Dolo nodded. The silvery light reflected from the planes of his face; he was about fifty years old. ‘Much of this is human work, Coalition work. The Qax tried to destroy our past, to cut us adrift from history. Their motivation was wrong - but their methods were valid. Remember, we have been in direct conflict with the Xeelee for eleven thousand years. We have done well. We have swept them out of the plane of the Galactic disc. But they remain huddled in their fortress in the Core, and beyond our little island of stars they swarm in uncounted numbers. We must put the past aside, for it is a distraction. If the Xeelee defeat us, we will have no future - and in that case, what will the past matter?’

‘Your ideology is powerful.’

Dolo nodded. ‘A single idea powerful enough to keep mankind united across a hundred thousand light years, and through tens of millennia.’

Teel said, ‘But the mountains and rivers of Earth were far older than mankind. How strange that we have outlived them.’

Luca was startled by this anti-Doctrinal sentiment. Dolo merely looked interested, and said nothing.

The yacht soared upwards, out through the great ranks of Snowflake surveillance stations that stretched as far as Earth’s Moon, and the planet itself turned into a glistening pebble that fell away into the dark.

It would take them a day to reach Saturn. Luca, on this first trip out of Earth’s gravitational well, had expected to glimpse Earth’s sister worlds - perhaps even mighty Jupiter itself, transformed millennia ago into a gleaming black hole in a futile gesture of rebellion. But he saw nothing but darkness beyond the hull, not so much as a grain of dust, and even as they plunged through the outer system the stars did not shift across the sky, dwarfing the journey he was making.

Saturn itself was a bloated ball of yellow-brown that came swimming out of the dark. It was visibly flattened at the poles, and rendered misty in the diminished light of the already remote sun. Rings like ceramic sheets surrounded it, gaudy. The world itself was an exotic place, for, it was said, mighty machines of war had been suspended in its clouds, there to defend Sol system should the unthinkable happen and the alien foe strike at the home of mankind. But if the machines existed there was no sign of them, and Luca was disappointed when the yacht stopped its approach when the planet was still no larger than he could cover with his hand.

But Saturn wasn’t their destination.

Dolo murmured, ‘Look.’

Luca saw an artefact - a tetrahedron, glowing sky-blue - sailing past the planet’s limb. Kilometres across, it was a framework of glowing rods, and brown-gold membranes of light stretched across the open faces. Those membranes held tantalising images of star fields, of suns that had never shone over Saturn, or Earth.