Unaware that both empires and outlaws were at that moment converging on their small ship, the crew and passengers of the Argo continued on their journey to Cholonu, passing the time in a variety of ways. Alex Ryan experimented with her new powers, Wonder Man, who had been trying to pursue a career as a performer on Earth, began writing a dramatization of their voyage so far, and the Cholonu men called Zero Man simply tried to prepare himself for whatever he might find on his homeworld.

    Arriving in Zero Man’s deserted home system, the rest of his companions on the Argo respected his privacy and Zero Man went alone to visit his now empty planet.

    It was exactly how he remembered it. There were no vast wastelands like he feared he might find. The cities still stood proudly. The buildings had been calmly evacuated. His brothers and sisters had not been taken, had not been massacred, his world had not been invaded or ravaged by plague or natural disaster; it had simply been abandoned.

    And for the Cholonu men called Zero Man, this was somehow even more disturbing.

    It was as it always had been, but now it was so very quiet, with only the sound of the wind whipping through leaves and insects chirping softly in the night air. It was eerily peaceful as he walked the empty streets and approached the Hall Of Warriors. Outside of it, he found a monument left by the Warpsmiths as a final testament to their honored foes. The giant statue of a Cholonu General, made from a blue alien metal that gleamed in the light of Cholonu’s two moons, was the only change in his world Zero Man that had yet to come across.

    Underneath the statue was a plague with an inscription written not in Cholonu, but in Interlac, the common tongue of the galaxy. It read, “In Memory of the Cholonu and their great sacrifice. May their nobility, loyalty and honor be remembered always. General Zem Baiee Nin Po, last of the Cholonu died 2343.9847.87 on Opali 4. Loyal to the last, his final wish will be honored.”

    Zero Man went inside the Hall of Warriors, and the building’s sensors detected his presence, powering up the Hall’s systems for the first time in many months. Zero Man accessed the Hall’s records and learned many of the specifics of his race’s fate, all coldly rendered in clinical, militaristic detail. The cessation of the breeding program in the interest of “maximizing personnel resources.” The mass transfer of every living Cholonu to the Warpsmith front and the unyielding orders to stand and fight to the last. His entire race ordered to their deaths, and all to cover the petty thievery of the K’te.

    He watched the final recordings the Hall’s archivists entered into the database before they, too, were ordered to leave for Warpsmith space. The battles were almost incomprehensible massacres. By then, the K’te had decided that there was little reason in wasting resources in even properly equipping the doomed Cholonu. Zero Man watched as they died in waves, charging forward to futilely engage the Warpsmiths in hand-to-hand combat. The Cholonu—men, women and children--fought with extraordinary ferocity and bravely, occasionally even connecting with a Warpsmith before being cut down in an ebony flash; several hundred dying for every one Warpsmith they managed to bring down. And yet, they wouldn’t stop. It was suicide.

    No, Zero Man decided, it was murder.

    And in the heavens above him, the nova wave that the K’te and their allies had created to wipe away the evidence of this murder finally reached the Cholonu system from four light months away.

    The Argo first detected it as a sudden, dangerous spike in gamma radiation. Then a terribly luminosity split the blackness of space, sweeping toward them. Recognizing the danger, Alex Ryan put the hyperdrive on-line and prepared to break orbit as Wonder Man yelled over the communicator that Zero Man had to get back to the ship immediately.

    Zero Man was done. He exited the Hall of Warriors and looked up. The night sky suddenly exploded into day. All around him, the nocturnal birds of Cholonu screeched in sudden, uncomprehending fear and took flight one last time. He watched their dark wings spread across the bright blue sky as his homeworld was bathed in alien sunlight. The grassy mall spread out before him and looked no different than on the countless afternoon walks he had taken there before. He closed his eyes knowing that this last memory would have to sustain him for the rest of life, and for a moment, just for a moment, wondered if it would be better if he simple stayed.

    The forests began to burn and he rose into the now blindingly white sky. He felt the searing turbulence as the atmosphere began to be ripped away. A few seconds later he was hanging onto the side of the Argo as it accelerated. He stole a look over his shoulder. Doppler and other visual artifacts of the ship’s warp field distorted the death of the Cholonu system into something almost dreamlike.

    When he reentered the Argo, he said only one thing: “This was no coincidence.”

    The last of the Cholonu did not know the full shape of the conspiracy that had taken away his brothers and sisters and his homeworld, but he could vaguely perceive its massive presence hanging somewhere all around him, and he could sense that the peace conference at Dressilus was pivotal to it. Perhaps there, and only there, would be the answers he sought. In this way, the Traveler’s quest had become his own, and the Argo would now speed toward the Crux of Empires with a newfound sense of urgency.

    And loss.