Its enough to buy part-ownership in a ship, said Bash. Hell, Megan, think what we could do if we pooled our money. Finance our own damn expedition.

Just what in hell is it youre planning to do? she asked Tarrant.

We first need to know if youre in or not, said Sifra.

Megan rolled her eyes. In for what, exactly?

A new expedition, said Tarrant, deep into the galaxy to find something called the Wanderer.

What is it, precisely?

You might regret asking me that question, Miss Jacinth, as its going to take me a while to explain.

She looked down at her hand, and noticed the bulb of Irish coffee it was still clutching. She had entirely forgotten it was there.

She took a sip, then sat back, gazing off towards an image of Kjregrnnested that was turning slowly on a screen at the far end of the lounge.

Im all ears, she said.

SIX

Megan

The story of the Wanderer had started, Tarrant went on to explain, with a discovery made on Alyeska.

Until the discovery of the ruins beneath Alyeskas ice, the Meridians had remained almost entirely unknown to mankind. Like the Shoal, they had once spread far and wide across the galaxy, leaving colonies on hundreds of worlds. But, unlike other starfaring species, the Meridians had never stumbled across a Maker cache, and so never acquired the means of faster-than-light travel. It would therefore have taken any one of their ships tens of thousands of years to travel from one end of their empire to the other.

It rapidly became clear to the archaeologists studying their ruins that, despite this, the Meridians had nonetheless undergone a dramatic spike in technological and scientific development within a very short time frame. That meant either that the Meridians had indeed found a Maker cache but somehow failed to take advantage of the faster-than-light technology contained therein or that their newfound technological sophistication had arrived by some other route.

What that route might be, Tarrant explained, had remained a mystery until the Schellings came into possession of data attributing this sudden spike to a machine-entity with whom a Meridian expedition had made contact. They had named this entity which had apparently been roaming the galaxy for millions of years at sub-light velocities the Wanderer.

The Meridians had found the Wanderer willing to communicate, and even to trade information. It was, it seemed, looking for something. But as to what that might be, the Meridians either hadnt asked or had failed to record the answer. Analysts working under strictest secrecy had cross-referenced the newly discovered data with the historical records of other known spacefaring species, quickly finding a correlation with the Atn, and even with the Shoal. They, too, it seemed, had had their own encounters with the Wanderer, albeit at a much later date.