"How are you?"

"I am not the one who spoke to you previously. My mother died in the recent convocation."

"...I'm sorry."

"Did we succeed?"

In simple terms, Rodi told the story.

"So, in the end, Thet spared you. Why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps the futility of it all got through to her. Perhaps she realized that with all contact with the Exaltation lost her best chance of survival was to take the Ark away, try for a new beginning in some fresh Universe..." And perhaps some lingering human feeling had in the end triumphed over the programing.

"But now you are stranded, Rodi. You have lost your family."

"...Yes."

"You are welcome here. You could join my sexual grouping. The surgery required is superficial--"

Rodi laughed. "Thank you. But that's well beyond my resources."

"What, then?"

He remembered Darby's wise kindness. If the Lunar colonists welcomed him, perhaps the loss of his family would grow less painful...

"We will remember you, and your Integrality."

"Thank you, Comms Officer."

Rodi turned the battered flitter and set course for the Moon.

Fragments of humanity. Relics of forgotten battles, aborted assaults...

Here was the most extravagant mission of all.

Once the system had been a spectacular binary pair, adorning some galaxy lost in the sky. Then one of the stars had suffered a supernova explosion, briefly and gloriously outshining its parent galaxy. The explosion had destroyed any planets, and damaged the companion star. After that, the remnant neutron star slowly cooled, glitching as it spun like some giant stirring in its sleep, while its companion star shed its life-blood hydrogen fuel over the neutron star's wizened flesh. Slowly, a ring of companion-gas formed around the neutron star, and the system's strange, spectral second system of planets coalesced.

Then human beings had come here.

The humans soared about the system, surveying. They settled on the largest planet in the smoke ring. They threw microscopic wormhole mouths into the cooling corpse of the neutron star, and down through the wormholes they poured devices and human-analogues, made robust enough to survive in the neutron star's impossibly rigorous environment.

The devices and human-analogues had been tiny, like finely jeweled toys.

The human-analogues and their devices swarmed to a magnetic pole of the neutron star, and great machines were erected there: discontinuity drives, perhaps powered by the immense energy reserves of the neutron star itself.

Slowly at first, then with increasing acceleration, the neutron star -- dragging its attendant companion, ring and planets with it -- was forced out of its parent galaxy and thrown across space, a bullet of stellar mass fired at almost light speed.

"A bullet," I said. "Yes. An apt term."

A bullet directed at the heart of the Xeelee Project.

"But," Eve said, "when the single, immense shot had been fired, little thought was given to those abandoned within the star, their usefulness over..."[6]

Hero

Hero

A.D. 193,474

When Thea wore the Hero's suit, Waving became extraordinary.