Skirting beneath low clouds, the transport lumbered across the sky, silhouetted against the last light from the tiring sun on the horizon line. The air, heavy with the first waiting rain of the season, stirred in the building wind. Under rising moonlight, the desert temperature fell off quickly.

A robot drone piloted the planetary transport, intent on carrying a cargo of foodstuffs north to the bustling spaceport at Narssus. Deep in the drone�s computer core, a subroutine ran over a line of navigational code. Just before the program reset itself to process the next line of data, a glitch popped up and the subroutine skipped back on itself. It skipped again. The problem compounded itself over the next fraction of a second and compounded further when the data stream feeding the stabilizers dried up.

The transport jerked hard to port, angling sharply downward, and began a screeching descent. In the drone�s auxiliary memory, a parasite program clicked to life, prompted by the distress signal that had just burst from the communications relay. The parasite pumped a string of surrogate data into the gaps in the navigational command line. The transport steadied almost immediately, but it was still rushing down toward the towering cliffs. Toward one in particular. The bulk freighter drove into the sheer rock face, crumpling like paper and lighting up the night sky with orange jets of fire as it dropped into the deep canyons below. Heat lightning flashed across the cloud banks and thunder boomed through dense humidity, but the rain still waited.

Hiding in the breathing night shadows of a coastal swamp, a thinking lizard cradles her young child, singing the low tones of an ancient lullaby. The meaning of its alien words are long forgotten, but the melody carries through the wet jungle night, soothing her crying infant. Finally, the child sleeps, and the mother sings the final verses. �And don�t you know, child?...� come the gentle words, �...it�s so long to the City.� In the stars above her, empires and confederacies grow restive, forever in the grip of timeless animosities and rumors of war.