“Which opens up a further option,” Tinkerbell said. “I can also transfer your souls into the empty serjeant bodies.”

“That’s better,” Stephanie said. “But if we go back, even in serjeant bodies, we’ll still wind up in the beyond at some later time.”

“That depends. Your race may decide how to deal with souls that become trapped in the beyond before that happens.”

“You’re giving us a lot of credit. Judging by our current record, I’m not sure we deserve it. If you can’t shoot it, people aren’t interested.”

“You are being unfair,” Sinon said.

“But honest. The military mind has infiltrated government for centuries until they became one,” Rana said.

“Don’t start,” Cochrane grunted. “This is like important, you dig?”

“I don’t pretend to predict what will come,” Tinkerbell said. “We abandoned that arrogance when we came here. You seem to be determined. That usually suffices.”

“Did you come here purely to circumvent the beyond?” Sinon asked. “Was this your racial solution?”

“Not at all. As I said, we are an old species. While we were still in our biological form we evolved into a collective of collectives. We gathered knowledge for millennia, explored galaxies, examined different dimensional realms coexisting with our own universe—everything a new race does as fresh insights and understanding open up. Eventually there was nothing original for us, only variations on a theme that had been played a million times before. Our technology was perfect, our intellects complete. We stopped reproducing, for there was no longer any reason to introduce new minds to the universe; they could only ever have heritage, never discovery. At such a point some races die out contentedly, releasing their souls to the beyond. We chose this transference, the final accomplishment for our technological mastery. An instrument capable of moving the consciousness from a biological seat to this state was a challenge even for us. You can only sense the physical aspects of this vessel, and even those can be at variance with what you understand. As I think you realize.”

“Why bother with an instrument? We came here by willpower alone.”

“The energistic power you have is extremely crude. Our vessels cannot even exist fully in the universe, the energy patterns they support have no analogue there. Their construction requires a great deal of finesse.”

“What about others? Have you discovered any life forms here?”

“Many. Some like us, who have abandoned the universe. Some like you, thrown here by chance and accident. Others which are different again. There are visitors, too, entities more accomplished than we, who are charting many realms.”

“I think I would like to see them,” Choma said. “To know what you do. I will join you if I may.”

“You will be welcome,” Tinkerbell said. “What of the rest?”

Stephanie glanced round her friends, trying to gauge their reaction to the offers Tinkerbell had made. Apprehension persisted in all of them, they were waiting for her lead. Again.

“Are there any other humans here?” she asked. “Any planets?”

“It is possible,” Tinkerbell said. “Though I have not encountered any yet. This realm is one of many which has the parameters you desired.”

“So we can’t seek refuge anywhere else?”

“No.”

Stephanie took Moyo’s hand in hers and pulled him close. “Very well, time to face the music, I suppose.”

“I love you,” he said. “I just want to be with you. That’s my paradise.”

“I won’t choose for you,” she told the others. “You must do that for yourselves. For myself, if a serjeant body is available I will take it and return to Mortonridge. If not, then I’ll accept death here in this realm. My host can have her body and freedom back.”

To a civilization innocent of regularised interstellar travel, the arrival of a single starship could never be viewed as a threat in itself. What it represents, the potential behind it, however, is another matter. A paranoid species could react very badly indeed to such an event.

It was a factor Joshua kept firmly in mind when Lady Mac emerged from her jump a hundred thousand kilometres above the diskcity. The crew did nothing for the first minute other than running a passive sensor sweep. No particle or artefact was drifting nearby, and no detectable xenoc sensor locked on to the hull.

“That original radar pulse is all I’m picking up,” Beaulieu reported. “They haven’t seen us.”

“We’re in clear,” Joshua told Syrinx. All communication between the two starships was now conducted via affinity, the bitek processor array installed in Lady Mac ’s electronics suite relaying information to Oenone with an efficiency equal to a standard datavise. The bitek starship had searched through the affinity band, its sensitivity stretched to the maximum. It was completely silent. As far as they could tell, the diskcity Tyrathca didn’t have affinity technology.

“We’re ready to swallow in,” Syrinx replied. “Shout if you need us.”

“Okay, people,” Joshua announced. “Let’s go with the plan.”

The crew brought the ship up to normal operational status. Thermo dump panels deployed, radiating the starship’s accumulated heat away from the gleaming photosphere; sensor booms telescoped up. Joshua used the high-resolution systems to make an accurate fix on the diskcity, not using the active sensors yet. Once he’d confirmed their position to within a few metres, he transferred the navigational data over to a dozen stealthed ELINT satellites stored on board. They were fired out of a launch tube, travelling half a kilometre from the fuselage before their ion drives came on, pushing them in towards the diskcity on a pulse of thin blue flame. It would take them the better part of a day to fly within an operational distance when they could start returning useful data on the artefact’s darkside. Joshua and Syrinx considered it unlikely the diskcity could detect them in flight, even if their sensors were focused on space around Lady Mac . It was one of the mission’s more acceptable risks.

With the satellites launched, he brought the starship’s active sensors on-line and conducted a sweep of local space.

“We’re now officially here,” he told them.

“Aligning main dish,” Sarha said. She followed the grid image, waiting until the coordinates matched the diskcity.

Joshua datavised the flight computer to broadcast their message. It was a simple enough greeting, a text in the Tyrathca language, spread across a broad frequency range. It said who they were, where they came from, that humans had cordial relations with the Tyrathca from Tanjuntic-RI, and asked the diskcity to return the hail. No mention was made of the Oenone being present.

There were bets on how long a reply would take, even of what it would say, if all they’d get back was a salvo of missiles. Nobody had put money on getting eight completely separate responses beamed at them from different sections of the diskcity.

“Understandable, though,” Dahybi said. “The Tyrathca are a clan species, after all.”

“They must have a single administration structure to run an artefact like that,” Ashly protested. “It wouldn’t work any other way.”

“Depends what’s tying them together,” Sarha said. “Something that size can hardly be the most efficient arrangement.”

“Then why build it?” Ashly wondered.

Oski ran the messages through their translator program. “Some deviation in vocabulary, syntax and symbology from our Tyrathca,” she said. “It has been fifteen thousand years after all. But we have a recognizable baseline we can proceed from.”

“Glad to see some sort of change,” Liol muttered. “The way everything stays the same with these guys was getting kind of spooky.”

“That’s drift, not change,” Oski told him. “And take a good look at the diskcity. We could build something like that easily; in fact we could probably do a much better job of it like Sarha says. All it demonstrates is expansion, not development. There’s been no real technological progress here, just like their colonies and arkships.”