In all the hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way, nothing was so rare as intelligence. Intelligent species seldom arose, and often destroyed themselves before they could give rise to practically immortal intelligent machines.
The ancient machine intelligences of the Predecessors recognized the threat that the death wave posed, and had striven for millennia to save as many intelligent species as they could reach. The Predecessors enlisted the help of Earth’s humankind in their ongoing race against the death wave. In return, they gave the humans the shielding that would protect Earth and the rest of the solar system from inevitable catastrophe. And the knowledge to build ships to span the light-years between the stars.
Humankind rose to the challenge and sent expeditions to the worlds nearby where intelligent species lived, preindustrial civilizations that were blithely unaware of the doom rushing toward them at the speed of light.
Starship Odysseus was one of those missions. It was a lenticular-shaped vessel, propelled by dark energy and capable of reaching relativistic velocity, close to the speed of light.
Its crew and passengers slept the centuries that it took to reach Mithra, their bodies frozen into deepsleep and their memories downloaded into the ship’s master computer, then uploaded back into their brains once they were thawed and revived.
Now they faced the task of saving a world, and the intelligent creatures who lived on it.
Odysseus’s technical staff were a strangely youthful group, picked with meticulous care for their star mission. Nearly all of them were alone in the world, orphans or loners who had no families, no loved ones to keep them from leaving the Earth they knew, hardly any people they cared for or who cared for them.
They flew off to save a world from annihilation, knowing that they would never return to the world of their birth, not caring that when—if—they returned, it would be to an Earth that was more than four hundred years changed from the planet they had left.