Promised Land

Richard Morgan made one promise to five thousand people.

He promised them a world.

He kept it.

They crossed twelve years of empty space in the dark, suspended between the stars, dreaming of what waited at the other end. A planet. Their planet. A place where everything Morgan had told them about themselves, about their destiny, about what they deserved, could finally be made permanent.

Morgan was not a preacher. He was not a prophet. He made no claims about gods or heaven or divine selection. What he offered was simpler than that and more powerful. He was a man who had never been wrong. Not once. Not about anything. And when a man like that looks you in the eye and tells you that you are better than the world you were born into, that there is a place out among the stars that belongs to you and only you, that all you have to do is trust him and follow him into the dark —

You follow.

Five thousand people followed.

And when they arrived, Morgan delivered. The planet was everything he had said it would be. Rich soil. Clean air. Open sky. They unloaded the temple components first, before the housing, before the food stores, before anything else, because that was the order of things, and they built their world from the ground up with the calm of people who had never once considered the possibility of being wrong.

The settlement rose. The fields spread outward. The temple stood at the center of everything, gleaming in the light of a sun that was almost but not quite the same as the one they left behind.

Five thousand people.

One world.

Everything Morgan ever promised them, finally real, finally permanent, finally theirs.

Richard Morgan had never been wrong.

He had never been wrong about anything until now.