The Russian he had met in the woods touched Mirsky's arm and pointed east. Hundreds of Russian soldiers squatted in a square, flanked on all sides by at least a dozen crosses and three people he didn't recognize, dressed much like the woman who had taken him captive.

More blunt-arrowhead craft descended and landed near the chamber's southern cap, disgorging more people. Mirsky wondered idly if they were all going to be killed. Did it still matter? Having died once? He decided it did.

He still wished for the stars. Now the possibility of attaining that wish was remote, yet the wish itself informed him he was essentially Pavel Mirsky. He still had a connection with the five-year-old boy who had stared up at the stars over winter-bound Kiev. In fact, that memory was pure, not reconstructed but original; Vielgorsky had not blasted that most basic experience from his head.

He wondered idly if Vielgorsky and the other political officers were in the crowds of captives. What could they do to him now? Nothing.

Only a Russian, Mirsky thought, could draw a free breath in such a situation as this.

Senator Prescient Oyu joined them at the resort and informed Yates and Olmy that the Frants were planning to close the gate, standard procedure in any temporary emergency involving the Way.

Olmy acted quickly. Before the gate could be closed, Yates requested that a small defense flawship be prepared to ferry the secondary gate opener and his guests. The request was denied, but Yates tested his authority on the Frant side of the gate by appropriating one of the two Axis craft left on the reception field. The human defense forces there—mostly Naderite homorphs—decided to abide by the letter of the law, and not Toller's parting instructions, and gave the secondary gate opener what he asked for, as well as two guards and a mechanical defense worker.

Taking the craft through the gate and up to the axis, they found three flawships that had been disengaged from the singularity to allow Toller's craft passage. One was unoccupied; it had been parked just minutes before and abandoned by its Naderite crew in a near-axis inspection area, tethered to the flaw by traction fields. Again, following the letter of the law, the crew had retired their small flawship for an inspection after a hundred thousand hours of active duty.

Yates's authority easily overrode the flawship's ambiguous instructions.

They boarded and restrung the flawship on the singularity. The flaw passage through the center of the ship simply extended to the outer bulkheads, reshaping the craft's nose-in-profile from an O to a U, and then closed around the flaw. They accelerated toward 1.3 ex 9.

"You have a lot of support, don't you?" Lanier asked Olmy as they watched the Way blur into black and gold.

"More than I would have gambled on," Olmy said.