Vreta turned towards Dr. Wetherall. “I am implying that there may have been a being related to the Cradle on your homeworld at a point in time roughly two thousand years ago. Whether it is [i]still[/i] there, though, I would have no way of knowing. And of course, there are alternative explanations to what the Navigator told me, as I said. But, if there was a Cradle being on your homeworld, then it would not surprise me at all that you find yourself here now. You may have been led here in some way, without your population as a whole knowing. Remember, we found the Navigator on my people’s homeworld, and it claims its kind have seeded life in this galaxy. Had the Navigator not been buried so deep, had it been more accessible to us, we may have found it long ago. In that case, it may have been us that was led to the Cradle.”

For a moment, Vreta rubbed his head, trying to focus on the details of his meeting in the Cradle. Unfortunately, there was nothing that came to mind which could answer Freyr’s question. “I don’t remember it telling me where to find more of its kind. I remember it pointing out a potential location in Andromeda to find evidence of the Hegemon, but nothing about other Cradle beings. It is still possible that it sent me away with the data, though. It could, perhaps, be stored away within my implants. I just need to take some time to go through my data storage and look for unrecorded changes.”

It was not long before Nirann interjected. By the way he had been staring at Vreta, he had been waiting eagerly for him to finish speaking. “That is a good idea. By all means, do that, but…even if it didn’t leave you anything else, we [i]may[/i] already have what we need to at least give us a start. Think about it, the Navigator claims his kind are life-seeders, right? We found one on the Rothian homeworld, Outremer had intelligent life before you arrived, even if it didn’t survive to modern day, and now we have information suggesting that there may have been a Cradle being on the Human homeworld at some point in time. Every Cradle being we know of has had [i]some[/i] connection not just with life, but with [i]intelligent[/i] life. I’d call that a pattern, wouldn’t you? If that pattern holds, then we might find what we’re looking for by searching the homeworlds of known intelligent species. Now that we have mountains of data from our scans of the Navigator’s object, we know what to look for.”