Lvov couldn't take her eyes off the flakes. "Because of the water," she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. "There must be water glass, on Charon's surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto's interior, and the glass from Charon... They need the resources of both worlds to survive--"

"Lvov!"

The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.

Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.

There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.

Pluto, Charon and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.

Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.

The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.

It was a time of extraordinary ambition and achievement. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans.

Given time, humans could do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

Michael Poole was rightly celebrated for his achievements. His wormhole projects had opened up the System much as the great railroads had opened up the American continent, two thousand years earlier.

But Poole had greater ambitions in mind.

Poole used wormhole technology to establish a time tunnel: a bridge across fifteen hundred years, to the future.^[2]

Why was Poole's wormhole time link built?

There were endless justifications -- what power could a glimpse of the future afford? -- but the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it.

But Poole's bridge reached an unexpected future.

The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole was confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it was a war -- brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before -- but a war nevertheless. It was an invasion from a remote future, in which the Solar System had been occupied by an alien power.

The incursion was repelled. Michael Poole drove a captured warship into the wormhole, to seal it against further invasion. In the process, Poole himself was lost in time.

The System, stunned, slowly returned to normal.

Various bodies combed through the fragments of data from the time bridge incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.

It was said that before Poole's wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future. And the rumors said that the future -- and what it held for mankind -- were bleak indeed.

If the data was anything like accurate, it was clear that there was an agency at large -- which must be acting even now -- systematically destroying the stars...