He had written those words fifteen years earlier, in 2765, and delivered them as his first public address after his accession to the Archonate.

And, fifteen years later, a ship had gone to the stars and returned in less than a month. Perhaps. There was always the chance that they had traveled no farther than the orbit of Pluto, broken down and limped back home. He would find out soon enough.

Rising, McKenzie traversed the gleaming marble floor of his private chamber—a shameful extravagance, he had always thought in his dour way, but the chamber had not been designed with his tastes in mind—and passed through the irising sphincter into his transmat cubicle.

Naylor waited there, an obsequious little man in the stiff black robe of the Technarch’s personal staff. “The coordinates are set, Excellency.”

“Have you been through it?”

“Of course, Excellency. I have tested it twice.”

“Good enough. Leave the field open for my return.”

McKenzie stepped forward. The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The hidden power generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator that spun endlessly on its poles somewhere beneath the Atlantic, condensing the theta force that made transmat travel possible. McKenzie did not bother to check the coordinates Naylor had set. Call it an act of faith; the Technarch was supremely confident that no one schemed his assassination. A minor abscissa distortion, and the Technarch’s atoms would be scattered to the cold winds. He stepped into the glow of green without stopping to examine the coordinates.

There was no sensation. The Technarch McKenzie was destroyed, a stream of tagged wavicles was hurled halfway across a world, and the Technarch McKenzie was reconstituted.