Greetings, my friends! Yes, I'm still alive, and not mad – not more than usual, at least. We are both alive, my ship and me. She's repaired and recharging, and now it's just a matter of waiting, just a short time, and then we'll be gone.

After my last broadcast, I started the interface and merged my consciousness with the matrix.

It was... there are no words to describe what it felt like. My whole self was expanding, as if a blind man could suddenly see millions and millions of colours; I suddenly was everywhere and everywhen, time and space dissolved in a slow explosion, into a million of snowflakes, dancing like microscopic mirrors... And then the matrix consciousness found me. She pulled me back, she spoke to me, not in words, for words were to vague and clumsy for the exchange we shared, but in pure thought. What I can give here is no more than a dim shadow of these things.

She let her deep sorrow surge through me, made me feel her fear. We are dying.

I know. What can I do to save us? I answered in the same way, sending my love and trust to her to carry my question.

This universe is wrong. It is neither the one I was grown in, nor the one where we lived after he saved us. She relived the explosion in the control room, partly through my eyes, my own memories of the scene when white light engulfed the girl in the stasis field and everything else.

When you were cutting off parts of me, you made me vulnerable. I impulsively cried out to a kindred soul, and for a moment I touched the matrix consciousness of his ship. We were in synch, so my lowered inner shields dragged down hers, and when the girl fell inside her, she fell through space, into me. I wanted to tell you, even the girl wanted to tell you, but you muted her and none of you were ready to listen to me. So I couldn't warn you when he came in her wake.

My guilt and panic almost drowned us both. So he came to save her, and I blew him up, too?!

When you raised the inner shields while his ship was already landing inside me, I would have been ripped apart, and so would the girl and everyone in the console room. I tried to resist. Space was bend and warped, until it finally ripped apart. You and I were pulled through the rift, into this world. But he and his ship were not, and I believe that she saved them. Together, they saved all of them, I am sure. They are both so old and wise.

Her admiration for him and his trusted vessel flooded my consciousness, calmed my fear and guilt.

I am so young, and I was bred for battle. Now it was her shame that I felt, so similar to my own. His ship... I could feel her recoilwhen she touched my weapon systems.

But you refused when you were ordered to abused them! I tried to pacify her, in a wave of calm and trust. And you went with us, you helped us run away to find him. Doesn't that count?

The warmth of her response was like the glow of sunsets on my face. I hope so. Because I don't regret a second of it. You allowed be to see the universe he saved.

There was so much gratitude in her answering thought, but also a deep, intense longing, the same as I felt, for home. Our real home, and we shared a dream image of our planet, in its vast orange glory, returned to its place in real space, in a sky full of stars.

Can we go back there? It felt like I was crying – not with my eyes, because at that moment, I existed only as bare consciousness, but with my hearts and soul.

Yes. I am still clinging to life. A picture formed in my mind, of a small crystalline battery somewhere in the wiring of the engine core. You have to find me, and to give me life.

My confusion at this was met with irritation. I was too badly damaged, and time is running out. I could not adapt to this universe and its energy, so I need energy from our home dimension, either one of them, to recharge. Sadness touched me, asking for forgiveness. I have to ask you for a fraction of your life. That is the only energy I can use to gain the power for one jump, back through the rift. I would not ask for it...

No! No, I give, I gladly give some of my life to bring us back home.

And so I did. When the connection was severed – what had felt like mere moments to me had taken several hours of your time, as I later found out – I crept into the central core, the mechanical heart of the ship, the brain to her mind, and there I found the little light in the darkness. I took it in my hands, I closed my eyes and offered myself. Just for an instant, my body turned ice cold, as several years of my time left me, feeding the glow of the little battery, making it shine brighter and brighter, and I laughed off the cold at this amazing sight.

The ship is now looping this energy, my sacrifice of years, back on itself, slowly recharging. I have repaired the remaining systems, and as power levels rise, the lights are coming back on, the temperature is becoming more endurable, and soon we will jump up, out of your atmosphere, through the rift, and be gone.

I used my spare time to search your information networks and found out that even you, in this parallel universe, know him, even if he is only a story to you. But no, I shouldn't say 'only'. Stories have power. It were stories of him that Light told me in the gloom of the orphanage, when the starless sky of our small world had gone dark. These stories permeated everything; they connected her and me, they connected us to others, even later when we were adults, and they were how those meetings began, in little rooms and with shared fantasies. We found like-minded people, ones who didn't believe in just sitting and waiting and letting him carry all the burden, suffer all the trouble on hisown. We dreamt of imitating him; stealing a decommissioned ship and running away, pushing through to the other universe, the one we originally came from; to find him and help him bring us back.

But then, suddenly, our dreams were not so impossible any more. A bright young astrophysicist, as you would call him, who was to become our diplomat one day, found a way, a theory only and incredibly risky, to push through. A friend of his wife, specialist on dismantling weaponry, knew how to get into the military depot and where to find the battleships decommissioned for insubordination during the ravages of the Great War. And so, we just did it. We started running, and haven't ever stopped since.

[static, as the record is stopped, then started again]

Well, the battery is fully recharged now. That means I'm leaving. It means I will finally meet him. You know stories of him, you must know how I feel. You have heard of my people, our people, what they did, and how he saved us non the less.

I was one of the children, survivors in the ruins, on the day the monsters clouding our skies disappeared and took the stars with them. And I want to help him to return our home back to the stars.

I thank you all for your interest, and for listening. I keep believing, and I am eager to see which universe our story will take us to. [footsteps, a lever being pulled. Finally, her voice already distant:]

I am MercuRiaobScuraliBelle, Libelle for short, and this is my final signing out. Farewell!

[the rising and falling hum of an engine, then static noise and finally, silence.]