No energies slashed out; the gate-like link was stable and unimpeded. The remotes gave him a visual picture from within the Way, just centimeters above the link.

The Way was empty in this vicinity, and for hundreds of kilometers north and south. Radar signals probed rapidly south, and returned just as rapidly, telling him his gate had been opened a distance of one thousand kilometers from the cauterized end of the Way.

The Way was empty in that direction, and to the north, as well, for at least five hundred thousand kilometers.

Korzenowski broadcast the Jart’s signal once again through the link, paused for several seconds and then repeated it continuously. There was no response.

But the emptiness might be response enough…might, in Jart manners, be an exceedingly cordial invitation.

“We have a beachhead,” Korzenowski picted to the defense force observers. “The Way is empty to at least five ex five.”

He removed the remotes and severed the gate-like link. It had been previously agreed that under this circumstance, he was to go ahead and attempt a full link, to connect the Way to the seventh chamber.

Defense forces were already marshaling there, ready to secure the Hexamon’s advantage.

Korzenowski rested for several minutes, steeled himself, and began the re-opening of the Way.

The dot of light formed again, extended its petals outward, filled the void beyond the open seventh chamber with a garden of intricate, elegant flowers, the tortured world-lines of a haze of half-real universes surrounding status geometry. The flowers dimmed and were pushed aside.

At the edges of the seventh chamber, the color of bronze became apparent. Faster than his unaided eye could follow, the Way filled in the void with its complete presence.

The Engineer kept his place at the center of the blister, linked to the clavicle, waiting for the final evidence of his success: the lengthening of the Way’s central singularity, the flaw, to compensate for the Way’s new condition as an adjunct of status space-time.

He knew precisely where the flaw would stop its advance. It would end up just over nineteen centimeters from the locus of his clavicle, pushing through the blister field.

He felt the flaw advancing: to his eyes, it resembled a strange, curved mirror growing larger in front of him. In the clavicle’s abstraction, it registered as an enormous dynamically restrained force, all the tension of the Way’s existence and self-contradictions tied up in a calm, yet raging knot. The singularity was in some respects more real than the Way itself; but few humans could comprehend that kind of reality.

The flaw pushed aside the blister’s field, which formed a thin, bright-blue ring around it. Inexorable, awesome even to the Engineer, the blunt end of the flaw reflected some nightmarish version of their world, images thankfully indistinct, and came to its greatest extension—as he had predicted—barely a hand-span from the clavicle.