As McCaffrey says in her introduction, this story really makes no sense on its own. I've read The Ship Who Sang several times, and I'm still confused when I read this - need to reread the Ship so I can remember exactly who Niall Parollan is, what happened when she went to Beta Corviki the first time, where the c-v drive came from in the first place...stuff like that. This is a neat tying-up of loose ends, if you remember that the ends are loose...and a nice present for Helva (and probably for Niall as well, though it doesn't say exactly what he got from her). ( )