We're all here," said Louis Nenda's voice. "Where's here? Can you see?" "Not a thing. Black as a politician's heart. - Charles Sheffield

Any other instructions?"
"Not without breaking one of my own golden rules. In an unpredictable situation, the man or woman on the spot should make the decisions, not the general sitting on his ass a million miles away from the action.

The universe is all extremes. Monstrous gravity fields, or next-to-nothing ones; extreme cold, or heat so intense that solids and liquids cannot exist; multimillion atmosphere pressures, or near-vacuum.
Ice or fire. Niflheim or Muspelheim: the ancient alternatives, imagined by humans long before the Expansion.
It’s planets that are the oddities; the strange neutral zone between suns and space, the thin interface where moderate temperatures and pressures and gravity fields can exist. And if planets are anomalies, then planets able to support life are rarer yet—a zero-measure subset in that set of strangeness.
And within that alien totality, where do humans fit?

War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.