the hair was dark brown rather than ginger. But apart from that, the features had not been altered much. Aaron thought it a particularly inferior disguise, as if he were wearing makeup and a bad wig.

"Inigo!" Corrie-Lyn whispered.

"Of all the Restoration projects on all the dead worlds in the galaxy, you had to walk into mine."

Corrie-Lyn sank to her knees, sobbing helplessly.

"Hey, girl," Inigo said sympathetically. He knelt down beside her and flipped the outer seals on her helmet.

"Where've you been, you bastard!" she screamed. Her fist smacked into his chest. "Why did you leave me? Why did you leave us?"

He wiped some of the tears from her cheeks, then leaned forward and kissed her. Corrie-Lyn almost fought against it; then she suddenly was wrapping her arms around him, kissing furiously. The fabric of their suits made scratching noises as they rubbed together.

Aaron waited a diplomatic minute, then unsealed his own helmet. The air was bitingly cold and held the strangest smell of rancid mint. His breath emerged in gray streamers. "You're a hard man to find."

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn broke apart.

"Don't listen to him," Corrie-Lyn said urgently. "Whatever he wants, refuse. He's insane. He's killed hundreds of people to find you."

"Slight exaggeration," Aaron said. "No more than twenty, surely."

Inigo's steel-gray eyes narrowed. "I can sense what you are. Who do you represent?"

"Ah." Aaron gave a weak smile. "I'm not sure." But we're about to find out. He could feel the knowledge stirring in his mind again. He was about to know what to do next.

"I won't go back," Inigo said simply.

"What happened?" Corrie-Lyn pleaded.

Aaron's u-shadow reported that a call was coming in from Director Ansan Purillar. It had been transferred across the hundreds of desolate kilometers from Kajaani by the small sturdy beacons to enter the camp, where it finally had trickled down into the excavation through a single strand of fiber-optic cable.

"Yes, Director?" Aaron said.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other a puzzled glance, then looked at Aaron.

"Do you have some colleagues following you?" Ansan Purillar asked.

"No."

"Well, there's a ship coming through the atmosphere above us, and it won't respond to any of our signals."

Aaron felt his blood chill. His combat routines came online as he instinctively shielded himself with the strongest force field his biononics could produce. "Get out."

"What?"

"Get out of the base. Everyone out. Now!"

"I think you'd better explain exactly what is going on."

"Shit!" His u-shadow used the tenuous link to the base to establish a tiny channel to the Artful Dodger's smartcore. "Tell them," he yelled at Corrie-Lyn.

She flinched. "Director, please leave. We haven't been honest with you." She turned to Inigo. "Please?" she hissed.

He gave a reluctant sigh. "Ansan, this is Earl. Do as Aaron says. Get as many as you can into the starship. Everyone else will have to use the ground cruisers."

"But-"

The Artful Dodger's smartcore scanned the sky above Kajaani. Its sweep was hampered considerably by the protective force field over the base, but it showed Aaron a small mass thirty kilometers high, holding its position above the thick outer cloud blanket. "Come and get us," he told the smartcore. "Fast." His exovision showed him the starship powering up. Flight systems took barely a second to come online. Its force field hardened. Directly overhead, an enormously powerful gamma-ray laser struck the base's force field. A scarlet corona flared around the puncture point, and the beam sliced into the generator building.

Complete force field failure was an emergency situation that had been incorporated into the base's design. Secondary force fields snapped on over the cottages and science blocks almost in time to protect them from the first awesome pressure surge. Several sheets of ice crystals hammered against the walls, drilling holes in the grass. Staff members who were caught outside screamed and flung themselves down as the impacts battered them. It was over in seconds as the retrapped air stilled. When they looked up, they could see the parkland being scoured of grass and bushes by the victorious wind. Their starship had been cut in two by the gamma-laser strike; uneven sections lay twisted on the pad as the cold storm buffeted it about.

Beside it, the Artful Dodger rose into the maelstrom of radioactive destruction that cascaded across the base the instant the main force field vanished. Sensors showed it a pinprick of dazzling white light searing its way downward, accelerating at fifty gees. The ship's smartcore blasted away at the weapon with neutron lasers and quantum distortion pulses. Nothing happened. The smartcore started to change course, but it wasn't fast enough. The lightpoint struck the Artful Dodger amidships, unaffected by the force field. Enormous tidal forces tore at the ship's structure, destroying its integrity. Even spars reinforced by bonding fields were ripped out of alignment. Ordinary components were mangled beyond recognition. The entire hull buckled and imploded to a third of its original size. Then the Hawking m-sink punched through the other side of the ship and streaked onward into the ground. Its intense spark of light vanished. The surrounding ground heaved as if Kajaani had been hit by a massive earthquake, annihilating the remaining buildings and structures. All the secondary force fields died, leaving the collapsing cottages and science blocks exposed to the planet's malignant atmosphere.

The wreckage of the Artful Dodger tumbled out of the hurricane to smash into the ruins of the base.

Aaron's contact with the starship was lost as soon as the Hawking m-sink had penetrated the hull, when every microcircuit and kube was physically distorted and ruptured.

A couple of Kajaani's sensors had caught the last moments of the star that had bolted out of the churning naked sky. Its speed was such that human eyes registered it as a single line of light, like a perfectly straight lightning bolt. Radiation monitor records showed a swift peak that went off the scale.

"What the hell just happened?" Corrie-Lyn demanded.

Aaron was too stunned to reply immediately. His u-shadow confirmed that the beacon relay now ended two kilometers short of the base's perimeter.

"They fired on the base," Inigo said quietly. "Lady, they were completely unarmed." He glared at Aaron. "Was that one of the factions?"

"Could be. It might even have been the Cleric Conservator making sure of his tenure."

"There's a place in the depths of Honious reserved for your kind. I hope you reach it quickly."

"Where?" Aaron asked.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave him an identical snort of disgust.

"We'd better get back up to the shelter," Inigo said. "I expect they'll want to get to Kajaani right away. We are one of the closest camps."

As soon as they came through the cramped suit room, Ericilla pointed an accusing finger at Aaron. "That was you," she yelled in fury. "You're responsible. You told them to get clear. You knew who that was. You brought them here."

"I didn't bring them here. Those people were going to catch up with us eventually. The location was...unfortunate."

"Un-fucking-fortunate?" Vilitar spit. "There were nearly two hundred people there. We don't know how many of them are still alive, but even if some of them survived the attack, they'll be dying from the radiation. My friends. Slaughtered."

"They'll be re-lifed," Aaron said impassively.

"You bastard," Cytus stepped forward, his fist raised.

"Enough," Inigo said. "This won't help."

Cytus paused for a moment, then turned away, his face contorted with disgust and anger.

"You knew, Earl," Nerina said. "You warned Ansan as well. What the hell is going on? Do you know these people?"

"I'm the one they're looking for. I didn't know about the attack."

The rest of the team started at one another in mute bewilderment.

"We're going to Kajaani," Ericilla said. "We can help recover the bodies before the winds blow them too far."

"How long before your organization sends another ship?" Aaron asked.

"Like you care!"

"How long? Please."

"Too long," Nerina said. "Hanko isn't part of the unisphere. We can't just yell for help. Our only link to the Commonwealth was the hyperspace link in the starship, which was connected to our headquarters back on Anagaska. Without that we're completely cut off. Anagaska will assume there was some kind of equipment failure; then, after we haven't repaired it in a week, they'll probably investigate. If I remember right, we're due a scheduled flight in two weeks, anyway. They'll probably wait until then. Budget considerations." She snapped it out with contempt.

"By which time radiation poisoning will have killed everyone exposed to the atmosphere," Vilitar said. "We don't have enough medical facilities to help them all. Congratulations." He stared challengingly at Aaron.

"We need to get moving," Ericilla said. "The medical systems on our ground crawlers can help a couple of them, maybe more." She pushed her way past Aaron, not looking at him. Cytus managed to knock Aaron's elbow as he went into the suit room.

"You coming, Earl?" Nerina asked.

"Yeah."

"You've done enough already," Vilitar said. "Whoever the fuck you really are. I thought-" He snarled incoherently and hurried into the suit room.

"We'll come with you," Corrie-Lyn said. "We can help."

"The Asiatic glacier is half a day from here," Nerina said. "The far end has mile-high cliffs. Why don't you help us by driving off them." She went into the suit room and closed the door.

"Then there were three," Aaron said.

"We'd better get going," Inigo said. He faced Aaron. "You know they'll probably close the Restoration project down because of this."

"Do you think the next galaxy along will mount a Restoration project for all the species which the Void devourment phase exterminates?"

For a moment Aaron thought Inigo might activate his biononics in an aggressor mode. "You know nothing," the lost messiah whispered.

"I hope something, though."

"What?"

"That you have a starship stashed away. Preferably close by."

"I don't."

"Really? I find that mighty curious. You took all this trouble to stay lost, yet you have no escape route if someone came along to expose you."

"Obviously not. Otherwise I wouldn't have been here waiting for you."

"You wouldn't have been waiting around here if it had just been me," Aaron said. He gestured at Corrie-Lyn. "But her? That's different. Seventy years is a long time to be alone. She stayed in love for that long. Did you?"

Corrie-Lyn moved close to Inigo. "Did you?" she asked in a quiet voice.

A mournful smile flickered over his lips. "I'm glad it was you. Is that enough?"

"Yeah." She rested her head on his shoulder.

"No ship," Inigo told Aaron. "And the only way I go anywhere with you is in a bag as small lumps of charcoal."

"That's a shame, because I know what weapon they used to take out my starship and the base."

"Is that supposed to impress me? I expect you know a great deal about weapons and violence. Men like you always do."

"It was a Hawking m-sink," Aaron said. "Do you know what that is? No? They're new and highly dangerous. Even ANA gets nervous around them. Basically, it's a very small black hole, but cranked up with an outsize event horizon to help absorption. It starts off as a little core of neutronium about the size of an atomic nucleus."

Corrie-Lyn caught the emphasis. "Starts off?"

"Yes. Its gravity field is strong enough to pull in any atoms it comes into contact with. They're then also compressed into neutronium and merge with its core. With each atom, it gets a little bit bigger. Not by much admittedly, not to begin with. But the larger the surface area, the more matter it can absorb. And after it tore through the Artful Dodger, it hit the planet. Right now it is sinking through the mantle, eating every atom it encounters. It'll stop at the center of the planet. Then it just sits there and grows."

"How big will it get?" she asked anxiously.

Aaron shot Inigo a look. "Black holes have no theoretical size limit. We used to think that was what the Void was."

"But...Hanko?"

"It'll take about two weeks to devour the entire mass of an H-congruous world. Except we'll be dead long before that. Hanko will start to disintegrate as it's consumed from within. The continents will collapse in three or four days. So, once more, with an awful lot of feeling, do you have a starship hidden nearby?"

Araminta kissed three of hims as they sat at a table under a gazebo of flowering yisanthal in his garden. "I missed that," she told the rugged Oriental one.

Mr. Bovey smiled in unison. Hes raised his glasses. "Cheers."

"Cheers." She sipped her white wine.

"So?" asked the one she had had their first dinner with.

Araminta steeled herself. "If your offer is still open, I'd like to accept."

She even heard cheering coming from the big house as well as the racket that the three under the gazebo made.

"You've made some old men very happy."

"Us young ones, too."