Behind the precincts, half a million kilometers down the Way, a tiny defense flawship was decelerating drastically, the flaw ahead of it brightening to violet and blue. It had to slow to Earth orbital velocity by the time it followed the linked precincts out the end of the Way—if it managed that feat at all.

The charges buried in the walls of the seventh chamber synchronized.

The grips of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were withdrawn, and the huge cylinders coasted south toward the seventh chamber cap at just a little over forty thousand kilometers per hour, or eleven kilometers per second.

The detonators reached their appointed microsecond.

Within the seventh chamber, there was a noise beyond human description. Billions of tons of rock and metal rushed in toward the axis from the seven charge points, and immense fissures shot outward to the vacuum of space.

Around the northern pole of the asteroid, dust and debris spread out in a wide circular fan, followed by a white glow more brilliant than the sun. The glow faded to red and purple. A seventy-kilometer-wide monk's cap of rock was propelled away from the asteroid. The asteroid withdrew much more slowly from its severed end, and for the briefest moment, between them, there was a hole in space, filled with the light of the plasma tube, showing an infinite perspective—

Out of which flew the linked precincts of Axes Euclid and Thoreau, barely missing the asteroid itself, shunting aside debris with conical traction fields. Through the fading glow and spinning chunks of rock and metal, the precincts passed out of range of the Thistledown's Beckmann drives. The drives then fired to maneuver the Thistledown into orbit.

The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness—violet and sea green, carmine and indigo—venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum.

Closing.

Sealing itself off forever from this universe.

Olmy sat back and closed his eyes. Yates was more animated, rubbing his hands together. Senator Oyu appeared as cool as ever, but Lanier noticed her eye movements were frequent and jerky.

If Prescient Oyu was even slightly nervous, and Olmy resigned, then Lanier figured he had every right to be terrified.

"Are we going to make it?" he asked.

"Just barely," Olmy said, eyes still shut.

Lanier faced the bow.

The brightness of the seven coordinated blasts had reduced the bow to opacity. Now it cleared and gave them a view of the Way's beginning. Within a glowing circle of molten asteroidal debris and frozen streaks of rushing water vapor was a circle of blackness.

The circle was shrinking, being taken over by an iridescent nullity that hurt the eyes: the new terminus of the Way.

And then, within the diminishing black circle, Lanier saw a dull white crescent. He blinked.

The Moon.