I know what we would think. We would think that the intruder had to come from somewhere… an open goodstar.
My job was to make sure nobody ever followed Pelenor back to Earth.
I nodded to my assistant, Yoko Murukami, who followed me to the armsglobe. We unfolded the firing panel and waited while Moishe ordered Pelenor piloted cautiously closer.
Yoko looked at the panel dubiously. She obviously doubted the efficacy of even a mega-terawatt laser against technology of the scale described by Yen.
I shrugged. We would find out soon. My duty was done the moment I flicked the arming switch and took hold of our deadman autodestruct. In the hours that passed, I watched the developments carefully, but could not help deepremembering.
4
Back in the days before starships—before Seeker broke Sol’s eggshell and precipitated the two-century CometWar —mankind had awakened to a quandary that caused the thinkers of those early days many sleepless nights.
As telescopes improved, as biologists began to understand, and even tailormake life, more and more people began to look up at the sky and ask, “Where the hell is everybody?”
The great lunar-based cameras tracked planets around nearby yellow suns. There were telltale traces of life even in those faint twenty-first-century spectra. Philosophers case nervous calculations to show that the galaxies must teem with living worlds.
And as they prepared our first starships, the deepthinkers began to wonder. If travel between the stars was as easy as it appeared to be, why hadn’t the fertile stars already been settled by somebody else?
After all, we were getting ready to head out and colonize. By even modest estimates of expansion rates, we seemed sure to fill the entire galaxy with human settlements within a few million years.