‘Yes,’ said Pirius, smiling. ‘And your floating museum!’

Rusel thought that over. ‘Then mankind lives on?’

Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy. It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But mankind had endured.

‘And we won!’ Pirius said brightly. Pirius and Torec themselves had been involved in some kind of exotic combat to win the centre of the Galaxy. ‘It’s a human Galaxy now, Rusel.’

‘Human? But how are you still human?’

They seemed to understand the question. ‘We were at war,’ Pirius said. ‘We couldn’t afford to evolve.’

‘The Coalition—’

‘Fallen. Vanished. Gone. They can’t harm you now.’

‘And my crew?’

‘We will take them home. There are places where they can be cared for. But, ah—’

Torec said, ‘But the Ship itself is too big to turn around. Too much mass-energy. I’m not sure we can bring you back.’

Once he had seen himself, a stiff ageless man, through the eyes of Diluc’s great-grandson Poro, through the eyes of a child. Now, just for an instant, he saw himself through the eyes of Pirius and Torec. A wizened, charred thing suspended in a webbing of wires and tubes.

That didn’t matter, of course. ‘Have I fulfilled my mission?’

‘Yes,’ Pirius said gently. ‘You fulfilled it very well.’

He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He wasn’t aware of Pirius’s farewell call as they shot away, back towards the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.

The Ship - and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face, with distracted eyes, He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a clot of ancient guilt.

The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean and bright and empty as his thoughts.

I knew Andres. I knew about the five Ships that sailed from Port Sol. I always wondered what happened to her.

Some of the Ships sailed on to even more exotic fates than her Mayflower’s. But that’s another story.

The conquest of the Galaxy was perhaps humanity’s finest hour. The ministers, generals and Commissaries at the heart of the Coalition looked back on the immense achievement of their ideological government with, perhaps, justifiable pride.

But it was an irony that as soon as the victory was won, the Coalition lost its purpose, and its control.