 Approximately 600,000 opt to colonize some star system centuries of travel core-wards beyond former Pax space using a spinship built by the Aeneans, who give them special permission to use the Hawking drive, despite its deleterious effects on the Void Which Binds (after redesigning it to reduce the effect by orders of magnitude).The spinship "Helix" has not yet reached a suitable destination when it receives a distress signal from a binary star system.Four of the five shipboard AI (apparently formerly of the TechnoCore; in characteristic Simmons fashion, each is patterned after a famous literary figure, in this case, Japanese