terly 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.

His hatred had had four long years to smolder. The year of isolation
had been longest, training himself to feel nothing, in the face of
danger. Even the fourteen odd months of pirating had crawled---the
killing of his crew had been a sad necessity. Then the slow,
meticulous construction of the fleet. Human minds were worthless here;
they would only be read and turned to jelly with strange fears and
false images. Only a close-knit, automatic response to telepathic
command, forty fast-black robot ships, were of any use. Why he had
chosen black he couldn't say, unless perhaps it was a gut feeling they
didn't like it. But the Hole was black..... STOP THESE USELESS
THOUGHTS! NEXT YOU'LL BE THINKING OF MARIA.

It was not possible they weren't aware of his opposition. But they
seemed to allow such things. . .or perhaps they couldn't stop them.
No, that was too much to ask himself to believe. Certainly no one had
stopped the fascist uprising, the snowballing of events which had led
to interworld war, the slaughter, the death camps. True the
Commonwealth had eventually come to grips. But the destruction, the
loss of life, could ne