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By Root 979 0

drank some anyway as he read. The cultures that had pulled themselves together out of the radioactive ashes of the downfall of the Engineered never quite lost the memory of their little empires, of a time when people were ruled for their own good by men and women of power. Their later, slowly assembled governments became empires, too, finally just one Empire, nostalgically harking back to those “good old days,” seen as better by far than their present post-Holocaust world, a blasted place where everything must be tightly controlled so that everyone who lived would have enough to eat, a place to live and work. Slowly the earth greened again, starting to heal itself, nature proving, one more time, to be more powerful than those whose thoughtlessness threatened her—at least insofar as she had much more time to work with than they did. But though the world greened again, the hearts of the people who lived in her stayed sere and cold, not trusting the new spring. And the rulers of that world looked out at space, considering that they had had a very close call. They looked into the darkness and saw, not a silent wonder to explore, but a replacement home, a way to make sure that they would never almost be wiped out again.

Serious intrasystem space travel began. Mars was terraformed over the space of forty years —Picard rubbed his forehead at the casual reports of the Martian artifacts, the great ancient buried sculptures in the caves and the writing laid down deep for preservation in the sandstone strata, all gone—blasted away in the casual leveling of mountain ranges, the excavations of new seabeds. Millions of people relocated to the new world when it was ready—many of them being relocated by force. After all, reasoned the government of the Empire of Earth, didn’t a planet need enough colonists to make it self-sufficient—then productive enough to send minerals and so forth home to the mother planet? And when Mars was well settled, the government looked out farther yet. After all, one extra planet wasn’t enough, was it? What if something happened to the sun? Humanity’s survival must be assured—and indeed that had become their watchword, the motto of the new Empire, appearing in its arms, while they still bothered with such things: We Survive.

Research in long-distance ships that would push toward the edges of the relativistic envelope began in earnest. The late twenty-first century and the beginning of the twenty-second saw the first large sleeper and colony ships built and launched, but they were overtaken—literally—by the development, by Zephram Cochrane and his team, of the first warpfields and warp engines, enabling the colonization of Alphacent and various planets of the other nearer stars.

Picard got up and went over to the replicator, trying to stretch the cramps out of his back, as much a matter of nervous tension as anything else. No Third World War, he thought. Ironic that these people should have become what they seem to have become by avoiding all that bloodshed, the 40 million lives lost. … But then—if they had suffered that terrible interregnum—who knows? They might have renounced the terror, the death.

He took the fresh tea back to his desk, sat down, sipped it carefully, and went back to his reading. They had found alien life on Alphacent, hominid life, colonists from one of the other Centauri worlds. They had wiped them out, apparently uncertain that there were any other habitable planets in this part of space, unwilling to take the chance. When they later deciphered the Centauri language and discovered that gamma Centauri was the homeworld of the aliens they had found, they took their time, reconnoitered it—and then used “clean” atomics on the planet to wipe out its inhabitants and colonize it themselves.

Picard made an unhappy face. Then they had met the Romulans. At first the encounters had been as tragic and fatal for the Imperials as for the Earth-based space forces in Picard’s own universe. Finally, as had happened in his own universe, the Battle of Cheron befell, a dreadful defeat for the Romulans.