"Most of them are deserted. Two support search and warning
stations and automatic interceptors to protect our property.
Look! - there's Flora." Alexander gestured at the land mass that
appeared below.

Flora was a great green oval two hundred kilometers long and
about a hundred wide.

"Pretty, isn't it?" Alexander said as they sped over the low
range of hills and the single gaunt volcano filling the eastward
end of the island and swept over a broad green valley dotted with
fields and orchards interspersed at intervals by red-roofed
structures whose purpose was obvious.

"Our farms," Alexander said redundantly. The airboat crossed a
fair-sized river. "That's the Styx," Alexander said. "Grandfather
named it. He was a classicist in his way - spent a lot of his
time reading books most people never heard of. Things like the
Iliad and Gone with the Wind. The mountains he called the
Apennines, and that volcano's Mount Olympus. The marshland to the
north is called the Pontine Marshes - our main road is the Camino
Real." Alexander grinned. "There's a lot of Earth on Flora.
You'll find it in every name. Grandfather was an Earthman and he
used to get nostalgic for the homeworld. Well - there's
Alexandria coming up. We've just about reached the end of the
line."

Kennon stared down at the huge gray-green citadel resting on a
small hill in the center of an open plain. It was a Class II