At the same moment, the observation hall on the space station's third level—which could hold tens of thousands of people—was already packed with delegations of observers from various nations and reporters from all over. Despite the crowd, the hall was fairly quiet. The colossal artificial construct beyond the enormous screen, its wings of light spread wide, had left them speechless.
It was a kind of industrial beauty they could scarcely describe. The light of the stars, even that of the orange star in the prime of its life at the center of the system, paled beside its brilliant radiance.
They hadn't even noticed that, at some point, another row of seats had appeared in front of the tiered seating, now occupied by a long line of senior Imperial military officers.
Marshal Estan, the sword-bearing minister of the Grand Marshal's Office, was there, of course. So was Admiral Farrell, who had made a name for himself in this exercise at the expense of the old marshal. Observers from other nations believed that, barring some major blunder, the man might well receive a marshal's baton before he turned fifty. But among those seated in that row, he was still just a junior.
The most eye-catching figures in the row weren't the aging marshals, though. They were the four men in Imperial uniforms, each wearing a sixteen-star Order of the World Dragon on his chest.
The World Dragon, also known as the Dragon of Dawn or the Eight-Headed Dragon God, was the supreme deity in the ancient myths of the Tirillo people: the lord of the world, who had created and ruled over all things. They also firmly believed that the inscrutable spirit of the universe existed in this very form.
The Imperial House of Dawn in the Galactic Empire had adopted the