Jaimec

Jaimec is the Sirian Empire’s ninety-fourth planet and the principal setting for James Mowry’s operations on the world. Its established cities and transport infrastructure stand alongside extensive forest country, where Mowry repeatedly seeks concealment. At the end of his wandering, the forest no longer shields him from events: a Terran fleet of four thousand ships passes overhead, making Jaimec the ground-level setting for a sudden change in the war’s scale.

Planetary Setting and Population

Jaimec has a mass seven-eighths that of Terra, but only about half Terra’s land area, with the remainder covered by ocean. The account places its first settlement two and a half centuries before the present and estimates its population at about eighty million. These figures establish it as a long-inhabited, substantial world rather than a remote, unpeopled frontier. The population and age of settlement also give the forest episodes a particular contrast: Mowry moves through a world with a large, organized society, yet can still travel for days without encountering anyone beyond occasional workers.

The planet has cities, railroads, spaceports, and the other features of an established civilization. Its landscape is not presented as uniformly urban, however. Forests remain extensive enough to provide cover for a fugitive, while roads connect the wooded interior to named settlements such as Radine and Khamasta. Jaimec’s geography therefore supplies both sides of Mowry’s predicament: infrastructure that makes travel and official communications possible, and wild country in which he can disappear from ordinary view.

Settlements, Roads, and Communications

Radine is one of the points around which the forest narrative is organized. After watching a vehicle leave, Mowry returns to the town and uses a public booth to telephone Kaitempi headquarters. He keeps his scanner switched off and tries to give his voice the singsong tones of a native Jaimecan. The scene places a public communications facility inside a security struggle: the booth lets him reach the authorities, but the call depends on his ability to disguise himself and avoid detection.

The road between Radine and Khamasta provides another line through the landscape. Mowry reaches the main road after several days in the forest and follows it at a distance, continuing toward Radine. The route does not take him out of danger so much as bring him toward the edge of the events overtaking him. Jaimec’s roads and towns mark a connected inhabited world, but Mowry’s movement along their margins shows how a fugitive can use that same geography cautiously, without simply re-entering ordinary life.

Forest Refuge and the Closing Reversal

The woods offer Mowry a temporary refuge. When he returns to his cave, he finds everything intact and undisturbed, and regards it as the safest place available to him. Later, while moving through the forest, he avoids the occasional lumberjacks he encounters. The detail makes his concealment concrete: the forest is not empty, and remaining unseen requires him to treat even its sparse human traffic as a risk.

His provisions last ten days as he continues through the woods. He follows a westward circle intended to bring him not far south of Radine, a route shaped by the need to survive and by the hope of approaching familiar ground without exposing himself. At this stage he imagines that, if he has become a lone outlaw, he may as well become enough of a thug to prosper. The narration undercuts that imagined self-determination: wider events are already overtaking him, and he is no longer master of his destiny.

That change becomes visible on the Radine–Khamasta road. At precisely the eleven-time hour, a tremendous flash lights the sky. Mowry hears the shouting of a multitude, steps onto the empty road, and looks up as the heavily battered Terran fleets thunder overhead, four thousand strong. He dances in the middle of the road. The forest journey had narrowed his world to food, concealment, and a route back toward Radine; the fleet’s arrival suddenly places him within a military event of immense scale. Jaimec thus closes the episode as more than a hiding place: its forest and roads have sustained Mowry’s isolation, while the open sky above them reveals that the larger war has caught up with him.