Ice and Steel

The strongest survives!

Twenty-five thousand years have passed since humanity took its first step into space. Great empires rose and crumbled to dust, terrible wars thundered and then faded—wars unknown to any other era in the history of the race. Humanity has reached something close to godlike power more than once, and then slid back again to the brink of a civilized existence. By the year 3346 of the new era, dozens of planets and hundreds of billions of people living on them have frozen in a fragile equilibrium maintained by the standoff between formidable forces—each capable of destroying the world.

Another interstellar war has just ended, a war that wiped out an entire race. But humanity, mired in internal contradictions, continues fighting “all against all.” The conflict draws in both supporters of biotechnological development and techies—and even the race of mages. Battle spells against assault robots; biocybernetics against ancient peoples.