Phillida's eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. "Don't be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which I -- and everyone else who has ever lived -- can only dream."

Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. "But you don't envy me. Do you, Phillida?"

Phillida's smile crumbled. "No," she said quietly.

Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.

She cried out.

Her mother enfolded her in her arms. "The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun..."

The woman Lieserl -- engineered, distorted, unhappy -- receded from my view, her story incomplete.[4]

Humans diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. In the increasing fragmentation of mankind, the shock of the Poole wormhole incursion faded -- despite the ominous warnings of Superet -- and it remained a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.

Squeem ships burst into the System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn't count, for instance. But eventually common ground was found.

The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system, which was beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies.

The Squeem seemed friendly enough. Trade and cultural contacts were initiated.

And then, in orbit around every inhabited world in the Solar System, hyperdrive cannon-platforms appeared...

PART 2 ERA: Squeem Occupation

PART 2
ERA: Squeem Occupation

Pilot

Pilot

A.D. 4874

When the Squeem occupation laws were announced, Anna Gage was halfway through a year-long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.

Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.

Resistance had imploded quickly.

Anna Gage -- shocked, alone, stranded between worlds -- tried to figure out what to do.

She was seventy-nine years old, thirty-eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she'd carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.

Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn't stay out here for long. But she couldn't return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.

Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.

She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.

After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.

Chiron...