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to be any point to this entire journey, any way at all of giving the deaths of Howard and Tabitha meaning, then I had to reach that beacon, which lay an indeterminate way off, but appeared to be growing just a little bit stronger, day by day.
    Weeks later, I found the buoy.
    It appeared to be the first piece of whole-cloth Outbounder technology I'd yet discovered. Incredibly small, and apparently operating on a store of antimatter—which the original Outbounders had never had—the device pinged happily at the observatory while I used the remaining functional thrusters of the station to pull alongside and match course and speed. My radio query sparked a message laser that shot towards the observatory. I had to fiddle for a few minutes to bring the correct receptor dish into place—something Howard could have done reflexively, with a mere thought—and then the main audio-video channel was alive with a recorded message.
    It was a head shot of a young woman against a bluescreen. She was of Asian descent, and spoke TransCom with an accent I suspected to be Chinese.
    "If you are seeing and hearing this message," she said, "then you are halfway to us. We know about the war, and we know that you would not have come this far unless you sought refuge. Be aware the Quorum has decided to grant asylum to all refugees from the governments of Earth, the independent satellite localities, and all colonies of the asteroids and the Jovian planets. Provided that you can reach us. We regret that we can offer no further assistance at this time. We also regret that we cannot offer you precise coordinates to follow, but if you have come this far, you already know the rest of the way. Good luck."
    The message repeated, and I was both elated and crushed.
    So far. I'd come so far. Tab and Howard had sacrificed so much. And this was only halfway?
    I went back to my calculations, regarding stores and the upkeep of the hydroponics. There was no way I'd squeeze out fifteen more years, even if I thought I could last that long alone without going insane as a result. Even if I dumped the entire antimatter reserve into one, long, drawn-out burn, I'd have nothing left to slow myself down with when I neared the endpoint.
    I stayed near the buoy, and debated at length.
    The girl in the message had obviously intended for refugees to keep following the last known trajectory of Pioneer 10. Following that jellybean trail was a snap. How I could do it and still be alive upon arrival was another matter entirely.
    It took me three days of thinking and tinkering to come up with a plan.
    It terrified me, because it seemed so much like suicide.
     
    The room with the recording equipment hadn't been touched in a long, long time. Tab had sealed it in a low-density, pure nitrogen environment after she'd helped put Howard into the computer, so that all the machinery and the consoles remained pristine and in good working order. It was also one of the few rooms the micrometeoroid disaster had not touched, and this gave me a hint of comfort while I set about preparing to download myself into the observatory's database arrays.
    I'd spent a few weeks carefully creating a new, hardened shelter for those arrays, then painstakingly moved each one of them from the old core down to the new location, finally powering them up and synchronizing them, with triple-redundant electricity I'd snaked down from the antimatter reactors.
    If the observatory got hit again, I didn't want to suffer the same lobotomized fate as my old friend.
    The instructions for recording were fairly simple. The device itself was like a compact PET scanner that lowered over the skull like a hair dryer.
    The catch was that the process could not be aborted or re-tried. The recording process took days, and was so electromagnetically intensive it destroyed neural pathways as quickly as it stored them in the databanks. Once the recorder lowered itself over my skull and began scanning, I was on a one-way trip. And since