And so in the end it was the truth which had betrayed them.

Rodi would never see his parents again.

But the Exaltation would go on. He could join another Ark, and—

Thet’s voice hissed through the distorted inseparability net. “I know… you’ve done…”

Unity Ark loomed in his monitors, its bulk cutting him off from the Exaltation.

“Thet. There’s no point—”

The flitter slammed.

“…next time…”

Roaring with frustration he dropped into three-space, emerging poised over the Ring.

Unity Ark closed, bristling with weapons. Thet’s image was clear. “It’s over, Rodi.”

Rodi took his hands from the controls. He felt very tired. “Okay, Thet. You’re right. It’s over. We’re both cut off from the Exaltation. We’re stranded here. Kill me if you like.”

Unity Ark exploded at him. Thet stared into his eyes.

Then she cried out, as if in pain.

The Ark veered sideways, avoiding Rodi, and disappeared into the mist at the heart of the Ring.

“Integrality calling Comms Officer.”

“This is the Comms Officer.”

“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]

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

Breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle’s vortex lines, until it seemed she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself!

Was this how life had been, before the Core Wars? Oh, how she wished she had been born into the era of her grandparents — before the Wars — instead of these dreary, starving times.

She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged in a pink, misty infinity. She surged on through the Air, drowning her wistfulness and doubt in motion…

But there was something in the way.

Everyone had heard of the Hero, of course. The Hero myth was somehow more vivid to Thea than, say, the legends of the Ur-humans, who (it was said) had come from beyond the Star to build people to live here in the Mantle — and who then, after the Core Wars, had abandoned them. Perhaps it was because the Hero was of her own world, not of some misty, remote past.

Even as she grew older — and she came to understand how dull and without prospect her parents’ world really was — Thea longed for the Hero, in his suit of silver, to come floating up through the sky to take her away from the endless, drudging poverty of this life of hunting and scavenging at the fringe of the Crust forest.

But by the time she reached the age of fifteen she’d come to doubt that the Hero really existed: in the struggle to survive amid the endless debris of the Core Wars, the Hero was just too convenient a wish-fulfilling myth to be credible.

She certainly never expected to meet him.

“Thea! Thea!”

Snug inside her cocoon of woven spin-spider webbing, Thea kept her eyecups clamped closed. Her sister, Lur, was eighteen — three years older than Thea — and yet, Thea thought sourly, she still had the thin, grating tones of an adolescent. Just like a kid, especially when she was scared—

Scared.

The thought jolted Thea awake. She struggled to free her arms of the cocoon’s clinging webbing, and pushed her face out into the cool Air. She shook her head to clear clouded Air out of her sleep-rimmed eyecups.

Thea cast brisk, efficient glances around the treacherous sky. Lur was still calling her name. Danger was approaching, then. But from where?

Thea’s world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded above by the Crust and below by the Quantum Sea. The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with krypton grass and the graceful curves of tree trunks. Far below Thea, the Sea formed a floor to the world, mist-shrouded and indistinct. All around her, filling the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from the far upflux — the North — and arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, converging at last into the soft red blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.

Thea’s people lived at the lower, leafy fringe of the Crust forest. Their cocoons were suspended from the trees’ outer branches, soft forms among the shiny, neutrino-opaque leaves; and as the humans emerged they looked — Thea thought with a contempt that surprised her — like bizarre animals: metamorphosing creatures of the forest, not human at all. But the cries of children, the frightened, angry shouts of adults, were far too human… The tribe’s small herd of Air-pigs, too, were squealing in unison, thrashing inside the loose net that bound them together, and staining the Air green with their jetfarts.