officers command them to attack the base. Suddenly turned into frenzied, hateful attackers - far different from their much less aggressive and more contemplative normal personalities – the soldiers raze the base and kill all but one Tauran, who successfully escapes the planet. It later turns out that the Taurans (now for the first time shown as a roughly humanoid species, somewhat in-between a quadrupedal and bipedal species) on the base had been totally unarmed, and that all of the casualties sustained during the firefight were caused by frenzied friendly fire. The realisation that humans had in the recent past done worse things to their own fellow humans - and without psychological conditioning - leads Mandella to a resignatory conclusion about human nature. Volume 2: Lieutenant Mandella The second volume deals with the effects of time dilation on the veterans and on human society involved in the war, as well as with the cold-hearted way in which the military bureaucracy ignores human feelings. On board of the combat vessel Anniversary, heading out to another collapsar-mission, Mandella and his compatriots, including Marygay Potter, a woman he has become romantically involved with, are attacked by a Tauran cruiser "from the future" – while on a mission involving collapsar jumps, so many decades or even centuries may go by in the rest of the universe that ships from different time periods may end up meeting each other. The consequences are disastrous for Mandella's ship, with a large part of the vessel being destroyed and many of his fellow soldiers dying during the engagement, which is fully fought under computer control as the ship tries to escape new missiles accelerating at several hundred gravities. Returning to Earth after their combat with the Taurans, the veterans slowly realise how much Earth has changed in the decades since they set out. Friends have grown old beyond their age, parents have died, younger brothers are now much older than they are. Earth's society has also changed strongly, and is now under the control of a militaristic world government leading the fight against the Taurans. Though feted as heroes, being the first ever soldiers to fight Taurans, Mandella and his compatriots find their sceptical views on the war and on their own military mission edited by all-present censorship - their own complaints during talk shows are digitally replaced by positive, propaganda-inspired comments. Later, when his mother lies dying,