“You saw him,” said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen a little breathlessly. “Aenea’s husband?”

Ces Ambre smiled. “I was fourteen standard years old. It was a long time ago. He was traveling from world to world via farcaster and stayed a few days in my second triune parents’ home because he was ill—a kidney stone—and then the Pax troopers kept him under arrest until they could send someone to interrogate him. My parents helped him escape. It was a very few days a very many years ago.” She smiled again. “And he was not Aenea’s husband at that time, remember. He had not taken the sacrament of her DNA, nor even grown aware of what her blood and teachings could do for the human race.”

“But you saw him,” pressed Chief Branchman Keel Redt.

“Yes. He was in delirium and pain much of the time and handcuffed to my parents’ bed by the Pax troopers.”

Reta Kasteen leaned closer. “Did he have any sort of… aura… about him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ces Ambre with a chuckle. “Until my parents gave him a sponge bath. He had been traveling hard for many days.”

The two Ousters and the Templar seemed to sit back in disappointment.

Ces Ambre leaned forward and touched the Templar woman’s knee. “I apologize for being flippant—I know the important role that Raul Endymion played in all of our history—but it was long ago, there was much confusion, and at that time on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B I was a rebellious teenager who wanted to leave my community of the Spectrum and accept the cruciform in some nearby Pax city.”

The other three visibly leaned back now. The two faces that were readable registered shock. “You wanted to accept that… that… parasite into your body?”

As part of Aenea’s Shared Moment, every human everywhere had seen—had known—had felt the full gestalt—of the reality behind the “immortality cruciform"—a parasitic mass of AI nodes creating a TechnoCore in real space, using the neurons and synapses of each host body in any way it wished, often using it in more creative ways by killing the human host and using the linked neuronic web when it was at its most creative—during those final seconds of neural dissolution before death. Then the Church would use TechnoCore technology to resurrect the human body with the Core cruciform parasite growing stronger and more networked at each death and resurrection.

Ces Ambre shrugged. “It represented immortality at the time. And a chance to get away from our dusty little village and join the real world—the Pax.”

The three Ouster diplomats could only stare.

Ces Ambre raised her hands to her robe and slipped it open enough to show them the base of her throat and the beginning of a scar where the cruciform had been removed by the Aeneans. “I was kidnapped to one of the remaining Pax worlds and put under the cruciform for nine years,” she said so softly that her voice barely carried to the three diplomats. “And most of this time was after Aenea’s shared moment—after the absolute revelation of the Core’s plan to enslave us with those despicable things.”

The True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen took Ces Ambre’s older hand in hers. “Yet you refused to become Aenean when you were liberated. You joined what was left of your old culture.”

Ces Ambre smiled. There were tears in her eyes, and those eyes suddenly looked much older. “Yes. I felt I owed my people that—for deserting them at the time of crisis. Someone had to carry on the Spectrum Helix culture. We had lost so many in the wars. We lost even more when the Aeneans gave us the option of joining them. It is hard to refuse to become something like a god.”

Far Rider made a grunt that sounded like heavy static. “This is our greatest fear next to the Destroyer. No one is now alive on the forest ring who experienced the Shared Moment, but the details of it—the glorious insights into empathy and the binding powers of the Void Which Binds, Aenea’s knowledge that many of the Aeneans would be able to farcast—freecast—anywhere in the universe. Well, the Church of Aenea has grown here until at least a fourth of our population would give up their Ouster or Templar heritage and become Aenean in a second.”

Ces Ambre rubbed her cheek and smiled again. “Then it’s obvious that no Aeneans have visited this system. And you have to remember that Aenea insisted that there be no ‘Church of Aenea,’ no veneration or beatification or adoration. That was paramount in her thoughts during the Shared Moment.”

“We know,” said Reta Kasteen. “But in the absence of choice and knowledge, cultures often turn to religion. And the possibility of an Aenean being aboard with you was one reason we greeted the arrival of your great ship with such enthusiasm and trepidation.”

“Aeneans do not arrive by spacecraft,” Ces Ambre said softly.

The three nodded. “When and if the day ever comes,” broadcast Far Rider, “it will be up to the individual conscience of each Ouster and Templar to decide. As for me, I will always ride the great waves of the solar wind.”

Dem Lia and the other three returned.

“We’ve decided to help,” she said. “But we must hurry.”

There was no way in the universe that Dem Lia or any of the other eight humans or any of the five AIs would risk the Helix in a direct confrontation with the Destroyer or the Harvester or whatever the hell the Ousters wanted to call their nemesis. It was not just by engineering happenstance that the three thousand life-support pods carrying the 684,300 Spectrum Helix pioneers in deep cryogenic sleep were egg-shaped. This culture had all their eggs in one basket—literally—and they were not about to send that basket into battle. Already Basho and several of the other AIs were brooding about the proximity to the oncoming harvesting ship. Space battles could easily be fought across twenty-eight AU’s of distance—while traditional lasers, or lances, or charged particle-beam weapons would take more than a hundred and ninety-six minutes to creep that distance—Hegemony, Pax, and Ouster ships had all developed hyperkinetic missiles able to leap into and out of Hawking space. Ships could be destroyed before radar could announce the presence of the incoming missile. Since this “harvester” crept around its appointed rounds at sublight speed, it seemed unlikely that it would carry C-plus weaponry, but “unlikely” is a word that has undone the planning and fates of warriors since time immemorial.

At the Spectrum Helix engineers’ request, the Aeneans had rebuilt the Helix to be truly modular. When it reached its Utopian planet around its perfect star, sections would free themselves to become probes and aircraft and landers and submersibles and space stations. Each of the three thousand individual life pods could land and begin a colony on its own, although the plans were to cluster the landing sites carefully after much study of the new world. By the time the Helix was finished deploying and landing its pods and modules and probes and shuttles and command deck and central fusion core, little would be left in orbit except the huge Hawking drive units with maintenance programs and robots to keep them in perfect condition for centuries, if not millennia.

“We’ll take the system exploratory probe to investigate this Destroyer,” said Dem Lia. It was one of the smaller modules, adapted more to pure vacuum than to atmospheric entry, although it was capable of some morphing. But compared to most of the Helix’s peaceful subcomponents the probe was armed to the teeth.

“May we accompany you?” said Chief Branchman Keel Redt. “None of our race has come closer than a hundred thousand kilometers to the machine and lived.”

“By all means,” said Dem Lia. “The probe’s large enough to hold thirty or forty of us, and only three are going from our ship. We will keep the internal containment field at one-tenth gee and adapt the seating accordingly.”