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mistake in abandoning technology, but by then it was too late. Quite a few of the most primitive worlds the Confederation had rediscovered had been founded by people who wanted to get away from technology, only to discover that their planned societies were unsustainable without it. Many of them had died knowing that they’d failed.
    Despite her worries, Elyria found herself smiling. This was original science, something that might push the boundaries of human knowledge further out. And if it did lead to transcendence... who knew where else it could lead? The Confederation had certainly developed in some very strange ways since it had passed through the singularity.
    One week left , she told herself. They’d made excellent time through hyperspace. One week until we reach Darius .
    She just couldn’t wait to begin.

 

    CHAPTER
S IX
    Darius was a very odd world, in a very odd star system.
    Dacron sat in one of the monitoring stations, studying the live feed from the probes Hamilton had launched as soon as she came out of hyperspace twenty light hours from Darius. At least there was one AI trait that had crossed over to his human body; he could multitask far better than any mundane human. The probes were sending back enough data to overwhelm a human, but Dacron and the RIs had no trouble putting it into a coherent whole.
    Making sense of it was another issue altogether. Dacron had wondered, despite the assurances he’d received from the AIs, if the first survey ship had made a whole string of mistakes, or suffered more sensor glitches than they’d realised. But one glance at the probes scanning the system and he realised that they had understated the weirdness surrounding Darius. A sphere, centred on the star, of roughly two light months in diameter had been completely swept of space dust. Apart from the comet, and the planet itself, there was literally nothing within that region of space. Dacron found himself unable to come up with any theory that might have explained it, apart from alien intervention. But why would the aliens bother?
    The Confederation had occasionally taken steps to safeguard a primitive alien world from random asteroid impacts that would have destroyed the fragile societies – or ecosystems. It didn’t exactly count as interfering, or so the humans claimed, although the supposed logic of the situation often defeated Dacron’s comprehension. But then, the primitive society would have no awareness of how close they’d come to being destroyed before the Confederation intervened. They would never compose legends about how the sky-gods had shown them mercy in their darkest hour.
    Throughout history, mankind had been tempted by the stars – and the planets that orbited Sol, near Earth. Eventually, they had all been settled – and then the human race had gone further afield. But anyone growing up on Darius wouldn’t know that there were other planets orbiting other stars, at least unless they managed to make telescopes powerful enough to pick them out – and even if they did, bootstrapping themselves into space would be incredibly difficult. The simplest solution to the mystery was to assume that whoever had created Darius, and transported a number of humans to the planet, had deliberately intended to ensure that they couldn’t leave. Assuming they had been taken during the First Expansion Era, it was quite likely that the aliens would have concluded that humanity would destroy itself. Without the First Interstellar War, it was possible that they would have been right.
    The single comet received hundreds of probes, which scanned the entire object several times and concluded that it was a fairly typical comet, a ball of ice comparable to the millions of others that had been recorded all over the galaxy. Captain Thor was unconvinced and ordered a survey team to land on it and take core samples, as well as running through hundreds of tests to detect the presence of alien technology. Dacron suspected that