“Your dad’s been in the Wadi juice, sounds like.”

“No he hasn’t, my dad—”

Anlyn cleared her throat behind the bickering boys before the argument could get personal. The volunteer peacemakers spun around, and she took as much pleasure in their shocked expressions as she had amusement in their whispered delusions.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked.

“Princess Hooo,” Rend said—

“Lady Hooo,” Dor whispered, elbowing his friend. He shrugged for Anlyn, as if he couldn’t be held responsible for his crewmate’s imprecise knowledge of royal etiquette.

“I’m sorry, Lady Hooo,” Rend said, “I forget you’re engaged. We were just talking about Lord Campton and his lance. My father was there for the speech. He saw—well . . .” The poor kid glanced at the lance, seemingly miserable with nerves. His hands squeezed fistfuls of his outer tunic as he fidgeted in place.

Anlyn gave each of the boys a serious look as she walked around them and approached the weapons rack. She rested a hand reverently on Edison’s lance. “It belonged to one of my uncles,” she said. She turned to Rend and Dor. “A guard once used it to cut a friend of mine in two. Lord Campton later turned it into a symbol of peace, not war.”

“Told you,” Dor said to Rend.

Rend ignored him. “I heard it was you who used it in the Pinnacle, that the great speech came about because of . . .” Rend gazed at the lance.

Anlyn could sense he wanted to touch it. She pressed the pad of her finger to the security harness and the clamps clacked open. Pulling it from the rack, she turned around and held it out to the two lads.

Dor reached for it eagerly. Rend grasped the other half as if the lance were as fragile as Thooo eggs.

“Don’t touch the trigger,” she warned them.

Neither boy looked up; they just nodded and turned the large device over and over, inspecting the royal markings and the electrical modifications Edison had made. Rend ran his hand down to the Wadi hook on the one end while Dor tested the point on the other side with a cautious finger.

“I would let you inspect it further,” Anlyn said, “but I actually came to retrieve it before our meeting with the Rift Commander.”

“It was an honor, Lady Hooo,” Rend said. He pulled the lance away from Dor and extended it to her. “I would love to speak with you sometime, perhaps hear more of your interpretations of the prophecy.”

“I would enjoy that as well, peacemaker. And it would please me to hear your interpretation. Now, return to your duties. There will be time enough to gossip while we wait for the prophecy’s fulfillment. For all we know, we may have years together for swapping tales.”

Both boys smiled and bowed low, pulling their outer cloaks up to their chins. Anlyn returned the gesture with one hand, touching the deck with the tip of the lance as she did so. She then moved off in the direction of the embassy ship’s cockpit, smiling to herself.

Behind her, she could hear one of the boys whispering excitedly. Something about “a thousand suns” and “Wadi queens.”

Anlyn kept the end of the Wadi lance just off the deck as she made her way to the cockpit. Several crewmembers and peacemakers greeted her as she passed, bowing low and grasping the edges of their tunics. Anlyn returned the stiff formalities, but all the time-consuming ceremony just heightening her eagerness to join Edison near the bow of the ship. She felt herself hurrying, needing to be near him. She passed through the narrow communications room and crossed the staff corridor, pausing to wave to the off-duty crew dining in the officer’s mess. She then turned toward the nose of the large starship and hurried down the wide central passageway. As she went through the last sliding door, she found Edison waiting for her just outside the cockpit, mindful as always of her fear of going inside.

“Pleasant awakenings,” Edison said, greeting her in his thick, growl-ing English.

Anlyn stepped into his embrace. Her head rested against his belly, her Glemot lover a full meter taller than she.

“Pleasant awakenings to you,” she cooed. She wrapped one arm as far around him as she could and remained there, taking deep breaths. Of all the things she missed about her time aboard Parsona—excepting Molly’s and Cole’s company, of course—she most regretted no longer being able to sleep on Edison’s chest, warm and safe. Now that they were back among her people and Counselors of the Circle, certain decorum had to be observed.

They had planned on marrying, on making their union official, but had promised Molly and Cole they wouldn’t do so until they were all back together. That impulsive and sincere vow had now created the distinct possibility that the marriage would never occur, but they had decided to respect the wishes of their friends. And—as Edison had once put it in his awkward English—they would respect “her culture’s non-optimal stance on betrothal co-habitation.”

Anlyn pulled away from him and gazed up at the silky coat of fur sticking out of his tunics and at the intelligent, bright eyes below his strong brow. She patted his arm and glanced into the cockpit. “Are we there yet?” she asked, unable to see anything over the flight crew, as everything in the ship was built for the height of a Drenard male.

“Approximately,” Edison said. “I have a visual.” He looked down at his lance, which Anlyn held with one hand. “Will that be required?”

“No, but it does carry a certain mystique, which may help.”

Edison frowned.

“I know how you feel about the prophecy stuff, but we’ve gotten quite far on superstition, so wield it as if you believe.” She handed him the lance. “Are you ready?”

Edison grunted. “Approximately.”

Anlyn smiled. She thanked the flight crew without stepping inside, then the two of them turned and set off for the airlock. Once again, the walk was punctuated with bows and raised tunics. Anlyn fought the urge to politely wave them along; she participated in each ritual as she attempted to build solidarity amongst her crew. With Dani’s help, she had hand-picked each crewmember from a legion of volunteers. They had initially thought it would be impossible to find a full ambassadorial complement to accompany her to the Great Rift, but the opposite problem had occurred: so many believers of the Bern Prophecy had shown up that most had to be turned away. And—instead of looking for the few faithful—they had found themselves weeding out the truly fanatic, searching among them for the rare moderate and temperate heads.

A second and larger worry had arisen during their selection process: sniffing for the moles her ex-fiancée Bodi had attempted to plant within the mission. It wasn’t a question of whether some had made it through, but how many.

And what they had planned.

For security reasons, the embassy ship was not allowed to couple with the Rift Keep. A shuttle met them several hundred kilometers out and ferried them to the command corner of the great structure: a small outpost kept separate from the living and business sectors, accessible only by ship.

Anlyn and Edison admired the Keep from their padded seats as the shuttle pilot transferred them over. Like other defensive keeps from the histories of so many races, its position had been determined by tactical necessity. Of course, where most keeps of old were placed on high overlooks, along critical waterways, or by the mouths of important Wadi canyons, the Great Keep stood in the middle of nowhere, out in the vast expanse of empty space. Because that’s precisely where the Bern Rift had been discovered so many eons ago.

“Approximate its diameter,” Edison said, peering through the glass.

Anlyn looked out her porthole at the Keep, even though she knew the answer by heart. The scaffolding of the structure formed a mesh of metal, like a giant cage hanging in the vacuum of space. Ribbons of steel crisscrossed from one side to the other, creating a tangle of obstructing debris around the tear. It looked like something in mid-construction, but it had been completed many Hori cycles ago.

“It’s just over a thousand kilometers across,” she told Edison.

He grunted, obviously impressed.

Anlyn turned to him and smiled; it wasn’t often she saw him in awe of Drenard-built things. The sensation filled her with pride for her race, even as the reason for having constructed the Great Keep gave her a shiver of fear.

“And central to the structure?” Edison put a claw against the glass, pointing toward the occasional flash of golden light emanating from within the keep.

“The stuff in the middle? That’s the armored cube right across the tear. If you think of the cosmos as having a wound, that’s the bandage.”

“Increase specificity,” Edison said, reminding Anlyn just who she was dumbing things down for. She rooted around in her childhood studies, then recited in a sing-song manner:

“It’s saturated fluoroalkane in gold alloy armored canisters. The fluorine and carbon are bonded together, making them extremely inert, therefore hard to demolish from the other side.” She took a deep breath. “Still, the Bern do find ways to destroy it now and then. It’s a constant battle to keep enough in place that nothing gets through.”

Edison turned and looked toward the cockpit of the shuttle. His brows were down, his eyes unfocused.

Anlyn smiled at him. “Oh, my. Did I just get too technical for you?”

“Hmm?” He turned to her. “No, I lapsed into ruminations. What prevents the Bern from employing a Birch reduction using electride salts? The ejected anion would destabilize the bond, resulting in one-four cyclohexadienes. Reacting through the rift on such a solution would be elementary, especially considering the electrical conductance of the golden vessels.”

Anlyn shook her head. “Do what?”

“A Birch reduction. Using electride—”

“No, no.” Anlyn waved her arms. “Forget it. Look, talk to some of the physicists about—”

“Chemists,” Edison corrected.

“Okay, talk to the chemists about that. The point is, the stuff works. Mostly.”

“Mostly? Elaborate further.”

“Well—”

Before she could elaborate further, telling him about the frequent escapes and the methods used to chase blockade runners down, the shuttle thumped against the locking collar of the Keep and it was time to depart. One of the flight crew exited the cockpit and opened a hatch forward of them. He bowed and waved them through as Edison and Anlyn left their seats and approached the door.

“Thank you,” Anlyn said, as much for rescuing her from the conver-sation as for the flight. She bowed and then stepped out of the shuttle and into one of the many connecting tubes ringing the Great Rift Keep. Through the transparent passage, she could see the vast network of visisteel corridors stretching out for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. They converged on each other like a Drenard freeway, further than the eye could see. Several shuttles buzzed along the perimeter, their hulls twinkling with navigation lights as they ferried workers from one part of the Keep to another.

Strolling down the passageway to greet them was Lord Bishar Nooo, the Commander of the Keep. Anlyn recognized him more by his elab-orate tunics than his face. They were family—as she could tell by his outermost layers—but they had never actually met.

“Anlyn Hooo,” he said in greeting, using her common name. He bent over and embraced her fondly. “You must be Edison,” he said, showing his palms and bowing, his eyes darting to the lance held by the Glemot’s side. “Pleased to have you both.”

“Are you?” Anlyn asked. “I’d heard you weren’t amused with our mission.”

Bishar smiled. “Let’s walk,” he said, waving them along the tube. A dozen meters or so from the locking collar, the passage opened into the command center, the military heart of the Keep.

Anlyn followed, looking down at the grav panels visible in the floor of the visisteel tube. They not only provided physical weight, they also seemed to manufacture psychological comfort. She didn’t suppose it would feel pleasant to walk across solid visisteel and nothing else, not with the cosmos hanging on all sides.

“Unsuitable for agoraphobics,” Edison mused in English, obviously thinking the same thing.

“What was that?” Bishar asked, turning to face them.

“My betrothed said this place would be unpleasant for people fright-ened by open places.”

Bishar laughed. “Without question. Our job, though, is one of con-stant vigilance. There are outbreaks now and then, and every staff member carries a warning device and possesses a keen eye.” He patted the small object hanging around his neck, nestled in the folds of his outer tunic. “The visisteel makes sure nothing is missed, and a battalion of Interceptors are always on standby, ready and alert.”

“A full battalion? Even with the extermination of the Humans un-derway?”

Bishar frowned. “Let’s not call it an ‘extermination,’ shall we? It will mean an end to the hostilities in the rest of the galaxy, which will eventually make our job here that much easier. Until then, there will be some cutbacks, of course, and some pilots taking extra shifts. Come, step inside.”

Bishar waved them through a set of clear blast doors and into a room full of manned consoles glittering with purposeful lights. The walls, ceiling, and most of the floor were transparent, creating an uncanny scene of hovering workspaces amid a backdrop of stars, nebulae, and woven strips of steel.

“Cutbacks?” Anlyn asked, pressing the point home. She watched as Edison wandered to one of the control booths and peered over an operator’s shoulder, probably figuring out how to rebuild the entire machine from twigs and grasses if he had to.