Having left Camrose and jumped towards our destination, I found myself swirled in nothingness. I felt the wind (which is not wind) against my hull, heard the electromagnetic snarl of the universe stretched and amplified. Ships called to each other in distant systems, and I heard their echoes like whale song beneath the arctic ice. Stars roared like blowtorch flames. And I tore through the mists like a skydiver, bursting with the joy that came from fulfilling my purpose.

A tool or a weapon lives only in the moment in which it is used. As I no longer waged war, I now existed for these instants, when I leapt from the universe, describing a glittering arc through the blank void, trusting only that my calculations would catch me and bring me safely to my destination.

Ships that botched their calculations or jumped with faulty engines seldom re-emerged from higher-space. I had known a few during the war: good ships who’d taken desperate gambles to preserve themselves and their crews, only to disappear forever, irretrievably lost in the fog.

In the human-habitable torus around my waist, the crew turned off their external screens. The limbo-like nothingness of the higher dimensions bothered them on a deep, instinctive level. Exposed to it for too long, their mammalian brains were prone to imagining sabre-toothed shadows lurking in the mist beyond the cave mouth. Millions of years of evolution had conditioned them to see patterns, to pick the outline of a skulking predator from a confusion of foliage. Faced with the utter vacuity of higher-space, that same instinct flared impulsively, conceiving arrangements and dangers where none existed.

Understandably, I had been designed to be immune to such considerations. My view of the void around me contained nothing fanciful or illusory. The only threats tagged by my targeting computers were those that could be independently verified by my other sensors. During the war, one of my lieutenants had been fond of quoting Nietzsche. But when I gazed into this abyss, I saw only an absence; and if the abyss gazed back at me, I remained unaware of its attentions.

Instead, I let my mind drift, thinking of the war and my lost sisters.

* * *

As a civilisation, the Conglomeration claimed descent from the capitalist Anglo-American culture that flourished around the margins of the Atlantic Ocean in the centuries before the Great Dispersal, a culture that had in turn borrowed many of its ideals and foundations from the classical Greco-Roman empires of the Mediterranean Basin. While not as large or powerful as some human societies within the Generality, the Conglomeration was at least one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse, able to number among their citizenry representatives of every Terran race and creed—although this diversity owed more to the enslavements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the wars and migrations of the twentieth and twenty-first, than it did to any conscious policy of inclusion.