the

be taking any particular interest in the Templar vehicle.
Inside the van, the ride to the spaceport was mostly silent; it was beginning to sink in on the other recruits, perhaps, what sort of a major change in lifestyle they had embarked upon.
Listening to the few words that his two companions exchanged between them, Chen gathered that basic training for all Templar recruits from the Eight Worlds now took place on the planet Niteroi, only about two days' travel from Salutai at c-plus speeds. Chen hadn't bothered to ask where he was going, having, as the sergeant evidently realized, quite enough in the way of other matters to engage his thoughts.
Now in the back of Chen's mind the faint hope—he wasn't sure it really amounted to a hope—had arisen that he might, now that he was officially a Templar, get a chance someday to see the Templar Radiant, and perhaps even the opportunity to meet or at least set eyes on the man who was the chief object of all his political action, the exiled Prince Harivarman. The Prince had been held at the Radiant in Templar custody for the past four standard years. Well, maybe some day that chance would come. Right now Chen was willing to settle for exile himself, or imprisonment or just about any terms on which he would be allowed to live.
The recruiting sergeant, who had come along in the van to deliver his shipment, eyed Chen closely again when they were getting out of the vehicle at the spaceport, already behind the closed gates and gray walls of the small Templar enclave there.
"I hear you were out there demonstrating for the Prince." The sergeant's face was still unreadable. His voice no longer sounded exactly polite—Chen was no longer a civilian who had just walked into his office as a prospect—but the tone did not seem to express disapproval either.
"That's right," Chen said proudly.
The sergeant did not respond in any way that Chen could see, but turned away and went on about his business.
Other recruits, gathered from elsewhere on the planet, were waiting within the walls of the spaceport Templar enclave, already being kept separate from civilians. More than a dozen freshly enlisted young men and women were aboard the shuttle when it finally rose from Salutai.

Chapter 2
For hundreds of years Earth-descended humanity had observed and tried to explain the class of astrophysical objects called gravitational radiants, but still no wholly satisfactory scientific theory existed to account for them. Only nine of the objects, including the Templar Radiant, were known to exist in the entire Galaxy. Each of the nine was a fiery paradox: a mild source of comparatively harmless radiation, and, what made them unique, each a center and source of inverse gravity. Centuries ago human effort had rendered the Templar Radiant unique even in its class by enclosing it completely within a vast spherical fortress of stone and metal and fabricated forms of matter.
Commander Anne Blenheim was enjoying what was almost her first look around the vast interior of the ancient Templar Fortress that enclosed the Radiant itself, and of which she had very recently assumed command. Looking up, she saw the Radiant as a sunlike object, not much bigger than a point in its apparent size, though only about four kilometers directly above her head. The reversed gravitational influence of the Radiant naturally prevailed here, and the sunlike point would be in the same directly overhead position for anyone standing anywhere on the inner surface of the Fortress, whose basic shape was that of an enormous hollow sphere.
The reasons why that form of construction had been used—or indeed the reasons for the Fortress having been built at all—were lost, along with much else in the early history of its creators, the Dardanians. They had disappeared from Galactic society centuries ago, and to historians of the present day they formed one of the most enigmatic branches of Earth-descended humanity.
Still, the thought behind one aspect of the construction was obvious; the inner surface of the Fortress had been fixed at a distance of approximately four kilometers from the Radiant itself, because at that distance the reverse gravity of the Radiant, pushing the inhabitants of the Fortress against the faintly concave surface, was equal to Earth-standard normal.
Commander Blenheim stood, neatly uniformed, just outside the main gate of the Templar base; around her the little, self-contained