Free Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) by Jeffrey A. Carver

primitive life had scarcely yet evolved on Earth. This was Triton eons ago, in another star system, another reality.
    It was Triton at war.
    In frightening silence, he watched as long plumes of light splashed languidly across the ruined landscape of a nearby planetary body, the mother world. He was aware that the light beams came from the surface of Triton, and they were no mining lasers. They were weapons, terrible weapons, and they were raining devastation upon their homeworld. The plumes of destruction flowed and surged over the planet's surface like tides, and the civilization beneath them crumbled, melted, evaporated.
    Nor was the conflict confined to the planet's surface: battle raged in space, as well—between the planet and its moon, and on the surface of the moon. Spaceships tumbled past one another, lancing each other into debris. Streams of fire swept over the surface of the moon, boiling away its atmosphere and reducing miracles of technology to molten slag. The footsteps were gone now; it all happened in silence. But he imagined that he could hear the screams of dying beings echoing across the emptiness of space.
    There was no escape, none at all—except down into the buried, shielded translator, the place from which the quarx had first emerged in his failed, futile effort to prevent this tragedy from happening. Though damaged and unable to escape, the translator could probably survive the dark and the cold to come, if it could just survive this last terrible onslaught of violence. The quarx was now slipping downward through the deep darkness of ice, into the machine that might bear him through eons, and perhaps an eternity, of silent exile. He felt, but only distantly, the final tremendous explosions that vaporized the last living beings on the surface and hurled the moon out of orbit, out of its star system, and into the somber and lonely silence of interstellar space. With those explosions had come the final, bitter end to this war, and to the last of those who had fought it.
    The quarx drifted off into a timeless, dreamless stasis-sleep. His final thoughts were darkened with grief. Where he was bound now, he had no idea. But he knew it could take longer than the lifetime of his own race to reach his next destination. And while he slept, the translator repaired itself. Would he ever see another quarx? All he really knew for certain was that his life had changed forever, yet again.
    Bandicut's whisper was a part of the blurred datastream. My God, is this your memory? Did you really live through this? Were those your people who died?
    Not my people, no. For a time, yes, but not anymore...that time was past...
    —shift—
    The battle images spun swirling away, the whirlpool of memory displaced by new images of Triton in orbit around the cold, cerulean planet Neptune. The heat of its capture had melted most of the moon, causing all the stone and metal in its crust to sink to the core; but some of that energy had been harnessed by the translator, and it, with some of the metal remnants of the alien civilization, had erupted back upward to the surface in a great convective flow as Triton cooled.
    With awakening, for the quarx, there was a sense that certain memories were faded or perhaps had been lost, that some very important work had gone unfinished, that some failure had to be rectified, some wrong atoned for, some need fulfilled. There was a reverberating memory that this was how it always felt to awaken.
    The quarx felt a deep loneliness and longing, but also a sudden new urgency. Here was a new place and time, a new solar system, a new race called "humanity" that had come into being while he had slept. And humanity had found its way to Triton, and would soon discover the translator. Who were they, these humans—and were they dangerous? Would one of them make a suitable host and companion? Were they dangerous? Why had the translator waited so long to wake him? It had served him well, and protected him—but