A thousand years have passed, and traces of the past catastrophe that pushed human civilization back hundreds of years are gradually fading—but the world is still cruel and dangerous. Even small children know to beware of war machines, the wreckage of which lies strewn across the ruins of cities…
Two boys find strange mannequins in the basement of a former clothing store. They don’t look like primitive androids that, long ago, were used to display fashion novelties—but they also don’t seem to be war machines, either. Seryozha and Sasha preferred to move away from trouble. How could they know that a chance find would affect the future of the whole planet? Even Ilya Ternov, a combat mnemonic, who arrived from an interstellar station to search for the missing father, didn’t know this. But it was precisely Ternov who had to intervene immediately in a conflict between the remnants of the human race and the oldest galactic civilization of insects…