Prologue: The Eternal City

Earth, 2606. A short man stands at a panoramic window above the Square of Five Corners, a plaza repeated on level after level. He is John Winston Hammer, head of the World Government. “Earth was an eternal city”: the technosphere has closed over the whole planet, absorbents have cleared the industrial fog that drowned the Earth of Blind Punch, transparent walls are back in fashion, and the megasuburbs climbing into the clouds look like enormous terrariums.

Three and a half centuries ago the Great Exodus ended, with thousands of colonial transports swallowed by hyperspace and dozens of unfinished starships abandoned on the Moon’s shipyards. Ulrich Fitzgerald, the founder of Genesis, saved what was left: his Martian fleet seeded the poisoned oceans and air, and he revived the World Government, blocked the cyberspace Layer and forced people out of their in-modes. Then the population grew again, and the Moon, Mars, the Belt and the Jovian mining colonies broke away and dictated terms to Earth for almost three hundred years.

Hammer changed that. As a trade representative in a bar on Phobos Orbital Station he met Alexander Nagumo, a young ice-hauler pilot from the Belt, just offered a miserable hundred credits a tonne for his thousand-tonne block of ice, who swore he would cast the whole Solar System at the feet of anyone who gave him a couple of warships. His price was the title of admiral. Hammer won the election of 2561, and in March 2564 five ancient warships still carrying the half-erased logos of Genesis, Rimp Cybertronics, Megapool and Cryonics destroyed the Martian Mining Company’s cruiser and stormed Phobos. The Moon capitulated, Hammer proclaimed the Terran Alliance, and a long war for the Asteroid Belt followed. He won the war but not the shortage behind it. Mars is ruined, the Moon hollowed out, the Belt exhausted; sixty billion people live on Earth, four in five of them on subsidies.

At the briefing the gray-haired Admiral Nagumo listens, and the young admirals Tiberius Nadyrov and Max Gornev look bored. Edward Nechaev, head of Earth’s Intelligence Agency, explains that Johann Ivanov-Schmidt’s hypersphere theory is confirmed: sixty-four power lines run from the Sun to stars five to fifteen light years away, and the Exodus ships were lost to the very blind punch that names Book I. Only two oxygen worlds lie within one jump: Yunona, whose colonists from the wrecked transport Yuna died of an exovirus, and Dabog, a thriving colony that trades with the more advanced worlds of Elio, Kjuig and Rory. Dabog was founded by the Fugitive, which carried Rimp Cybertronics staff, Catherine Rimp and the engineer Hans Gervet, so technologies Earth has lost may survive there; it would take a few immigrants, by competitive selection. When Nechaev incautiously remarks that the colonists will hardly take just anyone and turn their world into a dirty flophouse for layabouts, Hammer hears an insult to Earth and explodes over the population map: “These are all people, you know!”

Nechaev warns that Dabog’s hybrid biosphere will make Earth people ill, but a metabolic implant will protect assault troops, and Earth still owns Genesis’s military terraforming technology. Nagumo calls Dabog the key to everything: an industrial base outside the Solar System, whose bunker-zone factories can be modernised for the fleet. Hammer, sure that billions outweigh a handful of colonists, sees new waves of expansion ahead.

Act of Intimidation: The Museum

Dabog, early morning, October 9, 2607. Part 1 takes its title from what Earth calls the operation. A flycar brings a class of children and their teacher through a mountain tunnel to a shallow crater whose cliffs still show signs of melting: the Colonization History Museum of Dabog. At the gate stands a pitted ceramic armour plate from the Fugitive; nearby a crushed machine frame rusts, and a guard turret lies half-buried in spent shell casings beside an android’s endoskeleton. Daria Kretchetova, their young teacher, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and leads the children through a sterilising airlock and down a cold, dim corridor to the halls of holographic dioramas.

The first shows a moonlit night jungle of horsetail- and fern-like plants five or six metres high, vines arching between the cliffs, and a new star crossing the moon, dropping fireballs and vanishing: the Fugitive arriving. Then the diorama shifts to the crash under a reddish sun and purple clouds, dazed colonists climbing out of the blackened hull. Microbes, not beasts, drove the first settlers underground, Daria explains. She skips the harder truth, told by the narrator: most of them had come straight from the Layer and were not ready for a real world.

Livadny cuts between the dioramas and the sky. One hour before the invasion, three cruisers lead the Terran fleet in, black as night under their phantom generators: the flagship Endgrouse opens its catapults for fighters, the Titan its vacuum docks, and the Shadow of Earth bares the ports of its rocket batteries. Pacing the Endgrouse’s bridge, Nagumo has a plain plan: grind Dabog’s cities into dust, combat-terraform the biosphere, keep only the bunker zones and their factories, and give every colony an example. “Go ahead, Tiberius,” he tells Nadyrov. In the Shadow of Earth’s launch tubes wait the space-to-surface missiles that pilots call megacity killers.

In the museum, under virtual rain, a dicort, a tyrannosaur-like lizard that climbs cliffs on suction tendrils, leaps down on colonists hauling a sinking soil spreader and bites an android in half. Aboard the Shadow of Earth sirens sound, hundreds of troopers in armoured camouflage suits file into assault modules, and the first planetary combat vehicle rolls out on eight ribbed wheels. In the next hall a huge armoured two-legged machine strides out of the jungle, and a boy named Sasha takes it for a monument. Daria names the first generation’s heroes: Max Bourne; Catherine Rimp; her daughter Chloe, who bred the first hybrid plants; and Hans Gervet, who built the universal servomachine out of the giant loader that stripped the transport’s armour, borrowing the bionics of the great lizards. Every family once owned such a machine. This one is Aquila, the Rokotov family robot. Daria promises the next hall and the real Aquila. Then the walls shake, the holograms die, and the red emergency light flickers out.

Fire from Orbit

Igor Rokotov, thirty-seven, a researcher of Dabog’s colonisation, has just parked at the museum and stepped into the service lift down to the hangar where he keeps the restored Aquila. His life’s work began on a rainy autumn evening in his youth, when the old agrobot stored in a leaking hangar woke as he approached; he climbed into its cabin, a scanner took a drop of his blood, and the screen welcomed him as its pilot. He read the manuals, explored nine half-flooded colonial shelters, and found Gervet’s books and the diaries of Max Bourne, the first servomachine pilot on Dabog, a past the colony lost touch with two centuries ago, when controlled mutations let people leave the shelters.

The strike drops the lift and jams it under tonnes of rubble. Lips smashed, Igor squeezes out and climbs down a bundle of cables in total darkness toward a torch below: Daria, with the children frightened but unhurt. He guesses at an earthquake and leads them to the better-protected technical boxes. Above them the act of intimidation has gone wrong. Two mushroom clouds climb into the stratosphere, and Nagumo, replaying the probes, sees why: the megacity killers split into thousands of burrowing warheads and found the ancient reactors buried under two cities, shielded by plating from the colonial transport. The continent is now beyond terraforming. The capital, far from both blasts, is spared; Nagumo thinks about the factories.

An hour later, hands scratched and shaking, Igor charges batteries from Aquila’s engine and fits the tunnelling lasers he had prepared for the anniversary of the Fugitive’s landing. Sasha slips in and asks whether Aquila can manage; Igor says he can. He leaves Daria batteries for three or four hours and must seal her part of the shelter. Then she hugs him, suddenly, and asks him to come back soon: two people who until today had only nodded in passing, made close in minutes. Aquila, whose neural chips came from Hugo BD-12 androids and whose own mind is an open question, walks out of its supports into the cracked emergency tunnel. Its sensors climb to a lethal radiation reading, two ruby laser lines cut the rubble, and outside are crimson clouds, smoking slopes, carelessla burnt to wire, and ash falling like snow.

Through the ash his probes show the megacity: mounds of wreckage and the stumps of lower floors along the edge of a fire-breathing pit. Igor understands that no one there survived. Crossing the farmland, he ends the suffering of a blinded cow, weeping, and passes a pale human outline left on a sooty wall. Aquila’s scanners show the second big city gone too and the coastal volcanoes awake; only toward the capital is the radiation falling. At its edge the Terran air assault modules land. Major Sherman finds the city empty, a combat vehicle plasma-burns a rooftop communications complex, and Captain Joshua jokes that the natives died of fear. Racing the ash front down the highway through radioactive rain that withers the Bao saplings, Igor learns that Aquila has a hidden cryptographic subsystem: it breaks into an encrypted channel, and in a strangely altered Intergalactic English he hears Sherman order the capital’s bunker seals blown, or gas pumped into its shelters.

One Machine Against the Landing

Lieutenant Patrick Goodman, commanding combat vehicle seven, has values formed in virtual reality and has never seen death. His sensors pick up an unknown signature; Sherman tells him it is a lost robot from one of the agrofarms. Igor, heading for the cargo bay of an ancient shelter to send a vehicle and supplies back to the museum, is ambushed when a blunt-nosed PCV bursts out of the plantation under its masking field; plasma and missiles tear Aquila’s cabin, and he blacks out. Gray foam reseals the cabin. Igor wakes in a fog of pain, flicks off the laser safety, and the spinning shoulder lasers cut the vehicle apart. Goodman dies screaming, while Sherman assures the watching infantry that the steaming giant above the trees is only a colonists’ farm robot.

Hearing the scream, Igor climbs down and runs to the wreck to save the crew. He pulls at a hand, and half a body slides into the mud. He is sick against Aquila’s leg in the radioactive rain, and this, the narrator says, is the moment the Galactic War and the defence of Dabog began.

On the Endgrouse the chief fleet engineer begs Nagumo to capture the machine, whose lasers rival a frigate’s guns; Nadyrov wants it destroyed before it reaches the cargo portals. Nagumo orders an orbital strike on top of his own seventh platoon: “You can chip in and build them a memorial,” he says. The barrage ploughs through the suburbs and the Avenue of Fugitives and falls on Terran troops too, who scream over the radio at their own ships. Igor, past fear now, walks Aquila between the explosions and cuts down a combat vehicle lurking at an intersection; on the Terran channels someone cries that he is still coming. He smashes through a building onto an elevated highway, damages an assault module, and realises how small the invasion force is. Four vehicles firing from a supermarket’s ground floor are buried when he cuts the building’s beams.

Nagumo orders a withdrawal: two assault ships are burning and six combat vehicles lost. Aquila, its right leg jammed, left laser seized and reactor overloaded, burns one more assault ship before a rocket stops it and the reactor shuts down in green steam. The surviving Terran ships lift off and abandon their assault teams. People in ancient protective suits surround the last damaged landing ship, and a Hugo BD-12 android climbs Aquila’s leg and starts to open the hatch by hand. Inside, Igor, irradiated, concussed and bleeding from shrapnel wounds, is unconscious. Part 1 ends there.

The War for Dabog

No English or Russian preview goes past Part 1. The Russian table of contents names the remaining parts The Bitterness of Wormwood, Planetary Attack and Countdown (literal translations; the English edition’s own titles are unconfirmed), followed by an Epilogue. Everything from here rests on summaries and trope wikis, and keeps to what they say.

They agree that the landing is beaten, as Part 1 already shows the first wave fleeing, and, in the wider history, that Dabog then ties down Earth’s strike force long enough for the more advanced colonies Elio and Kjuig to organise their defences; how much of that the book itself shows, they do not say. One reader puts the failed blitzkrieg down to a handful of people who fought for their home. The cost to Igor runs through the book. Part 1 already speaks of his descent into apathy and hate; a trope wiki singles out his trauma as rare and carefully motivated, and a Russian reader of the 2000 text says you end up pitying Rokotov, so hard is he driven.

A second thread comes from the other side. TV Tropes tells of a soldier in this novel who has spent his life since the age of five in a prison mining camp on a Jovian moon, for the crime of being born, and is let out only on condition that he enlist. He is very probably Andrew Groves, whose Russian original, Roshchin, is already mocked in the 2000 text as a man taken to prison straight from the maternity ward. The same wiki has Groves, on the colony Cassia, refuse an order to kill an unarmed civilian woman, stop his superior from doing it, and end up fighting the invaders; a Russian trope wiki traces the colonial navy’s later dynasty of Admirals Roshchin to a defector from the Alliance.

How Dabog’s biosphere dies, the sources tell two ways. TV Tropes has the frustrated fleet admiral nuke the whole colony from orbit after the rout, and blames Nagumo and Nadyrov for turning a pleasant world into a radioactive wasteland when the colonists would not yield. A Russian trope wiki gives the massive nuclear strikes of 2607, which destroy the whole biosphere for about a century, to the act of intimidation itself, carried out by Nadyrov’s Shadow of Earth, whose crew and admiral, it says, went down in history as war criminals. Whether the last three parts hold a second, wider bombardment, no source found settles.

The example Hammer wanted works the other way. The attack meant to frighten the colonies unites them, and a week-long blitzkrieg becomes the thirty-year First Galactic War. In the longer history Aquila becomes the prototype for the colonies’ serial servomachines, and the Alliance builds its own from what it saw at Dabog. What becomes of Daria and her class, of Sherman and of Hammer, and where Igor stands at the Epilogue, the available sources do not say.

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The whole walk: The Series · The History · I · II · III