Polity Agent

How could he possibly know?

* * * *

Orlandine had been travelling through U-space for five days now, her course taking her around from the galactic rim, while skirting the Polity, and in towards the clustered stars of the inner galaxy. Soon, she decided, she would adjourn to a cold coffin, shut down the tech operating inside her body and sleep for a hundred years. Somewhere, deep within the Milky Way galaxy, she would wake and find herself a world that the line of Polity would not reach for a millennium, supposing the Polity itself survived for that long. There she could fully explore the Jain technology, and there build something… numinous.

As a further five days passed, Orlandine realized she was procrastinating. Eventually she threw a hard question at herself.

‘Okay, Orlandine, what is this numinous thing you are going to build, and who’s going to appreciate it anyway?’ She paused, gazing out through Heliotrope’s sensors at the cold light of the stars.

‘Oh hell,’ she finally muttered, and turned the ship around.