The Hearthers worked tirelessly to knit the differing cultures into a single loose alliance. They brokered treaties and instigated conferences. But their most enduring legacy was one that chimed most closely with their own values.

Until the coming of the Hearthers, individual governments and civilisations had been responsible for the wellbeing of their ships, and vessels and crews that ran into trouble far from home might as well have been at the far side of the galaxy for all the help they could expect. The Hearthers changed that, creating a fleet of ships for the specific aim of rescuing travellers stranded in the unforgiving depths of space. Loosely translated, the fleet’s name could be rendered in English as “The Communal Grouping of Individual Hearths into One, Dedicated to the Preservation and Recovery of Stricken Itinerants”.

For six thousand years, the Hearthers and their fleet served the races of the Multiplicity. They hurried to the aid of floundering starships, and brought food and medical aid to planets blighted by famine and pestilence. Their name became a byword for trust and dependability. The yellow star logos on the hulls of their ships became the universal symbol for emergency rescue. Their crews were afforded a heroic reverence in eight hundred cultures scattered across two hundred thousand light years…

But it didn’t last.

Fifty centuries before Sofia’s birth, while on Earth woolly mammoths roamed the northerly wastes of Siberia, the rescues stopped. Distress calls went unanswered. The ships of the fleet disappeared and the Hearthers vanished. They abandoned their bases and way stations, and expeditions to their home planet found only a cold and uninhabited world, snowbound and desolate.

* * *

When Sofia Nikitas first read the story of the Hearthers, she realised with an electric thrill that she had finally found the purpose that had been eluding her. She resolved to dedicate her wealth and resources to the re-establishment of The Communal Grouping of Individual Hearths into One, Dedicated to the Preservation and Recovery of Stricken Itinerants. Only she would call it the House of Reclamation; and, at first, she would limit its activities to the squabbling factions of the Human Generality. In time, when the House had been given the chance to prove itself, she could expand the scope of its operation to include all the races of the Multiplicity.

Within a year, she had retrofitted her entire merchant fleet for its new duties. The expense almost broke her, but after a few high profile recoveries, individual governments agreed to contribute to the upkeep of the House in return for the benefit of its services. Personnel and ships applied to join the organisation; depots and way stations flourished at strategic points throughout human space; and slowly, one calamity at a time, lives were saved.

The Hearthers’ yellow star-shaped symbol became the sigil of the House, and their translated motto—Life Above All—became its mantra and mission statement.