“And?” I said.

  “I’ve learned that the equation changes those who truly understand it. Think of it as a cognitive infection. The mathematics themselves are alive in a way, self-propagating. Once you comprehend the formula for unmaking reality, it begins unmaking you. Every great mathematician who’s glimpsed even portions of it has either gone mad or destroyed their own work in terror.”

  “So the Burnt Polarion went mad from studying it?”

  “Not mad, precisely. Converted. The equation doesn’t just describe the universe’s undoing—it argues for it, with logic so perfect it overwrites the mind that comprehends it. The Burnt Polarion may believe he wants to end existence, but it’s the equation wanting to manifest through him. He’s become its vessel.”

  “How long ago did he find it?” I asked.

  “Several centuries at least,” he said. “The corruption would have been gradual at first, then accelerating once he understood enough to derive the deeper proofs.”

  “Stop talking in riddles, huh,” I said.

  “I cannot be more direct at present.” His voice dropped even lower. “The walls have ears, and I wonder if she has begun to suspect my true purpose. But consider this: your ring has been recording everything. Every use, every activation, and every protection it has offered. It is learning, Kane Hunter, learning you.”

  “Learning me for what?”

  “For what comes after, I suspect.”

  There was a beep from his end. He looked at something on his panel and straightened in his chair.

  “Now,” he said in a louder voice, “about our trade. You encountered something on the dying moon. The machine at its core released objects before creating a spatial anomaly. I would very much like to know what you observed.”

  I hesitated. Information was valuable—I understood that. But what would I lose by telling him? Besides, surely he’d seen what we had.

  “Pods,” I said. “They scattered in all directions. Some went toward the gas giant, others into deep space.”

  “Describe them please.”

  I realized this was how he traded. He’d given me data on the ring. I needed to pay him for that if I wanted to learn more.

  “The pods had transparent hulls,” I said. “Or at least the one I saw did. Inside was… I don’t know exactly. Tentacles or cables wrapped around a core of light. It looked alive.”

  The Collector’s breathing apparatus made a wet, excited sound.

  “What were they?” I asked.

  The Collector’s head turned, looking at something off-screen. When he faced me again, he said, “Our conversation must conclude. But before it does, I give you a warning and an offer. The warning is this: the T-suit you retrieved requires more than just wearing. The black globe is not merely a power source. It is a pilot.”

  “What kind of pilot?”

  “The kind that should have stayed buried with the moon. But that’s irrelevant now. My offer is this: when you use the Negator on the Burnt Polarion, I want your promise that you’ll tell me exactly what happens, every detail. That information would be invaluable.”

  “Why should I promise you anything?”

  “Because if you promise, I’m going to tell you how to find the Dreadstar,” he said.

  I snorted. “We can find it ourselves.”

  “No, you cannot. The Ick have moved it to a location that doesn’t appear on any star chart. They’ve hidden it in a place between. But I know where that is and how to reach it.”

  “And you’ll just tell me for a promise?”

  “Not just tell you. I’ll give you the navigation cipher that will let you access their hidden route through foldspace. Without it, you could search for a thousand years and never find them.”

  Behind him, I heard a hatch open.

  “Decide quickly,” he said.

  I thought about it. We needed to find the Dreadstar. Without it, none of this mattered.

  “Deal,” I said.

  His fingers moved over his console. “I’m transmitting the cipher now. Use it wisely. The path it reveals is treacherous.”

  My console beeped, confirming the data transfer.

  “One more thing,” the Collector said quickly. “Your ring can interface directly with the T-suit. But be careful when you do. The black globe has been waiting a very long time for a proper host. Don’t let it—”

  The screen went black, communication severed.

  “What just happened?” Alina asked.

  “I don’t know.” I tried to reestablish contact, but there was nothing. Then I saw through the sensors that the Collector’s ship was moving, sliding into foldspace. I had no idea how they could do that so near a gravitational body like the massive gas giant. We couldn’t do that. Within seconds, the ship and the entrance to foldspace were gone.

  “They ran,” Alina said.

  Through my neural interface, I looked at the data packet the Collector had sent. It was huge, encrypted in layers I couldn’t begin to understand without the Theron’s help.

  “Maybe because he’d already said too much,” I said.

  Or maybe because the High Polarion woman had figured out what he was doing. Either way, we had what we needed: a way to find the Dreadstar—if the Collector had been telling the truth. It could have all been a lie or a deception.

  Still, his warnings echoed in my mind. The T-suit used a pilot and the black globe was waiting for a host? And the ring was learning me for “what comes after”?

  I had a bad feeling we were walking into something bigger than just stopping the Burnt Polarion. But what choice did I have in this?

  “Alina,” I said, “start working on the cipher. We need to be able to find the Dreadstar.”

  “What about the T-suit?” she asked.

  I thought about the black globe, remembering how it had felt when I touched it, that sense of something alive and waiting.

  “We’ll deal with that when we have to,” I said.

  But even as I said that, I knew we were running out of time to figure out these mysteries. The Burnt Polarion was waking up, his daughter was out here with her new flesh body and powers, and we had a suit that might be muy dangerous.

  The universe really didn’t cut us any breaks.

  -54-

  I slept like the dead after that, and I didn’t remember any dreams upon waking.

  A solid twelve hours had passed and nothing had changed. I spoke with Bill and then Alina. She hadn’t cracked the Collector’s gift yet. She and Bill had agreed to move the Theron a considerable distance from the gas giant, putting us at the edge of the star system. So that had changed, but we hadn’t entered foldspace yet.

  We debated all that had happened. And we used sensors on the T-suit, but nothing showed us what was in the black globe.

  The suit lay in the cargo bay. Pendance’s corpse no longer did. It floated in space, having been given a sea burial.

  We debated our plans, particularly regarding the Dreadstar.

  “I’m going to have to use the T-suit,” I concluded. “But I don’t know how to go about testing it safely.”

  “Your ring is supposed to help with that,” Bill said.

  “That’s what the Collector told me, anyway,” I said. “Is it the truth? We don’t know until I try it.”

  We talked more, but didn’t come to any further conclusions.

  Bill left to repair sections of the ship and the battered pod. Gorrax followed me around. He said it was in case the High Polarion attacked again. Alina worked on finding the Dreadstar’s hidden location.

  Gorrax got tired eventually and went to his cabin. It turned out that Tokari warfighters ate more and slept longer than any of us did. Made sense given their size and ferocity.

  I wandered into the cargo bay and stared at the T-suit as if it were a rattlesnake coiled to strike. The black globe on its back waited, and every time I looked at it, I felt something looking back.

  This was getting frustrating. We’d gone to great effort to acquire the T-suit, and now it mocked us with its presence and reputation.

  I paced back and forth before it, not quite daring to get too close again. I wore my ring, a possible protection and interface artifact. I’d tried all the sensors and looked at it through the neural interface. Alina had tried to Wi-Fi connect with it, but had gotten zip, zero, nada.

  “The hell with it,” I said, marching up to the suit.

  The moment my fingers touched the fabric, the surface of the black globe rippled. Then a voice scraped through my head like rusty nails on steel: I see. Another amateur thinks he can wear the mantle of war.

  I jerked my hand away. That hadn’t been my imagination. The thing had spoken in my mind. I didn’t want to deal with something like that just now. It was too soon after everything else.

  I started backing up.

  The black globe pulsed again. Put on the suit, muscle-headed child. Time grows short, and you haven’t even begun to understand what you face. Or are you too scared to do what you have to?

  “I’m not scared,” I said.

  I think you are.

  I flipped it off.

  Did that take excessive courage, or did it merely prove my point that you’re chicken?

  “What are you?” I said.

  What everyone’s been saying: the pilot.

  I shook my head.

  I see. You’re a fool, as you don’t seem to realize that the High Polarion princess is running back to daddy to let him know what happened here.

  “You think so?” I said.

  I know so. The question is, are you going to let that happen?

  That was the question all right. It wasn’t that I could chase down the spy ship and capture her; the question was whether I’d give them the initiative. If “daddy” woke up because of her and started setting up High Polarion defenses… Maybe I’d never get to him with the Negator under those conditions. Maybe he’d practice his Null Equation before I was ready.

  I eyed the T-suit.

  The funny thing was this thing’s insults actually gave me confidence that I could do this. I mean, how bad an alien creature could it be if it traded insults the way it did. Maybe it was trying to help me.

  I screwed up my courage and decided to trust my instincts. Then I lunged at it and grabbed the suit, and started pulling it on before I changed my mind.

  It was heavier than I expected, like putting on medieval armor made of lead. As I set the helmet over my head, the circular antenna on top hummed with energy.

  Then the black globe pulsed warmly against my back.

  Finally, it said. Though watching you fumble with basic fasteners makes me wonder if your species evolved thumbs yesterday.

  “Yuk yuk,” I said, sealing the final clasp.

  Know that I am Chak-Tal, last pilot of the Void Corps. And you, muscled simpleton, are about to learn what teleportation really means.

  Before I could respond, the suit activated. Not gently, not with warning—it just grabbed control. My ring flared hot, trying to interface with the systems, but Chak-Tal was already doing it.

  Lesson one, he said in my skull. Never let the pilot drive until you know where he’s taking you.

  The cargo bay didn’t blink out in the usual wash of golden motes like the temple teleporter. Instead, it seemed to peel away in slabs, like sheets of glass shearing off and twisting into the dark. For a heartbeat, I thought the suit had failed. The deck under my boots buckled, then stretched, and then it wasn’t there at all.

  My stomach lurched, not the quick jolt of a normal jump but a bottomless drop, the kind that claws at your guts and keeps on going. Pressure clamped around my skull until my ears rang and my teeth ached in their sockets. The light around me bled sideways, dragging itself into ribbons, every color stretched thin until they tore into white.

  I tried to breathe but the air quivered in my lungs, vibrating as if it wanted to shake itself loose from my chest. My fingers clawed at nothing, and still the plunge continued. The seconds stretched—too many it seemed to me.

  Just what was happening here? Was this suit too old, not working right?

  Now shapes flickered at the edge of vision. They weren’t places or people, just impressions, like shadows burned onto my eyes. My balance failed as up and down traded places, then folded together until I had no idea which way I faced.

  The temple teleports had been quick and clean, almost casual. This was different. It was violent and relentless. As if something vast had opened its jaws and swallowed me whole. And the terrifying part wasn’t the pain or the pressure. It was the sense that I was falling into a depth no one had ever warned me about—a depth that didn’t care whether I came out the other side.

  Then, abruptly, we materialized with a soft pop, and I fell to my knees and nearly vomited, my stomach heaving. I opened the helmet and then couldn’t hold it back anymore as I puked onto the floor.

  That’s pathetic, Chak-Tal said. In my day, recruits who couldn’t handle dimensional threading were fed to the entropy wyrms.

  “Where—” I gasped, wiping my mouth. “Where are we?”

  He didn’t say.

  I looked around. We were in some kind of storage area with weapons stacked everywhere.

  Did you say something a second ago?

  I blinked several times, trying to get my bearings. “Yeah, I did. Where are we?”

  Fenris III, Chak-Tal said, sounding smug about it. It was one of the more interesting hotspots in the High Polarion Empire.

  “What?” I said. “I thought that empire disappeared a long time ago.”

  You’re right. It did, he said.

  “Then what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

  Of course it does. We’re currently about twenty-one hundred years before your time.

  “You took us back in time? You can do that?”

  Listen, buzz-brain, a T-suit doesn’t just move through space. It threads through dimensions, including the fourth. Though ‘back’ is a primitive way to describe it. We’ve moved sideways through causality to a parallel time-stream that happens to align with—

  “Stop!” I said, my head spinning. “Just… why? Why bring me here?”

  Because you’re going to die otherwise when you face the Burnt Polarion, he said. Your little negation gun won’t work on him, not without the proper focusing element. Which happens to be on Fenris III—you’re welcome.

  “What focusing element?”

  Focusing, amplifying, different people say it differently. It’s called the Entropy Lens. One of seven created at the Empire’s height. It channels negation energy into a coherent beam that can unravel even a High Polarion’s quantum structure.

  “So we just grab it and go?”

  In a manner of speaking, he said.

  That sounded like a catch.

  “So how do we get it?” I asked, pretty certain I wasn’t going to like the answer.

  Listen carefully, because I won’t repeat myself. You have thirty-six hours before the suit’s energy depletes and returns to your time with or without you inside. If you’re not wearing the suit when that happens, you stay in the past and die when the timeline corrects itself.

  “This is crazy if it’s even true. How do I know you’re not lying about all this?”

  Shut up and listen for a change. You need two items. First, a power amplifier or Entropy Lens from the deepest part of the Chirr nest. They built this particular hive around an old tech chamber, something from before even the High Polarions came. The amplifier is what will let you negate the Burnt Polarion with the Negator.

  “And the second thing?” I said.

  I need to feed, as it’s been a long time. Not feed on just anyone, but on something with real power. You’ll know it when you see it.

  “Uh, so you’re saying I should take off the suit and go get this lens?”

  I didn’t say anything about taking off the suit, but I did imply it, yes.

  “What’s a Chirr nest?”

  Look, take off the suit and you’ll turn into a Vomag colonel. You’re still you, but you’ll have his memories and shape. You’ll be wearing his skin.

  “What’s going on here, man?”

  You’re a time-liner peon, so this might seem weird to you. But trust me, this is how these sorts of transfers work. Don’t worry. If you can get back with the items, you’ll don the suit as you and return to the Theron.

  “Just take me back now. We’ll figure something else out.”

  Sorry, no can do, he said. I need the energy for the return home and for when I help you reach the Burnt Polarion.

  I blinked several times. That didn’t seem logical. He’d return anyway in thirty-six hours. But…

  The Void Corps pilot had me over a barrel. While this might be the craziest thing I’ve done so far, it almost seemed in line with Phase Barriers, High Polarions, and the Null Equation.

  I could think this through and probably lose my nerve, or I could just get it done already. It was like jumping a canal with your dirt bike. Too much thinking made everything harder.

  I began to unbuckle the T-suit, knowing this was crazy. As I took off the helmet, my vision blurred and everything seemed to twist around me.

  -55-

  When my vision cleared, I was standing in the same metal storage room, but now it reeked of industrial cleaning solvent and fear-sweat. The air had that recycled staleness that implied we were underground.

  I hid the bulky T-suit behind some gun lockers. As I stepped away, I realized that my center of gravity felt off.

  I looked down at myself. Come on, this was nuts! I was wearing brown ceramic armor over a thick combat suit, the plates scarred and pitted from acid damage. My hands were thicker than they should be, scarred in patterns I didn’t recognize. There was data flooding my brain. They were memories that weren’t mine, knowledge of weapons I’d never used and tunnel-fighting tactics that I’d never learned.

  With a start, I realized that I was wearing the skin of Colonel Timur Malik of the 2051st Berserker Regiment, and I’d been fighting in these tunnels for five years. The memories were so vivid I could taste them: the copper tang of recycled air, the burn of combat stims and the constant ache of old wounds that never quite healed right.