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In the end, Captain Neil Scott and six other senior officers were convicted of murder and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of the remaining 1,768 members of the crew, only 138 were declared innocent. The rest received sentences ranging from twenty to three hundred years.

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The Fleet International prison was located in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Thus, the prisoners had to leave Earth again. Although Bronze Age had reached geosynchronous orbit, the prisoners were doomed never to travel the last thirty thousand kilometers of their 350-billion-kilometer voyage home.

As the prisoner transport ship accelerated, they once again drifted and fell against the portholes at the stern, like fallen leaves doomed to never reach the root of the tree. They looked outward as the blue globe that had haunted their dreams shrank and, once again, became just another star.

Before departing the fleet base, former Commander Rovinski, former Lieutenant Commander Schneider, and about a dozen other officers returned under guard to Bronze Age for the last time to assist with some details of the handover of the ship to her new crew.

For more than a decade, this ship had been their entire world. They had carefully decorated the inside with holograms of grasslands, forests, and oceans; cultivated real gardens; and built fishing ponds and water fountains, turning the ship into a real home. But now, all that was gone. All traces of their existence on the ship had been wiped away. Bronze Age was once again just a cold stellar warship.

Everyone they encountered in the halls looked at them coldly or simply ignored them. When they saluted, they made sure their eyes did not waver, to make it clear to the prisoners that the salute was for the military police escorting them only.

Schneider was brought to a spherical cabin to discuss technical details of the ship’s targeting system with three officers. The three officers treated Schneider like a computer. They asked him questions in an emotionless voice and waited for his answers. There was not a hint of politeness, and not a single wasted word.

It took only an hour to complete the session. Schneider tapped the floating control interface a few times, as though closing some windows out of habit. All of a sudden, he kicked the spherical wall of the cabin hard, and propelled himself to the other end of the chamber. Simultaneously, the walls shifted and divided the cabin into two halves. The three officers and the military policeman were trapped in one half, and Schneider was alone in the other.

Schneider brought up a floating window. He tapped on it, his fingers a blur. It was the control interface for the communications system. Schneider brought the ship’s high-powered interstellar communications antenna online.

A faint pop. A small hole appeared in the cabin wall, and the cabin was filled with white smoke. The barrel of the military policeman’s gun poked through the hole and aimed at Schneider.

“This is your last warning. Stop what you’re doing immediately and open the door.”

“Blue Space, this is Bronze Age.” Schneider’s voice was quiet. He knew how far his message could travel had nothing to do with how loudly he spoke.

A laser beam shot through Schneider’s chest. Red steam from vaporized blood erupted from the hole. Surrounded by a red fog made of his own blood, Schneider croaked out his last words:

“Don’t come back. This is no longer your home!”

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Blue Space had always responded to Earth’s entreaties with more hesitation and suspicion than Bronze Age had, so they had only been decelerating slowly. Thus, by the time they received Bronze Age’s warning, they were still heading away from the Solar System.

After Schneider’s warning, Blue Space instantly shifted from decelerating to accelerating full speed ahead.

When Earth received the intelligence report from the sophons of Trisolaris, the two civilizations had a shared enemy for the first time in history.

Earth and Trisolaris were comforted by the fact that Blue Space didn’t currently possess the ability to engage in dark forest deterrence against the two worlds. Even if it tried to broadcast the locations of the two solar systems to the universe at full power, it would be almost impossible for anyone to hear it. To reach Barnard’s Star, the nearest star that Blue Space could use as a superantenna to repeat Ye Wenjie’s feat, would take three hundred years. However, it hadn’t shifted its course toward Barnard’s Star. Instead, it was still heading toward NH558J2, which it wouldn’t reach for two thousand more years.