"You ever thought, Sammy, there could be other folks come to this tea party?"

"Sir?" The two of them were alone in the parking lot.

"There are human colony worlds closer to the OnOff star than we are."

Thattea party. "Yes, sir. We're updating our eavesdropping on them." Three beautiful worlds in a triple star system, and back from barbarism in recent centuries. "They call themselves ‘Emergents' now. We've never visited them, sir. Our best guess is they're some kind of tyranny, high-tech but very closed, very inward-looking."

The old man grunted. "I don't care how inward-looking the bastards are. This is something that could...wake the dead. Take guns and rockets and nukes, Sammy. Lots and lots of nukes."

"Yes, sir."

Sammy maneuvered the old man's wheeled chair to the edge of the parking lot. In his huds, he could see his ships climbing slowly up the sky, still hidden from the naked eye by the nearest tenement. "Another four hundred seconds sir, and you'll see them come out past the roof just about there." He pointed at the spot.

The old man didn't say anything, but he was looking generally upward. There was conventional air traffic, and the shuttles at the Lowcinder spaceport. The evening was still in bright twilight, but the naked eye could pick out half a dozen satellites. In the west, a tiny red light blinked a pattern that meant it was an icon in Sammy's huds, not a visible object. It was his marker for the OnOff star. Sammy stared at the point for a moment. Even at night, away from Lowcinder's light, OnOff would not quite be visible. But with a small telescope it looked like a normal G star...still. In just a few more years, it would be invisible to all but the telescope arrays.Whenmy fleet arrives there, it will have been dark for two centuries...and it willalmost be ready for its next rebirth.