At first there was a period of stasis - the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.

Then the stars began to go out.

It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.

It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ‘photino birds‘ who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes - a conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.

It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.

We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ‘construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries - discovered, even colonised, but never understood.

One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.

People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.

It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.

But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.

When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.

PART SIX - THE FALL OF MANKIND

PART SIX

THE FALL OF MANKIND

THE SIEGE OF EARTH - c. AD 1,000,000

THE SIEGE OF EARTH

c. AD 1,000,000

I

The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.

Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose - in this case, to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.

His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.