Often you would find people standing at the great windows of Icarus Quay waiting for a ship. Too many of them waited too long, long after everyone else knew that the person that they pined for wasn't coming home.  Sometimes an overdue ship did loom into view, silhoutted against the star which lay below from horizon to horizon like an ocean. But the star often takes a morsel in sight of home, and that was before the great fleets came and the star gorged itself on the insane proceedings of men and their hopeless wars. Now the star is always hungry.

Always.