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A pair of noses were silhouetted against the sky for instant, like a human waving his hands exuberantly at the heavens. "The brightest things we see are just kind of local dazzle. They aren't good guide posts." He pointed at a couple of open clusters, claimed they matched stuff he'd found in the Dataset. Amdi had also noticed the Magellanic galaxies,复件 (72) air max1, and figured out far more than Ravna. "So anyway, Straumli Realm was" -- was! you got it kid -- "in the High Beyond, but near the galactic disk. So, see that big square of stars?" Noses jabbed. "We call that the Great Square. Anyway, just left of the upper corner and go six thousand light-years, and you'd be at Straumli Realm." Jefri came to his knees and stared silently for a second. "But so far away, is there anything to see?" "Not the Straumli stars,复件 (64) air max2, but just forty light-years from Straum there's a blue-white giant --" "Yeah," whispered Johanna. "Storlys. It was so bright you could see shadows at night." "Well that's the fourth brightest star up from the corner; see, they almost make a straight line. I can see it,复件 (11) air max, so I know you can." Johanna and Jefri were silent for a long time, just staring up at that patch of sky. Ravna's lips compressed in anger. These were good kids; they had been through hell. And their parents had fought to prevent that hell; they had escaped the Blight with the means of its destruction. But ... how many million races had lived in the Beyond, had probed the Transcend and made bargains with devils? How many more had destroyed themselves There? Ah, but that had not been enough for Straumli Realm. They had gone into the Transcend and wakened Something that could take over a galaxy. "Do you think anybody's left there?" said Jefri. "Do you think we're all that's left?" His sister put an arm around him. "Maybe, maybe not Straumli Realm. But the rest of the universe -- look, it's still there." Weak laughter. "Daddy and Mom, Ravna and Pham. They stopped the Blight." She waved a hand against the sky. "They saved most all of it." "Yes,复件 (15) air max," said Ravna. "We're saved and safe, Jefri. To begin again." And as far as it went, that comfort was probably true. The ship's zone probes were still working. Of course, a single measure point is of no use for precise zonography, but she could tell that they were deep in the new volume of the Slowness, the volume created by Pham's Revenge. And -- much more significant -- the OOB detected no variation in zonal intensity. Gone was the continuous trembling of the months before. This new status had the feeling of mountain roots, to be moved only by the passage of the ages. Fifty degrees along the galactic river was another unremarkable space of sky. She didn't point it out to the kids, but what was of interest there was much nearer, just under thirty light-years out: the Blighter Fleet. Flies trapped in amber. At normal jump rates for the Low Beyond,复件 (9) air max, they had been just hours away when Pham created the Great Surge. And now ...? If they had been bottom luggers, ships with ramscoops,mbt safiri, they could close the gap in less than fifty years. But Aniara Fleet had made their sacrifice; they had followed Pham's godshattered advice. And though they didn't know it, they had broken the Blight. There wasn't a single Slow Zone capable vessel in the approaching fleet. Perhaps they had some in-system capability -- a few thousand klicks per second. But no more, not Down Here, where new construction was not a matter of waving a magic wand. The Blight's extermination force would sweep past Tines World in ... a few thousand years.