The Worldweb, the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man—all of them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide. Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate policy of fratricide—the murder of any species with even the slightest potential of being a competitor. And the Ousters, the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between the stars and the only group not dominated by the TechnoCore, was next on our list of extinction.
