The Protectorate exploits the extra-solar colony planets and has garrisons, for example, on Sarai in the Capellan System and on Krasna in the Tau Cetian System. The clandestine Fellowship of Independence plans simultaneous revolutions on a dozen planets. Known mattercasters will be seized but Navy ships can be expected to arrive through 'casters hidden elsewhere in the colonized systems so missile defences are also being prepared. A premature Centaurian rebellion was defeated forty years previously.
The four spacemen whom the Astronautical Guild will teleport to the Southern Cross are:
Terangi Maclaren from New Zealand;
David Ryerson from the Hebrides;
Seiichi Nakamura from Sarai;
Chang Sverdlov, a Fellowship man from Krasna.
The Cross has been diverted from its course to Alpha Crucis so that these men will be able to study a dead star which Maclaren thinks might be:
"'...left over from some previous cycle of creation!'" (1, p. 11)
- because this present universe might not be old enough for any star to have exhausted all of its nuclear and gravitational energy yet.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
One political complication we discover in "The Ways of Love," Anderson's short story sequel to THE ENEMY STARS, was that the Protectorate was a monarchy ruled by a dynasty which had endured for three centuries. A stable dynasty would be able to prevent the repeated military coups mentioned in ENEMY as determining who would become Protector.
Ad astra! Sean
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