Narang: Ivan has the power to be a significant threat. The nanites, as I mentioned before, are capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level. They completely replaced a flesh and blood human being with a metal version. And maintained his personality, memories, and thought processes.

Interviewer: What do you know of his plans?

Narang: At the moment, he’s trying to contact the beings who created the nanites. Probably to report in, and possibly to receive further orders.

Interviewer: So he’ll wait until he gets a response.

Narang: No, not necessarily. The entity has a certain amount of discretion, based on what it might find in a system.

Interviewer: The entity being Ivan.

Narang: No, this is what I keep trying to tell you. Ivan and the entity are separate beings. Ivan is a computer programmer who crewed on the Mad Astra. The entity is a computer program that was placed in our solar system to wait for the emergence of intelligence.

Beside him, Commodore Mandelbaum stood at parade rest, showing neither impatience nor boredom. She was in charge of the strike force assigned to take out the threat, and it had been made abundantly clear to Moore that he was answerable to her.

When the excerpt finished, Mandelbaum turned to him, her impeccable eyebrows arching. “Is she credible?”

Moore shrugged. “I can’t think of a reason for her to be making this up. For most of the time she’s been, if not on the other side, at least not sympathetic to our concerns. It would take something on the order of what she claims to make her come to us like this.”

Mandelbaum nodded, deep in thought. “Communications with the Makers, then, aren’t our biggest concern. If only Ursa Minor stars are involved, then we have an absolute minimum of 142 years before even a radio response would get back here, let alone any kind of physical arrival.”

“Discounting the brown dwarf,” Moore added.

“That’s a safe assumption, I think. These Makers would tend to be found in the systems they originated. Or similar systems. No species is going to evolve in a brown dwarf system.”

Moore thought she was being a little naïve by just writing off the brown dwarf system, but he had every intention of having resolved this situation before a twenty-two-year round-trip completion anyway.

“Ideally,” she continued, “we will be able to take him down before he is ready to transmit at all, thereby solving all our problems at once. A less ideal outcome would be to destroy him before completion of his task, meaning we’d be uncertain if the message had been sent to the correct stars. But at least we’d have some breathing room to prepare.”

“We need to know what we’re up against, and how far along Pritchard is.”

“We’ll have to reconnoiter,” Mandelbaum said. “Ideas?”