These three novellas reveal what came after the original series, each one focusing on a fan favorite from the trilogy who didn't get enough time in the spotlight the first time around. In the The Augmented Stars, Ashok the cyborg engineer becomes the captain of his own ship and embarks on a deep-space mission to investigate a cosmic anomaly (and confront actual, literal space pirates). In The Artificial Stars, the machine intelligence known as Shall receives a mysterious summons... from an earlier version of himself, who warns of a threat to the fabric of the universe itself. In The Alien Stars, intrepid alien Lantern returns to the station where she was born to confront the monsters who reared her.... and also works out some matters of the heart.