Mysterious corpus-deprived alien intelligences who Nakail and Aenea claim can help us against the Dark Swarm. Aenea, Nakail, and Christina are preparing to negotiate with them to learn technologies and powers that will allow the defeat of the Swarm. This is supposedly in exchange for allowing them to pass into this galaxy?/time?/dimension? as their own time has some unspecified problems of its own. But they've already dealt with the Swarm or something like it.