What he was actually seeking was a clear view of the Milky Way, so that he could look at Sagittarius. He missed Martin deeply. To be cut off from the past was to cherish the future all the more; Martin was much of Arthur's future, though they would never see each other again, and hadn't communicated for a year and a half, by Arthur's time frame.

Martin had left on the seventh Ship of the Law, with fifty human crewmates, only eight years after Earth's destruction, before most of the survivors had been put into cold sleep. The ships had been traveling for centuries now, accelerating and decelerating, searching, refueling from dead ice moons.

He found Sagittarius, the Archer, between Scorpius and Capricorn. He lifted his gloved hand and pointed: somewhere there. Within the arc subtended by his trembling finger lay the solar system of Earth's killers.

How terrifying the sky was now. Arthur wished he could share Harry's vision of united solar systems forming vast "galactisms." Now, from what the Moms had told them, the galaxy was a vaguely explored frontier at best, a vicious jungle at the worst.

The galaxy, too, was young.

The planet-eaters had not come from such a great distance, after all. The first signs of their builders' interstellar dissembling, their protective coloration, had become evident less than a hundred light-years from the sun.

Martin, a quiet, solemn man who had grown to resemble his father, floated among a crowd of younger student-pilots on the observation deck of the kilometer-long, needle-thin Ship of the Law. All the Ships of the Law had been hewn from the material of the dead Earth itself. With the galaxy's center in view, still inconceivably faraway, he thought back to the debates he had had with the ship's Moms at the beginning of the journey.

" What if we find the civilization of the planet-eaters, and it's matured? What if it's beautiful and noble and rich with culture, and it regrets its past mistakes? Do we still destroy it?"

"Yes," the Moms had replied.

"Why? What good would that do?"

"Because it is the Law. "

In fact, the builders of the planet-eaters had come very early on, thousands of years ago, to realize their mistake. They had laced the planetary systems around their parent star with dozens of false civilizations, misleading beacons, even genetically engineered biological decoys, complete in every detail but one—the ability to mislead a Ship of the Law.

Three ship-years before, Martin had walked the surface of one such decoy planet, marveling at the creativity, the sheer expenditure of energy.

The planet had revealed sophisticated defenses. They had barely escaped the trap.

Now they were closing ...

If they failed, others would follow, more informed, more aware of the dangers and pitfalls of this neck of the galactic woods.