It was early here. The skies of Pacem were yellow, tinged with greenish clouds and an ammonia smell which attacked her sinuses and made her eyes water. The air had that thin, foul, chemical smell of a world neither completely terraformed nor totally inimical to man. Gladstone paused to look around. St. Peter’s was on a hilltop, the square embraced by a semicircle of pillars, a great basilica at its cusp. To her right, where the pillars opened to a staircase descending a kilometer or more to the south, a small city was visible, low, crude homes huddling between bone-white trees that resembled
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