Langley closed his eyes for a moment, and Dakota thought she heard him swear quietly under his breath. When he opened his eyes again he looked over at Dakota and motioned to her.

‘Dakota, would you like to be first to take a look?’

She stepped forward, bending over to peer through the telescope’s viewfinder. Clearly, Langley hadn’t responded to Aiden’s statement because what he had said was true. The only reason humans had ever reached the stars had been down to the help of the Shoal. Twenty-second century experiments in long-distance quantum entanglement had resulted in tach-transmission, a form of instantaneous communication already long put in use by the Shoal’s vast interstellar fleets of core-ships. Among all those millions of inhabited star systems, they claimed to be the only race who had developed a faster-than-light drive, and in return for a promise that humanity would never attempt to replicate this technology, mankind would be allowed to colonize other planets within a specified bubble of space approximately three hundred light years in diameter.

It was an offer that couldn’t be refused, but there had been stories and rumours of subsequent human attempts to replicate the transluminal drive, regardless of the Shoal’s original threats. But all those attempts had apparently ended in abject failure. Similarly, there was never any public admission that human governments used covert satellites and remote observation technologies to constantly observe Shoal coreships in those vital moments before they translated into transluminal space, yet it was widely believed to be the case.

Without the Shoal, therefore, there would now be no colonies, no interstellar trade, no carefully licensed alien technologies provided by the Shoal’s other client races, and certainly no original colonists to build Erkinning, the Free States, and all the other human cultures here on Bellhaven.