Into the Sea of Stars

Prologue

It was a time of high adventure; an age when men and women could seize destiny and shape it to their will. Can our generation again breed such heroes? I think not, for a golden age of exploration comes but rarely to a race, and ours is now lost forever. They were of the same mold as Alexander at the Asian Gate and Caesar at the Rubicon.

Look to the choices that lay before them, a thousand years ago in the darkness of the twenty-first century. The world beneath them was poised for the madness of ther monuclear night; a madness that threatened to reach out to the Earth's thousand colonies. And with that madness came the calling-the calling from Old America, and Eu rope, and the vast reaches of the Asian giants. A calling for the children to return, to arm themselves, and to join in the war of the parent states. A war that would engulf mankind and create another dark age, from which we have so recently emerged.

But the colonies were no longer of Earth. They were the new children, those who beheld a new horizon and could look beyond the parochial squabblings below.

And one day they were gone. Pointing their colonies into the unknown, they abandoned Earth forever. Using plasma drives, ion thrusters, matter/antimatter engines, thermonuclear pulse propulsion, and even solar sails, the colonies broke the bonds and headed off into the un known-looking for freedom and an escape. Led by such legendary men as Ikawa Kurosawa, Vasiliy Renikoff, and Franklin Smith, the colonies abandoned the parent world to its madness. And then the War came.

Where are they now? What great wonders have these visionaries of the past created, unhindered by the Holocaust War of the twenty-first century and the chaos that followed? Will we ever know the fate of the colonies missing for a thousand years?

From a rejected manuscript by Dr. Ian Lacklin, Missing Colonies and the Heroic Figure in History.