CRON: A Trap Among the Stars

Previouslya handful of daring souls from Sorpigal exposed the false king Alamar and freed the real one — not knowing that the impostor, caught red-handed, had no intention of surrendering.

Hunted, cornered, with no hiding place left, Sheltem does the only thing left to him — he flees through a gate that, just at that moment, opens onto the planet VARN for the first time in years. On the other side of the gate is CRON — a gigantic observation-and-research station of the Ancients, orbited, like a flotilla of satellites, by dozens of smaller nacelles such as VARN. This entire flotilla has been heading in one direction for decades — toward the planet called Terra, where the Great Experiment was meant to reach completion. Only now has the station come close enough for the crossing to become possible.

CRON's defenses are incomparably better than those of provincial VARN — and it's precisely that fact that gives Corak the edge he's been waiting for since the chase began. Sheltem knows this just as well. He sets a trap, and an overconfident Corak walks into it without warning — Sheltem separates his body from his memory and hides both halves at opposite ends of the station, as far apart as its size allows.

Sheltem separates Corak's body from his memory and hides both halves as far apart as the station's size allows.

Before he flies off himself, he leaves something else behind: a copy of his own consciousness in the control center, with a final order written into the system — CRON, together with the entire remaining flotilla, is to fly straight into the sun. One of the nacelles sets off in that direction at once, before anyone can react. A hundred thousand lives are lost within minutes.

The rest of CRON's crew, however, have no intention of dying without a fight. A handful of the most capable among them, following the words of an old prophecy, track down Corak's severed "self" and restore it to function just in time to wrest control of the station from Sheltem's copy. The course toward the sun can no longer be fully reversed, however — CRON, with whatever is left of it, plunges instead toward the nearest planet it had been passing all along: Terra. It is not a soft landing. The station sinks into its ocean, carrying down with it everything that survived the fall.

Sheltem himself doesn't wait to see whether his order succeeded — he flees in his own ship straight toward Terra, the planet where it all began, not yet knowing that the CRON he knocked off course is about to come down in those very same waters.