contemporary astronauts, it gives the command to Wilson Kime, one of the members of the original Mars mission. Using a self-enclosed "flowing" wormhole for propulsion, the Second Chance travels to Dyson Alpha. When the Second Chance arrives and begins to explore what appears to be an enclosure generator, an unknown mechanism shuts it down and the barrier around the star disappears. Formerly imprisoned inside is an extremely warlike and aggressive species, a race that comes to be called "the Primes". They consist of intelligent "immotiles" that breed and control vast armies of sub-sentient "motiles" via electronically extended neural interfaces. The few immotiles constantly vie with each other for territories and resources, and by the time of the story, the strongest uses the technology gleaned by analysis of the human's wormhole-generation techniques to destroy all the other Prime immotiles and thus become the only one remaining Prime: MorningLightMountain. Primes had previously colonised the solar system referred to as Dyson Beta using slower-than-light starships and had committed genocide against its native inhabitants in the process. Disconnected from their originating immotile groupings, and provided with novel biological forms, Beta's Primes started to routinely alter themselves through genetic manipulation and mechanical augmentation. This was an anathema to the Alpha Primes, who referred to them as AlienPrimes. With Beta's Primes no longer under the control of Alpha's Primes, a war began between the two systems. The war appears to have continued until forces unknown erected the barrier around the stars. After capturing two crew members of the Second Chance (one of them Bose), MorningLightMountain discovers the location of the Commonwealth. Upon learning of the Commonwealth's existence, MorningLightMountain makes it its primary objective to destroy it. Having been in almost continual combat for its entire evolution, MorningLightMountain believes that it is necessary to eliminate all other life in the Universe to secure its survival into the distant future; it views all life that is not under its control as a potential threat. Hamilton weaves several other stories into the main narrative of the Prime encounter. Among these is that of the ancient spacecraft Marie Celeste, found crashed on one of the Commonwealth planets, Far Away. An enigmatic figure, Bradley Johansson, claims the original passenger of the spacecraft is alive, an alien he calls the Starflyer. He claims that it is using mind-controlled agents to manipulate events in the Commonwealth, and that it caused the events that