The New Japanese Republic---Empire, in everything but name---was strong, but surprisingly benevolent. For the first time in its modern history this serious, hard-working nation had the room and resources to keep its naturally overachieving peoples busy and content. There was no longer any reason for the underlying brutality of earlier Japanese culture, and in truth many of the more aggressive social and political stances had begun to lose favor among the masses. How long this relative inner calm would last none could say, and few thought to cross them. In romanticized histories of the second World War the saying, "Let sleeping dragons lie," had been used to refer to the United States. It now applied with equal and ironic aptness to the Japanese. 3) B-N5 But the fastest growing, and to many the most frightening of the Space giants, was the metal-churning monster known simply as 'The German States'. Their technology and industrial determination once more bringing them to the fore of the political arena, this born-again superpower, in the eyes of many, was the card on which the growing instability would turn. And the Germans themselves, for reasons not entirely clear, seemed to savor this new role, and to do everything possible to enhance it. Most had believed (not without cause) that it was they who encouraged the Cantons, and therefore they who would soon be making their presence felt in the outlying sectors. But when the time for such a move had come---the ruthless destruction by mercenaries of half the Canton fleet at Centaurus (so read the propaganda line)---they had shown no such inclination, choosing instead to remain neutral. True, their moneys and weapons were sometimes involved; but by all legitimate intelligence not a single German squadron or military adviser had been seen within the whole of Andersen sector during the dispute. There could be no denying, however, that their geological fleets had moved in quietly after the destruction of the Laurian ore-planet, recovering valuable mineral wastes that the Cantons could not. The mysterious 'gravity station' had also disappeared. P-Q3