Brunner's mouth worked, but no sounds would emerge.
"He asked me to give you a message. To say….. He tried to be like you. That he was sorry. Sorry he had failed….. He couldn't hold them off."
Brunner hung his head in agony and shame. And the words of Joseph Conrad sprang, so easily to his mind, seeming to sum up perfectly this brutal sham of Man's creation. DEAR GOD.
"The horror! The horror!"
And the tears that his wife was so fond of, trickled bitterly down his cheek.
……………………………………………………………… …………………………
EPILOGUE
NIEMAN
Nieman stood leaning over the main ship's console, the sharp lines of its blues, greens and whites reflected in his face. His lean, strong body was wrapped in celluloid black. The face too was hard and sharp, aged beyond illusion but not desire, eyes taut like those of a man with a squadron behind him and no fear of death ahead, but only a smoldering anger that had displaced all other emotion. And emptiness. A fleet of robot ships—-that was enough.
Omega V was gone. Without reason, without warning, an entire system. A synthetic sun that was supposed to last a billion years. While he was away fighting for the lives of others….. He had never trusted the Guardians, though the soft and protected Commonwealth did; and now he would ram it down their throats. Spirit beings! The space they occupied was real enough—-the silver threads like a massive, geometrical spider's web encircling the Hole in Space, the white globes pulsing across them. Hole in Space. That was what THEY called it. An immense dark clot in the sky, so black, with no stars behind it. He would see how untouchable they were.