encounter: he gave Run Seven the codes to the colonists' reefersleep caskets when Seven forced him to watch her undergo torture, while she, under the influence of torture, provided Seven and his crew with the Greenflies and their activation codes. They wonder between them if anybody could have survived within the swarm of machine-tended bio-domes. Eventually they detect a message emanating from the swarm, parsed in an ancient human format, tight-beamed directly at them. The message is from Remontoire, who has managed to survive with a small group of Conjoiners orbiting a pulsar (the Greenflies do not attack pulsars, which lack the light to sustain vegetation and usually the mass to build domes). It had taken tens of thousands of years for the light from the relativistic lighthuggers' C Drives to reach and be detected by the galactic plane, and thousands more for their message to arrive at the two ships. The message simply consists of Remontoire begging them for help. Irravel meets the Conjoiners in AD 40,000 on Hope, a hollowed out asteroid the Conjoiners have ejected from the Galaxy. They explore the Hideyoshi and find it abandoned, learning that Markarian has been physically absorbed by the medichines sustaining him in his old age, and exists now only as a collection of software servers which simulate his behaviour. They collect the remaining colonists (whom Markarian has stored as alpha-level neural scans plus complete genetic archives) and prepare to leave the galaxy to re-establish a new civilisation elsewhere, fleeing just ahead of an immense nebular swarm of Greenfly machines which had homed in on Hope as it fled the galactic plane. The novel Absolution Gap contains a reference to entities in a parallel universe (or at least claiming to be from one) facing attack from an agent very similar to the Greenfly. In their world, the Greenfly gradually consume the entire universe, rendering it uninhabitable. There are references that may imply the alternate universe entities are actually the extreme far future of humanity. See also Revelation Space universe Revelation Space 2006 short story collections Science fiction short story collections Victor Gollancz Ltd books