At Zimia Spaceport, a hawk-featured man walked around an old-design update vessel, making his final inspection before takeoff. Freshly painted and overhauled, the old black-and-silver ship reflected the golden rays of the setting sun. Once he left, he doubted anyone here would ever see him again.

Vorian no longer wore any uniform. He tried to imagine what true freedom would be like, away from the duties that had imprisoned him for decades. It was time he left and flew far away, to the Unallied Planets and beyond. He would not regret leaving anything behind. Gone would be the cares of the Jihad, and he would rarely think of Abulurd, Agamemnon, Omnius, or any of the others who had inflicted so much pain on him.

His long career as a fighting man was concluded, and he did not know what lay ahead for him. He had lived two human lifetimes so far, and might easily have more than that remaining in his supercharged genes. He had begun to show faint signs of aging— he looked thirty at the most— but in his bones, in his very soul, he carried the fatigue of a thousand years. The Jihad and all of its tragedies had taken a great deal out of him, and he didn’t know when, or if, he would ever recover.

Maybe he would stop on Rossak to visit his dedicated granddaughter Raquella, who worked there with the surviving Sorceresses. He had no idea what they were doing, or why, but he looked forward to finding out. Maybe he would even go back to Caladan. He should at least say goodbye to his sons and grandchildren.

He felt like a galactic tourist with no schedule to keep, none of the pressures to which he had grown so accustomed over the past century.

For backwater trips on planets, he had brought an inflatable boat and suspensor-driven platforms that were compact and stowed away in the Dream Voyager‘s storage compartments. He also had enough provisions to last for a long time. Vor could roam anywhere he wanted, discovering anything he liked. Most of his life had been devoted to learning and perfecting the art of war, but he had no use for such skills anymore.

Ironically, he did have a use for something he had learned early in life, long before he’d ever become a famous Hero of the Jihad, back to the easy days when he and Seurat had made update runs between Synchronized Worlds. Days of simplicity. This ship, once filled with computerized systems, now had only a manual operation system. With the redundancies that Vor had specified in the reconstruction, the craft would serve him well. Fewer parts and less sophisticated systems meant increased reliability, fewer breakdowns.

He boarded the Dream Voyager and took off a day ahead of schedule, so that he could avoid any fanfare or goodbyes. As he rose through the atmosphere, a huge weight lifted from his shoulders, replaced by a sensation of raw excitement, as if he were newly born into a life full of promise again.