He pulled to the center of the passage and opened the scooter up. The walls blurred past. People were running in the pedestrian lanes. Scooters hurtled at him from the opposite direction. There were near collisions at every cross corridor. A voice like that of a god kept booming, "Battle stations. Battle station."
Damn, damn, damn, Moyshe thought. I shouldn't be going back under so soon.
Five vast and tangled ships began nosing out of the intense nova light. The blowfly vessels still swarmed around their wounds, and between them and the derelict tumbling along in their midst, guarded by their shell of fire. One by one, the five great ships rolled to present their heaviest weapons outward from a common center.
Two: 3049 AD
The Contemporary Scene
A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this part of space before.
Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the crater's flat dust face.
No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives, derelicts, and children... like everyone who lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.
The ship that bobbed to the dust's surface looked like a giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark's fin, rose from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted it.
The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke its lack of color.