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join with, he would pass into oblivion, a fate akin to Hell.
    What Ln’Da, Sa’To and Su’Zi, attempted was a spontaneous, unrehearsed retirement ceremony at a great distance, in a bid to save some portion of Kr’T’s psyche and prevent the mortal sin (in Dadr’Ba society) of Kr’T’s passing into oblivion.
    Psychic energy like any form of energy has a place, a time, a direction and a magnitude, but it is impossible to tell if psychic energy has momentum. Once foundationless, no one knows if a psyche would get quickly left behind. Since the ship is traveling three thousand kilometers per second, a momentum-less psyche would almost instantly be left behind and lost forever.
    Retirement ceremonies are planned far in advance and conducted in a slow coordinated, synchronized way so that everything that happens is known. Yet this didn’t stop Ln’Da, Sa’To and Su’Zi from trying. They thought for a brief moment that they found him, but it turned out to be someone else with a similar pattern to Kr’T, and who at the same time they tried to make their presence known seemed to flee in pain and terror. They realize to their dismay that they stumbled on a birthing, and their searching probes may have caused a premature birth or mental damage to the child even producing a stillbirth.
    With the shock and dismay about what their frantic search may have caused still echoing the psyche-sphere around them, helpless to do anything about the damaged birth, they turn the quest outside the ship as a last resort, attempting to find Kr’T adrift in interstellar space.
    It’s a slim, desperate hope, interstellar space is second only in its hostility to intergalactic space, it’s a cruel acidic environment that continuously strives to shred whatever ventures into it, of its very existence.
    Now Ln’Da, Sa’To and Su’Zi, have to deal with the reality that for whatever reason, be it consumed in fusion fire, cast adrift and left behind, or evaporating under the forces of the nothingness of interstellar space. Kr’T was gone, the worst fate possible for a Dadr’Ba crew member, is to be wasted… on a starship where nothing is wasted.
     

Chapter 4, Su’Zi’s Mourning
     
    Su’Zi wondered the labyrinth matrix of shafts and tunnels, her mind adrift, unable to focus; oblivious to the dangers, hazards and threats her inattention placed her in.
    She wandered a vast maze; the result of centuries of mining operations, the T’Bm’s [20] resemble giant worms working their way throughout Dadr’Ba. Starting near the core and slowly working outwards in levels, each colder than the one above it, edging toward the outer skin of Dadr’Ba.
    Dadr’Ba is slowly consuming itself for the fuel to power its main engine that provides both propulsion and primary power needed to operate.
    The infrastructure necessary to operate and maintain Dadr’Ba and its engine is massive. There is mining equipment to collect the raw fuel cometary material. Then there is the material transport system; belts, elevators and vehicles, and the processing plant that refines the raw fuel, separating valuable byproducts and producing a light element rich mixture easy for Dadr’Ba’s fusion fires to consume.
    There is a multitude of essential life support and ancillary equipment, storage tanks, vats, silos, pumps, kilns and reactor vessels. There are asteroids buried within Dadr’Ba that are mined for minerals and metallic ore and metal refineries and fabrication plants needed to produce everything else needed by Dadr’Ba.
    Now with the voyage, almost complete, Dadr’Ba had consumed a third of its three trillion-kilogram mass for fuel.
    Dadr’Ba’s light weight, almost hollow status meant little to Su’Zi as she wandered deep, down, following the ten-meter diameter tunnels left by the T’Bm’s. The tracks run away from the warm core of Dadr’Ba towards its cold outer regions, closer to the frigid hostile expanse of space.
    Su’Zi wishes she could go back