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that
some feared might strike the Earth. So far as anyone knew, none of those
catastrophes came to pass, but rather than waking up the members of Project Van
Winkle from their stasis capsules, someone in charge had decided to leave the
whole population on “ice,” so to speak. The project had been of the highest
security and very few had even known it existed, which may be why they were
eventually forgotten and only woke up long after they had expected when the
power systems running the stasis fields at Van Winkle Base began to fail.
    What they found was a world as
alien to them as any that might be imagined. The Mer were of genetically
altered human stock, designed to live a semi-aquatic lifestyle, with
dolphin-like tails instead of legs. They lived, primarily around the coastlines
of the supercontinent the humans called Pangaea Proxima or sometimes, just
Pangaea. The large landmass was a mash-up of the Americas, Europe and Asia
which had been cast together by tectonic forces over the long time the humans
had been in stasis. There was another, smaller continent that had once been Antarctica
and Australia in the far south of the globe, but so far this had been left
largely unexplored. There was just too much terra
incognita on Pangaea to worry about Australis.
    The Atackack population sparsely
covered much of Asia. They liked to live in large population centers and rarely
colonized new ones, so there was a lot of space between settlements. And the
human population lived mostly in a single city near where Cleveland had once
been. There was a lot of room left on Earth.
    When the human colony had been
barely established, Park and Iris had taken a boat to explore downstream of Van
Winkletown and ran into Marisea, her father Taodore and the Atackack shaman,
Okacktack. The discovery was a surprise on many levels, but Park had been happy
to discover that Project Van Winkle had not woken up in a world devoid of
intelligent species, but filled with only the post-mammalian and post-reptilian
monsters they had encountered soon after coming out of stasis.
    Had Park and Van Winkle Commander
Arnsley Theoday known what would happen when they attempted to launch a trio of
communications satellites, they may have been more careful about pushing their
way into outer space. Certainly their Mer allies had warned them about the
“Galactics” who would allow no Earthling to fly any higher than one hundred
miles over the surface of the planet, but neither Park nor Arn had taken the warnings
to heart.
    The “Galactics,” who called
themselves the Alliance of Confederated Planets, had a base on Luna, from which
they meant to enforce the quarantine of Earth, but luck and a few ancient
missiles from Park’s first spaceship took them by surprise. One thing led to
another and eventually the Alliance was forced to accept Earth and her people
as full members, but one faction, the Premm would never accept them for reasons
that were as much fanatically religious as they were pragmatically political.
    The Premm left the Alliance in
protest, annexed several worlds in systems near their own and declared
themselves to be a holy empire. Park recalled his own recent conversation with
Lord Rebbert of Dennsee, one of Earth’s first friends within the Alliance.
There really was no proof that the mysterious Dark Ships had anything to do
with the Premm. Certainly, neither the Premm nor the Dark Ship People had
acknowledged each other as allies. But the coincidence of the Premm’s
demonstrations within the Diet, timed as they were with the appearance of the
Dark Ships, led even the most skeptical to believe they were working together.
There was no way to verify it. Park had suggested placing a spy on one of the
Premm worlds but Rebbert had assured him there chance of the spy being caught
out was just too high.
    “No two species of human are
sufficiently alike,” Rebbert had explained. “There are people on some worlds
who might look like Premm, but the Premm