away. Three zotl needlecraft had established the lynk after following a Foke-shaped gravity echo into the Rim. The conclusion was obvious. A Rimstalker had armored a Foke, had sent him to a Foke-fertile planet where the food lure to the zotl would be irresistible, and had used the lure to attack the zotl through their own lynk. The plan had been a cunning and devastatingly effective one.
Like two spider gods, the remaining city-spheres of Galgul hung in a web of broken metal, misty against the whorl of the Cloudriver. The broken hulks of the ruined spheres dangled like torn roots among clots of fused metal. Needlecraft sparkled among the rocksmoke and the avalanches of destroyed shapes.
Camouflaged by the tumult of devastation were jumpships, black boomerangs with laser cannon, waiting in ambush for any Foke or Rimstalker aggression.
Zotl and Rimstalkers had warred since the zotl first arrived in the Werld, seventy-two cycles ago. Though the two species occupied the two distant poles, a Werld apart, they were both four-space creatures, and they conflicted in the tesseract range that contained the Werld. Their battles were timeflux distortions in superspace, and they fought over which species would occupy the narrow tetrad vector field that connected the Werld with the multiverse.
The Rimstalkers had dominated this gateway to infinity for the three hundred cycles of their time in the Werld before the zotl arrived. Rimstalker technology was by far the most advanced, but zotl four-space awareness was innately more adroit. After forty cycles of zotl incursions into the disputed tetrad vector. field, the spider people established a beachhead and, by dint of their elusive four-space awareness, were able to evade Rimstalker timeflux distortions and develop a lynk technology of their own. In another two or three
cycles, .they would have begun establishing a multiversal empire.
The zotl had been taken by surprise when the Rimstalkers abandoned their superspace forays to attack Galgul with a three-space gravity wave. Within moments, the zotl capital had been reduced to ruins. Only two city-spheres were left intact. Three were crippled, and the rest utterly demolished. And now, Foke-zotl food-were using the rubble-clogged fallpaths to penetrate zotl defenses and sabotage the cleanup and repair work.
This was the darkest time the zotl had known in the Werld, and their keening warbled across the tesseract range to Rataros, where the Rimstalkers were equally shocked. They had issued the, armor to Carl Schirmer as a favor to an eld skyle that had opened a channel to the tetrad vector 'field when the Rimstalkers were in need. Unlike the zotl, the Rimstalkers did not rely on organic sustenance. Their nourishment came directly from the hyperphotons of the tetrad vector field, and when the zotl began to expropriate vast swaths of the tetrad field for their own expansionist strategies, Rimstalkers starved.
Eld skyles, as five-space beings, were in a position to direct the four-space vector field to some degree.
One eld skyle had been able to channel enough hyperphotons to save the lives of over a thousand Rimstalkers.
In return, the Rimstalkers had armored Carl and sent him to fetch the three-space substance that the eld skyle needed for its own survival. ''
. The Rimstalkers had never guessed that the zotl would detect the fraction-of-a-second echo in the tetrad field, let alone follow it to its destination. That the armor had demonstrated the wit and initiative to wait for, the zotl to set up a lynk and then use the zotl lynk to assault Calgul was not as surprising. The armor, after all, had its own artificial intelligence loyal to its creators, and it was only slightly hampered by the emotional organ the creature it occupied called a brain.
But now the Rimstalkers had a problem.
If the Rimstalkers had planned this offensive, they would have used a light lance with the power to destroy all of Galgul.
Instead, the zotl had been badly hurt but not eliminated. The Foke harassing them could not hope to overcome them. So, in a cycle or two, the zotl would be back in the tetrad vector field and more aggressive than ever.
Some of the Rimstalkers wanted to armor more Foke and direct an assault against the remnants of Galgul. But that idea was dismissed at once in the face of the realization that the zotl, if pressed to the wall, could use their budding lynk technology to disrupt the gravity matrix that gave the Werld its shape and collapse the entire Werld into, the black hole that held them all.
The Rimstalkers understood: A three-space war against the zotl was. out of the question. They had to capitulate.
In return for a zbtl agreement to stay out of the tetrad vector field for five cycles and then only to occupy regions designated by the Rimstalkers, the Rimstalkers acknowledged that the gravity wave that had blasted Galgul was an accident, not the prelude to a three-space war. As a token of retribution, the Rimstalkers gave the zotl a light lance and armor of their own.
The appeasement was tiny. The armor and lance were designed to implode if their interiors were tampered with, so the zotl could learn nothing from them. Also, they were useless anywhere near Rataros, so they were no good against the Rimstalkers. The only immediate use for the armored lance was as an instrument of revenge. The Foke who had fired the gravity wave into
Galgul would be destroyed, and the Foke-fertile planet that had served as a lure would become the first conquest of the zotl's multiversal empire.
To celebrate this new determination, the best of the suspended Foke were revived and milked.
The choice stock of Foke delicacies was located in one of the mangled spheres. There, behind fumestained glastic panels, were several thousand human bodies asleep in no-time. The myriads of Foke were individually encapsulated and stacked upright to facilitate -their gravity-pumped life support.
Among the stock was a slender woman with a quiet face and strawberry flecks in her drowsy gray eyes.
'Evoe is alive,' Zeke told Carl. Zeke's eyes were blurry with drowsiness. His bear-sized frame leaned in the doorway to his bedroom, his baggy black silk pajamas scarred with sleep creases.
Carl had already shaved and dressed, though dawn was still a dark hour away. He wore a beige pair of trousers, sneakers, and a purple pullover sweater. He was sitting in the living room practicing touch control with his lance by changing channels on the TV from across the room. When he heard Zeke, his hand twitched, and the TV flew off its stand and smashed into the wall. Sparks and glass spurted, and Carl leaped up from the cushioned chair where he was slouched. 'tire you sure?'
Zeke stepped over the shattered corpse of the TV and stretched out on the sofa. 'I saw her in Galgul,' he
