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After the winds of change had swept across Earth in the period around the beginning of the third millennium, the path was clear to a new world order.

Not too far into the twenty-first century, virtually all war ceased. A small part of the reason for this was that international relationships had improved; mostly, however, it was due to the increasing effort required by individual nations to feed and maintain rising, domestic populations.

The environmental destruction characteristic of the twentieth century had largely ceased, but the damage, some of it irreparable, was already done. It was some time before the technology and resources existed to both feed the world's enormous population and undo some of the ruin humanity had inflicted on the Earth.

When problems eased as populations adjusted to prevailing circumstances, it would have been easy for humanity to regress into barbarity. But people all over the planet realized the senselessness in returning to the old ways, realized how much better life was when resources were squandered not on the materiel of warfare but on more worthwhile things. Moderate parties - espousing humanist and Green policies - were elected in an increasing number of nations.

Of course, there were some nations (or, more accurately, their leaders and policy-makers) that did wish to go back to the twentieth century's methods, that still dealt harshly with their neighbors - whether by military or subtler methods, such as economic or trade embargoes and restrictions. But the more moderate nations created multinational, military juggernauts or economic unions to compel the aggressors to back down - in effect using their own weapons against them - or scattered them to the winds.

Towards the middle of the twenty-first century, after a series of not inconsequential obstacles had been overcome, a planetary government was formed, its first elected leader, President Moses Appleton. The world parliament was based, in theory at least, in Zurich, but the two hundred senators representing each of the old nations were rarely actually present in the European city: it was far easier for them to vote "on-line" on the occasional issues considered worthy of international interest. For the most part, the world parliament did not interfere in the day-to-day affairs of each nation, which still governed their own domestic affairs according to individual constitutions.

A decrease in weekly working hours, necessitated by the reality that there was insufficient work for one hundred percent, full-time employment, meant increased leisure time for the average person. The standard of living of the person in the street was high, as technology cheaply supplied every need - and most wants. People enjoyed the extra time that they could spend with their family and friends or in developing themselves in new directions.

With the relative anonymity of the Internet and virtual reality devices, more and more people interacted with others from all over the world. A new, spiritual awareness spread across the Earth, and - whether it was due to this mass change in mind-set or simply a quirk of evolution - there was an exponential increase in the incidence of psionic talents manifesting in people all over the planet. The latent talents had always been present to some degree, occasionally appearing in isolated individuals, but now, perhaps due to the overwhelming evidence of their existence, they appeared to be almost universal, as humanity flexed previously dormant, mental muscles for the first time. The power of these talents was undeniably weak, but they could be improved with discipline and application.

Eventually, with the discovery that the faster-than-light, tachyon particles were the source of psionics, computers that could amplify psionic strength were developed. Now, a person who was strong in telepathy could communicate by mind with another person on the other side of the world, however weak the other's telepathy; now, an individual with strong telekinesis could pick up a small object, such as a glass, without using the hands.

Technology in many fields received a boost, as scientists and engineers previously committed to military projects turned to work in other areas. Controlled fusion reactors, anti-gravity generators, and genetic engineering were among the innovations that improved the human condition. With the discovery of the psionic talent of teleportation, humankind found access to hyperspace, and true, interstellar travel became possible.

Hyperspace travel required human interaction with an advanced computer: the natural, human, psionic talent of teleportation needed monumental amplification in order to shift an occupied spacecraft across light years of space.

The Pathfinder series, deep-space probes were the first, mass-produced spacecraft to feature human/computer mind-links. The Pathfinders investigated nearby star systems, able to make interstellar journeys infinitely more quickly than the older, unoccupied space probes, which were limited to sub-light velocities.

Discovered in orbit around most stars were planets, including a select few potentially inhabitable with terraforming alterations, techniques pioneered during the restoration of the Earth. Starships, carrying fleets of robot, terraforming spacecraft, were sent to the most promising planets; the probes descended on their target worlds, adjusting climate and atmosphere, creating terrestrial biospheres. Within thirty or forty years the planets were suitable for human occupation.

Some of the more restive or adventurous people of Earth volunteered to colonize these new worlds. They set forth in groups - specially selected by computer to offer the best, genetic mix for their destination planet - in fully equipped starships, with the raw materials necessary to establish a small, self-contained village. Thus were Thermos, Hibernus, Aquarius, and Terra Nova first settled. The Empire of Earth had been created in essence and was soon enshrined in name and constitution as well.

Pathfinder 131, investigating the Ursae Majoris 47 system, found a number of gas giant planets, completely unsuited to human inhabitation. It did find, however, that a moon of the largest planet was eminently suitable for terraforming probes. Jane Buckley-Thorne, the civilian pilot of Pathfinder 131, chose to go into orbit about the moon in order to make a more detailed survey. As she neared the area, her tiny spacecraft was suddenly destroyed by a burst of electromagnetic energy from the gas giant's satellite.

It was the latest in a long line of tragic events in humanity's conquest of space. Many people had been killed in space accidents before, but Buckley-Thorne's loss seemed different. No one could explain exactly how or why she had been killed. Some thought the energy burst was an unknown, natural phenomenon. Others suggested a more sinister reason: intelligent, alien life existed in the Ursae Majoris 47 system, a life form that had maliciously attacked an unarmed, exploration vessel. But humanity had never before encountered alien life in all its travels, and the Imperial government was slow to accept such an explanation.

The Ursae Majoris 47 system was in the center of the next designated sector of human expansion, and the demise of Pathfinder 131 required further investigation. An Imperial starship was sent to the area, and it released a squadron of reconnaissance probes into the star system. These probes came under attack by spacecraft of unknown design that swarmed from hidden bases on the moon at the heart of the mystery.

A tachyon signal was received from beyond the frontier of human exploration. It was incomprehensible, but its staccato rhythm was menacing. For the first time the truth of the Ursae Majoris 47 system was confirmed: it was inhabited by intelligent, alien life (or such a life form had left robotic, military vessels), and these aliens were aggressive. Their hostility brought to the fore old, basic, human instincts: Imperial President Cheryl Wootton considered the military option.

In a secret base beneath the surface of Luna, Earth's moon, Imperial scientists and engineers, both human and computer, designed and built spacecraft armed with humanity's most sophisticated weapons. Citizens of the Empire were covertly recruited to train for service aboard the new, interstellar warships, forming the Imperial Navy and Star Marines.

The alien moon in the Ursae Majoris 47 system was designated E-1 - or Enemy 1. It was determined that E-1 should be studied in the short term, until more was learnt of the aliens and their capabilities. The original, tachyon signal had emanated from a point in interstellar space, suggesting the aliens possessed interstellar travel and possibly occupied other star systems. Human stubbornness and innate curiosity meant exploration of the region was not going to be abandoned, so in future the secret Navy warships would discreetly escort Pathfinder probes into new systems.

Newly recruited, military scientists - graduates in multifarious fields - were directed by the Imperial armed forces to furnish theories about the nature of the aliens of E-1. They were asked to devise a means of communicating with these aliens, and various, message-bearing, tachyon signals were sent both to E-1 and the source of the original, tachyon transmission. But no one could interpret the infrequent replies that were received.

Twelve years passed. Then Pathfinder 165 and its warship escort came under attack in the soon-to-be-designated E-2 system. The Navy warship held its own: its nuclear missiles were able to destroy some of the alien spacecraft that brought energy weapons to bear in the space battle. The human spacecraft limped away, still intact but heavily battered.

The farther away from Earth that exploration progressed, the more frequent became the incidence of alien star systems. It soon became clear that electromagnetic weapons the aliens had at first employed were secondary arms. They were using psionic weapons that appeared to have no effect on the human mind. The aliens changed tack: soon the Imperial spacecraft found themselves assaulted by a psionic weapon capable of influencing human minds. People not in control of their own thoughts directed INS Rommel to a fiery destruction in the E-5 system star.

In time humanity perfected psionic shields, and the scales were readjusted. The balance was maintained, until the aliens countered with an awesome, new weapon: the atomic disrupter.

Human, military technology had largely stagnated since the twenty-first century, and so the atomic disrupter came as a complete surprise. The crew of the INS Apollo was killed, snuffed out in an instant, in the E-6 system. But it was not long before Imperial, military scientists and engineers were hard at work, striving to create their own weapon from what they had learnt of the aliens' device.

It was now common knowledge that there was an alien civilization hostile to the Earth, and the existence of the Navy warships had been revealed to the general public. Citizens of the Empire overloaded public and government opinion sites on the Internet, demanding that humankind strike back, not knowing the Empire had already struck - and, for the most part, failed.

The highest officials of the Imperial government privately feared the consequences if the aliens were to press into human territory with their terrifying atomic disrupter; President Huang Lee's Navy advisers informed him that they believed even defending Imperial Earth itself might be an impossible task. For the time being, however, the aliens seemed mercifully reluctant to leave their own star systems.

The vulnerability of the human situation was lessened with the creation of humanity's own version of the atomic disrupter, which enabled the Imperial Navy to wreak havoc on an alien fleet in the E-8 system.

And so an intriguing situation had developed. The Empire pursued its expansionist policy, spreading through the galaxy. Sometimes humanity encountered alien-occupied star systems, where the mysterious Enemy - as it had become known - fiercely defended its territory. But the Enemy never attacked human settlements or even ventured out of its own systems.

Navy warships still accompanied all expeditions into unexplored regions. Small, single-seat, reconnaissance spacecraft surveyed the known, alien worlds, and they were always unmolested, for it seemed the Enemy recognized that they were mere observers.

The two, interstellar civilizations had developed a sort of treaty in an undeclared war. The Enemy did not attack human worlds but defended its own; the humans, for their part, did no more than survey Enemy worlds. But human spacecraft sometimes blundered into the aliens' systems, for the Enemy did not know how - or did not choose - to warn them off.

Neither side could afford to fall behind in military technology, for the next innovation could be costly to the civilization that failed to make the breakthrough.

A stationary, planet-bound observer would have judged him swift. But set against the vacuous vastness of space, his velocity was not especially significant. And that insignificant velocity - around ten percent of the speed of light - meant Lieutenant Mikael Anders Svensson was in deadly peril.

His mission had been to reconnoiter E-7, an outpost world of the Enemy. As he drew within sensor range of the pink- and brown-banded gas giant, an anti-spacecraft missile had been launched from E-7's dayside. That missile had caught the scent of his Eagle Eye spacecraft's sensor emissions, and, ignoring all decoy probes, it now accelerated in pursuit.

The Eagle Eye was the standard, Imperial Navy, reconnaissance spacecraft. It was roughly wedge-shaped, twenty-five meters long and seven meters wide at the rear, tapering to a conical nose. A self-contained sphere three meters in diameter, the cockpit bulged from both sides of the thin, streamlined hull (reminiscent of a pill in a blister pack, Svensson always thought). Two, fat cylinders - the drive tubes - extended from just shy of the nose, through the stubby wings, to marginally past the rear of the hull. The majority of the spacecraft was constructed of silver plasteel, the outer hull, including the cockpit sphere, burnished like a mirror: this was a last-line defense against lasers and other, electromagnetic weapons. The faint, golden glow of the defense shield was an aura over the mirrored hull. At this moment, from the rear of the drive tubes spat jets of dazzlingly brilliant, purplish-white, fusion flame, accelerating the spacecraft, but it was too little, too late.

Englobing Svensson (though he rarely had the leisure or inclination to consider his immediate environment) was the relatively featureless, white plastic of the interior of the cockpit sphere. Illuminated by dim, pinkish light, it was not an especially spacious setting; some people might have suffered claustrophobia in the confining space. But Svensson, like most military pilots, was genuinely at ease within the Eagle Eye's cockpit: he felt that it conferred an inordinate sense of assurance. Completely naked, he lay suspended, wholly immersed, within transparent, though pink-tinted, gelatinous sustagel. He was readily able to breathe the oxygen- and nutrient-enriched material, and its viscosity was high enough that he was able to move - or, rather, swim - passably freely within its embrace. He felt a distinct lift as artificial hormones surged into him - compounds that could not be diffused through sustagel - via a drip feed attached to the skin of his neck. The drip administered a constant, precisely measured dose appropriate to his body's needs. A perpetual replenishment and filtration of the viscously flowing sustagel swiftly extracted what little waste his body still excreted. A perforated, plastic canister that bulged from the curved, interior wall of the cockpit sphere dispensed both sustagel and the contents of the long, flexible, drip-feed hose. He could not begin to imagine what concocting and mixing went on in there but sincerely hoped the right stuff emerged from the tank.

Currently, he was mind-linked to Ms Mary, the spacecraft's flight computer: he and the computer were as one. Much of his time was spent in mind-linkage with Ms Mary, receiving information telepathically and/or by holovision. The latter created a three-dimensional, virtual realm that seemed to surround him so that his true environment - the cockpit sphere itself - was invisible to him. While he was receiving such a projection, a theoretical observer would note an impenetrable, black fuzziness enveloping his head.

He had instantly realized there was no escaping the Enemy missile; he and Ms Mary had less than a second to think and act. Their symbiotic mind-link was millions of times faster than the human norm. His human inventiveness was a good foil for Ms Mary's logical intelligence, and they ran through thousands of escape scenarios within a quarter of a second.

There was only one, plausible option: they were going to have to undertake a hyperspace jump - a "hy-jump." Unplanned, it was a potentially hazardous procedure, but the alternatives were seemingly much worse.

Linked, Svensson and the Eagle Eye computer focussed on being somewhere else. Anywhere else. The cockpit sphere about him warped and rippled, as if water ran sluggishly over his eyes - it was not a characteristic of the circulating sustagel but a quivering of the sphere's very plastic structure. The stars surrounding the spacecraft - observed on holovision - transmuted into bizarre, unnaturally colored pinpoints, then abruptly extinguished. E-7's customary, rose-streaked brown became a weird, lime-green and tangerine combination, before it, too, evanesced. Everything seemed to be stretching, twisting, and…turning inside out. Even the Eagle Eye's technology could not safeguard Svensson from all the exotic forces generated. He was momentarily impossibly heavy and compressed, then light and expansive. The chemicals pumped into his bloodstream could not keep him conscious.

As he began to black out, Svensson sensed a powerful spike of psionics that stabbed mercilessly into his fortunately ebbing consciousness. A burst of telepathy and empathy - and compulsion - it originated in the warhead of the anti-spacecraft missile that, riding its own violet, plasma exhaust, closed on the Eagle Eye. 'New psi-weapon,' he thought, then lost consciousness completely, as the spacecraft slipped into hyperspace.

The pilot woke after what seemed only an instant's blackness. Blinking, he peered around. Its dim interior no longer shivering with apparent - or actual - movement, the cockpit sphere had stabilized around him. The view of space external to the Eagle Eye had also normalized, but it was a largely altered star-field to that observed from the vicinity of E-7: the spacecraft had obviously jumped quite some distance to make the star patterns appear so radically different. He sensed, too, that he had lost time.

"What happened?" he wondered aloud, momentarily disoriented. Sound, though marginally distorted, carried quite readily through sustagel.

The facts started to filter through as he snapped back into mind-link with Ms Mary. An intense, tachyon stream had violated his brain just before the hyperspatial teleportation. The attack had come at an awkward moment, disturbing his mind as he was preparing for the hy-jump. Logic suggested the Enemy's missile had contained some sort of psionic relay in its warhead.

He let his breath out explosively, sending a momentary ripple through the sustagel. It was an alarming thought that the Enemy had such mastery that it could relay psionics so powerfully without a mind present to generate them. Surely, there had been no alien actually inside the missile. (An intelligent creature would not sacrifice itself in such a way, would it? Not that he, a Navy flyer, could pretend to understand the psychology of a largely unknown, alien species. Yet surely…) After launching its psionic assault, the missile had probably detonated in the routine way - nuclear fission - though the Eagle Eye had left the vicinity of E-7 by that time.

At that moment the mind-linked pair was nearly 417 light years away from the nearest, Imperial planet. Svensson was astounded. It was the Imperial homeworld, Earth, which was more than thirteen hundred light years from E-7. A normal hy-jump was less than fifty light years. The Eagle Eye had made an unplanned, emergency jump, warped by the influence of a potent, psionic assault. With that power and his mind distracted and poorly focussed, the spacecraft could have ended up anywhere. Though it did not really feel like it, Svensson realized he had been let off quite lightly.

He recalled his sense of having lost time. "How long was I out, Mary?"

"About thirty-two days," she replied with her husky, disembodied voice. "That Enemy, psionic attack left you virtually comatose, and the psionic node of your mind was inactive, so hy-jumps were impossible. We've cruised in a sub-light, random, stealth pattern while your PC and I restored you to health."

"I understand," he said. Ms Mary was programmed to make his welfare her prime consideration. Everything else, including heading home, was lower on her order of priority.

The Enemy's actions would surely have made sense by now. He wondered if the missile attack had heralded the long dreaded, Enemy invasion. The aliens would make a fearsome opponent, judging from their previously unknown ability to relay psionics so strongly. Now that humans had matched their other accomplishments, it would have required them to come up with just such an innovation to break the peace. One thing was certain: it was much too late for Svensson to be warning anyone.

There were no signals forthcoming from Old Earth or any of its colonies - the Imperial Navy did not often break its communications blackout with reconnaissance pilots - and Svensson transmitted none of his own. The Imperial homeworld seemed the best port of call in his current circumstances, so he surrendered himself to suspended animation for the journey.

Situated deep within his brain, his personal computer, in consultation with Ms Mary, adjusted the blend of nutrients surging through the drip feed and diffusing through the sustagel, adding new drugs. His heart slowed almost to a standstill, and he lapsed into a dreamless, preserving, hibernation-like sleep. This was the ideal state in which to undertake a hy-jump, for the conscious, human mind was generally too erratic, lacking in sufficient powers of concentration; an unconscious mind, however, still generated a psionic signal a flight computer could amplify. For Svensson there was a subjectively brief blackness, followed by a gradual return of awareness.

Curled into a fetal ball, the pilot groaned wheezily. Lethargy pervaded his body, rendering his limbs heavy, despite the support of the sustagel. His tongue lolled between slack lips. When he opened his eyes, the lids immediately descended back over the gritty, reddened orbs. He was acutely aware of an intense headache, something rarely experienced by a twenty-fourth century individual. He lay perfectly still, trying not to think too much.

"Don't move," Ms Mary told him. "I am restoring you to optimum condition."

He was supplied the chemicals necessary to revive him from days of existing just on the right side of the thin line between life and death. After several minutes he started to feel a little better. Within half-an-hour he was fully recovered, properly alert and healthy.

Svensson re-established his link with Ms Mary, and his senses expanded dramatically. The Eagle Eye, he was now aware, approached Sol at standard cruising speed: ten percent of light. It had taken a dozen hyperspace jumps to reach this point, still approximately ten light hours from the small, yellowish star. Ms Mary had not dared to jump any closer: there was too much risk of materializing where solid matter already existed…

Earth was the third planet of the Sol star system, the very heart of the Empire. There were no interrogative signals assaulting the Eagle Eye. Svensson frowned. It was strange that he was being allowed to approach without questions being asked. He decided to decrease speed.

Within two days the Eagle Eye neared the Perimeter, just beyond the maximum orbit of Pluto, where ships of the Imperial Fleet should have been waiting to intercept it. But there were no ships.

<'Mary,'> thought Svensson telepathically. <'Establish contact with someone. 'Anyone.'>

After a brief pause, she replied: <'There's no response.'>

"What's going on?" Svensson demanded aloud in exasperation.

"I don't know, Mikael."

"I don't like it."

Ms Mary did not need to be told twice. She could not sense anything out of the ordinary, but she respected the obscure, human instinct. She activated the Eagle Eye's defense shield, then primed its atomic disrupter cannons.

<'Computer: plot a course to Earth via a Mars slingshot,'> commanded Svensson telepathically.

Accelerating on a course marginally above the planetary ecliptic plane - this avoided most of the dangerous, hard to detect, stray matter orbiting Sol - the Eagle Eye streaked towards Mars. The atomic disrupters blasted what little, solid material - small asteroids, rocks, even dust motes - which crossed its path. At high velocity even a dust particle had potentially destructive, kinetic energy.

Five days later the spacecraft neared Mars. At a distance of just over one hundred million kilometers, Ms Mary started to receive sensor readings from the red planet. They were extremely unusual.

Svensson frowned. "This doesn't look too good. Give me a visual, Mary."

Ms Mary magnified a holovision image of Mars. Presently crescent-shaped, it was a fuzzy, orange-red color. It looked wrong somehow, though he could not decide why.

"Let's have a close-up of the surface."

Ms Mary obliged, and Svensson gasped, then cursed helplessly.

Mars was destroyed. Dead. Annihilated. He ran out of words to express his horror and disbelief and disgust. This planet, the famous, red planet, the first, extraterrestrial world where a person could live and breathe out in the open, had been ruined, the target of a campaign of unprecedented, terrible destruction. The Martian landscape had suffered a sustained bombardment from all manner of weapons. Through transitory gaps in a pall of red dust and thick cloud, he could see great strips of scorched, blackened earth and glassy slag a thousand meters wide and hundreds of kilometers long. Reducing the scale of magnification, he noted: shattered mesas, even mountains; crater-pocked crust of the southern highlands that had fissured into plates separated by wide canyons; and volcanoes, some ancient - including the broad, though lofty, shield volcanic peaks on the Tharsis Ridge of the northern hemisphere, Olympus Mons, Pavonis Mons, Ascraeus Mons, and Arsia Mons - and some newly created, that spewed forth varying mixtures of rock, ash, noxious clouds, and lava. Just south of the equator, the mighty canyon, Valles Marineris - initially a staggering four thousand kilometers long and, in parts, more than six kilometers deep - appeared to have lengthened and widened…and was overflowing with incandescent lava. At dozens of locations across the planet colossal levels of residual heat and radioactivity were detectable: nuclear blast sites. An ocean's worth of underground water had been released into the atmosphere, and the polar caps had melted, producing the peachy cloud flurries concealing most of the planet: it was as if Mars itself were attempting to hide its ravaged landscape.

As Ms Mary flicked through a succession of images from various parts of the devastated planet, Svensson was unmoving, shocked into silence. Finally, after two minutes of complete inactivity, the pilot stirred himself. "Give me a close-up of the Martian capital," he whispered hoarsely.

He thought for a moment that she had disobeyed him, an almost impossible thing. But it was hard to believe his eyes. He was staring at an ancient lava plain of the northern hemisphere, at…at a vast impact crater, six or seven kilometers across, where none should be. Observation of the surrounding area revealed, radiating in a starburst pattern away from the crater's raised rim, great quantities of ejecta material. Closer inspection showed huge droplets of some, silvery matter - some of them were four or five hundred meters in diameter - spattered about the Martian landscape.

"Oh, no, no," moaned Svensson, suddenly realizing just what he was seeing. This was the site of Vulcan, Mars' largest city. Twenty million people had lived in a cluster of towers that soared five kilometers into the thin, Martian air. Towers constructed of silver plastic. A massive object - an asteroid, probably - had been cast at Mars to impact here, and kinetic energy had produced a blast of cataclysmic proportions. All that remained of a city of twenty million people was the plastic that, melted by extreme heat and pressure, had been squeezed from the blast zone like drops of mercury to splash outside the crater. It was as if humanity had never existed on Mars.

Svensson sighed heavily, thoroughly despondent. "Any signals? Any life signs?"

"None of either, Mikael."

Ms Mary banished the holovision picture, and Svensson closed his eyes. He knew now why the long-range shot of Mars had seemed flawed: there were none of the green patches that had once dotted the face of the planet, the patches of Earth vegetation gradually expanding outwards from the equator - primarily northward - to cover the rust-red, Martian landscape.

The Enemy invasion had finally come, more devastating and horrific than even the most paranoid of human fears. None of this made any sense, though. It seemed like wanton destruction. There were other, more efficient methods of destroying a city, if that was one's desire. Vulcan must, at the end, have been totally defenseless to allow an intact asteroid to smash into it. And why pulverize the rest of the planet, where humanity and its enterprises were simply non-existent?

'What kind of creatures are they?' he wondered, though he realized the Enemy could not be judged by human standards. They were truly alien: almost nothing was known about them. Their origin was a mystery. No one even knew what they looked like. The acknowledged, Enemy planets - E-1 through -19 - were merely the sites of underground spacecraft bases; they showed no evidence of actual, alien settlements.

"Let's go to Earth," he suggested finally.

Svensson had a suspicion of what he might encounter at Old Earth, but even that vague anticipation could not prepare him for what he did find.

What had been done to Mars paled beside the deed that had been done here. Luna had been shattered. A miniature asteroid belt of irregular, gray-white chunks of rock and a copious volume of dust swiftly orbited the Earth - or the place where the Earth should have been. The Imperial homeworld had vanished. Irrespective of the degree of magnification, the Eagle Eye's cameras could produce no image of the famous, blue planet. But there was proof that the Earth still existed. From the co-ordinates of the planet's core, gravity still reached out with its insistent fingers; indeed, pieces of Luna were being inexorably drawn into the diminutive, sensor-dead place. As their orbit decayed, the lunar fragments swiftly became supremely hot, then abruptly…collapsed, coalesced…to become another, indistinct fraction of a tiny, intensely radiant ring - parallel to Luna's original ecliptic plane - the center of which was impenetrably black in all forms of radiation. Lethal bursts of x-rays periodically spat forth from near the edge of the invisible zone, as did two plumes of super-heated gas - clearly detectable to infrared sensors - which shot, perpendicular to the miniature, glowing ring, in diametrically opposite directions. Though he had never seen it before, the Earth was indisputably changed from what it had been.

"Where is it?" Svensson asked Ms Mary in disbelief. Though the facts made it quite clear, he could not quite bring himself to acknowledge the dreadful reality.

"The Earth has been incorporated into the mass of a black hole, Mikael."

Even his personal computer's adroit administration of exotic compounds through the drip feed and sustagel was failing to maintain Svensson at his physical and mental peak. He shivered and felt alternately chilled then overheated. His head and guts ached abominably, unfamiliar sensations (could he be dying?). This, the annihilation of humanity's homeworld was beyond anything he had ever experienced. Beyond anything anyone had ever experienced. How could it all be gone? Nearly five billion years the planet had existed. More than twenty billion people. Untold trillions of life forms gone, never to be duplicated. All of it just obliterated, consumed by the hungry black hole. (The aliens could not have created the black hole, could they? Such power… It could not be true. No, surely they had…found it in their travels. Yes, they had found the black hole and given it a charge. Then they had "towed" it with a "tractor", particle beam.) How the Enemy must have rejoiced when it perpetrated that deed! Yet who could comprehend what the aliens felt? Perhaps they had no emotions. Perhaps...

His thoughts were wandering. "Get me out of here, Mary!" he suddenly ordered. "Take me home."

Svensson did not want to think about his homeworld, the desert planet, Thermos. Let the Enemy have been satisfied with demolishing the Sol system. Craving oblivion, he gladly yielded himself to suspended animation, not really caring if it became permanent.

It did not last long enough without dreams. He did not miss the dreams, for they surely would have been nightmares. Yet they may have helped him cope with what had happened. Madness might lurk nearby, so perhaps his apathy to his fate was a clever, defensive ploy by his subconscious. If he allowed the full horror to overwhelm him, likely he would succumb to utter insanity.

Svensson did not feel much improved even after Ms Mary and his personal computer had stimulated his mind and body. "All right," he muttered, "take us in."

There were no signals he could detect. He was not all that surprised. In a corner of his mind, despite the lack of encouragement he offered it, a small seed of despair had already sprouted. Tears suddenly squeezed from his stinging eyes to disperse into the sustagel. Ms Mary advised his personal computer not to inject him with "happy" drugs: he needed to withstand and transcend this painful, psychological trauma.

"Oh, Mary," he blubbered. "There's no hope, is there?"

"I'm afraid not."

"All my family…friends…the whole, fucking Empire!" He howled, unable to check the tears that oozed from his puffy eyes. "Why, Mary? Why? Why do they hate us so much? Why kill us all?" He shook his head again and again, striving - and failing - to make some sense out of what had happened. Ten thousand years of human civilization and its achievements. The civilization that had birthed Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Hawking, and countless other genii, major and minor. Ordinary people, loved only by those to whom they were related or friend. All gone. Why was he here? Why had he been spared, when so many people, good and great, had died? He was drowning in overwhelming grief, swamped in guilt. And tantalized by that one, overriding question: Why?

"I will have revenge," Svensson declared finally. "In some, small way I will pay those bastards back." He took a deep, shuddering breath, almost a whimper. "I don't want to see it," he resolved. "I want to remember Thermos as it was. I never saw Old Earth before. All I can visualize is that avaricious, sucking vortex. I will remember the heat and the landscape and the sunsets and the people of Thermos. I'll remember them as they were."

Svensson did not know what else to do, so he hy-jumped towards Aquarius, longing to find a survivor somewhere, a single, living human being or even just an answering voice. Perhaps he would discover an Enemy fleet that he might descend on like an avenging eagle, atomic disrupters blazing…

He was disappointed on both accounts. Aquarius had suffered less physical damage than the other worlds, but in a way its fate seemed worse, a gross defilement of its former beauty. The oceans - which had abounded with marine life as prolific and nearly as varied as that to be found on the Earth itself - had boiled away, and the exposed seabeds emitted frequent, deadly pulses of radiation. Not one of Aquarius' fifteen million, human inhabitants had survived.

"What...an abomination," Svensson murmured numbly, face expressionless. "I just don't - can't - understand this."

When next he was roused from suspended animation, in proximity to Hibernus, the Thermosian could scarcely open his eyes. "I feel like I'm a thousand-years-old," he croaked.

Despite Ms Mary's best efforts, not to mention those of the miniature, personal computer located in his head, Svensson had never felt more fatigued. Of course, no one had ever undertaken so many hyperspace jumps across hundreds of light years in such a short time.

"I still feel about 750," he quipped without much amusement after an hour had passed. "Where are we now? Oh. Hibernus. The cold planet. At least it was." He sighed heavily, expression resigned. "Better take us in, Mary."

At first inspection Hibernus appeared to have been the least affected of the Imperial planets. Very little of the surface had been blasted, and most buildings remained undamaged in the various cities. It was only under extreme magnification that Svensson was able to perceive what the Enemy had done.

In the streets of Saint Petersburg, the capital of Hibernus, lay untold thousands of bodies. Dressed in stark, bright, typically Hibernusian colors that loomed out of drifting streamers of smoke, they sprawled in unnatural, twisted attitudes, shockingly strewn over one another in veritable drifts, a rainbow forest of felled trees. Nothing moved. Bullet-shaped aerocars hovered in mid-air at varying altitudes, their occupants as dead as the people in the streets below. Ten times as many people were likewise lifeless in buildings throughout the city. Svensson was grateful to be scrutinizing only a panoramic, overhead shot and declined Ms Mary's offer of a close-up: an amorphous sea of bodies was bad enough, but the notion of individual faces with dead, staring eyes... He transferred to vision of other cities, and it was the same everywhere: mass extermination. He could not find a single living thing on the planet, human or otherwise.

"No signals, Mary?" It was not really a question.

"No, Mikael."

He shook his head. "I've heard of twentieth century Nazi Germany, but this... It's almost as if they all died at once; like they were poisoned or gassed."

"No," Ms Mary disagreed. "They appear to have been systematically gunned down with small caliber projectiles. Precisely directed projectiles - miniature, anti-personnel missiles, presumably - aimed so they would pass through the intestines and exit the lower back, not instantly lethal. They would have died slowly, over perhaps an hour. Apart from military installations, the only structures destroyed seem to be hospitals and other, potential sources of medical aid. This was the first planet to be attacked, Mikael. From here the Enemy moved on Aquarius, then Thermos, then the Sol system."

Svensson let his breath out slowly. This apparently sadistic act was the most terrible crime of them all. At least to human sensibilities. People gunned down, for no good reason. There was not much material damage here, and no sign of an Enemy presence. Yet the Enemy had wreaked even greater physical destruction on Aquarius, more on Mars, and still more on the Earth. It was almost as if...

"The bastards are trying to outdo themselves!" he cried. "Where can they go after what they did to the Earth?"

Rage filled him, and he fairly trembled with its force, but it sputtered and expired. He concentrated again, fuelling a burning fury, before it, too, flickered fitfully and failed.

Svensson supposed he was too numb and spent for anger and hate. The Enemy was faceless, giving him nothing on which to focus his negative emotions. How did you hate someone you could not visualize? He guessed that his personal computer and Ms Mary were diluting his responses. Was he inhuman himself with his natural impulses and hormones suppressed and controlled by machines?

As the Eagle Eye cruised towards the Perimeter of the Hibernus system, warning lights suddenly flashed before his eyes, flooding the cockpit with pulsing, crimson radiance, and alarm bells pealed resoundingly in his ears, snapping Svensson's attention back to the situation at hand.

<'Two fighter spacecraft on interception course,'> thought Ms Mary urgently. <'Two minutes, twelve seconds until contact.'>

Data about the Enemy vessels appeared in the form of neon green characters and figures on a data screen - a transparent, two-dimensional rectangle edged in bright orange that remained within his line of sight no matter which way he looked - within the holovision projection. Though individually inferior to the Eagle Eye, they presented an undeniable threat with numerical advantage. Both were armed with a single, nose-mounted atomic disrupter. The alien spacecraft were under heavily boosted acceleration, endeavoring to match the velocity of the Eagle Eye. Beyond the data screen was three-dimensional footage - computer simulation or authentic, reconnaissance camera stuff, he was not sure - of squat, unembellished, matte gray cones riding blazing spears of light. Ms Mary had had little difficulty detecting their approach, for not much could be done to mask the revealing emissions of maximum acceleration. Svensson had ample time in which to evade them.

<'All right, Mary. Let's get...'> He paused. <'Computer: initiate attack run.'>

The data screen seemed to fold in on itself and vanished, leaving the holovision with the predominantly black arena of combat mode. In the center of Svensson's "view," the Eagle Eye was a silvery triangle with a thin, silver line stretching from its nose: its currently projected course. Two, miniature, gray cones represented the alien spacecraft, and their projected, gray course-lines intersected Svensson's silver thread.

The Eagle Eye adjusted its course, angling away from the converging, Enemy fighters. The alien spacecraft seemed to vacillate for a moment, then they separated, one - a gray cone designated "Bogey A" in combat mode - heading on a vastly divergent vector to the other: "Bogey B."

<'Computer: plot attack course on Bogey A!'> Svensson ordered. Ms Mary had already directed potent drugs through the drip feed to enhance his reflexes, and he was on a razor's edge of alertness. He was now thoroughly integrated with the flight computer, and his reactions, even his thoughts, could be measured in infinitesimal fractions of a second. He was grinning maniacally. He was going to have his revenge!

Ms Mary abruptly shifted the Eagle Eye onto a course almost perpendicular to the Hibernus ecliptic plane, and combat mode's silver, simulated arrowhead mirrored the move. As his spacecraft oriented on the alien fighter, Svensson was gripped by some of the crushing effects of massive inertia - a slight pressure and pull - despite the anti-gravity technology and compression-resistant sustagel protecting him. He had the superior vector of attack, coming broadside at Bogey A, but he was only going to have a fraction of a second's firing time at these speeds.

"Eat that!" Svensson snarled, bearing his teeth. At his mental command, the twin cannons emerged from the Eagle Eye's nose and blasted the Enemy ship with streams of atomic disrupter fire. There was a double row of tiny, brilliant flashes, like winking stars, across the gray hull of the fighter, but its golden shield was holding.

<'Fuck it,'> the Thermosian thought. <'Computer: Mary, transfer 20% of shield power to the disrupters.'>

With the supplementary firepower diverted from the Eagle Eye's shield, the atomic disrupters produced a veritable flurry of sparkles on Bogey A's shield. <'Just a little longer,'> Svensson thought to himself.

He checked "behind" himself on the progress of Bogey B. It was three light seconds away, having been wrong-footed by his abrupt maneuver. Its gray, course projection line had the beginnings of an arch, indicating the Enemy fighter was wheeling around in order to come after the Eagle Eye, but it was well beyond attack range for the moment.

<'Psionic attack!'> Ms Mary suddenly telepathically shrieked in his mind. <'Shield breached!'>

Svensson immediately ceased firing on Bogey A, frantically attempting to redirect power to the psionic sub-shield. He scolded himself. Of course, tachyons were infinitely fast and had great range. And the Enemy was the master of psionics. Had he not learnt that already!

The holovision projection was inundated by a rapid, chaotic sequence of fluctuating figures and distorted visuals as Ms Mary resisted the psionic attack. Briefly, Svensson discerned an image of Bogey A disintegrating with a fleeting, purple-white flash as its shield failed under the last antiprotons of his atomic disrupter fire.

A faltering voice assailed him, trailing away to nothing: "Flee, Mikael Svensson. And always remember…that I love you…"

Svensson experienced a sudden, shocking, wrenching sensation, a feeling of having been spurned and cast aside. Dazed, he did nothing for several seconds, while his wits belatedly returned. The mind-link had gone dead. He swam through the sustagel and punched a manual keypad recessed into the cockpit's white wall, but there was no response. Ms Mary's higher, interactive functions were gone. There was nothing left of her consciousness. She had cut the mind-link and sacrificed herself to save him.

Svensson blasted out of the Hibernus system so savagely his vision blurred with unchecked acceleration forces. Bogey B was left far behind, and it soon abandoned the pursuit.

The Thermosian curled into a defensive ball, back against the concave curve of the white, plastic wall. He blinked suddenly stinging eyes. Presently, body heaving, he sobbed uncontrollably.

A high price had been paid for his tiny act of revenge. Far, far more than it was worth. He had interacted with Ms Mary for three years, experienced many things with her. He had regarded her as human, albeit bodiless. Over three years a basic, artificial intelligence program had, with his influence, evolved into a distinct, well-rounded personality. Ms Mary had had her individual quirks: she had frequently harried and teased him. Yet she was ever responsive to his needs, mental and physical, and he often had to remind her not to mother him (though he secretly enjoyed the excess attention). The beauty - and the curse - of these AI programs was that no two were ever alike. Ms Mary was, to all intents and purposes, dead, and, because she was a one-off, he would never be able to bring her back. Fighter pilots were reputed to be closest to their computers, for in the intensity of high-speed combat they mind-linked completely, but he rather fancied the long flights of reconnaissance pilots made them similarly involved with their computers. Certainly no one human had been as dear to him as Ms Mary. There had been a few occasions in pleasure simulators when he had fantasized her as having a human body as attractive as her voice... They had dwelt in each other's minds, relating on a purely psionic level. She had been his lover in the truest meaning of the word, someone who had loved him unconditionally. It did not matter to him if it was programmed love, for who was to say it was not as genuine and complete as that between two humans?

The Thermosian suddenly launched into a frenzied pounding of the spongy plastic of the wall alongside him, expressing a compound of powerful, coalesced emotions. He finally sagged limply, drifting idly in the sustagel. He felt hollow: this last, pitiless deed of the Enemy had surely ripped away what little remained of his essence. "Why? Why me?" he moaned.

Not caring what befell him, Svensson allowed the Eagle Eye to cruise aimlessly for a few days. His personal computer did what it could to look after him, but it was doomed to be a losing struggle if he did not recover the will to survive.

On the fourth day he stirred from his bout of self-pity, savagely castigating himself. "Be a martyr, then! But go and look at Terra Nova first. That might give you something to cry about."

It was not an expedition to be casually undertaken, however. With the loss of Ms Mary's consciousness, he had no access to hyperspace and was confined to sub-light velocities. Terra Nova was nearly twelve hundred light years away, and that meant a journey (even allowing for time dilation) of over two thousand years' duration.

Svensson started to laugh hysterically. "Now you've got something to cry about!" he told himself. "Two thousand years! It must be the longest trip ever attempted!"

Poor as it was, it seemed to be his only choice. There was nowhere else to go. No one he loved - no one he even knew - lived any more (were there any, other humans still alive somewhere?). There was nothing for him here in this era. He realized that it was only one's links to others that tied one to one's home. He had none of those now. Of Thermos itself, who knew what remained? Maybe someone yet abided on Terra Nova, however. It was the last possible, human outpost. But after two thousand years there was likely to be little sign of humanity or the Enemy invasion left on Terra Nova. The planet might not even exist any more. Still, it was not important, he decided. This would definitely be his final mission, so it would be of no import whether it lasted two thousand or twenty thousand years: he was literally going to go out with a bang at its end.

It was tragic to think of the fate of Terra Nova, the paradise world, humanity's great prospect for the future. Everyone had aspired to go there, and only the elite had been selected: the finest scientists and scholars in the Empire. And the planet had had the best defenses outside the Sol system, so maybe... No, it was too much to expect after two millennia. Perhaps in the present but not when Svensson arrived in the fifth millennium. It was far too long. However, any evidence that humanity had survived for some time after the Enemy invasion would offer a modicum of comfort and satisfaction.

On May 4, 2392 - after a torturous week pondering his plans, in which he confirmed, then revoked his decision a hundred times - Svensson finally committed himself to his only, positive, proactive option: a mission to Terra Nova, beginning with a long, long sleep.

Time, despite distortion dictated by relativity, advanced with its inevitable, relentless impetus. Mind virtually inert, Svensson floated in his pink, semi-fluid environment, preserved in a near-death-like condition. Every now and then different parts of his body - organs, glands, muscles, joints, nerve channels - were stimulated to maintain some semblance of their function.

Though the Eagle Eye sprinted through the inky void of interstellar space - its acceleration partially boosted by controlled matter-antimatter annihilation within its drive tubes - the great journey was not swiftly completed. Thrice the spacecraft was assaulted by a shield-draining burst of gamma rays from distant sources; twice it was bathed in the brilliant light of newly revealed supernovae; and once it was compelled to alter course to avoid a passing comet. Even its perfectly reflective, mirrored hull dulled somewhat with the ravages of long-term exposure. It was not until late 4729 AD, 2 337 years later - or 2 032 years, subjective ship time - that Svensson was awakened from his hibernation.

He had been inactive for such a fantastic length of time that, despite liberal usage of the drip feed, his personal computer needed three days to rouse him to consciousness, and it was another two days before he was able to move even fractionally. Every muscle of a boneless body quivered and ached, and it felt as if a blunt object had penetrated his skull. Due to the slight, though measurable inefficiency of the suspended animation process his body had aged approximately two years. None of these inconveniences especially surprised or disappointed him: after all, he had been inanimate since the twenty-fourth century, and he was two-thousand-years-old!

"A two-thousand-year-old man has to take it easy!" he told himself with an uneasy laugh.

The events of his past were still clear in Svensson's mind, however. Time had not blurred the memories of the Enemy invasion, for it seemed, to him, to have transpired only a few days previously. Though he was reinvigorated, the longer he stayed awake, the more his memories disheartened him.

"I can't forget," he muttered. "Well, I'll be joining you all soon." Rendering one hemisphere of the cockpit sphere transparent (the defense shield still protected him from dangerous radiation and particles), he stared into the star-spattered ebony of space. "Wherever that is. Mother and Father and everybody. Every-fucking-body! I'm coming, too. Two thousand years I've delayed it, but I'm coming. The living dead man. I am coming."

Svensson piloted the Eagle Eye slowly towards Terra Nova, almost enjoying himself, knowing his ordeal would soon be over. His self-imposed mission to…chronicle - confirm? - the passing of the human race concluded at Terra Nova. Happily he overrode his personal computer by preparing and ingesting powerful drugs via the drip. Who cared what happened to one's body when one was soon to die?

Half a day out from Terra Nova, the Eagle Eye's automatic warning devices jolted him out of his drug haze - at least after the tiny computer in his head had shot him full of sobering stimulants.

"What did you do that for?" Svensson whined petulantly, before the lights and sirens became suddenly obvious to him.

He blinked itchy, reddened eyes and shook a buzzing head. He cried aloud wordlessly when he comprehended what the spacecraft was trying to tell him.

Each one circling like a mosquito searching for bare skin, a fleet of alien spacecraft surrounded Terra Nova: two, immense, disk-like spacecraft carriers; six, spherical battle cruisers; and a swarm of the compact, gray, conical fighters. Holding them back was a globe-encompassing defense shield that incessantly flickered as different parts of it were alternately strengthened and weakened (it required enormous power to keep a whole planet under perpetual, maximum protection). A myriad of orbital defense satellites hovered just within the shield's golden glow. A powerful computer had to be managing such a vast network.

Svensson laughed and laughed. "Oh, how ironic! The Enemy waits for Terra Nova to weaken, but the planet has held it out for two thousand years! It must be the longest siege in history!"

The Thermosian could almost picture the scenario. The Enemy had launched all its forces on a mission to destroy the human race. The aliens had breezed past the colony worlds of Hibernus, Aquarius, and Thermos, probably sustaining inconsequential losses. Then they had made their move on the Sol system, and it must have been there, around Mars and Earth, that a heavy toll had been exacted on their fleet. The greatly depleted armada had traveled to Terra Nova, only to confront another vigorous defense. And it remained there still, stalemated.

During his approach Svensson had detected the remnants of Imperial ships drifting around the outskirts of the star system. He noted now that more than three-quarters of the orbital defense satellites originally defending Terra Nova had been destroyed over the centuries. Without satellites to repulse the Enemy's attacks on the global shield, the aliens would soon be able to strike directly at the planet. To his eyes, it seemed that the Enemy must certainly be in a position to make the final assault on Terra Nova at some stage in the next few years. Terra Nova was the stuff of legends - to have held out for so long against a superior force spoke volumes for its defenders - but the odds had been too great, and soon it must all end.

And yet Svensson felt a flicker of hope. Surely, he reasoned, even the most loyal of computers would not have defended for so long if it had no one to defend. Perhaps there were a few descendants of the Imperial colonists left on Terra Nova.

He was not generally a sentimental person, but Svensson suddenly felt great pride in his race. Human tenacity could be no more evident than in the defense of Terra Nova. And the computer regulating the defense network had been programmed with all the attributes of its creators.

'Emotional fool,' he told himself, though without heat, as his eyes watered.

There were no, welcoming signals (or unwelcoming ones) forthcoming from Terra Nova. But someone could be there, had to be there. His mission was not complete until he had proof that someone human was alive down on the planet.

The Thermosian knew what he had to do. He must get down to the surface somehow, bypass the Enemy fleet and the Terra Novan defenses (he was not certain they would recognize or welcome him). Then he would see if any vestige of humanity remained.

He no longer had the benefit of super-fast reflexes provided by the mind-link, so he required a plan of some merit. A few hours' thought provided no logical plan, so he chose an illogical one. 'They won't expect someone to attempt that in a reconnaissance spacecraft,' he thought.

Svensson accelerated towards Terra Nova. Like an ant nest that had been turned over, the Enemy fleet boiled with activity, ships heading in all directions. The aliens must have realized that he was making a break for the planet, as squadrons of fighters were launched, maneuvering to screen the gaps between the spacecraft carriers and battle cruisers besieging the planet.

The Thermosian smiled broadly, as the Eagle Eye headed for the largest gap, where the greatest number of Enemy fighters had collected. Even as he approached their numbers surged: thirty, forty, fifty! Svensson had pre-programmed his course into the navigation computer. It was out of his hands now, as ordinary, human reactions were too slow to permit him to make last minute changes. The personal computer in his skull was working overtime, preparing him for what lay ahead. He watched the Enemy vessels streaking towards him on interception courses, paths their navigation computers would be certain intersected that of the Eagle Eye. His own course projection, however, told a different story.

A countdown began on a small data screen in the top, left corner of his vision, ticking off the seconds until he (and the Enemy) was in atomic disrupter range. 6...5...4... Svensson took a deep breath, steadying himself. 3...2...1... He exhaled again in anticipation of the next phase of his plan.

On the count of "0", as planned, the Eagle Eye sharply shifted course, racing across the leading edge of the cloud of alien fighters, defense shield set at maximum on the side that faced the Enemy vessels. Svensson was compressed by partially dispersed, inertial forces, then jolted as the Eagle Eye rocked under the impact of atomic disrupter fire. Nightmarish hallucinations pervaded his mind, and he screamed in absolute, paralyzing fear. He had anticipated a psionic attack, however, and had made certain he was incapable of doing anything to alter or ruin his plan at this late stage. His personal computer mercifully blacked him out, and this saved him from going insane under the mental assault.

The Eagle Eye, still acting on his programming, fled the Enemy fighters and angled towards a battle cruiser! Svensson's original plan had been a drive at a spacecraft carrier, but he had decided not to push his luck that far. Yet even this variant of the plan was likely to fail, for an Enemy battle cruiser - a smooth, matte gray, defense shielded sphere more than a hundred meters in diameter - had at least ten atomic disrupters, not to mention a battery of missiles. His principal objective for attempting the feat revolved around eluding the fighter fleet; but he was also conscious of an element of sheer, astonishing audacity.

Jinking from side to side and rotating along its central axis, the Eagle Eye rocketed at the battle cruiser, choosing the course of least resistance. Some disrupter beams sprayed harmlessly past, though many produced glittering trails of golden stars on the shield of Svensson's spacecraft. Sensor-equipped missiles leapt into flight, hot on the scent of the human vessel, and the Eagle Eye loosed a swarm of miniature, decoy probes - each one diverging from his current course and releasing convincing emissions at levels consistent with an Eagle Eye - to lure the missiles astray. (Fortunately, there did not seem to be any of the psionic-relay-equipped missiles.)

The Eagle Eye's shield was almost down, but before the battle cruiser or the approaching fighters could finish it off, they suddenly had another threat to deal with: several, slender, cylindrical defense satellites - essentially maneuvering thrusters married to atomic disrupter or electromagnetic weapons - had moved into position, covering Svensson's descent on Terra Nova.

Svensson regained consciousness in time to see the global shield glowing brightly goldenly before him. He had scarcely started to make a move, when an opening appeared in the shield - the coded, Imperial Navy ID signal he had been transmitting had finally produced results - and the Eagle Eye gratefully dived into it, like a rabbit down a burrow. The breach closed behind him, and Svensson was at last in Terra Novan airspace.

Terra Nova was a small planet, sapphire blue and light green and dusty brown, swathed in swirls of white cloud. It appeared strange to Svensson, accustomed as he was to the tawny- and reddish-brown face Thermos exhibited to space.

'They say it looks just like Old Earth,' he thought.

The Eagle Eye was rapidly decelerating as it orbited the planet, bleeding off some of the enormous velocity it had accumulated in its run on the Enemy fleet. The spacecraft traversed the terminator and swept over the shadowy, dark side of the planet. Svensson gradually worked his way into the atmosphere, and air resistance produced a fiery wreath over the silvery plasteel of the spacecraft, so it appeared the Eagle Eye was at the core of a raging inferno.

Black continents and blacker seas blurred beneath him. He was going far too swiftly to land, but air continually dragged at the spacecraft, retarding its headlong flight back into daylight.

Still ostensibly ablaze, the Eagle Eye punched through scattered cloud, bearing westward across a vast ocean and over a large island, perhaps a small continent. Its velocity slowed to somewhere around Mach 8, and Svensson considered landing on the other side of the continent. He had barely flown over a rugged, snow-capped mountain range, when an explosion rocked the spacecraft: the personality-free flight computer flashed a message onto a data screen, informing him the Eagle Eye's oxy-atmosphere turbine had been destroyed by a series of pulses from an x-ray laser.

"Where the fuck did they come from?" he roared in alarm and frustration.

Svensson evaluated his prospects. The Eagle Eye would glide onward for some distance, but it was going to have to come down at high speed, and he did not like his chances of survival.

He nursed the spacecraft for as long as he could, searching for something, anything that might soften his landing when he abruptly crossed the thin, white shoreline of an inland sea. 'That will do nicely!' he thought in relief, allowing the Eagle Eye to descend towards the water.

The spacecraft struck hard. Svensson felt the impact shake the Eagle Eye, despite the in-built technology designed to nullify physical assault, for the spacecraft was still traveling at close to Mach 1 when it hit the surface of the sea.

The pilot commanded the cockpit sphere to become translucent (it was still opaque from without, mirror-finished like the rest of the hull). It hardly affected his exterior view, and what he could see sobered him. The Eagle Eye had plunged deep beneath the waves, hurling a welter of superheated water and steam into the air. The cockpit sphere was all that remained - it was designed to protect the pilot when all else had failed - and it had slowly floated back up to the surface. Everything outside the cockpit had either been destroyed or had sunk (hopefully, the antiproton ammunition would remain safely contained at least until he had departed from the immediate vicinity). Buckled and torn pieces of plasteel bobbed about on the sea. He was not going to leave Terra Nova in the same way he had arrived, not in this Eagle Eye, at any rate.

Svensson lay still, breathing heavily of the sustagel. The entire descent, from his initial run at the Enemy line until splashdown, had taken just over thirty seconds. With a quivering hand he detached the drip feed, and, after a brief delay, it abruptly whipped into the recycling canister. He covered his face with his hands. He had crash-landed on Terra Nova, two thousand years into his own future. He felt suddenly, absolutely alone and vulnerable.

The Thermosian stirred himself. He had come here to search for evidence of humanity. There was only one, small colony complex here on this planet. At least there had been two thousand years ago. He needed to reach dry land, then he would ascertain whether the Complex - and any, possible inhabitants - remained.

After a significant pause - it was a momentous decision - he keyed a code into the keypad. Warning chimes sounded, and he duly repeated the code. Abruptly, the sustagel began to contract and retreat into the recycling canister. Air hissed into the gap swiftly growing above the descending surface of the sustagel, and Svensson sank towards the "floor" of the sphere. The pilot found himself sprawled on the curved, white plastic, sustagel gushing from his open mouth, nostrils and other orifices. He coughed convulsively as the last of it flowed out and was forced to take a sudden, shocking breath of flat, sterile air. He hyperventilated for a minute, until he had readjusted to the requirements of breathing ordinary air after so long in sustagel.

Feeling weak and dizzy, he slowly got to unsteady feet. "Is this one of the Empire's mighty warriors?" he asked himself. "No wonder the war was lost." He suddenly sniggered, then laughed outright for a full minute. He felt remarkably better. "Come on, Mikael. Get dressed, and then you'll really feel like you're on a post-orgasmic high." His expression grew wry. "Well, maybe not that good!"

In a storage compartment recessed into the wall next to the keypad, he found a bright orange, survival backpack, which contained a few, standard items - such as a climate suit package, food and water capsules, medikit, and sleeping bag - but no weapons, unfortunately.

From the backpack he fished out the climate suit package; approximately five centimeters cubed, the package was made of white, featureless, hypercompressed - hy-c - plastic. He pressed a thumb against a depression in one, ivory face and commanded telepathically: <'Activate.'>

As if it were fluid, the plastic package abruptly started to expand and spread. Rippling and flowing like a living, white puddle, it swiftly engulfed Svensson's arm, then spilt over his torso and legs. Within seconds, he was clothed in a white, neck to ankles, figure-hugging body suit, capable of keeping him perfectly comfortable regardless of external temperature. With pleasure he ran a hand over the smooth, pearly material covering his arms and legs, strangely grateful to find the muscles beneath still hard despite the ordeal he had undergone (his personal computer was discharging its duties admirably). Other, hy-c packages produced an all-purpose, wristwatch-style computer and tough, matte black boots with soft linings. He sealed up the orange backpack and shrugged it over his shoulders.

With a mental command to the flight computer he produced a holovision image of himself - dressed and ready for action - and approved of what he saw: the tight, white, synthetic material looked good on his trim form. "Hot, ice hot," he told himself.

'Ahh, a "living dead man" with vanity.' Yet it oddly succored him to be dressed in customary attire and to know that he yet remained in excellent shape.

Svensson briefly glanced outside again. All he could see was water. There was nothing to prove that he was not alone on this planet. He shrugged, punched the code on the keypad that created an emergency exit hatch. A rectangular, human-sized panel of plastic, set approximately halfway up the side of the sphere - above the waterline of the sea - abruptly melted away, and a set of steps formed leading up to it. Natural light and air flooded the cockpit.

Svensson climbed the steps and paused in the doorway. Terra Nova's sun was perceptibly whiter and dimmer than Thermos' system star, but its rays felt extraordinarily wonderful on his skin, and he closed his eyes for a few seconds in appreciation. He sniffed cautiously, though he knew the planet's humid, strange smelling air - salt? - was excellent. This was the first time he had actually landed on another world, so he lingered a moment, savoring the occasion.

"Look at all that water," he marveled, a little disconcerted by the encircling, glittering expanse of blue wavelets. Thermos was - had been - a dry planet, with nothing larger than a few, small salt lakes.

His plan was simple: hop onto a piece of the highly buoyant, plasteel hull and ride the prevailing currents to land. This was not a large sea, by all accounts. Hopefully, someone would come for him if he used the tiny comset in his wristwatch computer to continually broadcast an SOS signal. His climate suit would keep him comfortable as he drifted away from the cockpit sphere. The naked sphere would float on, awaiting a retrieval that would probably never come. He made a wry face at his sentimental thought: he had enough to worry about without considering the future of the cockpit sphere! But then it had taken him so comfortably and safely so far across space and time...

Steeling himself, he leapt out onto a floating section of mirrored plasteel. He twitched in shock as a small, white-sailed boat, three people aboard, suddenly came into his line of sight. From where had they sprung? Two of the people were white, dark-haired youths - one larger than the other - of about nineteen or twenty Standard Years. Their dress looked primitive, white, loose-fitting tunics and black trousers of some, coarse material. The third person was a much bigger, older man with long, black hair, perhaps thirty-four or thirty-five. Shit! The older man appeared to be encased in silver metal, and there was something reminiscent of a sword at his side! The trio jabbered urgently among themselves, and the Thermosian could not understand a word of what they were saying. What the hell was going on? He stared about him in panic and desperation, but he was stuck on the floating sheet of plasteel, the cockpit sphere already out of reach and only deep water all around him.

Resigned, Svensson squatted down on the piece of plasteel, rubbing his eyes with stiff fingers. Why was he apprehensive and unnerved? He had come here, fully expecting, even intending to die, and had he not found what he had sought? There were people still living on Terra Nova. These people were plainly human, unless he was hallucinating. Yet they did not seem to speak Imperial English and wore poor clothes and steel armor. A sailing-boat would not be unusual on a world with oceans, but this one appeared as if it was made not of plastic but wood! Could the Imperial colonists have lost all technology and regressed over the years? It was remarkable to think that humanity survived on Terra Nova, but this was not how he had envisaged that survival!

The Terra Novans cautiously sailed towards him. They eyed him with a degree of apprehension - even the bulkier, sword-bearing one - but also with undoubted curiosity. They chattered among themselves, then, with hesitant, though unmistakable gestures, they invited him aboard the boat. After deliberating briefly, Svensson stepped into their boat. What else could he do? He had nowhere to go. They cleared some primitive backpacks from a wooden bench in the prow of the boat, motioning him to sit. Facing the Terra Novans, he perched awkwardly on the bench, feeling uncomfortable both because of the hard seat and their curious stares. He closed his eyes in submission. After all he had been through, barbaric types armed with steel swords had apparently taken him prisoner!

They were twin brothers, not identical, yet as alike as any two, normal brothers. Both were dark-haired and of a little more than average height. Wilfen, the elder by half an hour, was wiry, possessing fine features and unremarkable, gray-green eyes; Alvonne was stockily built, and bright green eyes blazed out of his hawkish face.

Wilfen and Alvonne Argindell dwelt in Mardine, a village on the forested, island nation of Nevanderlof, which was situated in the Warldife Sea of the land of Terra Nova.

They lived with Filgen Culdana, their maternal grandfather, an elder of Mardine. Filgen's knowledge was phenomenal. His grandsons constantly asked him questions, for they were curious youths. It was Filgen Culdana who tutored them in various subjects, including the foreign language, Oriental, the native tongue of their dead father.

Filgen's lessons occupied their mornings, so in the afternoon the twins enjoyed visiting the beach. The village of Mardine was about a kilosword from the southern coast of Nevanderlof, and it was a short and pleasant walk through the forest to Mardine Bay.

It was a bright afternoon in the month of Bren - early winter, though the season was rarely harsh here - of Holmish Year 862. Wilfen and Alvonne descended the spiral staircase from Filgen's home among the trees, their young dog, Kinser, following their every step. The brothers leapt the last sword to the ground, landing easily with bent knees.

Mardine was sited predominantly on the forest floor. Nearly all of the village's robust, leaf-thatched, log cottages, daubed in mud tinted green or brown, were positioned among the trees at ground level, but a half-dozen - the homes of Mardine's esteemed elders - were actually set high in the forest canopy, nestled in the intertwined limbs of several eucalypti. A series of rope ladders and bridges, reminiscent of a mass of cobwebs, connected these elevated cottages to the staircase on the trunk of a tall gum-tree that was at the center of the village.

Scattering free-range, red-crested chickens, the twins headed away from the spiral staircase, passing the village barbecue: a round, steel plate placed over a shallow pit that could be filled with hot coals. Once a week, Mardine's inhabitants would hold a feast, at which they would roast one of the sheep or cows penned in a forest clearing just outside the village proper.

A few of the villagers, wearing the ubiquitous, grass green, Nevander cloaks, waved to them. Brawny, balding Kilm, the village blacksmith, was lugging a huge cooking pot towards his wood-fired forge deeper in the forest. Ma Indini, a plump, middle-aged woman, who adored children though she had none of her own - she was especially fond of the orphaned twins - gave them a particularly kindly smile. They smiled and waved back: Ma Indini was never shy about offering them one of the delicious titbits she had created, and it made good sense to retain her favor.

Nevanderlof was an impressive forest. Their bark mostly smooth and white, towering, evergreen eucalypti stretched thirty swords or more into the sky. A few, massive fig trees formed the middle stratum, gnarly trunks perhaps ten swords in girth, and crowns, dense with overhanging branches, more than fifty swords across. Bearing a multitude of glossy leaves and ripening fruit, the figs' branches created almost complete twilight beneath them, and the twins had often used them for shelter during a rain shower. Various, smaller trees and shrubs sprang from the earth where sunlight broke through the forest canopy: sword-high tea trees with masses of tiny, pink flowers; spirea with their thin, vividly orange leaves; eye-catching, red-, pink- or white-bloomed rhododendrons; outlandish strelitzia, their large, orange and indigo flowers strangely reminiscent of a bird's beak; clumps of cymbidium orchids, with their clusters of red-streaked, cream or yellow trumpets; and lantanas, their trails, festooned with miniature, purple or yellow stars, snaking insidiously far and wide through the undergrowth. Clumps of drab fungi and saw-toothed ferns filled dark, moist hollows. The majority of plants were evergreen, but columns of ants trailed over what leaf litter had accumulated, and beetles and other crawling insects flitted in and out of the refuse. Above the ground, webs linked trees and bushes, some merely tenuous, single strands that were easy to miss for the inattentive passer-by - more than once apiece the twins had to pull sticky threads from their face or hair - others elaborate constructions of concentric rings, their creators lurking within. Overall, the not unpleasant, earthy aroma of the forest itself just registered on the nostrils.

The twins tramped quickly through the familiar woodland, frequently glancing about in an attempt to catch a glimpse of wild life. They made plenty of noise to flush out anything hiding in the undergrowth, especially any snakes still abroad and active. They perused overhead branches for screeching, multi-hued parrots, laughing kookaburras, raucous, piebald magpies and satin-black crows, and other, more sweet-voiced birds. On the ground they observed assorted, drab-colored rodents, as well as several rabbits and small marsupials, and, once, a wild, tabby cat raking its claws down the scarred trunk of a eucalyptus. All around them, mostly hidden from their senses, was a myriad of fauna.

The predominant trees about them gradually became needle-leafed casuarinas and paperbarks with creamy, tattered bark, then thinned and failed, leaving the twins standing on dunes of fine, gray-white sand. The beach extended away out of their sight to either side. Ahead of them the Warldife Sea invited the youths with its restless, moody waves. Dazzling their eyes, sunlight scintillated from the shifting, sapphire surface, and the aroma of salt water assailed their noses.

Alvonne required no further encouragement. He stripped to old, cut-down trousers and, dispersing resting gulls, raced down the sand into the sea. He swam out into the bay, fighting the waves that rolled onto the beach.

Wilfen grimaced. He seldom swam - he disliked being buffeted by boisterous surf - much preferring to recline on the sand and enjoy the comfortable warmth of the sun.

Kinser did not relish the water, either. After tiring of pursuing shrieking gulls, the black pup settled on Wilfen's legs, despite the boy's protests, and proceeded to snooze. Kinser's bristly heat soon compensated his master for the sunlight the dog obscured.

Wilfen and Alvonne were, as usual, the only people around. The sea was not a noted passion of the Nevanders. Filgen reckoned it was their father's Holmish blood that made the twins respond to the call of the sea. Wilfen was not so convinced: after all, the two of them had been brought up as Nevanders from a very young age. Yet it was an irrefutable fact: they were the only regular visitors to the beach.

After an hour Alvonne wearied of his exercise in the water, and he joined his brother in lazing on the warm sand. Kinser reposed between them, content to be stroked by two pairs of hands.

They had lain there for a while, when Alvonne abruptly arose, expression apprehensive.

"What is it?" Wilfen inquired, too comfortable to want to get to his feet.

Alvonne did not reply, continuing to stare out to sea.

Curiosity piqued, Wilfen raised himself on one elbow to gaze out into the bay, and the sight presented troubled him as well. He stood up immediately.

A modest sailing-boat, a Holmish vessel perhaps, headed for the beach on which they stood; indeed, it seemed to be coming straight at them. There was no question of their moving: it was if they were spellbound by the rapidly growing silhouette of the sail, entranced by the stylized eye depicted on the white canvas. They waited side by side, as the boat drew closer to shore.

A figure with long, black hair grew visible in the stern, steering the rudder. It was a man. A white cloak draped over his broad shoulders, and he wore black, baggy trousers and black, calf-high, leather boots. A cuirass of steel plates, badly scored in places, encased his torso. At his side rested a sword, its pommel a great, red gem. The stranger was of indeterminate age: his tanned face seemed youthful, but there was an air of experience about him.

The sailing-boat struck the shore, and the man single-handedly dragged the boat up beyond the level of high tide. He approached the speechless twins and stood squarely before them, proving to be at least three inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Alvonne.

"Good afternoon, Wilfen and Alvonne," he greeted in Oriental, extending his hand in an Eastlander custom. "I am Shondal Argindell of Ambell."

Startled, Wilfen took an unconscious pace backwards, accidentally standing on Kinser's tail. The dog yelped and scurried out of reach of Wilfen's feet, regarding the youth reproachfully.

Blue eyes twinkling beneath his bushy brows, Shondal Argindell started to laugh, hands on hips and head thrown back. Shondal's laughter was infectious, and soon, too, the Nevanders were helpless with amusement.

Wilfen struggled to speak: "Welcome back to Nevanderlof...Uncle Shondal." He recovered from his spasm of laughter. "Kinser doesn't like to be laughed at."

Shondal bent down to the black pup. "My apologies, Lord Dog! My laughter was in poor taste!" He winked at the Nevanders; they grinned and inexpertly returned the gesture.

"I believe he accepts your apology, Uncle Shondal," Alvonne remarked, watching as Kinser permitted the man to stroke the dog's short fur.

"Good." Shondal straightened, studying the twins speculatively. "'Uncle Shondal,'" he repeated with self-mockery. "I've never really thought of myself as anybody's uncle."

"You're our father's brother: that makes you our uncle," declared Wilfen, and Alvonne nodded agreement.

"Some uncle!" Shondal snorted. "I've not seen you in three years. I told you I would come back for you both soon, but 'soon' can be a long time coming. You both had probably given up on me, even if Filgen promised you I would return. Actually, I'm amazed you even remember me."

"Three years is a long time," Wilfen had to agree. "And I didn't recognize you at first."

Their father's younger half-brother had joined the Holmish Army shortly before their parents' death in a plague. He had taken the orphaned twins to Filgen Culdana, promising to return for them. He had visited a few times but never to take them back to Holmis.

"I should have come more frequently," Shondal murmured slowly. "But there has been so little opportunity. I have fought wars in the Barbarian Lands and Arndlund, commanded a legion, become a bodyguard to the King of Holmis.

"It's all inexcusable, I suppose. Guilt about you two has haunted me. But I was only nine-years-old when you were orphaned by that plague. I didn't really have the experience or knowledge required to raise two babies, especially in a garrison." His voice picked up. "Anyway, I'm here now. There is peace in Terra Nova, and I have two months' leave."

Wilfen could not really condemn his uncle. He was nine-years-old himself, still nearly a year short of his coming of age. The Nevander was unable to conceive how he might manage to look after a child or, worse, a baby. He did not have the prerequisite skills or, he realized, adequate maturity.

"Can this peace last?" the elder twin asked.

"Not a chance. My guess is that there'll be war within a year. The Western Alliance of the Nulls and the Tharms will mount a major offensive in the East again; this is the calm before the storm."

The brothers were hushed, wondering at their uncle's stoic acceptance of the life he led as a professional soldier. It was almost as if he did not fear combat...

"Aren't you scared of war?" Alvonne wanted to know.

Shondal nodded earnestly, bobbing his long, black hair. "Absolutely. A sane man is. Some of us cope better, however."

Wilfen could see the subject was an uncomfortable one for the soldier. "Do you wish us to guide you to Mardine?"

"Yes, I believe I do," Shondal replied hastily. "I'm not confident I could find it after all this time."

They trudged through the hot, powdery sand towards the forest. Wilfen could feel the sun on his head, and the sudden coolness he experienced on passing into the midst of the trees was almost shocking.

The twins knew this part of the forest rather well. Through habit they generally took the same path to the beach and back, but they could find their way home from anywhere in the vicinity. Kinser at his heels, Wilfen led the party, followed by Shondal and Alvonne. They hiked in silence, past trees familiar to the youths, stepping over partially exposed roots that had tripped small feet on occasions gone.

The silence chafed at Alvonne. "Have you been to Nevanderlof many times, Uncle Shondal?"

"No, this is the fourth. The first was in the summer of '55, when I brought you both here, as you know." The Holm deliberated for a moment. "Boys: just call me 'Shondal.' It must be awkward calling someone 'Uncle.' And, to be honest, it embarrasses me."

Alvonne seemed on the brink of asking another question, so Wilfen got in first with one of his own. "What sort of gem is that in your sword, Shondal?"

Shondal unsheathed his broadsword, glancing at the blood-red jewel that nestled like an egg in the golden cup of the grip. "It's a ruby," he said. "Its purpose, as the pommel, is essentially to prevent my hand slipping from the sword." He handed the blue steel blade to Wilfen, pommel first. "Have a look for yourself."

Wilfen held the sword aloft, marveling at the glints of color from the ruby, and found the weapon to be very cumbersome. He felt a thrill at holding such a thing, but its weight discouraged any thoughts he had of swinging it around.

He passed the sword back to Shondal. "It must be valuable," he commented.

Shondal considered the ornately worked hilt with its ruby and gold pommel. "It is quite valuable. It's worth more than a thousand, Holmish golden crowns. But Findram is worth more to me as a family heirloom; a Memmish craftsman forged it for our family, and my brother bore it last. I retrieved it from the armory a week after your father's death, intending to destroy it, but, at the last, I was moved to retain the sword and put it to good use. Findram is too fine a blade to discard."

Wilfen was impressed. He did not know the value of a golden crown, but he was aware that gold was a highly prized metal.

A short time later they came to Mardine and headed towards the spiral staircase. A few of the villagers greeted them, apparently incurious about the stranger in their midst.

Filgen Culdana's house was situated twenty swords above the ground and close to the trunk of the central tree. Alvonne and Shondal waited on the rope bridge outside the front door, while Wilfen went inside to tell Filgen about the soldier's visit. The youth found the old Nevander had retired for his customary afternoon doze. He rapped softly on the thin, wooden door of Filgen's bedroom.

"Grandfather," he called. "Wake up!"

"I'm awake," Filgen returned. "You may enter."

Wilfen opened the door. "Grandfather! Uncle Shondal is outside! He's come at last!"

Still attired in his usual, white robe, Filgen lay atop the counterpane of his pallet bed, rubbing at his eyes. "Shondal!" exclaimed the old man, a frown on his lined face. He scratched at his bald pate. "It's three years since last he came!" Filgen started to muse: "Shondal... Is it time already?"

Wilfen shifted uncomfortably in the doorway. "Shall I let him in?"

"Yes. Yes, at once!"

Wilfen beckoned Shondal inside Filgen's house. The Holm ducked his head in order to avoid both a branch that grew outside the front door and the top of the low door frame.

"Greetings, Filgen," said Shondal on entering. He grinned in response to the old man's smile.

"Welcome back to Mardine, Shondal, my boy."

The main room of the house was comfortable and well lit with resin-scented lamps. The walls were varnished logs and adorned with Filgen's own woodland paintings. A small cabinet against one wall contained a priceless collection of leather-bound books. A shelf above the cabinet held a number of curios Filgen had collected over the years, both natural and artificial, including an elaborately carved, redwood, ornamental rod - a token of his status as a village elder - a stuffed rosella, a small chess-board made of alternate squares of red and white wood, and a silver nugget shaped vaguely like a fist. The floor was topped by thick, chocolate brown, Adar Mutian rugs. A circular, casuarina table was positioned near a large window made up of stained-glass panes in a wooden, grid-like framework. Bulky, comfortably cushioned chairs were arranged around the table.

Filgen and Shondal sat at the table. Under the Nevander's questioning, the younger man summarized events that had taken place in the world outside Nevanderlof in the previous few years. Filgen probed the soldier at great length, and the Holmishman answered every query in detail. It was Filgen's first tidings of the outside world in a long time, and he was eager to hear as much as Shondal could recount.

Alvonne became engrossed in the conversation, but Wilfen soon grew bored: the outside world was too far removed from his own. Involuntarily he began to fidget.

Shondal curtailed mid-sentence a description of the Adar Mutian fishing fleet. "Don't let our talk bore you. Have a peek at my boat, if you wish."

"I will. Thank you," Wilfen said. He called Kinser and ventured out, climbing quickly down from Filgen's house. The dog showed its usual dexterity in following his descent of the stairs that spiraled around and around the thick, white bole of the village's main tree.

Shondal's boat lay where he had left it, high on the beach. Wilfen stepped into the boat, glancing around. He guessed it to be about five swords long with a beam of perhaps half that. There were two oars which, on his testing, proved to fit the rowlocks on the boat's sides. At the rear, immovably bolted to the gray, weathered planking, was an ironbound, wooden chest, shaped like a plump, oversized loaf of bread.

Following some debate with himself, Wilfen opened the chest (which was unlocked, fortunately) and examined its contents: there was a folded, frayed map, some dried fruit in a tiny, tightly woven basket, a skin of water, and a hooded lantern with associated, fire-making apparatus. Next to the chest he discovered a round shield half a sword in diameter emblazoned with a crouching, fire-breathing dragon, underneath which were a small, recurved bow and a quiver of blue-feathered arrows.

Wilfen settled down on the bench in the stern of the boat, studying the map he had discovered. It was incredibly detailed, displaying the known extent of Terra Nova, from the Nullish Empire in the West to the Holmish Confederation in the East. He could see the names of places he had learnt about. Foreign cities were labeled in faded ink. Peering closely at the parchment, Wilfen was able to make out a diminutive, black circle entitled "Mardine" in Oriental.

An unexpected thump caused the Nevander to start guiltily. He whirled in panic, anticipating a confrontation with a Shondal incensed at finding Wilfen going through the Holm's property. He found Kinser instead, realizing almost immediately that the slight sound of a young pup landing in the boat could not possibly compare to that of a heavy, booted man. He sighed and stroked his pet.

"Thank the Goddess," he said in relief. "You scared me, Kinser. Well, it serves me right for trying to be as daring as Alvonne, because, Goddess knows, it does get him into more trouble." To prevent further frights, he restored the contents of the chest and closed the lid.

On his way back to Mardine, Wilfen came across Erfind, a Nevander not much older than he, who was collecting mushrooms and herbs for his dinner.

"Hello, Wilfen. I hear your uncle has come to visit," said Erfind. "Been gone a while, hasn't he?"

"Yes," agreed Wilfen. "Three years."

Erfind nodded vaguely and, with a wave, strolled away. Wilfen smiled to himself. In general, Nevanders were a very sober race. Hardly anyone ever came to Mardine, yet even a young man had no especial interest in a visitor. Wilfen was convinced that he and his brother would never be genuine Nevanders, no matter how long they lived in the forest.

When he returned to Mardine, Wilfen found Shondal still deep in discussion with Filgen and Alvonne. He quietly took a seat and listened to Shondal's tales of his travels.

"Had a look?" Shondal inquired of him after a few moments. "Tried the oars? Looked in the box?" Wilfen nodded shame-facedly to the last question. "Good!"

Wilfen excused himself and went to lie on his bed. Kinser lay abutting his master, resting a furry head on the boy's leg. The youth reflected on the momentous event of the day: his long lost uncle had returned. He had an impression that his life was about to be irrevocably changed.

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