That seemed like an unfair advantage. But whining about it wouldn’t help me. Outfighting him might.

  For a split second, his eyes cleared and I saw panic. Could that be the real Zorion surfacing? “The proof,” he whispered. “It proves itself through me.” Then the moment passed and he smiled as a demon would.

  “You see?” he said. “I’m connected. You can’t negate me without negating the machine, and negating the machine frees the equation.”

  He’s bluffing, Chak-Tal said. Look at the lines.

  I didn’t really know what the High Polarion had meant with his latest words. The T-suit’s dying sensors showed the light-streams, though. They seemed like two-way cables of radiance running between Zorion and the machine. Who fed whom? I had no real idea, but I could do this—

  I fired at the lines.

  Zorion threw himself into the shot, phase-shifting mid-rush and locking solid just long enough to take it in the chest. The negation ate deep, a football-sized subtraction. He dropped, breathing hard.

  Had I done it?

  No.

  The machine rebuilt him, formula by formula. I’d have to chip away at him for weeks to do it this way.

  “Enough of this,” Zorion said. “Behold!” He raised his left hand and reality rippled.

  Twelve of him appeared out of thin air. I had no idea how the copies did that. Maybe it only mattered that the original could.

  They circled me, all of them reaching for the ring hidden behind a T-suit glove.

  I phase-shifted as their hands did. I could tell they wanted to reach through the glove and pull off my ring, a similar trick to what I’d done to get the Negator and shoot Axion on the alien submarine.

  I phase-shifted farther than they did.

  Their fingers slid through me, but I could still aim with the Negator. I spun and fired in a low arc, trusting Malik’s voice in my bones: Don’t hunt where he is; hunt where he’ll be.

  Three of them vanished, negated by the gun.

  To your right, Chak-Tal warned.

  I dropped, rolled under a reaching arm, and fired point-blank. The backwash of void clawed at the suit, but it held together.

  The rest of the Zorions swarmed for me. I held my ground, firing again and again. Four more disappeared, then three. We were down to a single copy—and the real Zorion.

  “It’s too late,” Zorion said. “Don’t you see? It’s self-sustaining now. Even without me, it will complete. And the ring? I guess I didn’t need it after all.”

  I didn’t buy that, not for a second.

  I put my back to a failing pylon, lifted the Negator, and pretended to fire at him. He phase-shifted, just like I wanted. I tracked the pressure dip, the flicker, and fired where he had to reappear.

  The invisible shot hit him in the gut and drove through. He staggered, choking. The machine tried to heal him, the light-lines surging.

  I cut them instead with the Negator. One shot. Then another. The streams winked out and his body faltered because the machine didn’t repair him anymore.

  He lunged at me, reaching for the ring, eyes wild. The crushing presence of the equation around him faltered for the first time in maybe centuries. The real Zorion must have surfaced, even as his body still reached for the ring against his will.

  “Finally,” he breathed. “Finally free—”

  I pulled the trigger a final time.

  A hole appeared in him. Behind him, a pylon vanished. Zorion fell forward, his face already dissolving into nothing. The machine couldn’t save him this time. As fast as it rebuilt him, he dissolved even faster.

  An eye peered at me.

  Then he was gone.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  The chamber shook and the machine howled. Instead of radiating lines of Null Equation out, it seemed to be eating the machine and then the room. It was imploding instead of exploding. If I didn’t get out of here—

  I have one jump left, Chak-Tal said. But I can only go straight up.

  “Up is fine.”

  He teleported, and I found myself lying on ice, staring at stars that still existed. The Dreadstar hung where it belonged, dark and terrible.

  Far off, something burned down through the thin atmosphere. That had to be the Theron.

  I pushed myself up. Everything hurt, but that was good, as pain meant I was alive instead of turned into nothing.

  It hit me then. I’d done it. The Burnt Polarion was negated, the Null Equation cut off before it could learn to crawl. Zorion was nothing now.

  In time, the Theron settled on her skids. A ramp lowered and bit the frost, and a space-suited Alina ran out. Gorrax pounded after her like a mobile siege engine. They were real. I had never loved the sight of two people more.

  I climbed to my feet and staggered toward them. My knees buckled, but Alina’s gloved hands reached me, holding me up. Gorrax clapped my shoulder and nearly sent me back through the ice.

  Behind us, ice shifted on ice. The sky was dark, huge and indifferent. That felt right, I guess.

  Then they helped me stagger toward the ramp.

  -73-

  The Theron hummed through foldspace, a day out from the frozen corpse of Fenris III. I sat in the galley, nursing my fourth cup of what Bill insisted was coffee but tasted more like burnt motor oil. I caught myself checking my hands, maybe to make sure they were still solid after all that phase shifting.

  “You keep doing that,” Alina said from across the table. She had a tablet in front of her, scrolling through sensor data from our escape, she said.

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “Looking at your hands like you expect them to disappear,” she said.

  I shrugged. “After everything that’s happened, can you blame me?”

  Gorrax entered the galley, having to duck while going through the hatch. He grabbed what looked like an entire roasted animal from the cooler and sat down, the chair groaning under his weight.

  “The Dreadstar must still be burning,” he said. “I monitored communications before we left. There was much fighting onboard. The Ick battled against escaped prisoners. Some escape pods reached the frozen planet. They will die there, yes?”

  We’d been over this. I wondered why Gorrax wouldn’t let it go.

  “Who reached the frozen planet?” I asked. “The Ick or the prisoners?”

  “The Ick, I think.”

  “Good,” I said. “I hope they freeze, but who knows what they can find down there.”

  “The prison ship won’t be able to enter foldspace for quite some time,” Bill said. “From what I could gather, the Collectors’ sabotage of the ship was quite thorough. The prison ship is trapped in that system for months, I’d wager.”

  We sat in silence for a moment as the fridge system buzzed. It needed fixing. One of these days, Bill would get to it.

  “I’ve been thinking about the ring,” I said, holding up my right hand. The High Circle ring caught the galley’s light. “Zorion said he needed it for the Null Equation, but at the end, he claimed he didn’t.”

  We remembered Zorion, even though we shouldn’t have, since he’d been negated. I think the ring had something to do with that. After all, we’d remembered Axion. Zorion’s daughter must have vanished, though, since Zorion had never existed. I wasn’t sure how all that worked…

  I shrugged.

  “Zorion must have been lying,” Bill said. “Or deluding himself. The equation had corrupted his thinking so thoroughly he may not have known truth from fiction anymore.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe the ring wasn’t about the equation. Maybe it was about controlling something else in the process.”

  “Like what?” Alina asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But the Collector said there were three rings, each with its own purpose. This one interfaces with Polarion tech and protects against mental intrusion. What do the other two do?”

  “Questions for another day,” Gorrax said, tearing into his meal. “We survived. We stopped the unmaking. That is enough for now.”

  He was right, of course. We’d faced down a god-like being with reality-ending mathematics and won. That should be enough for anybody, maybe for the rest of our lives.

  “How long until we reach this Tarsis Station?” I asked Bill.

  “Ten more days,” the android said. “They should have replacement parts for the shield generator and fresh supplies.”

  “And beer—I hope real beer, not the synthesized swill you’ve been pouring us,” I said.

  “And ammunition,” Gorrax said.

  “And updated star charts,” Alina added.

  We all had our priorities.

  I stood up, stretching. Everything still ached from the fight with Zorion. “I’m going to check on the cargo bay.”

  The walk through the Theron’s corridors felt normal, wonderfully normal. There were no alarms, no enemies, no reality coming apart at the seams. Just the steady thrum of a ship doing what it was meant to do.

  In the cargo bay, the T-suit hung on its rack. The black globe on its back was dark and silent. Chak-Tal hadn’t spoken since we’d left Fenris III. I wondered if he was sleeping or just gone silent now that the crisis was over.

  The amplifier case sat on a workbench, still sealed. We’d decided not to mess with it. Some things were better left alone, at least for now.

  I ran my hand along the Theron’s bulkhead, feeling the metal under my palm. This ship had become home in a way I’d never expected when I’d found it in Nevada. Had that really only been a couple of months ago? It felt like a lifetime.

  “Kane?” Alina’s voice came over the comm. “We’re picking up a distress signal.”

  That seemed strange, as we were in foldspace. How was that supposed to work? I headed back to the bridge to find out.

  It turned out that the signal was weak. On the main screen, Alina had isolated the source: a beacon obviously launched into foldspace, not too far from us at the moment.

  The beacon showed us an image of a cargo hauler drifting in normal space, its engine section blown out.

  “I suspect pirates caused that,” Bill said.

  We had started back for Earth. It would take us a long time to get there, of course. Maybe I’d check out Tau Ceti first. I hadn’t decided yet.

  “All right,” I said, settling into the pilot’s chair. “Let’s take a look.”

  “It could be a trap,” Gorrax rumbled.

  I twisted around, looking at the big lug. This guy had ambush on the mind.

  “How do you figure that?” I asked.

  “The beacon shows us this ship,” Gorrax said. “We not know if it’s true or not.”

  I raised my eyebrows. He had a point.

  “We’ll go in loaded for bear,” I said.

  “What that mean?” Gorrax said.

  “I’m priming the pulse cannons, putting them online,” I said.

  “Yes,” Gorrax said. “That is good idea.”

  The Theron dropped out of foldspace. I used the sensors, but there was no spaceship, no nearby planets or stars—nothing at all.

  “I don’t see any pirates,” I said.

  “I don’t see anything,” Alina said.

  “So who put that beacon into foldspace?” I asked.

  “We could pick it up and take it apart,” Alina said. “That might give us a clue.”

  “Bill?” I asked.

  “It might prove a difficult task zeroing in on the beacon in foldspace,” he said.

  I kept expanding the sensor sweep, looking for anything that might have launched the beacon in the first place.

  “I found something,” Alina said.

  “A ship?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  Then I saw it, too. It was fifteen billion kilometers from us, more a speck at this distance.

  “Should we take a look?” I said.

  “Maybe we’ve done our part for a good long while,” Alina said. “I mean by stopping Zorion.”

  “They did send a distress beacon,” Bill said.

  “If that speck out there even sent it,” Alina said.

  I thought about that. “Let’s at least get closer before we decide.”

  And with that, I engaged the thrusters and headed that way.

  -74-

  Soon enough, Alina showed us a needle-thin derelict vessel, tumbling slowly against the stars.

  “That looks like a Throy courier ship,” Bill said, enhancing the image on his display. “If I’m not mistaken, it is a Husk-class courier.”

  “You recognize it?” I said.

  Bill nodded.

  “From when were you out here last?” I said.

  “Approximately two thousand years ago,” Bill said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “There are no life signs,” Alina said—meaning on the derelict.

  “I’d be surprised if there were,” I said.

  “But it looks as if the cargo hold is intact,” she said.

  In time, I brought the Theron alongside the thin derelict, matching its slow tumble. The courier ship was maybe a third of our size, its hull scorched and pitted from what looked like weapon fire. Long streaks of melted metal suggested energy weapons, probably military-grade.

  “The docking bay has been breached,” I said, studying the damage through the sensors. “It looks like they took a direct hit to their main airlock.”

  “Hull integrity is compromised in three sections,” Alina added, checking her readings. “Whatever hit them, I doubt the crew had much time to react.”

  “We’ll have to suit up and go EVA,” I said.

  Gorrax grunted his approval. “Good. I prefer to see danger with my own eyes.”

  Twenty minutes later, Alina, Gorrax and I floated across the gap between ships in our bulky EVA suits, tethered together by safety lines. The void between the vessels felt vast despite being only thirty meters across. The derelict’s airlock was gone, the metal twisted from some ancient explosion.

  “The atmosphere has been gone for decades,” Alina said, checking her scanner as we approached the breach. “Maybe longer. I’m reading trace elements that suggest the ship’s been drifting for at least fifty years.”

  We made our way through the ship’s narrow corridors, helmet lights cutting through the darkness.

  Bill had told us the Throy built their ships for function over comfort—cramped spaces with low ceilings that made me feel claustrophobic. Everything was covered in a fine layer of ice crystals. That must have happened when the atmosphere had explosively decompressed.

  “There’s a passenger compartment ahead,” I said, indicating a sealed hatch marked with alien symbols.

  I found and cranked the manual release, the mechanism protesting after possibly decades of cold and vacuum. Inside, we found three Throy in environmental suits, still strapped into their acceleration couches. They’d been dead so long their bodies had mummified inside their suits; the fabric was as brittle as old paper.

  I played my light over them. “It looks like they died fast, at least.”

  We searched the rest of the ship, room by cramped room. Personal effects had been scattered by the decompression. The empty supply lockers suggested that whoever had attacked the ship had picked it clean.

  “Pirates were thorough,” Gorrax said, examining an empty weapons locker. “They took everything of value.”

  The cargo bay was exactly what Alina had predicted, intact but empty, just tie-down points where freight containers must have been secured.

  “Whoever hit them cleaned them out well,” I said, echoing Gorrax.

  We spent another twenty minutes going through storage compartments, maintenance areas, and the ship’s small galley. There was nothing. The attackers had stripped the vessel bare.

  We were about to head back to the Theron when Alina’s scanner picked up something odd near the pilot’s cabin.

  “Wait,” she said, stopping at a section of bulkhead. “There’s a hollow space here.”

  She ran her gloved hands along the bulkhead. The metal looked identical to the rest of the corridor, but her scanner insisted there was empty space behind it.

  “That must be a smuggler’s compartment,” I said.

  It took me several minutes to locate the hidden catch, a pressure plate disguised as a rivet head. When I pressed it, a section of the bulkhead slid aside.

  Inside the narrow compartment was a single item: a wooden box, maybe the size of a shoebox.

  “Would you look at that,” I said, taking it out.

  “Is it locked?” Alina asked.

  I examined the lid, finding a simple latch. “It doesn’t seem to be.” I opened it, and we all leaned in to look.

  Inside, nestled in compartments lined with something that looked like silk, were dozens of gems. Rubies the color of fresh blood, emeralds, sapphires like chips of deep ocean, and others I didn’t recognize that caught our helmet lights like trapped starfire.

  “Someone’s retirement fund,” I said softly.

  “Or payment for something they didn’t want traced,” Alina said.

  “Not a complete waste of time, then,” Gorrax rumbled.

  We sealed up the ship as a courtesy to the dead. Then we made our way back to the Theron. Once we’d cycled through the airlock and gotten out of our EVA suits, I set the wooden box on the galley table where we could all get a better look at it.

  In the ship’s normal lighting, the gems were even more spectacular. Some were perfectly clear; others had inclusions that created patterns like trapped galaxies.

  “These have to be worth a fortune,” Alina said, holding up a ruby the size of her thumb.

  “We should split them four ways,” I said.

  “Keep them,” Bill said. “I have no use for such things.”

  “Same here,” Gorrax said, waving a massive hand. “Pretty rocks are not a warrior’s treasure. Victory and honor cannot be purchased.”

  Alina looked at me.

  “This will be the ship’s slush fund,” I said. “We may need money for repairs later. We’ll keep them here.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Alina said.

  I closed the box, listening to the satisfying click of the latch. Then I put the box in the freezer unit.