Read Balance Point for Free Online Page A

Marines stood guard there, in full Eternad armor with automatic weapons unslung. What lay aft remained a mystery to Yavet’s external intelligence services despite decades of effort. Nano remotes, recruited human agents, open-source research, nothing had unlocked the secrets.
    He looked away as he passed rather than be reminded of his own frustration. Continuing through the vast ship’s decks and sectors to his cabin, he lay rigid on his bunk and stared at the ceiling.
    Ruberd had sacrificed his life to end the Trueborns’ dominance. At least to begin the end.
    Max Polian clenched his teeth. No, his son had not sacrificed his life. It had been stolen from him by Trueborn assassins. And now Cutler had presented Polian with the opportunity to punish the thieves.
    After the great ship lifted, she hung above Rand while her crew prepared her for the nearlight voyage to the first of the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point transits through which the ship would jump. The jump across the TFIP, from one limb of a fold in space to another, connected points that were otherwise centuries of travel apart, even for light itself.
    Polian made his way to the ship’s centerline passage, where rotational gravity was effectively zero, and swam forward through thin air to the observation blister. He emerged into a crystal hemisphere eighty feet in diameter, its inner surface spiderwebbed with handrails at which passengers floated like fish crowded in a bowl.
    The world they were leaving behind filled half the blackness of the view that entranced them. Like most seeded Earthlikes, Rand was a blue and green ball frosted with white cloud swirls. Unlike most seeded Earthlikes, it was a satellite. Beyond Rand glowed the uninhabitable, streaked orange gas giant around which Rand orbited.
    Polian hung in the air, staring. The sight awed even him.
    He found a vacant space along a rail, alongside a group of five outworlders. At least he assumed they were outworlders. Two adults with three children could only come from a place where the problem was underpopulation. The man in the group floated alongside the boy, the woman between the girls. Both adults pointed out features visible on the globe below, compared them to the place to which they were bound.
    Polian rested both hands on the rail in front of him. He had, after all, no one for whom to point out sights.
    On inspection visits to the Ring he had often looked down on Yavet from near space. Yavet had, perhaps two hundred years before, resembled the blue, fleecy ball below him. Today, clouds rendered her a burnished gray, an enhancement wrought by industrious purpose and unified government.
    Even the Trueborns conceded that, but for the interruption forced on Earth by the Pseudocephalopod War, Yavet was what Earth would have become. He smiled into his reflection in the crystal. Leave it to the Trueborn historians—no, propagandists—to paint Yavet as ruined, instead of vigorous.
    What did the Earthmen say? History was written by the victors.
    The Trueborns had won the final victory against the alien civilization that had once kidnapped and enslaved the Trueborns’ paleolithic ancestors. Then that civilization had sprinkled those ancestors across the universe like seeds before it returned and tried to destroy mankind’s motherworld. And why had the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony returned to destroy Earth? Only the Slugs knew that. And now, no one would ever know. Because the Trueborns had ended hostilities by some still-undisclosed treachery that had annihilated their opponent without so much as a body left behind.
    But the history of the ongoing struggle within mankind between the motherworld and the seeded worlds like Yavet remained to be written. Polian had lost his son to the struggle. History would never, Max Polian thought, be allowed to forget that.
    Inside the ship’s gravity cocoon, the separation from the orbit of Rand and subsequent rapid acceleration brought with it no sensation of motion. The