The Mirzim scraped her keel softly on a yielding surface and was still. Trehearne opened the port, looking out on the dark windy desert.
Shairn spoke then. "A strange beginning for us, Michael, and now an even stranger ending."
He held out his hand to help her down and the pressure of her fingers was like something tearing at his heart. She looked up at him, a small lonely figure in the vast dark. He thought her lips moved but the wind came between them and took the words away and he had none of his own for answer.
The warning bell jarred harshly in his ears. He closed the port and she was gone.
Joris' voice roared from the bridge, through the intercom. "Flatten out, all! This is the only start we'll get on Kerrel and I've got to pile it on!"
The cruel hand of acceleration crushed Trehearne down. He lay on the scored plates of the deck and that last vision of Shairn's white face remained with him to remind him of all that he had had and lost.
He said her name over and over in the silence of the empty lock and his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of dust. The Mirzim leaped through space like a wild thing, driving toward the sector that was the goal of a thousand-year hope and quest, toward the Galaxy edge and the shores of outer night.
NINETEEN
They had stepped clear out to the edge of the galaxy, where the fringing stars were lost in the outer void and the dead suns swept forever through the entombing dark, where even the memory of creation was gone, blotted out by unimaginable time. No delimited frontier was here, but a border region between the swarming star-sparks and the black abyss beyond.