“You mean when you twist their arms hard enough,” a woman joked. The others laughed; even Wilmot smiled good-naturedly.

“Well,” the professor said. “This is it. This will be your home for the next five years, and even longer, for many of you.”

“When do the others start coming up?”

“As the personnel board approves applicants and they pass their final physical and psychological tests they will come aboard. We have about two-thirds of the available positions already filled, and more people are signing up at quite a brisk pace.”

The others asked more questions and Wilmot patiently answered them. Eberly filtered their nattering out of his conscious attention. He peered intently at the vast expanse of the habitat, savoring this moment of discovery, his arrival into a new world. Ten thousand people, that’s all they’re going to permit to join us. But this habitat could hold a hundred thousand easily. A million, even!

He thought of the squalor of his childhood days: eight, ten, twelve people to a room. And then the merciless discipline of the monastery schools. And prison.

Ten thousand people, he mused. They will live in luxury here. They will live like kings!

He smiled. No, he told himself. There will be only one king here. One master. This will be my kingdom, and everyone in it will bend to my will.

VIENNA: SCHÖNBRUNN PRISON

More than a full year before he had ever heard of habitat Goddard, Malcolm Eberly was abruptly released from prison after serving less than half his term for fraud and embezzlement.

The rambling old Schönbrunn Palace had been turned into a prison in the aftermath of the Refugee Riots that had shattered much of Vienna and its surroundings. When Eberly first learned that he would serve his sentence in the Schönbrunn he had been hopeful: at least it wasn’t one of the grim state prisons where habitual criminals were held. He quickly learned that he was wrong: a prison is a prison is a prison, filled with thugs and perverts. Pain and humiliation were constant dangers; fear his constant companion.