And Ty? He too was a veteran of ground combat with the scars to prove it. But there were many others who might have been chosen in his stead—ones better suited to leading an expedition and making first contact with what to the Spacers was an alien race from another planet. No, Ty had been chosen because of where he worked and who owned it. Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose. And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.