massive cultures of skin. Machines are harvesting a lot of it, far more than they would have needed for routine testing. At the other end, Nicolosi opens fire on the machines as they notice him. His plasma cannon explodes and wounds him, so the rest of the team fire on the robots. After blasting the door open, they get to the other side, but Martinez is taken down. He reveals that Norbert is in fact Martinez (his inability to form sentences is explained by injuries he sustained during the war. The rest of his brain is still intact). They leave the other Martinez (who is in fact "Quinlan", a stand-in for Martinez). The Nightingale then sends a swarm of robots that incapacitate the team. Dexia awakens a few hours later in a medical bay, where she speaks to the Nightingale. It permits her to see Jax, whom it will then kill and allow Dexia and the team to take with them. It insists there is no catch and takes her to Jax, whom it has turned into a massive living monument. Jax reveals to Dexia the ship's intentions: it was unable to reconcile itself with the fact that the people it was healing would be returned to the war. As such, it left Sky's Edge and killed everyone on board. It was about to kill Jax, but decided to turn him into a war monument to stop the fighting, and has spent the intervening period working on its masterpiece. It has now decided, however, to replace Jax with Martinez's team, whom she turns into one massive entity, consisting of all five people joined. Back on Sky's Edge, nobody is able to reverse the procedure; the linkages between them are too complex. The Nightingale has also disappeared. The war is over and the characters are now celebrities as a living symbol of the ceasefire, but they have suffered intense psychological damage from the procedure. "Galactic North" This story starts in the year 2303, when Captain Irravel Veda of the lighthugger Hirondelle, her second-in-command Markarian, and some fraction of their Ultranaut crew are ambushed by pirates while engaged in an unexpected repair stopover in a cloud of rocks and cometary matter in the charted but uninhabited star system Luyten 726-8. She briefly considers activating the "Greenfly" terraforming Von Neumann machines being transported on board, which she believes would easily be able to