Prologue:

      The decision of the Sentiency sprang instantly into the left lobe of Wed's dualistic brain as if it were his own thought, Destroy them. A golf-ball sized neural node between the two hemispheres of his twined brain identified the order as intended for this particular unit of the Sentiency and passed it across to the non-sentient right lobe for execution. The individual element of its overall self the super-consciousness knew as Wed Hodaki responded instantaneously and without question to the decision that was as much of its own making as that of any other single unit of the multi-billioned-being aggregate. Reaching out to the control console with his right-most arm, Wed activated the ship's weapons system.

      Flame danced repeatedly from the nose of the kilometer-long obelisk as the energy beam it emitted annihilated the few atoms of atmosphere present at this altitude on its way to its targets. Striking each of the fleet of defensive missiles rising from the planet's surface in turn the anti-weak-force beam instantly canceled the forces holding together the very atoms of the materials from which they were made. The impotent missiles simply ceased to exist; their atoms separating into rapidly dissipating clouds of disassociated protons, neutrons and electrons.

      Resume accretion, came the control thought from the Sentiency: Its billions of individual elements spread across the entire inner third of the galaxy all having observed the beam's effect in the same instant Hodaki's eyes had seen it on his view screen; those images telepathically transmitted to them across the thousands of light-years in literally no time at all.

      Hodaki acknowledged the new order by turning his attention to the console controlling the second of his two ships--one far larger and much more powerful than the control craft he occupied. Using that ship's sensor array he located the planet's largest concentrations of heavy elements. Once found, he engaged the ship's pure proton cutting beam and began slicing the planet up into discrete sections. Employing a gravity-wave generator, he gently nudged each section he sliced into an orbit designed to permit the most efficient collection of those precious elements. That these concentrations were located in the planet's cities was of no consequence.

      The planet consisted primarily of molten core material covered by only a thin layer of hardened crust. Applying the beam in the same methodical way as he had in a hundred systems before, Hodaki carved the planet up into gigantic wedges. Twenty in all, tumbling lazily, amoebae-like, in space; gravity slowly reforming the viscous wedges into a series of discrete, round, planetoidal blobs.

      The several billion souls on the planet's surface were either consumed in the infernos of the exploding seas and atmosphere as the exposed magma boiled them away or perished in the molten magma itself as it enveloped the very ground upon which they stood. In less than an hour, and without ever knowing why or what terrible sin it had committed to incur such wrath, a civilization ten thousand years in the making vanished from the record of galactic history.

      With the precious elements separated from the planetary rubble and the planet itself properly divided into manageable chunks, Hodaki set about completing the accretion. He first dispatched sweeper 'bots to collect the precious elements and load them into the tug field. While the 'bots loaded the tug he maneuvered the smaller ship from one new planetoid to the next, attaching a large mass driver to each. Careful programming of the drivers' navigation computers finished his task.

      Hodaki re-docked his control ship to the massive, planet destroying tug, then sequentially engaged the mass drivers on the planetoids. One by one they began to move, the next falling in behind the one before. Off they went, each radiating beautifully in the infra red like beads on an invisible string; the first step on their 500 year journey back toward the singularity the Sentiency was building at the base of this particular arm of the galaxy.

      This was the seventh planet in the system Wed had reduced and sent on its way, and the last, but finishing his work in this system would still take many more years. With the planets dispatched he could now begin dismantling the star, itself. Reducing its much larger mass, however, would require a more involved and far more time consuming process than had the planets. The star had first to be cut into sections too small to sustain a core reaction. Once he had stopped the fusion Wed would have to wait months for the thousands of new Jovian-sized planets the star would yield to cool sufficiently to be worked. Only then could he further reduce the new Jovians in the same manner he had the system's other bodies. The many planetoids yielded from each Jovian would then, too, be set on their way toward the gargantuan construction project just outside the galactic core.

***

      The Sentiency knew nothing of sin. It was not judgmental and had not punished the inhabitants of this world for some galactic indiscretion. It simply needed more mass for its singularities. For a thousand years Wed Hodaki and billions like him had been working their way out from the core down each of the galaxy's spiral arms, reducing each star system they encountered in the same manner and setting their mass on the long journey back to the two singularities they were constructing at the base of those arms.

      The Sentiency had a plan. A plan to create a brand new galaxy in place of this one--a galaxy in which the rule of the Sentiency would reign forever. But only a few systems further along this arm lay a small cluster of stars bearing names such as Centauri, Tau Ceti and Sol. There Wed Hodaki would encounter a Texas cowgirl, a Centauri doctor and the two's inter-species bred daughter. It is in that unremarkable little star cluster and amongst this unlikely band of warriors the ultimate battle for the salvation of the galaxy would be fought.

      But as he watched the glowing beads of the planet streak away on their invisible string it occurred to Wed what a beautiful sight they made. Such things were not supposed to occur to him. A quick check of the gateway node between the two lobes of his brain insured him the strange thought occurring in the right lobe had not been noted by the left, and, therefore, by the Sentiency. It was not the first time such a thought had occurred to Wed. There had been many since they began, unexplained, almost a hundred years ago. None of his other self-sentient thoughts had ever leaked over into the left lobe, either. Still, he felt uneasy as he marveled at the beauty of the beads he had created--and he was no more supposed to have feelings than he was these thoughts. The Sentiency would not approve of independent thoughts, of this he was sure, though he couldn't say why. He knew only that something about him was changing, that he liked this change, and that he intended to keep it from the super-consciousness for as long as it remained possible to do so.

      In two hundred years Wed Hodaki would come face-to-face with the cowgirl and her strange progeny. By then the change him would be profound; and would manifest in ways that would rattle the galaxy to its very core.