Megan remembered her first ever breath with razor-sharp clarity. She had opened her eyes, her last memory being that of dying, and found herself strapped to a table. Half a dozen faces, all of them entirely unfamiliar, stared down at her with cold and calculating gazes.

She had died when a star, in its final death throes, had torn apart the Magi ship she had piloted to the very edge of the galaxy, in the hope of finding some way to halt the Nova War then threatening life throughout the Milky Way. Her search had led her to a Maker Swarm, a cloud of interlinked alien machines whose sole purpose was to prevent the rise of other interstellar civilizations, only for it to cripple and then destroy her precious ship.

As she lay immobilized on that table, she knew herself only as Dakota Merrick. She did not yet know that her thoughts and memories now occupied the body of a young woman who had, until only a few hours before, been the Speaker-Elect of the Demarchy of Uchida.

One of those gazing down at her a fresh-faced young man who introduced himself as Thijs took it upon himself to explain to her, in precise and laborious detail, exactly how she had come to be where she was and what they wanted from her. She had actually died, he explained, more than two centuries earlier, and had subsequently been resurrected by yet another Magi ship. And if she wanted to live for more than just the next few hours, she would do exactly what was required of her.

She had died. Then somehow the same Magi ship that had transported her to the Maker Swarm had, in its last moments of existence, transmitted her memories and thoughts to others of its kind. And one of those others had subsequently come to crash, burned and crippled, here on Redstone.

If she only cooperated, Thijs explained, she would be allowed to live. Failure to cooperate, however, would cause her to be tortured until she divulged the information they wanted information she could already sense looming large in the data-repositories of her machine-head implants.

As she had stared up at those callous and overfed faces, she knew deep down in her gut that they were lying to her. They had no intention of letting her survive, whether or not she cooperated. They had brought her back to life just so they could murder her all over again once she was no longer of use to them.

She had refused to cooperate, in the strongest terms possible. She kicked out with one foot, catching one of them under the chin. He staggered away, clutching at his throat. It then needed all of the rest of them to hold her down on the table.