will render Marc sterile, and triggers it by a telepathic command. However, Marc detects this impulse, realises what the device has done, and kills Cyndia by reflex. Paul, father of Jack and Marc, is the leader of the Pro-Unity camp, and Jack decide to campaign against the rebels. As tension builds and several children start to co-adunate, the rebels' long-laid plans move into action. Marc has equipped hundreds of individuals with his CE devices, and his colleagues arm many ships. The rebels decide to demonstrate their power by destroying a planet — Molakar: the Krondaku planet from which the intervention was staged. Billions die in several seconds as the joined minds of the Rebels superheat the crust of the planet. A massive wave of metapsychic suffering and grief overwhelms the minds of the entire milieu. The response is not what Marc expects. Jack, Dorothea and his father, Paul, decide to confront him peacefully and will not let him take war to the galaxy. Marc decides to fight regardless, but the three pacifists call out to all the metapsychics in the galaxy to help join in Unity and stop the Rebels. One of Marc's main allies is Patricia Castellane, the Dirigent (planetary leader) of the cosmopolitan planet Okanagon. During the attack, the rebels accidentally lose control of another explosive device and it explodes, setting off Okanagon's unstable crust. The resultant geological catastrophe kills the entire population of two billion people. Jack telepathically asks his once-idolized brother, "What have you done?!" Jack and Dorothea manage to halt the rebel fleet, thanks to their ability to conjoin the powers of all the pro-Milieu operant humans. But these two and Paul die as a result. Many of the Rebels are also killed when their CEs overload, and Marc and a number of the leaders are badly hurt. The deaths of the people of Okanagon, however, propel humanity into the state of mental co-ordination (called "coadunation") which is the precursor to a benevolent joining of minds across the galaxy which the member races of the Milieu refer to as Unity. After the rebel faction is defeated, their leaders flee through a unique one-directional gate in France 6 million years back in time, to the Pliocene period. They were aided by a Lylmik who was powerful enough even to freeze Marc in his tracks, as he had done many years previously when Marc was a boy.