Tennal-and-Surit struck. They realized it was a mistake almost the moment they’d done it. It was like attacking a battleship with a tugboat. Surit couldn’t feed Tennal energy fast enough, even doing his frantic best—Oma had hundreds of people to draw on. She brushed the attack off casually. Her presence paused, triangulating, then projected an aura of annihilating energy at them. It seared their presence like a third-degree burn.

Hide, Surit said grimly. Another one like that and they were dead. Tennal-Surit dove back into the eddies of chaotic space. But just as they were learning, Oma was too: she slid between the disturbed currents after them.

She’s following us, Tennal said frantically. We have to try something else.

Surit realized what was nearby. The parent and origin of all the disturbances of chaotic space. The galactic link itself.

Oh Lights, Tennal said, in either a curse or a religious plea that echoed strangely in their alien mind. Guide us if you ever fucking have. All right, Surit.

Tennal-Surit jumped into the relative calm of clear space, across the interstellar winds, and into the maelstrom around the link.

The currents were shockingly strong. Tennal couldn’t keep them on a straight course. Instead they had to ride the eddies, trying desperately to lose Oma. At first, neither of them remembered Archer Link Station, bobbing like a leaf in a pond on winds humans couldn’t see. The horror of it hit them both at once: either they or Oma could destroy it with one careless movement. They skidded around it, traveling millions of human miles to circle around the link.

From here, they could see what the center of the link actually was. And both Tennal and Surit stopped moving altogether in stunned fascination.

To a human, the link only looked like a crackling storm. But the ghost in their minds could see the way the link led out of their sector—it was a tunnel, but not just one: it was a network, a web of them. They could both feel their minds expanding to accommodate new dimensions. Humans used one axis of the link to skip between two fixed points, like skipping a stone across the water, but that wasn’t what they were for. That wasn’t all they were. Surit thought of the root system of a forest, tendrils upon tendrils, every bare patch of earth connected, eventually, to everything else.

Oh shit, Tennal said suddenly. Like the whirlpool it resembled, the circling currents had sucked them closer to the vortex of the link, to those infinite fractal paths through space. Tennal threw them backward, panicking. Let’s not get sucked into that.

The whirlpool shuddered behind them.

Oma wasn’t as small and nimble as them. Instead of navigating the currents around the link, she forged her way through them. The power she was drawing on shaped the fabric of space around her. The link shivered like metal under stress.