A/N: Im getting this up to sort of set up a teaser for this story. Im not sure how long it will be before I have the first real chapter up and this has been in my head for a while, so I really wanted it to be the prologue, and get people thinking about what might be happening in the story. Enjoy and as always, please REVIEW!

Prologue

At 186,282 miles per second, it takes light 1.3 seconds to reach the moon, 8.3 minutes to reach the sun, and by 16.1 hours it is has left Voyager 1 far behind it.

At 3.26 years, light will have traveled one parsec, no small distance in itself, being somewhere in the measure of 19 trillion miles.

One could extrapolate some feeble cognizance of such distances by imagining the act of skipping a rock across a pond…except, perhaps, imagine that pond to be the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.

Light skitters across the vast gulfs of space, sending ripples of photons into the farthest reaches of the void, until the waves of particles are stretched to a point where no energy remains, and the infinitesimal scraps of mass are tossed about and thrown away into the distance like dust upon the wind, or foam borne upon the ceaseless brine of a boundless sea.

Even those regions of observable space, which reside at distances so far from the mind of man that the very prospect of their being is of no great consequence to him, for the distances at which those desolate, wind blasted ferric masses stand is farther than any distance than any man will ever reach and even when those who are the most profound of thought bend their minds to imagining the expanses of this space, they cannot properly conceive of that cosmic chasm, and are left to their awe, ignorance and fear

Even those regions are doused in some infinitesimal, but no less incandescent, amount of light. It might be beyond the range of any organisms ability in translating the electromagnetic spectrum, but photons remain, borne there at 186,282 miles per second

However, one cannot travel at 186,282 miles per second. Nothing can. Well, except for light….in a vacuum.

Complex beings of solid matter and mass are doomed to forever explore the universe bound to that postulate put forth by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity: E=m

Bound by a quantum tether to the fact that light speed travel is unattainable….

While Einstein's body rotted away and his bones were ground to dust in mundane ecological nullification, the human race worked for the next two centuries on the propulsion systems that would help them to travel at faster and faster speeds through the black seas of the void, reaching distances farther and farther from Earth.

Distances so far that radio transmissions took hours and days, not minutes and seconds.

In the end of the 21st century (by human reckoning), the brightest minds in physics had finally made feasible the genesis of copious amounts of antimatter and less than 20 years later, the pinnacle intelligence of quantum mechanical engineering developed the first antimatter engine.

So it was, that by the middle of the 22nd century, the human race, borne upon the radioactive wings of antiproton annihilation and gamma rays, had stretched their minds and influence to the farthest it yet been, the closest stars to that of their own Sun….Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B.

It was by the twin lights of those nuclear spheres, that the eyes of those intrepid souls of the first manned, interstellar space flight, saw Pandora, like their forefathers of old, spotting the dark line of some distant country on the horizon, while tossed about on wrathful and blackened waves, pointing to it with a cries of fear and wonder.

So it was when man first set eyes upon Pandora.

And like the Norsemen who had braved the icy deeps of the Northern Ocean to come upon the New World, those interstellar voyagers sought harbor upon the cosmic shores of that pinnacle of life set amongst the black seas of infinity.

Like the Norsemen, they were turned back…hurled back to their ships and put back to toil upon the roiling seas from whence they came.

They had made the same mistake as their forbearers in assuming that this new realm was uninhabited and therefore their property uncontested

And just as archaeological evidence in Newfoundland showed, where cracked skulls and splintered bones bore the undeniable signs of brutal warfare, the bodies of human soldiers rot away in the lush, vibrant jungles of Pandora, with brightly feathered arrow shafts sticking from their ruined bodies.

There had been contest indeed for this new world the humans had claimed for their own.

The Norsemen were doomed to suffer the cruelty of the sea in their exile, all of them pointing the dragon headed prows of their ships towards the East, but only few of them ever stepping foot upon the soil of Scandinavia ever again.

But, the survivors of the Pandoran conflict made it home, after having spent six years in cryostasis, pondering their exile in the dreamscapes of subconscious thought.

Not all were silent though, not all were in slumber.

Those left awake had six long years to communicate with those on Earth. Six long years to brood and nurture their hatred and their defeat.

In six years, an antimatter driven starship, otherwise known as an interstellar vessel (ISV), can reach the Alpha Centauri system.

For the first time in its history, the human race tasted defeat. In no other instance in history, had another species driven back the relentless march of man's expansion.

A small hiccup in a much greater scheme.

One species does not reach the pinnacle of biological imperialism by relinquishing their supremacy at the first sign of a challenge or struggle.

No…..the human race had no conception of surrender or quarter when it came to the game of survival and conquest.

The would bear no challenger to their perceived dominion.

Just as Augustus swore vengeance against Arminius in uttering in a most odious tone "legiones redde" and just as Cato the Elder proclaimed in a thunderous voice full of unforgiving malice "Carthago delenda est"….

So it was that man, ruthless and rancorous, so bent on surviving with distinction, that only a distance at which waves of light burn out into mundane flutterings of matter could obfuscate and nullify his covenant of vengeance.

A/N: Not super suspenseful, but I hope it gets some of you hyped up about the story to come. The language in italics is latin legiones redde (give me back my legions), Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Augustus said 'legiones redde' after losing three entire legions to the Germanic tribes in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, and Cato the Elder said his phrase in the Third Punic Ware after Hannibal had gotten through ransacking and pillaging the Italian peninsula. A little history lesson. If you guys are not familiar with the history or science im alluding to in this prologue, well , you know what to do...pick up a book and start learnin' . Take it easy.