The light had travelled one hundred and fifty thousand years to reach his eyes.

Four hundred billion stars poured their energies across the vast, empty gulf and reflected as points of light in his pupils, tiny and brilliant; yet through those eyes the same stars filled the heavens before him in a twin spiral of hard, blazing light and life that threw his shadow dark and long behind him.

Axel van Diemen had been to the outer stars of the Larger Magellanic Cloud before; a lifetime ago, when the dream was new and daunting...when ghosts and memories drove him. But now, generations on, the past was safely distant and the dream much closer and real.

Mankind's dream...to cross the gulf to the Milky Way. To go back. To find the original home of man. And he was to lead the way.