“This is a turning point in human history,” Sering’s voice—always slightly mournful—came to her, and then through her to everyone else. His image was in their Mind’s Eye HUDs, with the collar of his bright orange environment suit done up high to the chin. “I had to think long and hard before committing myself to this course, as you can imagine. But some things are too important. Sometimes you have to just do the right thing, whatever the cost.”

Kern nodded, pleased with that. Be a good monkey and finish up soon, Sering. Some of us have legacies to build.

“We have come so far, and still we fall into the oldest errors,” Sering continued doggedly. “We’re standing here with the universe in our grasp and, instead of furthering our own destinies, we connive at our own obsolescence.”

Her attention had drifted a little and, by the time she realized what he had said, the words had passed on to the crew. She registered suddenly a murmur of concerned messages between them, and even simple spoken words whispered between those closest to her. Doctor Mercian meanwhile sent her an alert on another channel: “Why is Sering in the engine core?”

Sering should not be in the engine core of the needle. Sering should be in the Sentry Pod, ready to take his place in orbit—and in history.

She cut Sering off from the crew and sent him an angry demand to know what he thought he was doing. For a moment his avatar stared at her in her visual field, then it lip-synced to his voice.

“You have to be stopped, Doctor Kern. You and all your kind—your new humans, new machines, new species. If you succeed here, then there will be other worlds—you’ve said so yourself, and I know they’re terraforming them even now. It ends here. Non Ultra Natura! No greater than nature.”

She wasted vital moments of potential dissuasion by resorting to personal abuse, until he spoke again.

“I’ve cut you off, Doctor. Do the same to me if you wish, but for now I’m going to speak and you don’t get to interrupt me.”

She was trying to override him, hunting through the control computer’s systems to find what he had done, but he had locked her out elegantly and selectively. There were whole areas of the facility’s systems that just did not appear on her mental schematic, and when she quizzed the computer about them, it refused to acknowledge their existence. None of them was mission critical—not the Barrel, not the Flask, not even the Sentry Pod—therefore none were the systems she had been obsessively checking every day.

Not mission critical, perhaps, but facility critical.