Astra 3 Ponders

Perhaps science offered more hope than magic? Probe had said that Alliance ships could only navigate to alternative realities that they had visited before. Now an Alliance ship had visited her own reality. That wasn't the same as the reality that the demifoxes were in, but from the similarity of events up to an advanced stage it sounded as if it should be very "close" to it. (As she understood it, the adventurers had only been transported through space by Moreau, not to another reality, so were still in the same reality that they had started in.) Might that mean that if an Alliance ship were to visit her own world, it would be "close" enough for the demifoxes to be located by either science or magic, and brought across to the ship?

She realised that this would in any case have to wait for a cure for the Phage. For one thing, until then the mages who might be needed for such an operation couldn't go on an Alliance ship. Secondly, whilst in their demifox forms those she wanted to rescue would presumably be immune to the Phage, once transformed back to their human forms they would lose that immunity. Or would they? She hadn't really understood the talk about the genetic difference between the Astra who had died of the Phage and the other Astras. But all the other Astras had spent time as a demifox before being converted back to humanity. (Except that this world's Astra was a demifox still, of course.) Could it be that the Crystallic had not precisely replicated the originals when converting them back? Perhaps even deliberately, as protection from the Phage, since the Crystallics seemed to have a measure of some strange intelligence?

1. Deciding that further speculation on this topic was pointless for the moment, she wondered when Belboz would get back to Malachi Droconis.

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