No matter what had happened when the Others came to Earth from the Dream Plane more than ten thousand years ago, they had forgotten their homeland and everything about their past. The Sirens were no exception. Hao Ren could imagine what this city had looked like back then: Nathatone had fallen through a massive spatial rift to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, taken root securely in this flat stretch of the deep sea, and the Sirens had awakened in the "strange" starship city, utterly ignorant and deeply confused about everything concerning themselves. They did not know who had built the city around them or how it had been built, much less what the city was really for. They only knew that they had awakened here as though it were perfectly natural, and then continued living here. Even now, their greatest achievement was merely mastering how to operate the city's life-support system and part of its defensive system, as well as performing simple maintenance on them. They knew nothing about the starship city's navigation, flight, or voyage databases.
The reason was simple. Those systems involved the core and were extraordinarily complex, far beyond comparison with the simple devices that could be operated by flipping a few valves and pressing a few buttons. The Sirens could not read the writing on the systems.
But Hao Ren firmly believed that those ancient operating systems must contain information about the Sirens' homeworld.
"This is a colony ship, though it could also be an escape ship. Either way, judging by its size, it definitely wasn't built for sightseeing within a star system." Hao Ren pointed at the magnificent facilities around them, his expression resembling that of a sleazy real-estate agent trying to sell property. "According to the most basic principles of interstellar travel and