Lieutenant Angers orbited the colony world as he scanned for the location of the planet’s terraformer. Its signal signal pulsed weakly.

In hyperspace, a signal could be received from much further away, though it carried different information than it did in localspace. Unintuitively, it was actually harder for Angers to locate the same while in the planet's orbit than it had been while the Blue Shrike lay hundreds of thousands of miles away in hyperspace.

Finally, his computer locked onto the signal. It seemed a portion of the planet’s atmosphere had been disrupted within the last century by a terraforming event which did not follow ordinary terraforming conventions. Whether the device had malfunctioned or had been tampered with by unqualified engineers, it seemed that more of its energy had dissipated than Angers had initially assumed by the strength of the signal.

He wondered about what this event had done to the surface of the planet. It worried him. A malfunctioning terraformer could do more than simply punch a hole in an atmosphere. It had the power to transform the inhabitants of a planet on a cellular level, reprogramming their DNA into something stable but aberrant. It could warp every molecule of a particular element on a planet into a completely different one, rendering that world inhospitable toward life of any kind.

But the computer registered electrical activity and transmission signals coming from all over the planet, so human civilization had maintained itself. That was good.

Angers wondered if he should head toward the most populated part of the planet and hope he could convince whatever engineers he could find to assist him, but Angers had no reason to believe the inhabitants of this planet would be any less selfish or curious than those of any other world. He had nothing to offer them except the technology of his ship, if they hadn't already discovered space travel on their own, an accomplishment which he doubted considering the level of technological activity his scanners picked up across the rest of the planet.

No, not exactly the rest of the planet. The technology came from only one continent. In fact, the other continents were completely barren.

Angers frowned. The colonists had never left their home continent? That was inconceivable. Humans of every world carried an inborn voyaging instinct. People were fundamentally driven to move beyond the borders of their homes and to explore and conquer every bit of land so they could find. It was this drive which eventually led human civilizations to the stars hundreds of times in the past and, surely, millions times more to come.

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Perhaps this failure to colonize resulted from the terraformer’s malfunction. Well, if it still worked at all, which seemed likely to Angers due to its still-pulsing signal, Angers could use its technology to repair his ship and to transmute localspace fuel, if not more nuclear power supplies for his hyperdrive.

He tried not to think too hard about the virus still lurking within his ship's computer. It could be the worst thing possible for an Ideologue Virus to come into contact with a terraformer. He would worry about that once he landed on the planet. If he made it.

The lieutenant dropped his starfighter into an orbital descent vector, hurtling directly toward the signal. His localspace fuel was almost completely depleted, and he used up over three-quarters of what remained to break out of orbit. Angers hurtled through the broken atmosphere, speeding toward what his computer quickly revealed to be ice. He frantically ordered a surface scan and determined that the terraformer was buried deep under fragile ice which appeared on the surface to be solid ground.

A small human settlement lay nearby, but their technology did not seem to be advanced, their communication channels operating by simple radio waves.

But under the ground, there was advanced technology indeed. Technology of a higher degree than Angers had detected anywhere on the surface of the planet. As he sped on a collision course with the world itself, Angers formed a picture in his mind. The humans of this world had once been more advanced. They would have initially been provided with their terraformer. None would have known how to operate in any other manner than as a black box, engaging with the controls to perform only basic tasks, though they carried with them an engine capable of destroying and creating life on a scale which would render them gods to humans of pre-technological culture.

At some point, these humans would, having curiosity, if they could figure out how to create the proper tools for it, disassemble their terraformer and perhaps try to reverse-engineer the components within, the components which Euclidian science could not even begin to decipher.

These humans would have believed they’d discovered the secret of how the terraformer worked, only to be proved wrong as they obliterated themselves and a portion of their atmosphere in a moment of false triumph.

With all the brightest minds of their generation lost, the rest of humanity would have progressed slowly and strangely, stagnating or perhaps even regressing from generation to generation.

This idea disheartened Angers. He doubted there were any minds left on this world capable of helping him. Well, then he would just have to help himself.

The Blue Shrike had long since reached terminal velocity. Angers pointed the nose of his starfighter at the weakest portion of the ice, which rose like a sheet of lightning to meet him. Rather than using the last bit of his fuel to thrust away from the earth to slow his descent, Angers diverted all power to his forward-facing shields, then shoved a thick guard into his mouth, clamped himself into his seat, and braced for impact.

A bright flash burst through his head as, even dampened by the shields, the impact slammed every cell in Anger’s body with titanic force.

Lieutenant Angers lost consciousness just as a thundering boom rolled across the Wasteland and his starfighter disappeared into the ice.