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terraforming project seemed moot.
    We’d have been better off as farmers, Tom and I. Or teaching school. Or helping settle Calafia. We should never have listened to Jake Demwa and Creideiki. This mission has brought ruin on everyone it touched.
    Including the poor colonists of Jijo—six exile races who deserved a chance to find their own strangedestinies undisturbed. In seeking shelter on that forbidden world,
Streaker
only brought disaster to Jijo’s tribes.
    There seemed one way to redress the harm.
    Can we lure the Jophur after us into the new transfer point? Kaa must pilot a convincing trajectory, as if he can sense a perfect thread to latch on to. A miracle path leading toward safety. If we do it right, the big ugly saprings will have to follow! They’ll have no choice.
    Saving Jijo justified that option, since there seemed no way to bring
Streaker
’s cargo safely home to Earth. Another reason tasted acrid, vengeful.
    At least we’ll take enemies with us.
    Some say that impending death clarifies the mind, but in Gillian it only stirred regret.
    I hope Creideiki and Tom aren’t too disappointed in me
, she pondered at the door of the conference room.
    I did my best.
    The ship’s council had changed since Gillian reluctantly took over the captain’s position, where Creideiki presided in happier times. At the far end of the long table,
Streaker
’s last surviving dolphin officer, Lieutenant Tsh’t, expertly piloted a six-legged walker apparatus carrying her sleek gray form into the same niche where Takkata-Jim once nestled his great bulk, before he was killed near Kithrup.
    Tsh’t greeted the human chief engineer, though Hannes Suessi’s own mother wouldn’t recognize him now, with so many body parts replaced by cyborg components, and a silver dome where his head used to be. Much of that gleaming surface was now covered with pre-Contact-era motorcycle decals—an irreverent touch that endeared Hannes to the crew. At least someone had kept a sense of humor through years of relentless crisis.
    Gillian felt acutely the absence of one council member, her friend and fellow physician Makanee, who remained behind on Jijo with several dozen dolphins—those suffering from devolution fever or who were unessential for the breakout attempt. In effect, dolphins had established a seventh illegal colony on that fallowworld—another secret worth defending with the lives of those left aboard.
    Secrets. There are other enigmas, less easily protected.
    Gillian’s thoughts slipped past the salvaged objects in her office, some of them worth a stellar ransom. Mere hints at their existence had already knocked civilization teetering across five galaxies.
    Foremost was a corpse, nicknamed Herbie. An alien cadaver so ancient, its puzzling smile might be from a joke told a billion years ago. Other relics were scarcely less provocative—or cursed. Trouble had followed
Streaker
ever since its crew began picking up objects they didn’t understand.
    â€œArticles of Destiny.” That was how one of the Old Ones referred to
Streaker
’s cargo of mysteries when they visited the Fractal World.
    Maybe this will be fitting. All those irksome treasures will get smashed down to a proton’s width after we dive into the new transfer point.
    At least then she’d get the satisfaction of seeing Herbie’s expression finally change, at the last instant, when the bounds of reality closed in rapidly from ten dimensions.
    A holo of Izmunuti took up one wall of the conference room, an expanse of swirling clouds wider than Earth’s orbit, surging and shifting as the Niss Machine relayed the latest intelligence in Tymbrimi-accented Galactic Seven.
    â€œThe Jophur battleship has jettisoned the last of the decoy vessels it seized, letting them drift through space. Freed of their momentum-burden, the
Polkjhy
is more agile, turning its frightful bulk toward the new transfer