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over thegalactic plane at a sharp angle, the outer layers of its dust and gas already in the process of being stripped away by a kindof galactic “atmosphere,” the gas clouds within which the Milky Way lay imbedded. He could see the distinct curve of his homegalaxy’s spiral arm, the twists and knots and filaments of dark and dusty nebulae, the faintly red-hued radiance of the centralcore, the delicate blue haze and the clotted knots of the brighter stars throughout the spiral, the background glow of throngingsuns too thickly strewn to see individually.

The vista, far more detailed and structured than mere light could possibly have revealed, struck him with a dizzying awarenessof light and time and gravity and space, a Whole frozen within an instant spanning eons.

Return, Konstantin’s voice said within that tiny fraction of Mind that was Trevor Gray. Don’t lose yourself.

Reluctantly, Gray allowed himself to fall back—to be pulled back—into the narrow confines of space immediately surrounding the human fleet, minute sparks of twisted space within theVoid.

We have them.

As the hive mind of the fleet had stretched out, encompassing more and more space, Konstantin—or perhaps it was the whole of the Mind itself—had been able to separate the faint flicker of gravitational drives from the thundering background noise of mutually orbiting black holes and thronging suns singing their gravitational arias. Gray saw them now, a dozen violet sparks all but lost in the glare of a spacetime filled by, defined by, gravity.

The group Mind focused in on the nearest of those sparks, their viewpoint zooming in on a massive cylinder all but lost inthe darkness. The cylinder, Gray knew without knowing how he knew it, was just over ten thousand kilometers long and a fifththat distance wide, the ends open to space. The cylinder’s rotation created spin gravity across the structure’s inner surfaceand also held a thin film of atmosphere pressed against the tube’s curved walls, held captive by hundred-kilometer walls aroundboth open ends. On the inner surface, glimpsed through one end, was a landscape, an inside-out habitable world of oceans andmountains and plains, of rivers and desert and forest, of rich greens and russet browns and the white spiraling sweep andsplatter of clouds.

The surface area of the inside of that rotating cylinder, Gray recalled, was well over 60 million square kilometers, as bigas all of Eurasia on Earth, from Gibraltar to Kamchatka, from Novaya Zemlya to Sri Lanka. The technology implicit in thatstructure left Gray awestruck and humbled.

Beyond one end of the cylinder flickered the brilliant blue-violet spark of a powerful gravity drive, steadily drawing thatmonster, artificial world forward. A McKendree cylinder this large possessed the staggering mass of a small planet—somethingon the order of 6 x 1023 kilograms, roughly the same as the mass of Mars—but its velocity, now just over half the speed of light, gave it a relativisticmass that was considerably greater. Viewed up close, the cylinder created a shimmering, three-dimensional gravity wake extendingin the shape of a hazy, thinning cone far astern. The structure had the look of a pale blue comet, a bright flickering pointof light as the head and a trailing tail 100 million kilometers long, with the cylinder itself all but lost within the coma.

How, Gray wondered, could that projected point of gravitational energy pull equally on the entire length of a ten-thousand-kilometer-long cylinder? Grav drives worked by putting the projecting craft into free fall, allowing tremendous acceleration without the high-G effects of acceleration. Still, the gravitational field had to be artificially tweaked to encompass the entire vessel or it might be torn apart by the tidal effects.

How were the Sh’daar inhabitants of that thing enveloping a ten-thousand-kilometer tube in an even gravitational field withoutripping the tube apart? It was impossible . . . like purest magic.

We have their coordinates, Konstantin whispered in his Mind. We can approach them now for a rendezvous.

 

Venting Tube 18

Quito Space Elevator

Cayambe, Ecuador

1648 hours, EST

The solitary aircar threaded its way through canyons and deep, jungle-tangled valleys, maintaining just enough speed to keepaloft on its repulsors without triggering any of the sentry mechanisms along the way. The aircar had been specially outfittedwith the latest stealth technologies and was essentially invisible on radar, infrared, and electromagnetic scans. Its externalnanoflage repeated the colors and shadowing of its surroundings, making it very nearly invisible at optical wavelengths aswell.

The pilot was Enrique Valdez, though at the moment he couldn’t remember his name. Days before, his in-head circuitry had been infected by nanobots programmed to suppress many of his memories and general cerebral functions, keeping him focused to an inhuman degree on his task. The effect was to reduce him to a kind of biological robot, a robot with only very limited intelligence and a vague self-awareness akin to that of a dream state. All he knew was that his goal was that snowcapped mountain directly to the northwest—specifically the mouth of a vent—and that when he maneuvered his aircar into the entrance of the venting tube, he would remember what he was to do next.

The mountain was called Cayambe, and its southern slope was dominated by an immense platform extending out from snow-cladrock. Towers, domes, and skyscrapers rose from this platform, and from the center, a needle-slender thread emerged from thebuildings and vanished into a deep purple sky. You could get dizzy trying to follow that thread into the zenith, but Valdezdidn’t try. The white-and-silver city on the mountainside and the lower reaches of the Quito Space Elevator were, to him,simply a part of the background.

He certainly was not thinking at the moment about that city’s destruction.

The valley he was following twisted back and forth but steadily approached the base of the mountain beneath the city of PortEcuador, Earthside anchor of the Quito Space Elevator. He could see his destination now, a low, stone entryway to a blacktunnel entrance.

A warning signal peeped at Valdez, indicating that he was being painted by radar, but the nanomatrix of his vehicle’s outerskin would absorb most of the incoming signal, giving a reading consistent with a large