Tensely, Rocket said, "You can't go back through Dream Gate. I don't care what your dragon's said, it's a lie. Dragons lie. You don't know what's waiting for you on the other side. If you cross over, you'll be—" His image cut off abruptly. But Jane knew Melanchthon's circuitry too intimately for him to work that trick. She overrode his commands. Rocket reappeared. "—forever. The mundane body you left behind is still alive. Like calls to like. You'll be drawn straight to it."
The streaming electromagnetic fault lines ahead fluttered wildly, as if struggling against a recalcitrant medium. "Yeah, yeah."
"You won't reintegrate." Rocket's dragon said something to him over his headphones and he shook his head impatiently. "You'll be trapped in your old body. No speech, no responses, no communication of any kind with the outside. Maybe no control over your own bowels."
"Stop behaving like an idiot, you asshole." She hadn't meant to speak so harshly, but the dragons' muttering distracted her. Their three streams of rage combined with her own dragon's suddenly rising apprehension to form a fast, jittery chord in her blood. "I just wanted to say—good-bye. I just wanted to say no hard feelings. That's not much. But you just keep on talking!"
"I have to make you listen. You don't know—"
She cut him off. "I know everything. I know the worst. There's nothing bad you can tell me—I've been kissed by the Baldwynn."
Melanchthon roared with fear and relief. This was what he had been trying to hide from her: That if they succeeded, she had a fifty-fifty chance of being thrown back to her original body in the aftermath. If the destruction were anything less than universal, she would spend the rest of her life a prisoner within her own alien flesh. But Jane didn't care. She'd figured that out long ago. Her will was as steady and unwavering as the dragon's own.
"I'm trying to help you, you fool!" Rocket was angry at last. "You're making a terrible mistake."
"Help me? What did you have in mind? If I turn back now, do I get to walk away free? No hard feelings? I can pick up my career where I left off? Maybe you're planning to marry me and carry me off to a clean white marble city on the grassy, windswept plains of Mag Mell. That it?"
Rocket bit his lip. His eyes were two coals.
The e-m fields abruptly steadied, merged, collapsed into a narrowing spear and disappeared altogether.
"We've got our gate," the dragon reported.
Hell Gate blossomed at the far limit of visual, an uncertain blackness against the starry bowl of space. Beyond it were two bright specks, Rocket's comrades moving into position where they expected a different gate entirely to open.
Rocket's voice rose in disbelief. "Damn you, what do you think you're doing? Things are unstable out there—one wrong action could harrow the upper world and the lower alike. You can't go through Hell Gate."
He looked so pale and tormented that Jane wanted to hug him. I love you, she thought. I want you. But something strong and perverse within her wanted not to comfort but to goad and provoke him. She didn't understand this impulse at all, but she was helpless before it. Melanchthon chuckled with disgust.
"Watch me."
"I am a defender," Rocket said in a choked voice. His face was highly colored; his temper barely contained. "Do not presume on my emotions, Lady. I will not throw over my honor for you—I will not!"
"Nobody's asking you to."
Squeezed out of nothingness, Hell Gate was a shimmering lenticular hole in the void. The two lead pilots, anticipating the wrong set of conditions, could not bank sharply enough to follow her in. They peeled away, their dragons bellowing with frustrated combat-lust. But Rocket's mount kept on her tail, hot in pursuit. Desperate with the need to engage and destroy.
"This is the last warning you get!"
"Warn away—you're wasting your breath. I'm beyond all that now."
"Jayne!"
Hell Gate exploded in her face.
They were flying high above a turbulent white ocean. Its surface bubbled and frothed, throwing up spikes half a mile high and as bright to look upon as an electric light bulb. One shot up beneath them and was only barely evaded. Just as it looked about to collapse, the spike was drawn rapidly back down into the ocean and reabsorbed.
"What the fuck is that?" Jane asked.
"Quantum uncertainty—chaos—unformed matter—the stuff of creation," Melanchthon said distractedly. "There's no adequate name for what it is. Who gives a shit? Just make good and sure none of it touches us."
Ahead, a white seashell shape that Jane could have covered with her outstretched thumb tumbled slowly in a featureless sky. Spiral Castle!
Rocket loosed an air-to-air missile at them.
It flew with single-minded fury. The dragon's tracking devices translated the missile's hunting song into a rising electronic squeal. Just as it peaked, Jane slammed the dragon left. The missile slipped past one wing. A spike of the primal ocean rose beneath them and she threw them right again. "Cer-fucking-nunos! Why can't we get above this crap?"
"Local conditions—this is as high as we'll go. Forget that. Your flyboy is too close. Brush him back."
Belatedly Jane remembered her rear guns and squeezed off a burst. Rocket's dragon slid to one side and back again, losing next to no speed at all. Jane swung around a rising pillar and glimpsed him dipping under a falling loop of primal matter for a fractional gain of distance. He was a crackerjack pilot, there was no denying that.
Two black explosions blossomed in the air beyond Rocket. His fellow warriors appeared in his wake.
"Yo, buddy, you miss us?"
"Hope you left something for us."
They fell into formation. All three were intermittently visible and invisible among the twisting, rising, and falling tentacles of light. Abruptly Rocket's voice rose, clear and surprisingly high, over the radio, singing:
"I weep for my lady—she is dead!
Oh weep for my lady! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!"
A swaying starburst slammed up before her, and Jane just barely managed to evade it. "He's crazy!" she said. "What the hell does he think he's doing?"
"Singing your dirge." An odd inflection, almost of regret, entered Melanchthon's voice. "It's a Corps tradition. Ignore it." The deeper-than-bass rumble of 8607 welled up under Rocket's and was joined by the doubled voices of Hawk and his 2928, and of Spitfire and his 6613, all merging into one:
"Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when she lay,
Thy daughter lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness?"
There was a strange, unworldly beauty to the song. Fleetingly Jane had a shivery glimpse of what it might be like to have Melanchthon subservient to her, broken to her will, undiminished in strength and intelligence but compliant. "Pussies!" Melanchthon roared. "If you had any self-respect, you'd eject those parasites and join with me. Cocksuckers! Slaves!" But the singing went right on, uninterrupted. A forest of chaotic waterspouts separated them from their pursuers, but by slow and steady increments the distance was shrinking.
"I'm not dead yet!" she shouted at them.
Heedless, her pursuers sang the dirge to completion. The song did not distract them from the business at hand but, rather, served to focus their concentration. When it ended, they were closer than they had been when they'd begun.