They claimed our mere presence on their world was a provocation. They did not want us here. They just wanted to be left in peace so they could kill their neighbors and the refugees.

We would have let them do it too, if some of those neighbors had not been taxpayers and if the Faith wyrmgate had not been strategically located near the boundary zones with the Shogunate. FedGov could not afford any instability here at this time, not with border tensions running so high.

The militias had a nasty habit of picking on anybody they saw as different and a number of Shogunate merchants had been blowtorched. That had given the samurai warlords an excuse to rattle their ghostblades at us. We’d be trading shots soon if this kept up.

I could not sleep so I called up a vid, one so dull I hoped it would put me to sleep.

The holo swirled into being over my head, shifting its position to track my eyes and generally keep within my line of sight. I saw the usual historical stuff. Holos of the Orange Voortrekkers heading out from Sol, followed by the rest of the Christian Utopian Diaspora. Some of them departed even before the wyrmgates opened, taking their generation starships with them. Most of them had religious objections to machine intelligence, genetic engineering, or both. Later they followed the wyrmlines out from the gate, skimming past innumerable Corpse Worlds, looking for places that would still hold life.

At this point, as always, the voiceover had to pause and talk dramatically about the Corpse Worlds and give the usual useless speculation about the Extinction Event. You know, you’ve heard it. The deep gravelly voice. The ominous background music—what could have wiped out almost all advanced civilizations in the galaxy all those tens of thousands of years ago? Why was mankind spared?

Many of the Christopians saw the Hand of God, of course. The galaxy had been scoured so His Chosen could inherit it. The Flood had really referred to the Extinction Event. The Earth had been the Ark. It was as plausible a theory as any we had.

The Diaspora had accelerated during the Machine War and the Manumission. The A.I.s and Ascendant Humanity had walled themselves off in the Singularity States. The rest of us had stayed behind and become the Federal Republic, the Shogunate, and all the other Survivor States that had chosen to avoid accelerated evolution.

The Christopians and the other cultural Amish, the Kaliban, the True Humans, and the rest of them had lit out for the Far Frontier, to put distance between themselves and Children of the Devil Machines.

And then came the Brood. We woke them on some infected station somewhere beyond the Rim and they swept into human space borne on our own ships. For a decade or so it had been touch or go. A flicker of images showing destroyed worlds, corpse warriors, giant monsters, progenitor bio-ships big as small worlds.

I caught sight of myself, younger, strapping on a nuke and being shot into the maw of the Progenitor Ark. I pushed those memories aside. I did not need any reminders of the Assimilation. I had fought it every step of the way. It had looked for a season as if humanity would be absorbed. Then the Brood hit a Singularity station.

Big mistake. Warmind Ares wasn’t going to put up with that. Nano factories the size of small worlds belched forth ships and battledrones.