"I've got a question, too," Alaric says, raising his hand. "The dubious ethics of complaining about ill-timed slave revolts aside, how sure are we that the moth drives are reliable in the first place? The entire reason for this discussion is that this is apparently a dead universe. The moth harness relies on the high calendar. If there's no people around - or at least no living humans - then the calendircal environment should tend toward invariant conditions, or at leave very unstable ones due to rift-leakage. I'm no a professional stategic planner, but it feels like it'd be preferable to shut the harnesses down in a controlled manner instead of having them fail while running from ravenous space monsters."