Let everything go wrong as usual, and Wang Zheng ends up on the reserve bench—but the competition is about to begin. Delegations from the military academies of Zeus and Apollo have already arrived. While the directors hold the official meeting, a commotion has erupted in the students’ circles: Captain of the Apollo Academy, Canberra, a third-year student of the officers’ faculty, the champion of the previous contest; and also the Captain of the Zeus Academy, Lier Kronos, a first-year student of the officers’ faculty. They and their teams are obvious favorites, because Earth hasn’t held first place for many years.
Meanwhile, in scientific circles, real panic reigns—someone, after many years, has finally given impetus to the development of the theory of “Navigation of Spatial Displacement in the Warp,” which could fundamentally overturn all ideas about space travel. And nobody even suspects that Wang Zheng, who is directly involved with all this, right now isn’t thinking about the fate of the universe at all—he’s experiencing, for the first time in his life, what real love feels like…