The officer inverted the blade to his stomach and, grunting, drove it in. After a pause he pulled it sideways. He was making a strange nasal sound now and his head turned slightly. Hiroshi supposed that at this point the soldier behind should have shot him in the head. But the subordinate merely held the sidearm up, inspected it, then turned to his companion.

‘We should take the sword,’ he said. ‘The Americans pay well for swords.’

The officer keeled over on his side. His thighs and the entire front of his uniform were saturated with blood, and intestine bulged from the single wound. Shivering, he tried to bite down on his groans. The soldier stooped, tugged the sword away, cleaned the blood off with the same white cloth and placed it to one side. He then began to go through the officer’s pockets and when the dying man tried to resist, pistol-whipped him until he stopped. He tossed a pack of cigarettes he found to his companion, who then also took up the sword. The first soldier pocketed other items, then after a moment he began tugging off the officer’s boots, whereupon the second soldier kicked the officer over onto his back and pressed a foot down on his neck. Casually, almost negligently, he began using the tip of the sword to gouge out the dying man’s eyes. At that moment the first soldier spotted Hiroshi watching, stared for a moment, then abruptly stood up and aimed his sidearm.

Hiroshi stepped aside into he knew not what—but which centuries hence would be called U-space. Shifting only slightly, he stepped out on what he later found to be the island of Osaka, and walked on.

He did not stop walking for a quarter of a century.

- retroact ends -

Only seconds passed aboard Heliotrope, then came that twisting sensation as the ship surfaced from U-space. All around lay jewelled stars, the largest visible object being an orange smudge amid blackness. Orlandine rechecked coordinates and dropped the ship out of existence once again, but only for fractions of a second more than previously. Heliotrope surfaced into realspace over an infinite ocean of orange gas, broken with rollers of red cloud and vast spreads of misty white like peeling skin. Orlandine ignited the fusion drive and dived in. Only as the ship penetrated the surface was it revealed how disperse was the gas—a thin fog. Again checking coordinates she oriented the ship, accelerated for an hour, then coasted for a further three. At the end of that time something like a vast steel cliff loomed out of the murk ahead of her.