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Dreamers not so long ago, apparently unable to bear the burden of some preposterous secret he had carried all his life. Or so the old fool told me, before he became voluntary squid food.’
    ‘I see. And what might this secret be?’
    ‘Preposterous nonsense, obviously. But I wanted to ask you about it, considering you were close pals with old Rigor for, oh, so many centuries. He claimed he knew the real reason we’ve been fleeing our own sun for so long. What he said was . . . remarkable. Of course, if you were to lend credence to such stories, it would raise rather a whole slew of other questions, wouldn’t it?’
    Trader steeled himself. ‘I wouldn’t know, General. What secret? Which questions?’
    ‘Officially, the decision to remove our world from the original home system was due to inherent instabilities within our own star, which were likely to result in particularly destructive solar flares. Correct?’
    ‘This is old news, General.’
    ‘For this reason,’ Squat blithely continued, ‘we have since been travelling through the eternal darkness of space at a sublight crawl for millennia. Yet there are plenty of viable and stable star systems we could have guided our world toward before now. But we haven’t done so. Why?’
    ‘General—’
    The General ignored Trader and continued. ‘Yet we continue eternally on this quixotic quest, believing misguidedly that it wouldn’t possibly occur to any of the tens of billions of Shoal-members living today that this story doesn’t hold up nearly as well as a bucket of fish guts on the sunniest day of the year. Otherwise, why would the Mother Star Faction have gathered so much support for the idea of simply finding a viable star and going there! And then, of course, there remains the question of why we don’t simply construct the biggest transluminal drive in the galaxy, and just fly this bloody great mudball to some other perfectly compatible star in an instant. Oh, so many questions, my dear Trader. And yet old Rigor seemed remarkably certain he had all the real answers.’
    ‘General, Rigor believed in a lot of things, but his mind became increasingly addled since he was forced to retire. You’ll recall he was captured in some middle-of-nowhere conflict and came very close to being made into a stew’
    ‘Be that as it may, everything the General told me made perfect sense. And don’t keep trying to play the innocent, Trader. Your own name turned up often enough during his confessions.’
    Trader sighed inwardly, and mentally prepared himself to murder General Squat at the nearest convenient moment. Now, however, he would have to listen to his idiotic heresies for a few minutes more, until the priest-geneticists were close enough for Trader to flash them the prearranged signal.
    Squat continued in his blustering way. ‘Remarkable, Rigor’s revelations, particularly his suggestion that our faster-than-light technology was in fact stolen from another species.’
    ‘General, would you really see the Shoal Hegemony collapse after half a million years? Is that what you’re seeking? Would you still be proud of giving away the secrets of some dried-out old idiot too tired of life to stick around to see what damage he could do before he died?’
    ‘Of course not. The days of our earliest interstellar travels are now long ago and half-forgotten. And, as we know, the few records that still exist are sketchy at best. Yet he didn’t stop there. According to Rigor, the transluminal technology has other uses so remarkable that merely possessing the knowledge of it would entirely explain our long flight from the home star . . .’
    The dozen priest-geneticists, in their bright, colour-coded pressurized bubbles, were almost upon them, feigning as if to pass on by in the opposite direction. Trader watched the General glance towards them, and struggled not to do the same.
    ‘All right, General, tell me what your price is. Please don’t tell me it’s anything as banal