So, said Bash, that fact alone makes it near as damn indestructible. As long as it can split off even a few of its components and leave them somewhere in the outer part of this system, if not even further away, it can always reconstitute itself, whatever happens in the meantime to the main part of its body. Each component contains the memories and knowledge of the whole. So even if most of it hell, nearly all of it was destroyed in a nova, it would still find a way to grow back to its former strength, even if it took a thousand years, or ten thousand. Time means nothing to things like that. All that means it has nothing nothing to fear from the nova mine. And, when its ready to attack, itll separate into its individual components, and the Ingersoll will be defenceless in the face of it.

Gabrielle remembered then how the Wanderer always spoke in a clashing multiplicity of voices. You said the Wanderer was keeping a secret, one you were trying to find?

And I found it, said Bash. Thanks to Megan.

What did she do?

The Wanderer launched an attack on her Magi ship. It was a ruse, so it could ransack the ships memory banks and find what it was looking for and it found it.

But what is it? asked Gabrielle.

In order to help you really understand the answer to that question, I need to show you something, Gaby. That way, youll understand what the Wanderer intends, not just for the human race, but for all life throughout the galaxy.

The void twisted around Gabrielle, and she now saw the Wanderer, surrounded by billions of blazing stars.

She was in the heart of the galaxy, witnessing events that had taken place millions of years before. She was seeing the Core Transcendence in all its terrible glory.

New data flooded into Gabrielles implants, indistinguishable from her natural memory. The Makers, she learned, had transformed the supermassive black hole occupying the centre of the Milky Way into a kind of computer. In some way, they had used entangled pairs of virtual particles along the edge of the black holes event horizon the point beyond which light could never escape it as a means of processing phenomenal amounts of data. And this, in turn, somehow allowed the Makers to dig deep into the underlying informational structure of space-time itself, and thereby alter it on a fundamental level.

It dawned on her then just what the Makers were doing. They were remaking the universe by hacking its operational constants.

Now do you see? asked Bash. The Wanderer wants to use the Ingersolls drive to fly itself directly to the core of the Milky Way. Because the nova drive takes a ship out of normal space, itll be able to make a kamikaze run right past the defences the Makers have erected all around the black hole.

And then?