Exultant

Chapter 1

Far ahead, bathed in the light of the Galaxy’s center, the nightfighters were rising.

From his station, Pirius could see their black forms peeling off the walls of their Sugar Lump carriers. They spread graceful wings, so black they looked as if they had been cut out of the glowing background of the Core. Some of them were kilometers across. They were Xeelee nightfighters, but nobody in Strike Arm called them anything but flies.

They converged on the lead human ships, and Pirius saw cherry-red light flaring.

His fragile greenship hovered over the textured ground of a Rock. The Rock was an asteroid, a dozen kilometers across, charcoal gray. Trenches had been dug all over its surface, interconnecting and intersecting, so that the Rock looked like an exposed brain. Sparks of light crawled through those complex lines: soldiers, infantry, endlessly digging, digging, digging, preparing for their own collisions with destiny. It was a good hour yet before this Rock and Pirius’s own greenship would reach the battlefield, but already men and women were fighting and dying.

There was nothing to do but watch, and brood. There wasn’t even a sense of motion. Under the Assimilator’s Claw’s pulsing sublight drive it was as if he were floating, here in the crowded heart of the Galaxy. Pirius worried about the effect of the wait on his crew.

Pirius was nineteen years old.

He was deep in the Mass, as pilots called it — the Central Star Mass, officially, a jungle of millions of stars crammed into a ball just thirty light-years across, a core within the Core. Before him a veil of stars hung before a background of turbulent, glowing gas; he could see filaments and wisps light- years long, drawn out by the Galaxy’s magnetic field. This stellar turmoil bubbled and boiled on scales of space and time beyond the human, as if he had been caught at the center of a frozen explosion. The sky was bright, crowded with stars and clouds, not a trace of darkness anywhere.

And through the stars he made out the Cavity, a central bubble blown clear of gas by astrophysical violence, and within that the Baby Spiral, a swirl of stars and molecular clouds, like a toy version of the Galaxy itself embedded fractally in the greater disc. That was the center of the Galaxy, a place of layered astrophysical machinery. And it was all driven by Chandra, the brooding black hole at the Galaxy’s very heart.

This crowded immensity would have stunned a native of Earth — but Earth, with its patient, long- lived sun, out in the orderly stellar factory of the spiral arms, was twenty-eight thousand light-years from here. But Pirius had grown up with such visions. He was the product of a hundred generations grown in the birthing tanks of Arches Base, formally known as Base 2594, just a few light-years outside the Mass. He was human, though, with human instincts. And as he peered out at the stretching three-dimensional complexity around him he gripped the scuffed material of his seat, as if he might fall.

Everywhere Pirius looked, across this astrophysical diorama, he saw signs of war.

Pirius’s ship was one of a hundred green sparks, ten whole squadrons, assigned to escort this single Rock alone. When Pirius looked up he could see more Rocks, a whole stream of them hurled in from the giant human bases that had been established around the Mass. Each of them was accompanied by its own swarm of greenships. Upstream and down, the chain of Rocks receded until kilometers-wide worldlets were reduced to pebbles lost in the glare. Hundreds of Rocks, thousands perhaps, had been committed to this one assault. It was a titanic sight, a mighty projection of human power.

But all this was dwarfed by the enemy. The Rock stream was directed at a fleet of Sugar Lumps, as those Xeelee craft were called, immense cubical ships that were themselves hundreds of kilometers across — some even bigger, some like boxes that could wrap up a whole world.

The tactic was crude. The Rocks were simply hosed in toward the Sugar Lumps, their defenders striving to protect them long enough for them to get close to the Lumps, whereupon their mighty monopole cannons would be deployed. If all went well, damage would be inflicted on the Xeelee, and the Rocks would slingshot around a suitable stellar mass and be hurled back out to the periphery, to be reequipped, remanned, and prepared for another onslaught. If all did not go well — in that case, duty would have been done.

As the Claw relentlessly approached the zone of flaring action, one ship dipped out of formation, swooping down over the Rock in a series of barrel rolls. That must be Dans, one of Pirius’s cadre siblings. Pirius had flown with her twice before, and each time she had shown off, demonstrating to the toiling ground troops the effortless superiority of Strike Arm, and of the Arches squadrons in particular — and in the process lifting everybody’s spirits.

But it was a tiny human gesture lost in a monumental panorama.

Pirius could see his crew, in their own blisters: his navigator Cohl, a slim woman of eighteen, and his engineer, Enduring Hope, a calm, bulky young man who looked older than his years, just seventeen. While Cohl and Hope were both rookies, nineteen-year-old Pirius was a comparative veteran. Among greenship crews, the mean survival rate was one point seven missions. This was Pirius’s fifth mission. He was growing a reputation as a lucky pilot, a man whose crew you wanted to be on.

“Hey,” he called now. “I know how you’re feeling. They always say this is the worst part of combat, the ninety-nine percent of it that’s just waiting around, the sheer bloody boredom. I should know.”

Enduring Hope looked across and waved. “And if I want to throw up, lift the visor first. That’s the drill, isn’t it?”

Pirius forced a laugh. Not a good joke, but a joke.

Enduring Hope: defying all sorts of rules, the engineer called himself not by his properly assigned name, a random sequence of letters and syllables, but an ideological slogan. He was a Friend, as he styled it, a member of a thoroughly illegal sect that flourished in the darker corners of Arches Base, and, it was said, right across the Front, the great sphere of conflict that surrounded the Galaxy’s heart. Illegal or not, right now, as the flies rose up and people started visibly to die, Hope’s faith seemed to be comforting him.

But navigator Cohl, staring ahead at the combat zone, was closed in on herself.

The Claw was a greenship, a simple design that was the workhorse of Strike Arm; millions like it were in action all around the war zone. Its main body was a bulbous pod containing most of the ship’s systems: the weapons banks, the FTL drive and two sublight drive systems. From the front of the hull projected three spars, giving the ship the look of a three-pronged claw, and at the tip of each prong was a blister, a clear bubble, containing one of the Claw’s three crew. For greenship crews, nobody else mattered but each other; it was just three of them lost in a dangerous sky — Three Against the Foe, as Strike Arm’s motto went.

Pirius knew there were good reasons for the trifurcated design of the greenship. It was all to do with redundancy: the ship could lose two of its three blisters and still, in theory anyhow, fulfill its goals. But right now Pirius longed to be able to reach through these transparent walls, to touch his crewmates.

He said, “Navigator? You still with us?”

He saw Cohl glance across at him. “Trajectory’s nominal, Pilot.”

“I wasn’t asking about the trajectory.”

Cohl shrugged, as if resentfully. “What do you want me to say?”

“You saw all this in the briefing. You knew it was coming.”

It was true. The whole operation had been previewed for them by the Commissaries, in full Virtual detail, down to the timetabled second. It wasn’t a prediction, not just a guess, but foreknowledge: a forecast based on data that had actually leaked from the future. The officers hoped to deaden fear by making the events of the engagement familiar before it happened. But not everybody took comfort from the notion of a predetermined destiny.

Cohl was staring out through her blister wall, her lips drawn back in a cold, humorless smile. “I feel like I’m in a dream,” she murmured. “A waking dream.”

“It isn’t set in stone,” Pirius said. “The future.”

“But the Commissaries—”

“No Commissary ever set foot in a greenship — none of them is skinny enough. It isn’t real until it happens. And now is when it happens. It’s in our hands, Cohl. It’s in yours. I know you’ll do your duty.”

“And kick ass,” Enduring Hope shouted.

He saw Cohl grin at last. “Yes, sir!”

A green flash distracted Pirius. A ship was hurtling out of formation. One of its three struts was a stump, the blister missing. As it sailed by, Pirius recognized the gaudy, spruced-up tetrahedral sigil on its side. It was Dans’s ship.

He called, “Dans? What—”

“Predestination my ass,” Dans yelled on the ship-to-ship line. “Nobody saw that coming.”

“Saw what?”

“See for yourself.”

Pirius swept the crowded sky, letting Virtual feeds pour three-dimensional battlefield data into his head.

In the seconds he’d spent on his crew, everything had changed. The Xeelee hadn’t stayed restricted to their source Sugar Lumps. A swarm of them speared down from above his head, from out of nowhere, heading straight for Pirius’s Rock.

Pirius hadn’t seen it. Sloppy, Pirius. One mistake is enough to kill you.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Cohl said.

“Forget the projections,” Pirius snapped.

There were seconds left before the flies hit the Rock. He saw swarming activity in its runs and trenches. The poor souls down there knew what was coming, too. Pirius gripped his controls, and tried to ignore the beating of his heart.

Four, three, two.

The Xeelee — pronounced Zee-lee — were mankind’s most ancient and most powerful foe.

According to the scuttlebutt on Arches Base, in the training compounds and the vast open barracks, there were only three things you needed to know about the Xeelee.

First, their ships were better than ours. You only had to see a fly in action to realize that. Some said the Xeelee were their ships, which probably made them even tougher.

Second, they were smarter than us, and had a lot more resources. Xeelee operations were believed to be resourced and controlled from Chandra itself, the fat black hole at the Galaxy’s very center. In fact, military planners called Chandra, a supermassive black hole, the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. How could anything we had compete with that?

And third, the Xeelee knew what we would do even before we decided ourselves.

This interstellar war was fought with faster-than-light technology, on both sides. But if you flew FTL you broke the bounds of causality: an FTL ship was a time machine. And so this was a time-travel war, in which information about the future constantly leaked into the past.

But the information was never perfect. And every now and again, one side or the other was able to spring a surprise. This new maneuver of the Xeelee had not been in the Commissaries’ careful projections.

Pirius felt his lips draw back in a fierce grin. The script had been abandoned. Today, everything really was up for grabs.

But now cherry-red light flared all around the Rock’s ragged horizon.

On the loops, orders chattered from the squadron leaders. “Hold your positions. This is a new tactic and we’re still trying to analyze it.” “Number eight, hold your place. Hold your place.”

Pirius gripped his controls so tight his fingers ached.

That red glare was spreading all around the Rock’s lumpy profile, a malevolent dawn. Most of the action was taking place on the far side of the Rock from his position — which was itself most unlike the Xeelee, who were usually apt to come swarming all over any Rock they attacked.

The Claw would be sheltered from the assault, for the first moments, anyhow. That meant Pirius was in the wrong place. He wasn’t here to hide, but to fight. But he had to hold his station, until ordered otherwise.

Pirius glimpsed a fly standing off from the target. It spread night-dark wings — said to be not material but flaws in the structure of space itself — and extended a cherry-red starbreaker beam. The clean geometry of these lethal lines had a certain cold beauty, Pirius thought, even though he knew what hell was being unleashed for those unlucky enough to be caught on the exposed surface of the Rock.

Now, though, the rectilinear perfection of the starbreaker beam was blurred, as a turbulent fog rose over the Rock’s horizon.

Cohl said, “What’s that mist? Air? Maybe the starbreakers are cutting through to the sealed caverns.”

“I don’t think so,” said Enduring Hope levelly. “That’s rock. A mist of molten rock. They are smashing the asteroid to gas.”

Molten rock, Pirius thought grimly, no doubt laced with traces of what had recently been complex organic compounds, thoroughly burned.

But still, for all the devastation they were wreaking, the Xeelee weren’t coming around the horizon. They were focusing all their firepower on one side of the Rock.

Still Pirius waited for orders, but the tactical analysis took too long. Suddenly, human ships came fleeing around the curve of the Rock, sparks of Earth green bright against the dull gray of the asteroid ground. The formation had collapsed, then, despite the squadron leaders’ continuing bellowed commands. And down on the Rock those little flecks of light, each a human being trapped in lethal fire, swarmed and scattered, fanning out of the trench system and over the open ground.

Even from here, it looked like panic, a rout.

It got worse. All across the Rock’s visible hemisphere implosions began, as if its surface was being bombarded by unseen meteorites. But the floors of these evanescent craters broke up and collapsed, and through a mist of gray dust a deeper glow was revealed, coming up from inside the Rock. It was as if the surface were dissolving, and pink-white light was burning its way out of this shell of stone. The Xeelee, Pirius thought: the Xeelee were burning their way right through the Rock itself.

Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. “Lethe,” he said. “Get us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!”

Cohl said weakly, “But our orders—”

But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and pulling back.

Even as the Rock fell away, Pirius could see the endgame approaching. For a last, remarkable, instant, the Rock held together, and that inner light picked out the complex tracery of the trench network, as if the face of the Rock was covered by a map of shining threads. The asteroid’s uneven horizon lifted, bulging.

And then the Rock flew apart.

Suddenly the Claw was surrounded by a hail of white-hot fragments that rushed upward all around it. The greenship threw itself around every axis to survive this deadly inverted storm. The motions were rapid, juddery, disconcerting; even cloaked by inertial shields, Pirius could feel a ghost of his craft’s jerky motion, deep in his bones.

Everybody on the Rock must already be dead, he thought, as the ship tried to save him. It was a terrible, monstrous thought, impossible to absorb. And the dying wasn’t over yet.

Pirius’s squadron leader called for discipline, for her crews to try to regroup, to take the fight to the enemy. But then she was cut off.

Cohl shrieked, “Flies! Here they come—”

Pirius saw them: a swarm of flies, rising out of the core of the shattered Rock like insects from a corpse, their black-as-night wings unfolding. They had burned their way right through the heart of an asteroid.

Some greenships were already throwing themselves back into the Xeelee fire. But the Xeelee deployed their starbreaker beams; those lethal tongues almost lovingly touched the fleeing greenships.

Pirius had no meaningful orders. So he ran. The Claw raced from the ruin of the Rock. The cloud of debris thinned, and the jittery motion of the Claw subsided. But when Pirius looked back he saw a solid black bank, a phalanx of Xeelee nightfighters.

He had no idea where he was running to, how he might evade the Xeelee. He ran anyhow.

And the Xeelee came after him.

Chapter 2

The battle at the center of the Galaxy was watched from far away by cold eyes and orderly, patient minds.

Port Sol was a Kuiper object, a moon of ice. It was one of a hundred thousand such objects orbiting in the dark at the rim of Sol system. It was not the largest; there were monstrous worldlets out here larger than Pluto. But it was no closer to other planetesimals than Earth was to Mars.

This immense belt was a relic of the birth of Sol system itself. Around the fast-growing sun, grains of dust and ice had accreted into swarming planetesimals. Close to the fitfully burning young star, the planetesimals had been crowded enough to combine further into planets. Further out, though, out here, there had been too much room. The formation of larger bodies had stalled, and the ancient planetesimals survived, to swim on in the silent dark.

Port Sol’s human history had begun when its scattered kin had first been populated by a rum assortment of engineers, prospectors, refugees, and dissidents from the inner system. More than twenty thousand years had worn away since then. Now Port Sol’s great days were long past. Its icescapes, crowded with immense ruins, were silent once more.

But still, lights sparked on its surface.

This lonely worldlet had been home to Luru Parz for far longer than she cared to remember. Sometimes she felt she was as old as it was, her heart as cold as its primordial ice. But from here she watched the activities of humanity, from the bustling worlds of Sol system all the way to the heart of the Galaxy itself.

And now she watched Pirius, Dans, and their crews as they strove to evade their Xeelee pursuers. The incident, brought to her attention by patient semisentient monitors, unfolded in a Virtual image, a searing bright slice of Galaxy center light, here on the rim of Sol system.

Faya, her cousin, was with her. “They’re lost,” Faya sighed.

“Perhaps,” Luru said. “But if they find a way to live through this, or even if not, they might discover something useful for the future.”

“There is always that.”

“Watch…”

The tiny, remote drama unfolded.

Chapter 3

Aboard the Claw, a strange calm settled. The loops were all but silent now, save for the ragged breathing of Pirius’s crew. But behind them, that black cloud of Xeelee ships closed relentlessly.

Another ship came alongside the Claw. It had taken a lot of damage. One strut had been crudely amputated, and a second blister looked cloudy; but the pilot’s blister was a bright spark of light. Pirius looked back, but nobody else followed: just the two of them.

Pirius recognized the other’s sigil. “Dans?”

“Large as life, Pirius.”

“I recognized your lousy piloting.”

“Yeah, yeah. So why aren’t you dead yet?”

“Shut up.” It was Cohl. “Shut up.”

“Navigator, take it easy.”

“Do we have to endure this garbage, today of all days?”

“Today of all days we need it,” Enduring Hope said.

Pirius said, “Dans, your crew—”

“I’m on my own,” Dans said grimly. “But I’m still flying. So. Every day you learn something new, right? Those Xeelee always have something up their sleeves. If they have sleeves.”

“Yes. In retrospect it’s an obvious tactic.”

So it was. The Xeelee’s usual approach was to swathe a Rock with fire, trying to scour out the trenches and get to the monopole cannons, all the time harassed by greenships and other defensive forces. This time they had focused their assault on one side of the Rock, easily perforating the defensive forces there. And they had used their starbreakers to burrow straight through the asteroid and out the other side, thus destroying the Rock itself and hurling themselves without warning on the remaining defenders.

“It’s going to take some counterthinking,” Pirius said. “We’ll need scouts further out, perhaps.”

“Yeah,” Dans said. “And flexible formations to swarm wherever the first assault goes in.”

“It won’t be us doing it,” said Cohl grimly.

“You aren’t dead yet, kid,” Dans called. She was twenty, a year older than Pirius, and a veteran of no less than six missions before today.

Cohl said, “Look at that crowd behind us.” The flies were still closing. “We can’t outrun them,” the navigator said. “In fact we shouldn’t be trying; we have orders to stand and fight. We are already dead. It’s our duty to be dead. A brief life burns brightly.”

It was the most ancient slogan of the Expansion, said to have been coined by Hama Druz himself thousands of years before, standing in the rubble of an occupied Earth. In a regime of endless war it was prideful to die young and in battle, a crime to grow old unnecessarily.

Under such a regime the highest form of humanity was the child soldier.

But Dans said rudely, “I knew you were going to say that.”

Pirius heard Cohl gasp.

Dans said, “So report me. Look, navigator, a brief life is one thing, but neither Hama Druz nor any of his legions of apologists down the ages told us to throw away our lives. If we took on that crowd of flies, they wouldn’t even notice us. Now what use is that?”

“Pilot—”

“She’s right, Cohl,” Pirius said.

Enduring Hope said evenly, “But whatever the orthodoxy, can I just point out that they are catching up? Three minutes to intercept…”

Pirius said tensely, “Dans, I don’t want to boost your ego. But I suppose you have a plan?”

Dans took a breath. “Sure. We go FTL.”

Cohl snapped, “Impossible.”

This time it was the technician in her talking, and Pirius knew she was probably right. The FTL drive involved tinkering with the deepest structure of spacetime, and it was always advisable to do that in a smooth, flat place, empty of dense matter concentrations. The Galactic center offered few such opportunities, and safe FTL use here needed planning.

Dans said rapidly, “Sure it’s risky. But it beats the certainty of death. And besides, the chances are the Xeelee won’t follow. They aren’t as stupid as we are.”

Enduring Hope said, “Which way?”

Virtuals flickered in their blisters, downloaded by Dans. “I say we cut across the Mass to Sag A East…”

The bulk of the Galaxy’s luminous matter was confined to a flat sheet, the delicate spiral arms contained in a plane as thin in proportion to its width as a piece of paper. But at its heart was a Core, a bulge of stars some five hundred light-years across. This region swarmed with human factory worlds and military posts. Within the Core was the Central Star Mass, millions of stars crammed into a space some thirty light-years wide. The two brightest sources of radio noise within the Mass were called Chandra — or, officially, Sag A*, the black hole at the very center — and Sag A East, a remnant of an ancient explosion.

Such names, so Pirius had once been told by an overinformative Commissary, were themselves relics of deeper human history. The soldiers to whom the Galaxy center was a war zone knew this geography. But few knew that “Sag” stood for Sagittarius, and fewer still that Sagittarius had once referred to a pattern in the few scattered stars visible from Earth.

“Two minutes to closing,” Cohl reported edgily.

“Short hops,” Dans insisted. “Forty minutes to cross a few dozen light-years to East. Maybe we’ll find cover there. We regroup, patch up, go home — and die another day. Come on, what is there to lose? For you it will be easy! At least you still have a navigator.”

Starbreaker beams flickered around Pirius. The nightfighters were getting their range; at any moment one of these beams could touch his own blister. He would die without even knowing it.

“We do it,” he said.

Dans quickly downloaded a synchronization command. “The two of us, then. On my mark. Two — one—”

Space flexed.

The nearby stars winked out of existence. The general background endured, but now a new pattern of hot young stars greeted Pirius, a new three-dimensional constellation.

Space flexed.

Again he jumped, to be faced by another constellation.

And again, and yet another blue-white supergiant loomed right in front of him, immense flares working across its broad face, but it disappeared, to be replaced by another set of disorderly stars, which disappeared in their turn…

Jump, jump, jumpjumpjumpjump…

As the jumps came more frequently than Pirius’s eyes could follow, the ride settled down to an illusion of continuity. There was even a sense of motion now, as distant stars slid slowly past. It did him no good at all to remind himself that with each jump spacetime was pivoting through its higher dimensions, or that even millennia after the technology’s first use the philosophers still couldn’t agree whether the entity that emerged from each jump was still, in any meaningful way, “him.”

First things first, Pirius.

He glanced over his systems and his crew. “Everything nominal,” he said. He raised a thumb to the pilot of the second ship, and through a blister’s starred carapace he saw a gesture in response.

“We’re still breathing,” Enduring Hope said evenly. “But take a look out back.”

The cloud of Xeelee ships had vanished. But a single dogged craft remained, its wings spread black and wide, a graceful sycamore-seed shape.

Dans said, “Stubborn bastards, aren’t they?”

Hope said, “At least we bought some time.”

“Yes. We’ve still got thirty minutes before East,” Pirius said. He waved his hands through Virtual consoles, initiating self-diagnostic and repair routines to run throughout the ship. “This is a chance to take care of yourselves,” he told his crew. “Eat. Drink. Take a leak. Sleep if you have to. Use your med-cloaks if you need them.”

Cohl said blankly, “Eat? Sleep? We’re going to die. We’d do better to review why we have to die.”

Dans said, “Lethe, child, there are no Commissary arses to lick out here. Don’t you find the Doctrines cold comfort?”

“On the contrary,” Cohl said.

Pirius glanced down at Cohl’s blister. He imagined her in there, wrapped up in her skinsuit, swaddled by machines, clinging to the pitiless logic of the Doctrines.

Thousands of years had worn away since the first human interstellar flight, and since humanity had begun the mighty march across the Galaxy called the Third Expansion. The Expansion was an ideological program, a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind’s near extinction. In the fierce light of human determination lesser species had burned away. At last only one opponent was left: the Xeelee, the most powerful foe of them all, with their concentration at the very center of the Galaxy.

It was already millennia since the Third Expansion had closed around the center. But the Xeelee responded in kind, just as resolutely. The Front had become a great stalled wave of destruction, a spherical zone of friction where two empires rubbed against each other. And seen from factory worlds scattered a hundred light-years deep, the sky glowed pink with the light of endless war.

The Xeelee would not engage with mankind in any way but war. There was no negotiation, no rapprochement, no contact that was not lethal. To the Xeelee, humans were vermin — and they had a right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured. And so, only if each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a whole prevail. This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.

For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.

Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.

Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”

“My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.

“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”

Pirius had tried to stay away from Enduring Hope’s peculiar sect, who called themselves “Friends of Wigner.” Pirius thought of himself as pragmatic; he was prepared to put up with nonsense names if it kept his engineer happy. But the Friends’ cult violated Doctrinal law just by its very existence.

“You can mock,” Hope said. “But you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me,” Dans said.

“All of this” — Hope made an expansive gesture — “is a first cut. Everybody knows this. In this war of FTL ships and time travel, we stack up contingencies in the Library of Futures on Earth. History is a draft, a draft we change all the time.”

“And if history is mutable—”

“Then nothing is inevitable. Not even the past.”

“I don’t understand,” Pirius admitted.

Dans said, “If you can redraft history, everything can be fixed. He thinks that even if he dies today, then history will somehow, some day, be put right, and all such unfortunate errors removed.”

“Hope, is that right?”

“Something like it.”

Dans snapped, “Pirius, the creed is anti-Doctrine, but it’s just as much a trap as the Doctrines. A Druz junkie thinks death and defeat reinforce the strength of the Doctrines. A Friend believes defeat is irrelevant because it will all be erased some day. Either way, you don’t fight to win. You see? Why else has this damn war stalled so long?”

Pirius felt uncomfortable with such heresy — even now, even here.

With a trace of malice Hope said, “But you’re as doomed as we are, Pilot Dans.”

Cohl said, “What about you, Pirius? What do you want to achieve?”

Pirius thought it over. “I want to be remembered.”

He heard slow, ironic applause from Dans.

Cohl muttered, “That is just so anti-Doctrinal!”

Hope murmured, “Well, you might be about to get your chance, Pilot. Sag A East is dead ahead. Dropping out of FTL.”

Jumpjumpjumpjump jump — jump — jump…

As the FTL hops slowed, they passed through a flickering barrage of stars, and electric-blue light flared around them: the pilots called it FTL light, a by-product of the energy the ship was shedding, coalescing into exotic evanescent particles. Pirius, relieved to get back to practical matters, tested the controls of the greenship and burped its two sublight drives — including the GUTdrive. This was a backup, a venerable human design, and one you would light up only in the direst of circumstances, for fear of attracting quagmites…

While Pirius worked, the others had been looking at the view. “Lethe,” Dans said softly.

Pirius glanced up.

Sagittarius A East was a bubble of shocked gas, light-years wide, said to be the remnant of an immense explosion in the heart of the Galaxy. Suddenly Pirius was at the center of a storm of light.

Dans called, “And look at that.” She downloaded coordinates.

A pinpoint of crimson light glowed directly ahead, embedded in the glowing murk. It was a neutron star, according to their first scans, a star with the mass of the sun but only twenty kilometers across.

Dans said, “That’s a magnetar. And I think it’s going to blow.”

Pirius understood none of that. “What difference does that make?”

“Here come the Xeelee,” Cohl snapped.

“Split up,” Dans called.

The greenships peeled away from each other. The single nightfighter, emerging from its own sequence of FTL jumps, seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat, as if wondering which of its soft targets to pursue first.

It turned toward the Claw.

“Lucked out,” Enduring Hope said softly.

“Hold onto your seats,” Pirius said. Lacking any better way to go, he hurled the ship toward the neutron star.

Still the Xeelee followed.

As the Claw squirted across space, Pirius called up a magnified visual. The neutron star was a flattened sphere, brick red, its surface smooth to the limits of the magnification. Blue-white electric storms crackled over its surface.

Cohl said, “That thing is rotating every eight seconds.”

Dans was standing off, Pirius saw from his tactical displays, watching the fleeing Claw and the dark shadow of her pursuer. “Help me out here, Dans,” Pirius muttered.

“I’m with you all the way. When you fly by, take her in as close as you can to the surface of the star.”

“Why?”

“Maybe you can shake off the Xeelee.”

“And maybe we’ll get creamed in the process.”

“There’s always that possibility… The crust is actually solid, you know,” Dans said. “There’s an atmosphere of normal matter, no thicker than your finger. You can get as close as you like. Your shields will protect you from the tides, the radiation flux, the magnetic field. It’s worth a try.”

“OK, guys,” Pirius said to Cohl and Enduring Hope. “You heard Dans. Let’s set a record.”

That won him ribald comments, but he could see that both Cohl and Hope were calling up fresh displays and hunching over their work. For a maneuver like this, all three of them would have to work closely together, with Pirius controlling the line, Cohl monitoring Claw’s altitude over the star’s surface, and Hope watching attitude and the ship’s systems. As they settled to their tasks — and so put aside their Doctrine manuals or illicit prayer beads or whatever else they turned to for comfort — Pirius felt reassured. This was a good crew, at their best when they were committed to what they had been trained to do.

Light flared over his Virtual displays. “Woah…”

The star’s surface had changed. Cracks gaped, and a brighter light shone from within. For a few seconds there was turmoil, as the whole surface shattered and melted, and remnant fragments swam. But as suddenly as it had begun, the motion stopped, and the crust coalesced once more, settling down to a new smoothness.

“Dans — what was that?”

“Starquake,” said Dans briskly.

“Maybe it’s time you told me what a magnetar is…

When this remnant was hatched out of its parent supernova explosion, it happened to be spinning very rapidly — turning a thousand times a second, perhaps even faster. For the first few milliseconds of the neutron star’s life, the convection in the interior was ferocious, and where the hot material flowed it generated huge electrical currents. The whole thing was like a natural dynamo, and those tremendous currents generated an intense magnetic field. As the star lost energy through gravity and electromagnetic radiation, the spin slowed down. But a good fraction of the tremendous energy of that spin poured into the magnetic field.

Dans said, “The field is still there, lacing the star’s interior. The field will decay away quickly — quickly, meaning in ten thousand years or so. But while the star is young—”

“And the crust quake?”

“The magnetism laces the solid surface, locking it to the interior layers. But the star is slowing down all the time, and the whirling interior drags at the solid crust. Every so often something gives. Happens all the time — like, hourly. But every so often the magnetic field collapses altogether, and the star flares, and… Lethe.”

“What?”

“Pirius, I’ve got another plan.”

“Make your flyby over these coordinates.” Data chattered into the Claw’s systems.

“Why?”

“Because a flare is about to blow there.” She downloaded a rapid Virtual briefing: a major collapse of the planet’s magnetic field, more faulting in the crust — and a huge fireball punching out of the star’s interior, a fist of compressed matter exploding out of its degenerate state. The magnetic field would hug the fireball to the star’s surface, whirling it around in a manic waltz.

The energy released by this event, it seemed, would be enough to cause ionospheric effects in the atmospheres of planets across the Galaxy. “Think of it,” Dans breathed. “This flare will batter the upper air of Earth itself — though not for twenty-eight thousand years or so. And you are going to be sitting right on top of it.”

“Tell me why this is good news,” Pirius said grimly.

Dans paged through Virtual data, copying everything to Pirius. “Pirius, in the middle of that flare the structure of spacetime itself is distorted. Now, we know Xeelee ships fly by swimming through spacetime, that their essence is controlled spacetime defects. Surely not even a Xeelee can survive that.”

“And so—”

“So you fly through the middle of the flare. See how it will arch through the magnetic field? If you pick your course right you can avoid the worst regions, while leading the Xeelee right into it.”

“But if a Xeelee can’t survive,” Enduring Hope pointed out reasonably, “how can we?”

Pirius said, “We don’t have a choice right now.”

“Four minutes to closest approach,” Dans said.

Pirius swept his fingers through Virtual displays. “Cohl, I’m sending you Dans’s coordinates. Let’s aim for that flare. We can’t end up any more dead, and at least it’s a chance. Dans — we’ll need time to plot the maneuver. How long will the flare last?”

Dans hesitated. “Only a second or so at its fullest extent. Pirius, a neutron star is a small, very energetic object. Things happen fast… Oh.”

For a moment Pirius had actually allowed himself hope; now that warm spark died. It was just too fast. “Right. So that millisecond is all we will have to compute our course, to lay it in, and to execute the maneuver.”

Cohl said, “It would take our onboard sentient tens of seconds to compute a course like that. Even if we had prior data on the shape of the flare. Which we don’t. Of course a Xeelee could do it.”

“Three minutes,” Hope said evenly.

Pirius sighed. “You know, just for a moment you had me going there, Dans.”

Dans snapped impatiently, “Lethe, you guys are so down. Maybe there’s a way even so. Pirius, have you ever heard of a Brun maneuver?”

“No.”

“Pilot school scuttlebutt. Somebody tried it, oh, a year or more back.”

Pirius hadn’t heard of such a thing. But the turnover in pilots at Arches Base was ferocious; there was little opportunity for field wisdom to be passed on.

“It didn’t work—”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But it could have,” Dans said. “I looked into it — ran some simulations — thought it might be useful some day.”

“Two minutes thirty.”

“Pirius, listen to me. Stick to your course; make for the flare. But keep listening. I’ll compute your maneuver for you. A way through the flare.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Sure it is. And when I download the new trajectory you’d better be prepared to splice it into your systems.” Dans peeled away.

“Where are you going?”

“If this doesn’t work out, don’t touch my stuff.”

“Dans!”

“That’s the last we’ll see of her,” Enduring Hope said laconically.

“Two minutes,” Cohl said. “One fifty-nine…”

Pirius shut her up.

As the Claw fell through space there was no noise, no sense of motion. The Xeelee’s slow convergence was silent, unspectacular. Even the neutron star would be invisible for all but a few seconds of closest approach. It was as if they were gliding along some smooth, invisible road.

The crew continued to work calmly, the three of them calling out numbers and curt instructions to each other. The Assimilator’s Claw was drenched with artificial intelligence, sentient and otherwise, and its systems were capable of processing data far faster than human thought. But the systems were there to support human decision-making, not to replace it. That was the nature of the greenship’s design, which in turn reflected Coalition policy, under the Doctrines. This was a human war and would always remain so.

There was no sense of peril. And yet these seconds, which counted down remorselessly inside Pirius’s head, would likely be the last of his life.

There was a flare of blue light, dead ahead, FTL blue — and then a streak of green. It was a greenship, cutting across his path. Suddenly data was chattering into the Claw’s systems. It was a new closest-approach trajectory.

Pirius saw Cohl sit up, astonished. “Where did that come from? Pilot—”

“Load the course, Navigator.”

A Virtual coalesced before Pirius: Dans’s head, disembodied. Her face was small, round, neat, with a wide, sensual mouth, a mouth made for laughing. Now that mouth grinned at Pirius. “Boo!”

“Dans, what—”

“It’s not me, it’s a downloaded Virtual. The real Dans will be hitting the surface of the star in” — she closed her eyes, and the image wavered, blocky pixels fluttering, as if she was concentrating — “three, two, one. Plop. Bye-bye.”

Pirius felt a stab of regret through his fear, bafflement, adrenaline rush. “Dans, I’m sorry.”

“There was no other way — no other trajectory.”

“Trajectory from where?”

“From the future, of course. Pirius, you’re twenty seconds from closest approach.”

He glimpsed a splash of red, wheeling past the blister. It was the neutron star.

Dans said, “You need to cut in your GUTdrive. On my mark—”

“Dans, that’s insane.” So it was; the antiquated GUTdrive was a last-resort backup system.

“I knew you’d argue. Your sublight won’t work. Do it, asshole. Two, one—”

In the heart of the GUTdrive, specks of matter were compressed to conditions not seen since the aftermath of the Big Bang; released from their containment, these specks swelled immensely. This was the energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself; now it heated asteroid ice to a frenzied steam and forced it through rocket nozzles. A GUTdrive was just a water rocket, a piece of engineering that would have been recognizable to technicians on prespaceflight Earth twenty-five thousand years before.

But it worked, even here. A new light flared behind the ship, a ghostly gray-white, the light of the GUTdrive.

Dans winked at Pirius. “See you on the other side.” The Virtual collapsed into a cloud of dispersing pixels.

The neutron star cannonballed at Pirius, suddenly huge. It was a flattened orange, visibly three- dimensional, its surface mottled by electric storms. It slid beneath Claw’s prow, and for a moment, continents of orange-brown light fled beneath Pirius’s blister. All these impressions in a second; less. But now a stronger light was looming over the horizon, yellow-white: it was the site of the flare, a grim dawn approaching.

And in the same instant the Claw juddered, shook, its drive stuttering. What now? Diagnostics popped up before Pirius. Around a Virtual of the GUTdrive core, shadowy shapes swarmed. Quagmites, he saw: the strange entities that were attracted by every use of a GUTdrive in this region — living things maybe, pests for sure, feeding off the primordial energy of the GUTdrive itself, and causing the mighty engine to stutter.

“The fly’s on us!” Cohl cried.

When Pirius glanced at the reverse view he saw the Xeelee fighter. Its night-dark wings flexed and sparked as it swam through space after him. He had never seen a Xeelee so close, save in sims: he didn’t know anybody who had, and lived. It was more than inhuman, he thought, more than just alien; it was a dark, primeval thing, not of this time. But it was perfectly adapted to this environment, as humans with their clumsy gadgetry were not.

And it was still on his tail. All he could do was fly the ship; there was absolutely nothing he could do about the Xeelee.

Ahead, light flared. Over the horizon came rushing a massive flaw in the star’s crust, a pool of blue- white light kilometers wide from which starstuff poured in a vertical torrent, radiating as much energy in a fraction of a second as Earth’s sun would lose in ten thousand years. An arch, yellow-

white, was forming above the star’s tight horizon, kilometers high. In places the arch feathered and streamed, tracing out the lines of the magnetic field that restrained it.

On a neutron star, events happened fast. The rent in the surface was already healing, the arch collapsing almost as soon as it had formed, its material dragged down by the star’s magisterial gravity field.

And the Claw flew right underneath it.

Pirius’s blister shuddered as if it would tear itself apart. Those mottled surface features whipped beneath, and the arch loomed above him. He had never known such a sensation of sheer speed. He might not live through this, but Lethe, it was quite a ride.

There was a punch in the small of his back, the ghost of hundreds of gravities as the Claw kicked its way out of the star’s gravity well.

The neutron star whipped away into darkness. The arch had already collapsed.

And in the last instant he glimpsed the Xeelee, behind him. No longer an implacable, converging foe, it was folding over, as if its graceful wings were crumpled in an invisible fist.

The Assimilator’s Claw hung in empty space, far from the neutron star. The crew tended their slight wounds, and tried to get used to still being alive. They saw to their ship’s systems; the encounter with the quagmites had done a good deal of damage to the GUTdrive.

And they reconstructed what had happened during those crucial moments at the magnetar.

At its heart the magnetic field embracing the flare had been as strong as any field since the first moments of the universe itself. At such field strengths atoms themselves were distorted, forced into skinny cylindrical shapes; no ordinary molecular structure could survive. Photons were split and combined. Even the structure of spacetime was distorted: it became birefringent, Pirius learned, crystalline.

It was this last which had probably done for the Xeelee. Nobody knew for sure how a nightfighter’s sublight drive worked. But the drive seemed to work by manipulating spacetime itself. In a place where spacetime crystallized, that manipulation could no longer work — but the Claw’s much cruder GUTdrive had kept functioning, despite the quagmites.

All that was straightforward enough. Just physics.

“But what I can’t get my head around,” Pirius told Dans’s Virtual, “is how you appeared out of nowhere, and squirted down the right evasive maneuver for us, based on a knowledge of the flare’s evolution before it happened.”

Dans said tinnily, “It was just an application of FTL technology. Remember, every FTL ship—”

“Is a time machine.” Every child learned that before she got out of her first cadre.

“I pulled away. Out of trouble, I watched the flare unfold, recorded it. I took my time to work out your optimal path — how you would have avoided destruction if you’d had the time to figure it out.”

Pirius said, “But it was academic. You got the answer after we were already dead.”

“And I had to watch you die,” said Dans wistfully. “When the action was over, the Xeelee out of the way, I used my sublight to ramp up to about a third lightspeed. Then I cut in the FTL.”

Cohl understood; “You jumped back into the past — to the moment just before we hit the flare. And you fed us the maneuver you had worked out at leisure. You used time travel to gain the time you needed to plot the trajectory.”

“And that’s the Brun maneuver,” Dans said with satisfaction.

“It’s some computing technique,” Cohl mused. “With the right vectors you could solve an arbitrarily difficult problem in a finite time — break it into components, feed it back to the source…”

Pirius was still trying to think it through. “Time paradoxes make my head ache,” he said. “In the original draft of the timeline, Claw was destroyed by the flare, and you flew away. In the second draft, you flew back in time to deliver your guidance, and then you — that copy of you — flew into the neutron star.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” Dans said.

He could see she was waiting for him to figure it out. “But that means, in this new draft of the timeline, we survived. And so you don’t need to come back in time to save us. We’re already saved.” He was confused. “Did I get that right?”

Hope said, “But there would be a paradox. If she doesn’t go back in time, the information that future- Dans brought back would have come out of nowhere.”

Cohl said, “Yes, it’s a paradox. But that happens all the time. A ship comes limping back from a lost battle. We change our strategy, the battle never happens — but the ship and its crew and their memories linger on, stranded without a past. History is resilient. It can stand a little tinkering, a few paradoxical relics from vanished futures, bits of information popping out of nowhere.” Cohl evidently had a robust view of time-travel paradoxes. As an FTL navigator, she needed one.

But Pirius’s only concern was Dans. “So can you save yourself?”

“Ah,” Dans said gently. “Sadly not. More than one Xeelee chased us after all. If I hadn’t hung around to work out your course I might have got away. I’m all that’s left, I’m afraid. Little pixellated me…”

“Dans” — Pirius shook his head — “you gave your life for me. Twice.”

“Yeah, I did. So remember.”

“What?”

She glared at him. “When you get back to Arches, leave my stuff alone.” And she popped out of existence.

For long minutes they sat in silence, the three of them in their blisters.

“Here’s something else,” Cohl said at last. “To get back to Arches from here we’ll have to complete another closed-timelike-curve trajectory.”

“A what?… Oh.” Another jump into the past.

“We’ll arrive two years before we set off on the mission.” She sounded awed.

Hope said, “I’ll meet my past self. Lethe. I hope I’m not as bad as I remember.”

“And, Pirius,” Cohl said, “there will be a younger version of Dans. A third version. Dans won’t have to die. None of this will be real.”

Pirius really did hate time paradoxes. “Time loops or not, we lived through this. We will remember. It’s real enough. Navigator, do you want to lay in that course?”

“Sure…”

Hope said dryly, “You might want to delay a little before kicking off for home, Pilot. Take a look.” He projected a Virtual into their blisters.

It was a shape, drifting in space. Pirius made out a slender body, crumpled wings folded. “It’s the fly,” he breathed.

Hope said, “We have to take it back to base.”

Cohl said, “We captured a Xeelee? Nobody ever did that before. Pirius, you said you wanted to make your name stand out. Well, perhaps you have. We’ll be heroes!”

Hope laughed. “I thought heroism is anti-Doctrinal?” Pirius brought the greenship about and sent it skimming to the site of the derelict. “First we need to figure how to grapple that thing.”

As it turned out — when they had got hold of the Xeelee, and with difficulty secured it for FTL flight, and had hauled it all the way back to the base in Arches Cluster — they found themselves to be anything but heroes.

Chapter 4

This was the energetic heart of a large galaxy, a radiation bath where humans had to rely on their best technological capabilities to keep their fragile carbon-chemistry bodies from being fried. But to the quagmites it was a cold, dead place, in a dismal and unwelcoming era. The quagmites were survivors of a hotter, faster age than this.

They were drawn to the neutron star, for in its degenerate-matter interior there was a hint of the conditions of the warm and bright universe they had once known. But even here everything was frozen solid, comparatively. They were like humans stranded on an ice moon, a place where water, the very stuff of life, is frozen as hard as bedrock.

Still, every now and again there was a spark of something brighter — like the firefly speck which had come hurtling out of nowhere and skimmed the surface of the neutron star. The quagmites lived fast, even in this energy-starved age. To them the fractions of a second of the closest approach to the neutron star were long and drawn-out. They had plenty of time to come close, to bask in the warmth of the ship’s GUTdrive, and to feed.

And, as was their way, they left their marks in the hull of the ship, the ghostly, frozen shell that surrounded that speck of brilliance.

When the ship had gone the quagmites dispersed, ever hungry, ever resentful, searching for more primordial heat.

On Port Sol, Luru Parz turned to her cousin with a quiet satisfaction.

“I knew they would survive,” she said. “And in the technique they have stumbled upon I see a glimmer of opportunity. I must go.”

“Where?”

“Earth.” Luru Parz padded away, her footsteps almost silent.

Chapter 5

If you grew up in Arches, meeting your own future self was no big deal.

The whole point of the place was that from the moment you were born you were trained to fly FTL starships. And everybody knew that an FTL starship was a time machine. Most people figured out for themselves that that meant there might come a day when you would meet a copy of yourself from the future — or the past, depending which end of the transaction you looked at it from.

Pirius, a seventeen-year-old ensign, had always thought of meeting himself as an interesting trial to be faced one day, along with other notable events, like his first solo flight, his first combat sortie, his first sight of a Xeelee, his first screw. But in practice, when his future self turned up out of the blue, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

The day began badly. The bunk bed shuddered, and Pirius woke with a start.

Above him, Torec was growling, “Lethe, are we under attack? — Oh. Good morning, Captain.”

“Ensign.” Captain Seath’s heavy boot had jolted Pirius awake.

Pirius scrambled out of his lower bunk. He got tangled up with Torec, who was climbing down from the upper tier. Just for a second, Pirius was distracted by Torec’s warm, sleepy smell, reminding him of their fumble under the sheets before they had fallen asleep last night. But soon they were standing to attention before Seath, in their none-too-clean underwear.

Seath was a stocky, dark woman, no more than thirty, and might once have been beautiful. But scar tissue was crusted over her brow, the left side of her face was wizened and melted, expressionless, and her mouth drooped. She could have had all this fixed, of course, but Seath was a training officer, and if you were an officer you wore your scars proudly.

Astonishingly, Torec was snickering.

Seath said, “I’m pleased to see part of you is awake, Ensign.”

Pirius glanced down. To his horror a morning erection bulged out of his shorts. Seath reached out a fingernail — bizarrely, it was manicured — and flicked the tip of Pirius’s penis. The hard-on shriveled immediately. Pirius forced himself not to flinch.

To his chagrin, everybody saw this.

To left and right the great corridor of the barracks stretched away, a channel of two-tier bunks, equipment lockers, and bio facilities. Below and above too, before and behind, through translucent walls and ceilings, you could see similar corridors arrayed in a neat rectangular lattice, fading to milky indistinctness. Everywhere, the ranks of bunks were emptying as the recruits filed out for the calisthenics routines that began each day. This entire moonlet, the Barracks Ball, was hollowed out and filled up with a million ensigns and other trainees, a million would-be pilots and navigators and engineers and ground crew, all close to Pirius’s age, all eager to be thrown into the endless fray.

Arches Base was primarily a training academy for flight crews. The cadets here were highly intelligent, physically fit, very lively — and intensely competitive, at work and off duty. And so the place was riven with factions which constantly split, merged and reformed, and with feuds and love affairs that could flare with equal vigor. Today it was Pirius’s bunk that Captain Seath was standing before, and from the corner of his eye Pirius could see that everybody was looking at him with unbridled glee. His life wasn’t going to be worth living after this.

Seath was walking away. “Pirius, put your pants on. A ship’s come in. You’ve got a visitor.”

“A visitor?… Sorry, sir. Can I ask what ship?”

Seath called over her shoulder, “The Assimilator’s Claw. And she’s been in a scrap.”

That was enough to tell Pirius who his visitor must be. Torec and Pirius stared at each other, bewildered.

Seath was already receding down the long corridor, here and there snapping out a command to an unfortunate ensign.

Pirius scrambled into his pants, jacket, and boots. He held a clean-cloth over his face, endured a second of stinging pain as the semisentient material cleaned out his pores and dissolved his stubble, and hurried after Seath. He was relieved to hear Torec hurrying along in his wake; he had a feeling he was going to need some familiar company today.

Pirius and Torec bundled after Captain Seath into a flitter. The little ship, not much more than a transparent cylinder, closed itself up and squirted away, out of the Barracks Ball and into space.

All around Pirius, worlds hailed like cannonballs.

The Barracks Ball was one of more than a hundred swarming worldlets that comprised the Arches Cluster base. Beyond the rocks, of course, hung the hundreds of giant young stars that comprised the cluster itself, tightly packed — in fact, the largest concentration of such stars in the Galaxy. Above the stars themselves was a still more remarkable sight. Glowing filaments, ionized gas dragged along the loops of the Galaxy’s magnetic field, combined into a wispy interstellar architecture constructed on a scale of light-years. The characteristic shape of these filaments had, it was said, given “Arches” its name.

The Galaxy center itself was just fifty light-years away.

It was a stunning, bewildering sky — but Pirius, Torec, and Seath had all grown up with it. They made no comment as the flitter laced its perilous route through the shifting three-dimensional geometry of the base.

Besides, Pirius had more on his mind than rocks and stars.

Torec looked composed. She was a little shorter than he was, a little broader at the shoulders. She had a thin face, but a full mouth, startling gray eyes, and brown hair she wore in rows of short spikes. Her nose was upturned, a feature she hated, but Pirius thought it made her beautiful. They had been each other’s squeezes, in barracks argot, for a couple of months now — staggering longevity in the fevered atmosphere of the barracks. But, despite the taunting from their colleagues, they showed no signs of falling out. Pirius was glad that Torec’s calm presence was with him as he faced the strangeness to come.

It was standard policy for any data FTL-leaked from possible futures to be presented immediately to any individual named in that data. Some of Pirius’s friends even knew when and how they were going to die. And so Pirius already knew, everybody knew, that in the future he was destined to pilot a ship called the Assimilator’s Claw. But the Claw hadn’t yet been commissioned. If a version of the Claw had come into dock — and a captain had taken the time to come get him from his bunk to meet a visitor — that visitor could only be one person, and his heart hammered.

The flitters destination was a dry dock. Perhaps a hundred kilometers across, this Rock was pocked by pits where ships nestled. They were all shapes and sizes, from one-person fighters smaller than greenships, through to ponderous, kilometer-wide Spline ships, the living vessels that had been the backbone of the human fleet for fifteen thousand years.

And in one such yard sat a single, battered greenship. It must be the Assimilator’s Claw, and as Pirius first glimpsed the scarred hull of his future command, his breath caught in his throat.

Torec nudged his elbow and pointed. A cluster of ships hovered maybe half a kilometer above the Ball’s surface in a cubical array, and Pirius saw the flicker of starbreaker beams and other weapons. Within the array he glimpsed a sleek shape, caged within that three-dimensional fence of fire, a shape with folded wings, black as night even in the glare of the cluster’s huge suns.

“Lethe,” he said. “That’s a Xeelee ship.”

“And that,” said Seath coldly, “is the least of your troubles.”

There was no time to see more.

The flitter dropped into a port. Even before the docking was complete, Seath was walking toward the hatch.

Pirius and Torec followed her into a bustling corridor. It was only a short walk through a hurrying crowd of engineers and facility managers to the Claw’s pit. And at the airlock Seath slowed, glanced at Pirius, and stood back to allow him to go ahead first.

This was Pirius’s moment, then. His pulse pounding, he stepped forward.

Three crew waited by the lock: one woman, two men. Dressed in scorched and battered skinsuits, their chests adorned with a stylized claw logo, they were clutching bulbs of drinking water. Pirius glanced at the woman — short, wiry, a rather sour face, though with a fine, strong nose. Pale red hair was tucked into her skinsuit cap. One of the men was heavy-set. His face was broad and round, his ears protruding; he looked competent, but somehow vulnerable. They were both grimy and hollow- eyed with fatigue. Cohl, he read from their nametags, and Tuta — or “Enduring Hope” according to a hand-lettered addendum. He had never met them, in his timeline, but he already knew these names from the foreknowledge briefings: they were his future comrades, whom he would choose for his crew, and with whom he would risk his life. He wondered who they were.

He was avoiding the main issue, of course.

The other man, the pilot, wasn’t tall, but he topped Pirius by a good half-head, and, under the skinsuit, was bulkier. Seath had told him that this version was aged nineteen, two years older — two more years of growing, of filling out, of training. At last Pirius looked the pilot in the face.

Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.

According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn’t even a common “now” you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.

But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but the events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.

In this war it wasn’t remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn’t happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn’t unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts back in the past was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn’t perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies — even if decisions made in the present could wipe out many of those futures before they came to pass.

A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.

Of course foreknowledge would have been a great advantage — if not for the fact that the other side had precisely the same capability. In an endless sequence of guesses and counterguesses, as history was tweaked by one side or the other, and then tweaked again in response, the timeline was endlessly redrafted. With both sides foreseeing engagements to come for decades, even centuries ahead, and each side able to counter the other’s move even before it had been formulated, it was no wonder that the war had long settled down to a lethal stalemate, stalled in a static front that enveloped the Galaxy’s heart.

For Pirius, it was like looking in the mirror — but not quite.

The architecture was the same: a broad face, symmetrical but too flat to be good-looking, with sharp blue eyes and a mat of thick black hair. But the details were different. Under a sheen of sweat and grime, the pilot’s face was hard, the eyes sunken. It was as if the bones of his skull had pushed out of his flesh. He looked much older than nineteen, much more than two years older than Pirius.

In that first glance, Pirius quailed from this man. And yet he was so familiar, so like himself, and he felt drawn.

He held out his hand. The pilot took it and clasped firmly. It was an oddly neutral feeling, like holding his own hand; the pilot’s skin seemed to be at precisely the same temperature as Pirius’s own.

“I saw the Xeelee ship you brought back,” Pirius ventured. “Quite a trophy.”

“Long story,” said the pilot. He didn’t sound interested, in the Xeelee or in Pirius. His voice sounded nothing like Pirius’s own, in his head.

“So I get to be a hero?”

The pilot looked mournful. “I’m sorry,” he said, apparently sincerely.

That bewildered Pirius. “For what?”

There was a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself facing a bulky man with the long black robes and shaven head of a Commissary.

“Pirius — both of you! — I’ve been assigned as your counsel in the trial,” the Commissary said. “My name is Nilis.”

Even at this moment of confusion Pirius stared. Arches was for young people; with white stubble, his face jowly, his skin pocked with deep pores, this Commissary was the oldest person Pirius had ever seen. And he was none too smart — his robe seemed to have been patched, and its hem was worn and dirty. Behind him were two more Commissaries, who looked a lot less sympathetic.

Nilis’s eyes were strange, blue and watery, and he looked on Pirius and the pilot with a certain soft fascination. “You’re so alike! Well, of course you would be. And both so young… Temporal twins, what a remarkable thing, my eyes! But how will I tell you apart? Look — suppose I call you” — the older pilot — “Pirius Blue. Because you’re from the future — blueshifted, you see? And you will be Pirius Red. How would that suit you?”

Pirius shook his head. Pirius Red? That wasn’t his name. Suddenly he wasn’t even himself any more. “Sir — Commissary — I don’t understand. Why do I need a counsel?”

“Oh, my eyes, has nobody explained that to you yet?”

The pilot — Pirius Blue — stepped forward, irritated. “Come on, kid, you know the drill. They’re throwing the book at me for what happened aboard the Claw. And if they are charging me—”

Pirius had heard rumors of this procedure but had never understood. “I will be put on trial, too.”

“You got it,” said his older self neutrally.

Pirius was to be tried for a crime that he hadn’t even committed yet. Confused, scared, he turned around looking for Torec.

Torec shrugged. “Tough break.” She seemed withdrawn, as if she were trying to disengage from him and the whole mess.

Pirius Blue was looking at him with revulsion. “Do you have to let your jaw dangle like that? You’re making us both look bad.” He brushed past Pirius and spoke to Captain Seath. “Sir, where do I report?”

“Debriefing first, Pilot. Then you’re in the hands of Commissary Nilis.” She turned and marched him away; the battle-weary crew of the Claw followed.

Nilis touched Pirius Red’s shoulder. “You come with me. I think we need to talk.”

Nilis had been assigned quarters in a rock the ensigns knew as Officer Country. To get there from the dry dock, with Pirius, Nilis endured a short flitter hop through the swarm of captive asteroids that made up the base.

In the sky outside the hull, worldlets plummeted like fists.

Planets were rare, here in the Core of the Galaxy; the stars were too close-packed for stable systems to form. But there was plenty of dust and ice, and it gathered into great swarms of asteroids. Some of the base asteroids were unworked — just raw rock, still the lumpy aggregates they had been when tethered and gathered here. The rest had been melted, carved, blown into translucent bubbles like the Barracks Ball. Worked or not, they were all wrapped in stabilizing superconductor hoops, like presents wrapped in gleaming electric blue ribbon, and they all had Higgs field inertia-control facilities mounted on their surfaces. The Higgs facilities gave a gravity of a standard unit or so on the worldlets’ surfaces, and provided stable fields in their interior: tiered for a Barracks Ball, more complex in other Rocks depending on their uses.

And the generators drew the Rocks to each other. Mutually attracting, they swooped and swirled about each other in an endless three-dimensional dance, mad miniature planets free of the stabilizing influence of a sun. Some of the Rocks swam so close to the flitter that you could see maintenance crews working on the surfaces, crawling over the tightly curved horizons like bugs on bits of food.

Pirius saw, bemused, that Nilis kept his eyes closed all the way through the hop.

Pirius had his mind on bigger issues. So his whole life was suddenly defined by whatever that arrogant clone of himself had done downstream! He wished he could meet Pirius Blue alone to have it out.

Nilis’s room, deep in the belly of Officer Country, was small. It was unfurnished save for a low bunk, a desk with a chair, and a nano-food niche. Pirius sat awkwardly on the bunk, and declined an offer of food or drink. Nilis himself sipped water. The walls of the room were translucent, as were all the walls throughout the Base, but they were buried so deep in this warren of offices and conference rooms that the sky beyond could barely be glimpsed.

“Which is the way I prefer it, I’m afraid,” Nilis said with a rueful smile. He sat on the room’s single chair, his robes awkwardly rucked up to expose scrawny shins. “You have to understand that I’m from Earth, where I live as humans did in primitive times — I mean, on an apparently flat world, under a dome of sky scattered with a few distant stars. Here the worlds fly around like demented birds, and even the stars are glaring globes. Of course only the most massive stars can form here; conditions are too turbulent for anything as puny as Sol… It’s rather disorienting!”

Pirius had never thought about it. “I grew up here, sir.”

“Call me Nilis.”

But Pirius was not about to call a Commissary, even a soft eccentric Commissary like this one, anything but “Sir.” He said, “Arches doesn’t seem strange to me.”

“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t.” Nilis got to his feet, cup of water in his liver-spotted hand, and he peered out through layers of offices at the wheeling sky. “A self-gravitating system — a classic demonstration of the n-body problem of celestial mechanics. And chaotic, unstable to small perturbations, never predictable even in principle. No doubt this endless barrage has been designed as conditioning, to get you proto-pilots used to thinking in shifting three-dimensional geometries, and to program out ancient fears of falling — an instinct useful when we descended from the trees, not so valuable for a starship pilot, eh? But for me, it’s like being trapped in some vast celestial clockwork.”

Irritated, distressed, Pirius blurted, “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t understand why I’m here. Or why you’re here.”

Nilis nodded. “Of course. Cosmic special effects pale into insignificance beside our human dilemmas, don’t they?”

“Why must I be punished? I haven’t done anything. It was him — he did it all.”

Nilis studied him. “Has your training not covered that yet? I keep forgetting how young you all are. Pirius, what Blue has done is done; it is locked in his timeline — his personal past. He must be punished, yes, in the hope of eradicating his character flaws. Whereas you are to be punished in the hope of changing your still unformed timeline. We can’t change his past, but we can change your future, perhaps. Do you see? And so you must suffer for a crime you haven’t yet committed.

“At least, that’s the logic of the system. Is it right or wrong? Who’s to say? We humans haven’t evolved to handle time-travel paradoxes; all this stretches our ethical frameworks a little far. And, you know, I really can’t imagine how it must be for you, Pirius Red. How does it feel to confront a version of yourself plucked out of the future and deposited in your life?”

“Sir, we train for it. It’s not a problem.”

Nilis sighed. He said, with a trace of steel in his voice, “Now, Pirius, I am here to help you, but I’m not going to be able to do that if you’re not honest with me. Try again.”

Pirius said reluctantly, “I feel — irritated. Resentful.”

Nilis nodded. “That’s better. Good. I can understand that. After all, your own future has suddenly been hijacked by this stranger, hasn’t it? Your choices taken away from you. And how do you feel about him — Pirius Blue, your double — regardless of what he has done?”

“It’s difficult,” Pirius said. “I don’t like him. I don’t think he likes me. And yet I feel drawn to him.”

“Yes, yes. You are like siblings, brothers; that’s the nearest analogy, I think. You are rivals — the two of you are competing for a single place in the world — you might even grow to hate him. And yet he will always be a part of you.”

Pirius was uncomfortable; this talk of “brothers” was seriously non-Doctrinal. “Sir, I wouldn’t know about brothers. I grew up in cadres.”

“Of course you did. Popped from the birthing tanks, placed in a training cadre, plucked out and moved on, over and over! You don’t know what it’s like to have a brother — how could you? But I know,” he said, and sighed. “There are corners, even on Earth itself, where people find room to do things the old way. Of course I had to give all that up when I joined the Commission. How unfortunate for you; if only your cultural background were richer, it might help you cope better now. Don’t you think?”

None of this meant much to Pirius. “Sir, please—”

“You want to know what an old buffoon like me is doing all the way out here.” He smiled. “I volunteered. As soon as I heard the particulars of the case, I knew I had to get involved. I volunteered to act as counsel to you and your twin.”

“But why?”

“You know that I’m a Commissary.” That meant he worked for the Commission for Historical Truth, the grand, ancient agency dedicated to upholding the purity of the Druz Doctrines — a task it performed with persuasion and force, with zeal and dedication. “What you probably don’t know is that the Commission itself has many divisions. The Commission is thousands of years old, Pirius. Astonishing when you think of it! The Commission has lasted longer than many of Earth’s civilizations. And it has grown into a very old, very tangled, bureaucratic tree.

“I work for a department called the Office of Technological Archival and Control. We’re a sort of technological think tank. If somebody gets a bright idea on Alpha Centauri III, we make sure it’s passed on to Tau Ceti IV.” These were places Pirius had never heard of. “But the name says everything: Archival and Control. Not a word about innovation, eh? Or development? The Commission’s cold hand is at our throats, and our opportunity to think is restricted. Because that’s the last thing the high-ups want us to do. Oh, yes, the very last. And that’s why I’m here. Do you see?”

Pirius tried to pick his way through all this. “No, sir, I don’t.”

“I heard about your heroics — or rather, Pirius Blue’s. I knew that to have captured a Xeelee, even to have survived such an encounter, he must have innovated. He must have found some new way of striking back at our perennial foe. And I’ve come to find out what that is. Of course, I’m unqualified for the job, and from the wrong corner of the Commission. I had to fight my way through a few administrative thickets to get this far, I can tell you.”

Out of all that, one word stuck dismayingly in Pirius’s mind: unqualified.

“But why is all this so important to you — to Earth?”

Nilis sighed. “Pirius, have you no sense of history? Perhaps not — you young soldiers are so brave, but so limited in your horizons! Have you any idea at all how long this war has been going on — how long this Front has been stalled here? And then there are the deaths, Pirius, the endless deaths. And for what?”

“The Xeelee are powerful. FTL foreknowledge leads to stalemate—”

Nilis waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. That’s the standard justification. But we have got used to this stasis. Most people can’t imagine any other way of conducting the war. But I can. And that’s why I am here. Listen to me. Don’t you worry about this absurd trial. I’ll get you both cleared — you and your older twin. And then we’ll see what we will see — eh?”

Pirius stared, bemused. He was no fool, and in fact had been selected for pilot training because of his capacity for independent thought. But he had never in his life come across anybody as strange as this Commissary, and could make nothing of what he said. Bewildered, disoriented, he longed only to be out of here, out of Officer Country, and back in the great orderly warmth of the Barracks Ball, safe under his sheets’ coarse fabric with Torec.

Pirius had to wait an agonizing week for the trial to be called. He tried to immerse himself in the mundane routines of his training.

Arches was under the control of the Training and Discipline Command, jointly run by the Navy and the Green Army, and every child hatched here was born into the Navy’s service. Most were destined to live out their lives performing simple services, administrative or technical support. But at the age of eight, a few, a precious few, were filtered out by a ruthless program of tests and screening, and submitted for officer training.

Pirius had made it through that filtering. Now his life was crammed with instruction in mathematics, science, technology, tactics, games theory, engineering, Galactic geography, multispecies ethics,

even Doctrinal philosophy — as well as a stiff program of physical development. But at the end of it was the prospect of serving the Navy in a senior and responsible role, perhaps as technical or administrative ground crew of some sort, or better yet in one of the prized flight roles — and best of all, as Pirius already knew was his own destiny, as a pilot. After that, if you prospered, there was the possibility of moving on to command, or, if you were invalided out, you could expect a role on the ground, or even in Training Command itself, like Captain Seath.

For young people primed from birth with the importance of duty, no better life could be imagined.

But none of this would come to pass if Pirius flunked his training, no matter what destiny FTL foreknowledge described for him. So Pirius tried to keep working. But his mind wasn’t on it, and as rumors spread about his predicament, his friends and rivals — even Torec — kept their distance.

He was relieved when the trial finally started. But, despite Nilis’s confidence, it didn’t go well.

The hearing was convened in a dedicated courtroom, a spherical chamber close to the geometric center of Officer Country. The judges, officers of the court, advocates and counsels, witnesses, and defendants took their places in tiered seats around the equator of the sphere. The central section was left open for Virtual displays of evidence. As mandated by custom and enshrined in Coalition law, the judging panel contained representatives from many of the great agencies of mankind: the Commission, of course, the Green Army, who governed the destinies of the millions of Rock-bound infantrymen, and the Navy, of which Pirius Blue’s Strike Arm was a section.

Before the trial opened, the president of the court, a grizzled Army general, gave a short instruction about the formal use of language: specifically, the use of historic tenses to describe events occurring in the “past” of Pirius Blue’s personal timeline, though they were in the future of the court itself.

Nilis leaned toward Pirius Red. “Even our language strains to fit the reality of time paradoxes,” he said. “But we try, we try!”

At first it wasn’t so bad: it was even interesting. Prompted by an advocate, Pirius Blue, the Pirius from the future, talked the court through a Virtual light-show dramatization of the incident in question, drawn from the ship’s log and the crew’s eyewitness accounts. The court watched Pirius’s withdrawal under fire from the line around the Rock barrage, his flight to Sag A East, the spectacular showdown with the Xeelee. From time to time he referred to his crew, Cohl the navigator and Tuta the engineer, to clarify details or correct mistakes. The show was stop-start, and if a clarification was conceded it would be incorporated into the draft of the Virtual sequence and that section run again.

Pirius himself — Pirius Red — watched intently. He felt intimidated that a version of himself, only a few years older, had been capable of this.

He tried to assess the reaction of the court members. Despite the legalistic setting, the members of the court watched, rapt, as miniature spacecraft chased each other across the spherical chamber. It was undoubtedly a dashing, daring episode, and it seemed to touch something primitive in people’s hearts, whatever their roles here today.

But Pirius Red’s heart sank at the grim expressions on the panel’s faces as they heard one example after another of how Pirius Blue had disobeyed orders: when he failed to hold the line as the Xeelee broke through the Rock, when he failed to turn back to face the fire of the pursuing nightfighters. Even Dans, obviously a maverick, had shown a closer adherence to duty by ensuring that she sent back a FTL beacon containing data on the engagement to the past, giving the military planners a couple of years’ notice of the Xeelee’s new Rock-busting tactic.

Nilis seemed unperturbed. He nodded, murmured notes into Virtual receptors, absorbed, analytical, his blue, rheumy eyes bright in Virtual light. He seemed most animated, in fact, at the dramatization of Dans’s ingenious countertemporal maneuver. He whispered to Pirius Red, “That’s it. That’s the key to the whole incident — that’s the way to outthink a Xeelee!”

When the reconstruction was over, the panel conferred briefly. Then with a curt, dismissive gesture, the president of the court summoned Nilis to make his response.

As he gathered his robes to stand up, Nilis whispered to Pirius Red, “See that look? He thinks the case is already over, that my defense is just a formality. Hah! We’ll show them — just as Blue showed that Xeelee.”

Pirius turned away, his heart thumping.

Nilis immediately conceded the accuracy of the reconstruction. “I’m not here to pick holes in a story told fully and honestly by three very honorable young people. And I’m not here to question, either, the central charge against Pirius: that he disobeyed orders both standing and direct in the course of the action. Of course he did; he doesn’t deny it himself. I’m not here to ask you to set aside self- evident fact.”

The old general asked dryly, “Then why are you here, Commissary?” Muffled laughter.

Nilis rose up to his full height. “To ask you to think,” he said grandly. “To think for yourselves — just as Pirius did, in extremis. We must think beyond mere orders. Why obey a pointless order if it will cost you your life, and the lives of your crew, and your ship, and gain absolutely nothing? Isn’t it better to put aside that order, to flee, to return — as Pirius self-evidently has done — and to fight again another day? Isn’t it obvious that Pirius disobeyed his orders the better to fulfill his duty?”

Pirius was shocked. If one thing had been drummed into him more than anything else since his birth, it was: orders are everything. He could tell from the thunderous expressions on the bench how well that sort of sophistry was going down with the service personnel.

Nilis went on in detail to analyze Dans’s use of the “Brun maneuver” — he described it as “the ingenious use of a closed timelike curve in a computing algorithm” — which he considered the crux of Pirius’s innovatory tactic. “Thanks to these two brave pilots, Pirius and Dans, at last we have a way, at least in principle, of overcoming the Xeelee’s single biggest advantage over us: their computing resource. This will need further investigation, of course, but surely you see that that alone is an achievement far beyond the dreams of most warriors in this endless war. And then, on top of that, Pirius brought home a Xeelee, a captive nightfighter! The information we will acquire may — no, will — transform our prospects in this conflict.” He paused, breathing hard.

Pirius had never heard a speech like this. Nobody talked about victory — not victory anytime soon, anyhow. The war wasn’t to be won, it was to be endured. Victory would come, but it was for future generations. The brass on the bench weren’t impressed by Nilis’s grandiose declarations either.

And Nilis proceeded to make things a thousand times worse.

“Sirs, once again I urge you to think. Rise above yourselves! Rise above your petty rivalries! Isn’t it true that soldiers of the Green Army habitually resent Strike Arm for the perceived luxury of their bases? Isn’t it true that Navy officers traditionally imagine that the Commission knows nothing of the pressures on warriors, even though the Commission plays such a significant role in running the war? And as for we of the Commission, are the Doctrines really so fragile that we fear their breaking even in such an extraordinary case — even in a case where a brave officer is simply overriding a pointless order for the sake of prosecuting his duty more effectively?” And so on. By the time Nilis was done insulting everybody, Pirius knew that any chance of the case going his way, if there had ever been one, was lost.

The panel’s deliberation was brief. The president of the court took only a few seconds to announce its verdict.

For his gross violation of orders, Pirius Blue was to be demoted, and transferred to a penal unit at the Front. Pirius Red knew, everybody knew, that such a posting was tantamount to a death penalty. It was scarcely more of a shock when the court announced that Pirius’s crew, Cohl and Tuta, would be transferred along with him for their “complicity” in his “crimes.”

And, in an almost causal afterthought, the president announced that Pirius Red, the pilot’s younger version, would likewise be transferred to a penal Rock. There were reassignments, lesser punishments, for the younger versions of Cohl, Tuta, and Dans.

By now Pirius understood the theory of temporal-paradox law. But he found this impossible to take in.

Once the president was done speaking, Nilis was immediately on his feet again. He announced his intention to appeal the verdict. And he requested that in the interim he have both Pirius Red and Pirius Blue assigned to his personal retinue. He would act as guarantor of their behavior, and he would seek to make best use of their services in the betterment of mankind’s greater goals.

The panel conferred again. It seemed some bargain was done. The judges did not dispute Nilis’s right to appeal. They would not allow Pirius Blue, as prime perpetrator of this anti-Doctrinal lapse, to escape the sentence passed down, but as a gesture of leniency they placed Pirius Red, the younger copy, in Nilis’s care.

Nilis got up one more time, to make a final, angry denunciation of the court. “For the record let me say that this shameful charade is in microcosm a demonstration of why we will never win this war. I refer not only to your sclerotic decision-making processes, and the lethality of your interagency rivalry, but also to the simple truth of this case: that a man who defeated a Xeelee is not lauded as a hero but prosecuted and brought down…”

It was stirring stuff. But the automated monitor was the only witness; the court was already emptying.

Pirius stood, bewildered. He saw faces turned to him, Torec, Captain Seath, even Pirius Blue, his older self, but they seemed remote, unreadable, as if they were blurred. So that was that, it seemed, Pirius’s life trashed and taken away from him in a summary judgment, for a “crime” he hadn’t even had the chance to commit.

He shouted down at Pirius Blue, “This is all your fault.”

Pirius Blue looked up from his lower tier and laughed bleakly. “Well, maybe so. But how do you think I feel? Do you know what’s the worst thing of all? That mission, my mission, is never even going to happen.”

Then he was led away. Pirius Red didn’t expect to see him again.

Here was the broad, crumpled face of Nilis, like a moon hovering before him. “Ensign? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem real. Sir, I don’t want to be placed under your supervision. I only want to do my duty.”

Nilis’s expression softened. “And you think that if I pull you back from the Front, that pit of endless death, I’ll be stopping you from doing that? You think your duty is only to die, as so many others have before you?” The old man’s eyes were watery, as if he was about to cry. “Believe me,” Nilis said, “with me you will fulfill your duty — not by dying, but by living. And by helping me fulfill my vision. For I, alone of all the fools and stuffed shirts in this room, I have a dream.”

“A dream?”

Nilis bent close and whispered. “A dream of how this war may be won.” He smiled. “We leave tomorrow, Ensign; be ready at reveille.”

“Leave? Sir — where are we going?”

Nilis seemed surprised at the question. “Earth, of course!” And he walked away, his soiled black robe flapping at his heels.

Chapter 6

Nilis’s corvette was a sleek arrow shape nuzzled against a port, one of a dozen strung along this busy Officer Country gangway.

Captain Seath herself escorted Pirius Red to the corvette. They were the first to get here; they had to wait for Nilis.

Pirius wasn’t sure why Seath had brought him here herself. It wasn’t as if he had any personal effects to be carried; he had been issued a fancy new uniform for the trip, and anything else he needed would be provided by the corvette’s systems, and it would never have occurred to him to take such a thing as a souvenir. Officially, she said, Seath was here to make sure Pirius “didn’t screw up again.” Pirius thought he detected something else, though, something softer under Seath’s scarred gruffness. Pity, perhaps? Or maybe regret; maybe Seath, as his commander, thought she could have done more to protect him from this fate.

Whatever. Seath wasn’t a woman you discussed emotions with.

He studied the corvette. It was a Navy ship, and it bore the tetrahedral sigil of free mankind, the most ancient symbol of the Expansion. He said, “Sir — a Navy ship? But I’m in the charge of Commissary Nilis now.”

She laughed humorlessly. “The Commission doesn’t run starships, Ensign. You think the Navy is about to give its most ancient foe access to FTL technology?”

“The Xeelee are the foe.”

“Oh, the Navy and Commission were at war long before anybody heard of the Xeelee.” It was disturbing to hear a straight-up-and-down officer like Seath talk like this.

There was a reluctant footstep behind them. To Pirius’s surprise, here came Torec. She was as empty- handed as Pirius was but, like him, she wore a smart new uniform. A complex expression closed up her face, and her full lips were pushed forward into a pout that looked childish, Pirius thought.

“You’re late,” Seath snapped.

“Sorry, sir.”

Pirius said, “Come to say good-bye?” He felt touched but he wasn’t about to show it.

“No.”

“Pirius, she’s going with you,” Seath said.

“What?”

Torec spat, “Not my idea, dork-face.”

Commissary Nilis came bustling along the corridor. Unlike the two ensigns he did bring some luggage, a couple of trunks and two antique-looking bots which floated after him. “Late, late; here I am about to cross the Galaxy and I’m late for the very first step…” He slowed, panting. “Captain Seath. Thank you for hosting me, thank you for everything.” He beamed at Pirius. “Ready for your new adventure, Ensign?” Then Nilis noticed Torec. “Who’s this? A friend to wave you off?”

“Not exactly,” Seath said. “This is Ensign Torec. Same cadre as Pirius, same generation. Not as bright, though.”

Torec raised her eyebrows, and Pirius looked away.

“And why is she here?”

“Commissary, I’ve assigned her to you.”

Nilis blustered, “Why, I’ve no desire to take another of your child soldiers. The corvette isn’t provisioned for an extra mouth—”

“I’ve seen to that.”

“Captain, I’ve no use for this girl.”

“She’s not for you. She’s for Pirius.”

“Pirius?”

Seath’s face was hard, disrespectful. “Commissary, take my advice. You’re taking this ensign out of here, away from everything he knows, dragging him across the Galaxy to a place he can’t possibly even imagine.” She spoke as if Pirius wasn’t there.

Nilis’s mouth assumed a round O of shock, an expression that was becoming familiar to Pirius. “I see what you mean. But this base is so” — he gestured — “inhuman. Cold. Lifeless. The only green to be seen anywhere is the paintwork of warships!”

“And so you imagined our soldiers to be inhuman, too.”

“Perhaps I did.”

Seath said, “We’re fighting a war; we can’t afford comfort. But these children need warmth, humanity. And they turn to each other to find it.”

Pirius’s cheeks were burning. “So you knew about me and Torec the whole time, sir.”

Seath didn’t respond; she kept her eyes on the Commissary.

Nilis seemed embarrassed too. “I bow to your wisdom, Captain.” He turned his avuncular gaze on Torec. “A friend of Pirius is a friend of mine. And I’m sure we’ll find you something gainful to do.”

Torec stared back at him. For the ensigns, this was an utterly alien way to be spoken to. Torec turned to Seath. “Captain—”

“I know,” Seath said. “You spent your whole life trying to get to officer training. You made it, and now this. Well, the Commissary here assures me that by going with him, Pirius will fulfill his duty in a manner that might even change the course of the war. Though I can’t imagine how,” she added coldly. “But if that’s true, your duty is clear, Ensign Torec.”

“Sir?”

“To keep Pirius sane. No discussion,” Seath added with soft menace.

“Yes, sir.”

Nilis bustled forward, hands fluttering. “Well, if that’s settled — come, come, we must get on.” He led the way through the open port into the ship.

Captain Seath stared at the ensigns for one last second, then turned away.

Pirius and Torec followed Nilis aboard the corvette. Sullenly, they avoided each other’s eyes.

They had both been aboard Navy vessels before, of course — transports, ships of the line — for training purposes. But they had never been aboard a ship as plush as this before. And it was clean. It even smelled clean.

In the corridor that ran along the ship’s elegant spine, there was carpet on the floor. A two-person crew worked in the tip of the needle hull, beyond a closed bulkhead. In the central habitable section, the outer hull was transparent, and if you looked into the sections beyond the rear bulkhead you could see the misty shapes of engines. But two compartments were enclosed by opaque walls.

Nilis ushered his hovering cases into one of these cabins. He looked uncertainly at the ensigns, then opened the door of the other opaqued compartment. “This cabin was for you, Pirius. I suppose it will have to do for the two of you.” There was only one bed. “Well,” he said gruffly. “I’ll leave you to sort it out.” And, absurdly embarrassed, he bustled into his own cabin and shut the door.

In the cabin there was more carpet on the floor. The room was dominated by the bed, at least twice as wide as the bunks they had been used to. Pirius glimpsed uniforms in a wardrobe, and bowls of some kind of food, brightly colored, sat on a small table.

They faced each other.

“I didn’t ask to be here,” said Torec. She sounded furious.

“I didn’t ask for you.”

“I’ve better things to do than to be your squeeze.”

Pirius snapped, “I’d rather squeeze that fat old Commissary.”

“Maybe that’s what he wants.”

They held each other’s gazes for a second. Then, together, they burst out laughing.

Torec crammed a handful of the food into her mouth. “Mm-m. These are sweet.”

“I bet the bed’s soft.”

Still laughing, they ran at each other and began to tear off their clothes. Their new uniforms were not like the rough coveralls they had been used to on Arches; officer-class, the uniforms crawled off the floor where they had been carelessly dropped, slithered into the wardrobe, and began a silent process of self-cleaning and repair.

The room had everything they needed: food, water, clean-cloths, even a lavatory artfully concealed behind paneling. “Evidently officers and Commissaries don’t like to admit they shit,” Torec said dryly when they discovered this.

For hours they just stayed in the room, under the covers or on top of them, eating and drinking as much as they could. They knew they had to make the most of this. Soon enough, somebody would come for them and take all this stuff away; somebody always did.

But nobody did come.

“How long do you think it will take to get there?”

Pirius was cradling her head on his arm, and eating tiny purple sweets from her bare belly. “Where?”

“Earth.”

He thought about that. Even now, more than twenty millennia since humanity’s first interstellar jaunt, a trip across the face of the Galaxy was not a trivial undertaking. “Earth is twenty-eight thousand light-years from the center.” Everybody knew that. “FTL can hit two hundred light-years an hour. So…”

Torec had always been fast at arithmetic. “About six days?”

“But we can’t get so far without resupply, not a ship this size. Double the time for stops?”

She stroked the center line of his chest. “What do you think it will be like?”

“Earth? I have no idea.” It was true. To Navy brats like Pirius and Torec, Earth was a name, a remote ideal — it was what they were fighting for. But they had never been told anything about Earth itself. What would be the point? None of them was ever going to go there. Earth was a totem. You didn’t think of it as a place to live.

“So what does Nilis want you to do?”

“Win the war.” He laughed. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Maybe the Commissary is working out a training program for us.”

“Yes, maybe that.” It was a comforting thought. They were used to having every waking second programmed by somebody else. Everybody moaned about the regime the whole time, of course, but Pirius admitted to himself it would be reassuring when they heard a brisk knock on the door and the Commissary issued them their orders.

But twenty-four hours went by, and still they heard no such knock.

They began to grow uncomfortable. It was hard even to sleep. They weren’t used to being enclosed, isolated like this. Back at Arches, where they had grown up, they had spent their whole lives in vast open dormitories, like the ones in the Barracks Ball, places where you could always see thousands of others arrayed around you, eating, sleeping, playing, fighting, bitching. Again everybody complained, and snatched bits of privacy Under the covers of their bunks. But the fact was, it was reassuring to be cocooned in a vast array of humanity — to have your little slot, and to fill it. Now they had been ripped out of all that, and it was disquieting.

Already Pirius could see Captain Seath’s wisdom. If not for the presence of Torec, somebody he could share all this with, he probably would go crazy. The two of them clung to each other for reassurance. But it wasn’t enough.

At the end of that first twenty-four hours they felt a soft judder — probably a docking, causing a ripple in the corvette’s inertial field as it interfaced with a port’s systems. They surely couldn’t be at Earth yet, but they were somewhere.

They jumped out of their tousled bed, pulled on uniforms, and hurried out of their cabin, leaving it for the first time since Arches.

Through the transparent hull they saw a plain of metal that softly curved away, like a plated-over moon. The corvette had nuzzled against a dock on this metallic worldlet, and to left and right they could see more ports, receding beyond the metal world’s tight horizon, complex puckers within which more ships rested.

There was no sign of the corvette’s crew. But Commissary Nilis stood here, gazing out. He hadn’t noticed the ensigns. He had his hands behind his back, and he seemed to be humming.

Torec and Pirius glanced at each other. Pirius stood to attention and plucked up his courage. “Sir.”

Nilis was startled, but he smiled. “Ah, my two ensigns! And how are you enjoying the trip? Well, we’ve barely started. If there’s anything you need, just ask.” He turned back to the window. “Look over there — remarkable — I think that’s a Spline ship.” So it was, Pirius saw. The great living vessel nestled in its dock; it looked like a bulging eyeball.

Torec nudged Pirius, who asked, “Sir — Commissary — can you tell us where we are?”

“Well, this is Base 528, I believe,” Nilis said. “We’re here for our first provisioning stop.” He glanced at them. “And what does that number tell you?”

Pirius was confused, but Torec said: “Sir, that it’s an old base. Arches is 2594. The older the base, the lower the number.”

“Quite so. Good. Now, come, see.” He walked past them to the other wall.

Pirius saw ships: many ships, of all shapes and sizes, crisscrossing before his vision. The nearer ships shuttled into docks, or left them. Beyond there were many more, just sparks too remote to make out any detail, a shifting crowd that sorted itself into streams that swept away. The ships were beyond counting, he thought, stunned, and this vast streaming must continue day and night, all from this one base.

But Torec was looking beyond the ships to the stars. “Pirius. The sky is dark.”

The sky was dense with stars, many of them hot and blue. But in every direction he looked, between the stars the sky was black, black as velvet. “We aren’t in the Galaxy center anymore,” he said.

“Quite right,” Nilis said. “We are actually in a spiral arm — called the Three-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost arm of the Galaxy’s main disc.”

“Three-Kilo,” said Torec, wondering. “I heard of that.”

“Many famous battles were fought here,” Nilis said. “But long ago. Once this base was on the front line. Now it is a resupply depot. The Front has since been pushed deeper into the heart of the Galaxy, deeper toward the Prime Radiant itself. In this part of the Galaxy there are ports, dry docks, graving yards, weapons ships: it is a belt of factory worlds that encloses the inner center, a hinterland that spans hundreds of light-years.” He sighed. “I’ve traveled here a dozen times, but the scale of it still bewilders me. But then, a war spread across a hundred thousand light-years, and spanning tens of millennia, simply cannot be grasped during a human life spanning mere decades. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the idea of winning this war is beyond the imagination of even our most senior commanders.”

Torec said hesitantly, “Commissary?”

“Yes, child?”

“Please — what do you want us to do?”

Nilis laughed. “Why, nothing. You must relax — treat this as a holiday, for believe me, we will have plenty to do once we get to Earth.” He slapped them on their shoulders. “For now, just enjoy the ride!” And he disappeared into his cabin.

Pirius and Torec shared a bewildered glance. For Navy brats, leisure was an alien concept. They stared out at the streaming ships.

The next leg of the journey would be the longest, a straight-line cut through the spiral arms of the Galaxy spanning six days and no less than fifteen thousand light-years, before they reached a resupply depot at the Orion Line.

In the humming womb of the corvette, Pirius and Torec still had nothing to do.

By the end of the second day the rich food began to make them feel bloated. There was always sex, of course, but even the appeal of that faded. Pirius came to suspect uneasily that the fact they could screw as much as they liked here took away a lot of the appeal of their under-the-blanket barracks fumbles.

In quiet moments on the third day, Pirius tried to analyze his feelings for Torec.

Obviously Seath had assumed they were a stable couple, that their relationship was strong. But the truth was that Torec had only ever been a buddy. For now she was his favored squeeze, and vice versa, but that might have changed overnight, without hard feelings or regrets. In the Barracks Ball, there was a lot of choice, and a lot of bunk-hopping. Sex was all about athletics, and a bit of comfort. Surely they weren’t in love. Were they doomed to spend their lives together even so?

Of course there was nobody to discuss this with — certainly not the Commissary, and they hadn’t even seen the crew. The ensigns had nobody but each other.

And so, naturally, on the fourth day they turned on each other.

By the fifth day, after hours of screaming rows, they were exhausted and regretful. In their striving to hurt each other they had both said many things they hadn’t meant, the most hurtful for Pirius being the charge that he had ruined Torec’s life, for it held a grain of truth.

They came back to each other for comfort. The day became a good day, a day of tenderness. Having endured the storm, Pirius sensed they had moved to some new level in their relationship. Perhaps, he began to wonder, eventually they really would find love.

But then the sixth day came, just another day in this unwelcome luxury, and still the journey dragged on.

At the end of the sixth day Torec escaped into sleep. But Pirius was restless. He slipped out of bed, sponged down with a clean-cloth, and pulled on a uniform. Torec stayed asleep, or at any rate pretended to.

Pirius found Nilis sitting in a chair before the transparent hull, working at a data desk propped on his knee. The Commissary smiled at Pirius and waved him to another chair.

Pirius sat stiffly, and gazed at the panorama out of the window.

The corvette’s FTL drive, working smoothly and silently, was making many jumps per second, and it seemed to Pirius that the scattered stars were sliding past his field of view. But after each jump the corvette was briefly stationary relative to the Galaxy’s frame of reference. So there were none of the effects of velocity you’d expect from a sublight drive, no redshift or blueshift, no aberration; they crossed the Galaxy in a series of still frames.

For Pirius it was a strange sky. Far from the Core now, they were moving out through the Galaxy’s plane. They were passing through the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, one of its richest regions outside of the Core itself. There were plenty of stars, but they seemed scattered and remote — and, remarkably, not one of them was close enough to show a disc. Even between the stars the sky was odd, black, and empty. It seemed a quiet, dull, low-energy sort of environment to Pirius.

Not only that, you could actually tell you were embedded in a sheet of stars. If Pirius looked straight ahead his eyes met a kind of horizon, a faint band of gray-white light that marked the position of the Galactic equator: the light of millions of stars muddled up together. Away from the plane, overhead or down below, there were only scattered handfuls of nearby stars — you could immediately see how thin this disc was — and beyond that there was only blackness, the gulf, he supposed, of intergalactic space.

The corvette wasn’t alone. It was one of a stream of ships, a great thread of swimming sparks that slid across the face of the Galaxy. If he looked around the sky he could see more streams of light, all more or less parallel to this one, some of them passing back to the center, others running out to the periphery. Occasionally a companion ship passed close enough to make out detail. These were usually Spline vessels, vast meaty spheres pocked with glistening weapons.

Nilis was watching him. Pirius started to feel self-conscious.

Nilis waved a hand. “Marvelous, isn’t it — all this? A human Galaxy! Of course, if you were to drop at random into the plane of the Galaxy, chances are you’d see little enough evidence of human presence. We’re following a recognized lane, Ensign, a path where ships huddle together in convoys for mutual protection — this convoy alone is hundreds of light-years long. And you can see the Navy Splines assigned to guide and shield us. We’ve driven the Xeelee back to their Prime Radiant in the Core, but they are still out there — in the galactic halo, even in other galaxies — and they are not averse to plunging down from out of the disc to mount raids.”

Pirius glanced up uneasily at the dark dome of the sky.

Nilis went on, “But even so, even on a galactic scale, you can see the workings of mankind. Think of it! On hundreds of millions of worlds right across the Galaxy’s disc, resources are mined, worked, poured into the endless convoys that flow into the Core — and there on the factory worlds they are transformed to weaponry and fighting ships, to be hurled inward and burned up, erased by the endless friction of the Front itself. Of course, after so long, many worlds are dead, used up, exhausted and abandoned. But there are always more to be exploited. So it goes on, it seems, until the Galaxy itself is drained to feed the war, every bit of it devoted to a single purpose.”

Pirius wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s remarkable, sir.”

Nilis raised an eyebrow. “Remarkable? Is that all?” He sighed. “The Coalition discourages the study of history, you know. That’s according to the Druz Doctrines, in their strictest form. There is no past, no future: there is only now. And it is a now of eternal war. But I have looked back into the past. I have consulted records, libraries, some official, some not, some even illegal. And I have learned that we have been devoted to this single cause, to expansion or war, for twenty thousand years. Why, the human species itself is only some hundred thousand years old!

“It’s been too long. We have become rigid, ossified. There is no development in our politics, our social structures, even our technology. Science is moribund, save for the science of weaponry. We live out lives identical in every respect to those of our forebears. You know, there used to be more innovation in a decade than you see in a thousand years now.

“In a way, the Xeelee themselves don’t matter anymore — no, don’t look so shocked, it’s true! You could replace the Xeelee with another foe and it would make no difference; they are a mere token. We have forgotten who we are, where we came from. All we remember, all we know, is the war. It defines mankind. We are the species that makes war on the Xeelee, nothing else.”

“Sir — is that such a bad thing?”

“Yes!” Nilis slammed his fist onto the arm of his chair. “Yes, it is. You know why? Because of the waste.” He reeled off statistics.

Around the Front there were a hundred human bases, which supported a billion people each, on average. And the turnover of population in those bases was about ten years.

“That means that ten billion people a year are sacrificed on the Front, Pirius. The number itself is beyond comprehension, beyond empathy. Ten billion. That’s more than three hundred every single second. It is estimated that, in all, some thirty trillion humans have given their lives to the war: a number orders of magnitude higher than the number of stars in this wretched Galaxy we’re fighting over. What a waste of human lives!

“But there is hope — and it lies with the young, as it always did.” Nilis leaned forward with a kind of aged eagerness. “You see, at Sag A East, despite a lifetime of conditioning, when it came to your crisis you — or at least your future self — threw off the dead imperative of the Doctrines. You improvised and innovated, you showed initiative, imagination, courage… And yet, such is the static nature of this old people’s war, you are seen as a threat, not a treasure.”

Pirius didn’t like the sound of that “conditioning.”

“That is why I asked for you, Ensign.” Nilis looked out at the swimming stars, the silent, ominous forms of the Spline escorts. “I reject this war, and I have spent most of my life seeking ways to end it. That doesn’t mean I seek defeat, or an accommodation with the Xeelee, for I believe none is possible. I seek a way to win — but that means I must overturn the status quo, and that is enough to have earned me enemies throughout the hierarchies of the Coalition. It is a lonely battle, and I grow old, tired — and, yes, afraid. I need your youth, your courage — and your imagination. Now, what do you think?”

Pirius frowned. “I don’t want to be anybody’s crutch, sir.”

Nilis flinched. But he said, “That brutal honesty of yours! Very well, very well. You will be no crutch, but a collaborator.”

Pirius said uneasily, “And I don’t see why you’re alone. What of your — family? You said something about a brother.”

Nilis turned away. “My parents were both senior Commissaries, who made the unpardonable error of falling in love. My family, and it was a family of the ancient kind, was as illegal on Earth as it would have been on Arches Base. The family was broken up when I was small — I was taken away.

“Of course my background is the key to me; any psychologist will tell you that. Why, the Doctrines deny women the right to experience giving birth! What a dreadful distortion that is. You yourself, Pirius, you were hatched, not born. You grew up in a sort of school, not a home. You have emerged socialized, highly educated. But — forgive me! — you are nothing but a product of your background. You have no roots. My background is, well, more primitive. So perhaps I feel the pain of the war’s brutal waste more than some of my colleagues.”

This made little sense to Pirius. On Arches, there was contraceptive in the very water. Men could get women pregnant — the old biology still worked — but it would be a pathology, a mistake. A pregnancy was like a cancer, to be cut out. The only way to pass on your genes was through the birthing tanks, and you only got to contribute to them if you performed well.

Nilis went on, “Since I lost my family, I have been neither one thing nor the other, neither rooted in a family nor comfortable in a world of birthing houses and cadres.” He glanced at Pirius. “Rather like you, Pirius, I have been punished for a crime I never committed.”

Pirius heard a soft sigh. Glancing back he saw Torec, standing behind a half-open door. She was wearing a shapeless sleeping gown, and her face was puffy with too much sleep.

Nilis looked away, visibly embarrassed.

She said, “You’re teaching him to talk like you do, Commissary. Pretty soon he won’t sound like Navy at all. Is that what you want?”

Pirius held his breath. Back at Arches, Torec would already have earned herself a week in the can.

But Nilis just said, flustered, “No. Of course not.”

“Then what? Six days we’ve been on this stupid toy ship. And still you haven’t said what we’re doing here.”

Pirius stood up, between Torec and the Commissary. “Sir, she just woke up…”

She shook him off. She seemed infuriated. She hitched up her gown, showing her thighs. “Is this what you want? Or him? Do you want to get into our bed with us, Commissary?”

Pirius used main force to shove her back into the cabin and pushed the door shut. He turned uncertainly. “Commissary, I’m sorry—”

Nilis waved tiredly. Pirius saw that the skin on the back of his hand was paper-thin. “Oh, it’s all right, Ensign. I do understand. I was young once, too, you know.”

“Young?”

Nilis looked up at him. “Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way. The human societies of the Core really are very young, you know, Pirius — those bases are swarms of children. The only adults you see are your instructors, I imagine. But I see you with a bit more perspective, perhaps. You have the bodies of adults, you are old enough to love and hate — and more than old enough to fight, to kill, and to die. And yet you will suddenly throw a tantrum, like Torec’s; suddenly a spike of childhood comes sticking up through the still-forming strata of adulthood. I do understand, I think.

“And besides, she’s right to ask such questions. After all, I have turned your lives upside down, haven’t I?” He smiled.

Yes, you have, Pirius thought uncomfortably. And he wondered if Torec had seen through to the truth. Maybe all these words about the philosophy of war were meaningless: maybe the truth was, this was just a silly old man who needed company.

Two days out from Earth, the corvette burst out of the crowded lanes of the Sagittarius Arm and passed into the still emptier spaces beyond.

Pirius looked back at Sagittarius. It was a place of young stars and glowing clouds, hot and rich. The outer edge of this spiral arm was the famous Orion Line, where an alien species called the Silver Ghosts had resisted humanity, and the Third Expansion had stalled for centuries. The storming of the Line had been a turning point in human history. Since then, like an unquenchable fire, humanity had roared on, consuming all in its path, to the center of the Galaxy itself.

But they were leaving all that behind. The corvette was approaching the Galaxy’s ragged outer edge now, and the stars were scattered thin. Earth’s sun, he learned, wasn’t even in a proper spiral arm at all, but in a curtailed arc of dim, unspectacular stars.

Their last stop before Earth would be at a system called 51 Pegasi.

As the corvette cruised toward the system’s central star, Torec came out of their room to stand before the transparent hull. Since her outburst, or maybe breakdown, Torec had been subdued. But the Commissary made no comment: it was as if the incident had never happened.

“There.” Nilis pointed. “Can you see? The sailing ships…”

The planetary system here was dominated by one massive world, a bloated Jovian that swept close to the sun, a world so huge its gravity pulled its parent star around. It was that jiggling, in fact, which had led to the world’s discovery from Earth, one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered. Humans had come here in their crude slower-than-light starships, in the first tentative exodus called, retrospectively, the First Expansion.

“I used to come here for vacations,” Nilis murmured. “The sky was always full of sails. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. You know, systems like this are a relic of the history of human advance. Technology tends to get simpler as you approach the source, Earth. It took so long to get to more remote regions that humanity had advanced by the time they got there; each colonizing push was overtaken by waves of greater sophistication. The Xeelee are different, though. All over the Galaxy, their technology is at the same stage of development. So they must have arrived all at once: they must be extragalactic…”

“Commissary,” Pirius asked hesitantly, “where is Earth?”

The Commissary glanced around the sky, blinking to clear his rheumy eyes. Then he pointed to a nondescript star hanging in the dark, barely visible. “There.”

Pirius looked up. For the first time the light of humanity’s original sun entered his eyes.

Chapter 7

Pirius Blue and the crew of the Claw, stranded in their own indifferent past, were taken away from Arches Base.

The transport was a heap of junk, a battered old scow whose best days were long past. They had to keep their skinsuits sealed the whole time, and the Higgs field inertial control had hiccups, making the gravity flicker queasily. You couldn’t even see out through the hull.

But then this wasn’t a Navy boat, as Enduring Hope had pointed out as they had dragged themselves aboard. Its hull was painted Army green, making it even uglier. “And,” said Hope the engineer gloomily, “everybody knows how good the Army is at running spaceships.”

Cohl wriggled on a heap of sacking, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. “Welcome to your new timeline,” she said.

Pirius was still consumed with guilt for having landed them in this — Cohl and Hope, and their younger selves, including his own. He had no idea how he was going to find the strength to endure what was to come. He could think of nothing to say to his crew.

After two days of living in their skinsuits, two days of sucking emergency rations through straws and stretching their suits’ relief systems to their stinking limit, the scow lumbered to a landing. The ship’s inertial field switched off, plunging them into microgravity, but their training had prepared them for such things, and they all grabbed handholds before they went drifting off.

Without warning, the hull popped open, to reveal gray, trampled ground, a sky crowded with stars.

An Army private in a scuffed green skinsuit appeared at the door. He was wearing a bulky inertial- control belt. “Out,” he ordered.

Pirius led the way. He picked up his bag and loped out of the broad hatchway, letting himself drift to the ground. He looked around. He was on a Rock — a small one by the feel of its gravity. He was standing in a crater, a walled plain, its surface heavily pitted by footsteps, and broader scars where the bellies of ships had touched. The sky was crowded with massive stars, and behind that speckled veil the center of the Galaxy was a wall of light, too diffuse to cast a sharp shadow.

Cohl asked, “Where do you think we are? Those stars are dense enough for it to be a cluster.”

“Not Arches,” said Enduring Hope bleakly. “I suspect we’re a long way from there.”

“Shut up,” the Army private said without emotion. He went along their little line, handed them inertial belts like his own, and took away their bags. “You won’t be needing that shit anymore.”

Pirius knew this was likely the last they would see of their gear, all he had left of his life at Arches.

Everybody had heard the scuttlebutt that buck privates believed Navy flyers were well-off compared to them, and he had expected theft, but not to lose his kit so quickly; it was shocking, denuding. But perhaps that was the idea.

An Army officer stood before them — a captain, according to the stripes on her shoulder. Her skinsuit was battered and much repaired, and through its translucent sheen Pirius saw the gleam of metal down her left side, her leg and torso and arm. She had her hands behind her back, and her face was shadowed, but brown eyes regarded them somberly — and, Pirius saw, startled, a fleck of silver gleamed in each pupil. “Put on your belts,” she said.

Pirius snapped to attention. “Sir, I am Pilot Officer Pirius of—”

“I don’t care who you are. Put on your belts.” They hesitated for one heartbeat, and she yelled. “Do it.”

Pirius’s inertial belt was battered, and the fabric was stained dark, perhaps with blood, though the color was indistinct in the pale Galaxy light. As he snapped it on, weight clutched at him, dragging him to the asteroid dirt. It had been preset to what felt like more than a standard gravity. He reached for the clasp.

“Don’t touch that control.”

Pirius snapped back to attention.

“My name is Marta,” the captain said. “This is a base at the heart of the Quintuplet Cluster. We know it as Quin.” Pirius knew that this was indeed a long way from Arches. “Let me begin your reeducation right now. This is an Army base, and I am an Army officer. You are still Navy personnel, attached to what we call the Navy Division, but you are under my command. You will be trained for work in the Service Corps.”

Pirius’s heart sank. The Service Corps: the shit-shovellers. He said, “Sir, what will our duties—”

“Shut up.”

“Sir.”

“That is the last question I want to hear from you. It is not important what you know, only what you do. And you do only what I tell you. Is that clear?”

The three of them mumbled a reply. “Sir.”

She took a step closer to them, and Pirius saw that she walked, not stiffly, but a little unnaturally; the systems that had replaced her left side worked smoothly, but not quite as an intact human body would. “Lethe, you’re unfit.” She prodded at Enduring Hope’s belly. “I’m truly sick of having you fat wheezing flyboys dumped on me.”

She stood back. “Let’s get this straight from the start. I don’t want Navy rejects here. Nobody wants you. But here you are. The work you will be assigned will be the dirtiest of dirty jobs, and the most dangerous. I’ve no doubt you’ll foul it up, but soon you’ll die, and then you’ll be out of my hair. Until then you will do what I tell you without question or complaint.”

“Sir.”

She had a data desk in her shining left hand. “Let’s check you are who you’re supposed to be. Pirius.”

“Pilot Officer Pirius, sir.”

“You’re not a pilot anymore. Pirius.”

“Sir.”

“Cohl.”

“Sir.”

“Tuta.”

Enduring Hope didn’t reply.

Marta didn’t look up from her desk. “Tuta.”

“Sir, my name is—”

Pirius broke in. “He’s Tuta, sir.”

Marta tapped her desk. “Fine. So you’re loyal to each other. You can all share Tuta’s punishment.” She touched a control at her chest, and suddenly the pull of false gravity on Pirius climbed, reaching twice standard. “Three circuits,” she said. It turned out she meant them to run three circuits of the crater rim; Pirius guessed it would amount to ten kilometers. “Your fitness work starts here,” she said.

Pirius said, “Sir. We’ve lived in these suits for days already.”

“Four circuits,” she said evenly. And she turned her back and walked toward her transport.

Without another word Pirius turned away and began to plod toward the crater wall. Cohl and Hope fell in beside him. He saw that Hope was already sweating. Hope mouthed silently, I’m sorry.

The way wasn’t hard to follow. All around the eroded rim of the crater, there was a path where the asteroid ground had been beaten flat by the passage of uncounted feet. But to run under the false weight of their belts was brutal, and their skinsuits, designed for the comparatively light use of greenship crews, were not intended for this kind of hard labor. Soon Pirius’s feet started to blister, and the suit chafed at his groin and armpits.

Enduring Hope managed two circuits before his legs gave way. Pirius and Cohl had to support him the rest of the course.

When their punishment run was done, Pirius, Cohl, and Hope, exhausted, their skinsuits covered in charcoal-gray asteroid grime, were shoved through a hatchway in the ground.

They found themselves in a shabby underground receiving area. Here orderlies briskly stripped them of their skinsuits, and the rest of their clothing. Uncomfortable as their skinsuits had become, they were unhappy to see these last contacts with their past disappear into the black economy of this nameless Army Rock.

Shivering, naked, they were put through a brisk barrage of showers and radiation baths. Every hair on their heads, faces, and bodies was burned off, and the top layer of skin turned into a powder that they could brush away with their fingers. Clumsy, aged bots probed at them, working at their teeth and ears and eyes. Fluid was pumped into their mouths and recta, only to spill out from both ends, humiliatingly, bringing the contents of their guts with it. After that they were subjected to a battery of injections that went on until their arms and thighs ached.

Pirius understood the need for such precautions. The human bases studded around the Front were closed communities, isolated by light-years, and tended to develop their own strains of bugs and mites. Pirius and the others could easily pick up a disabling plague from Arches, to which they might have no immunity. But despite all these injections, he suspected that a lot more care was being taken to ensure that Quin Base wasn’t infected by them.

When the cleansing was done, the three of them were led out of the receiving area. Then they were pushed out through a bulkhead hatch into a much larger chamber beyond. It was a barracks, a noisy high-roofed chamber crowded with people — and they were still naked, to Pirius’s sudden horror; the medics hadn’t given them so much as a blanket between them.

A grinning cadet, female, very young-looking, met them at the bulkhead. She wore a bright orange coverall, and she greedily eyed Cohl’s breasts, which the navigator vainly tried to cover with her hands. “Come on. I’ll show you your pit.” And she turned and led them into the big chamber.

Pirius tried not to be self-conscious, to give a lead to his crew. But of course it was impossible; he walked hunched over, his hands clamped over his genitals.

This underground habitat was basically a barracks, like the Barracks Ball at Arches. But it was much less orderly, crammed with tottering heaps of bunks that climbed from floor to rough-hewn ceiling. The air was hot and muggy, and stank of stale food and sewage.

And everywhere there were people. They crowded the alleys, they clambered on the bunks, they stared as the flyers passed. Some of them wore official-looking coveralls, like the girl who had met them, but others were bare to the waist, or wore shorts and shirts improvised from worn-out coveralls or blankets. And some of them just ran naked, as unashamed as the flyers were mortified. They ran and shouted, they wrestled on the floor, and couples and threesomes enjoyed noisy sex in the bunks, skin against glistening skin. And they all looked young, even compared to the population of Arches Base.

It was a swarming mass of youth and energy, an animal mass; Pirius had never seen anything like it. It was more like a nursery than a barracks. But some of these children were already veterans of combat. You could tell, he was starting to learn, by the gleam of metal in their eyes.

They reached a little block of bunks. One of the bunks was occupied by a man who lay on his back, hands locked behind his head. He said, “Welcome. Pick a bunk! It doesn’t really matter which…” He was old — at least twenty-five, old compared to the population of this chamber anyhow. He even had a little gray at his temples.

On three of the bunks sat small stacks of clothing: coveralls, underwear, a skinsuit each. The clothing was clearly ancient, much patched, and lacked any sentience whatsoever, just a one-size-fits- all design with crude expansion joints at elbows, knees, waist, and neck. You even had to do up the fastenings yourself. But the coveralls were at least clothes, and the flyers grabbed at them.

The swarming cadets crowded around, grinning, curious, malicious, heads shaven, their faces slick with sweat. Pirius towered over them. Some of them were so young he couldn’t tell if they were male or female. As small hands plucked at his coverall, he forced a grin. “Sorry to disappoint you. The surface crew took everything we had — hey!” Somebody had grabbed his balls. He backed up quickly and closed his coveralls.

Although the others were just as mortified, neither of them had raised a hand at the swarming cadets, which really would have been disastrous. He felt obscurely proud of them.

The older man on the bunk swung down his legs, stood up and clapped his hands. “Come on, give them a break.”

“Fresh meat,” one cadet giggled. She, or maybe he, had sharpened teeth.

The man stepped forward, arms extended. “Yeah, but they’ll be almost as fresh tomorrow. Come on, come on…” He herded the recruits away, like guiding unruly children, and they reluctantly acquiesced. But a circle of them stayed, staring at the newcomers and whispering.

“You’ll get used to it,” the older man said.

“I doubt it,” said Enduring Hope, as he struggled into a coverall that refused to fit.

Cohl was investigating her blankets. “These aren’t clean. Lethe, they’re warm.”

“You’ll get used to that, too. There’s a rather high turnover here.”

Cohl said, “What happened to her?”

“Who? Oh, the last person to sleep in those blankets?… You don’t want to know.” He wore a green- gray coverall, open to the waist; his body was taut, fit. He was handsome, Pirius supposed, with a lean, well-drawn face, a small nose, thick hair he wore swept back from his brow, and a quick smile. Pirius’s immediate impression was of weakness, oddly, despite his appearance. But his manner was relaxed as he welcomed the crew. And, like the other veterans here, his eyes shone silver.

Pirius walked up to him, hand extended. He introduced himself and his crew.

“I used to be a flyer too,” he said, “before I found my calling shovelling shit on this Rock. My name is Quero.”

Hope was staring at him. “No, it isn’t.” He lumbered clumsily up to Quero, and, hesitantly, touched his sleeve. “I know your true name. Everybody does.”

Cohl growled, “I don’t.”

Quero said, “I call myself This Burden Must Pass.”

Cohl said, “Oh, terrific. Another Friend.”

Burden laughed. “Why do you think I got busted down here? And why I keep on being busted back?”

“You’re a heretic. You deserve it.” Cohl threw herself back on her bunk bed. She covered her face against the glare of the drifting light globes, turned on her side, and curled up.

“If you say so,” Burden said gently.

Hope was captivated. “Pirius, you don’t know who this is, do you? This Burden Must Pass is the leader of the Friends.”

Burden admonished him gently. “Now, you know we don’t have leaders. But I’m flattered you know me.” He placed a hand on Hope’s shoulder, and gazed into his eyes. “You’ve had a tough time. I can’t promise you it’s going to get any easier. It never does. But just remember, none of it matters. And at timelike infinity—”

Hope’s eyes were wide. “Yes. This burden must pass.” Pirius saw his lower lip was trembling.

Burden turned to Pirius. “I take it you’re not a believer.”

“No. And you’re very trusting to break Doctrine in front of three strangers.”

Burden shrugged. “Look around. What else can they do? And are you going to inform on me?”

“No,” said Pirius. He glanced at Hope, who was sitting on his bunk, face blank. “If you can keep him happy, that’s fine by me.”

“You’re loyal to your crew. And wise. I like that.”

“I don’t need your approval.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“And if I was wise I wouldn’t be here…”

Cohl yelped and sat up. She pointed at a row of bunks opposite. “Did you see that?”

Pirius turned, saw nothing. “What?”

“A rat!”

Burden laughed gustily. “Oh, you’ll soon get used to the rats!” A klaxon sounded harshly, and the lights briefly dipped to green. Burden said, “Have you eaten? How long were you traveling?… Well, it doesn’t matter. I’d advise you to get some sleep.”

“Why?”

Burden started pulling off his coverall. “You’ll need it. In the morning your training will start in earnest. It’s usually quieter in here at this hour; you created a stir.” He glanced at Pirius warningly. “This isn’t a pilot school. It’s not exactly intellectually demanding. But—”

“We already had a taste of it.” Pirius began to explore his grubby blankets, and wondered how he could get them washed.

He checked on his shipmates. Cohl, still curled up, might not have been sleeping, but if not she was faking it well. Enduring Hope, physically exhausted and now apparently emotionally drained by his meeting with this enigmatic spiritual leader, slumped into his bunk.

Pirius lay back and closed his eyes. But the light was shifting and bright, the noise clamoring and disorderly. He had never thought of an Arches Base Barracks Ball as particularly peaceful, but so it seemed compared to this. He forced his aching muscles to relax, and he tried not to count down the minutes until he had to rise again.

In the hour before reveille, the general clamor seemed to subside. The talking, screwing, and wrestling was done for the night, it seemed, and people were drifting into sleep.

And in that last still hour, Pirius heard an odd noise. It was a scratching, a rustle, a whisper. Then a soft piping rose up from all around the dorm, a chorus of tiny voices joined in near harmony.

Later, Burden told him it was the rats, calling to each other from around the barracks. Having traveled with humans twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the rats had learned to sing, and humans who had never heard birds had learned to enjoy their song. For the rats it was a survival tactic; they had become lovable.

When the klaxon sounded, the soft singing was overwhelmed.

Chapter 8

As Nilis’s corvette approached Sol system, even while it was still under FTL, it was bombarded by a whole series of Virtual messages. The Virtuals were like shrieking ghosts, liable to erupt into existence anywhere in the corvette at any time. Some of these messages were sanctioned by the various authorities; others, it seemed, were not, but had been able to punch their way through a Navy ship’s firewalls anyway. Torec was freaked by the whole experience.

It took Pirius Red some time to understand that many of these clamoring entreaties and demands were aimed, not at Nilis, but at him, the boy who had captured a Xeelee.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Nilis said with a smile. “You’re already famous, that’s all!”

Of course that was disturbing enough in itself. Pirius had always harbored a guilty desire to do something spectacular, to be remembered. But he didn’t want to be notorious for something he hadn’t done, and, now that history had been edited, never would.

And anyhow, personal fame was utterly non-Doctrinal. Pirius had expected that here, close to the center of humanity, adherence to the Doctrines would be stronger than ever. But that, it turned out, was naive.

“In many ways, things are simpler out where you come from,” Nilis said gently. “Here in Sol system, and especially on Earth — despite the best efforts of the Commission for Historical Truth — everything is very crowded, very old, and very messy. Nobody is in control, really, and never could be. You’ll see!”

Like much of what Nilis had to say to him, Pirius found it best not to think too hard about that. But the messages continued to come, and as the light of Sol grew brighter, his heart beat faster.

The corvette stopped briefly at Saturn. Pirius and Torec knew that name, for this immense gas giant had famously been requisitioned long ago by the Navy as its largest base in Sol system.

Pirius peered out in awe. Around the cloud-draped planet, ships and facilities orbited in swarms. Even the moons bristled with factories and weapons emplacements — though it turned out that many of the smaller moons had been broken up for raw materials, water-ice of mantles and rock of cores.

Nilis waxed nostalgic about this world. He even showed Pirius Virtuals of how it had been before the arrival of humans, when it had been circled by a spectacular system of ice rings. But the rings had been too tempting a mine for the first settlers of the system, and too fragile to withstand the fires of the first wars fought here.

Scenery didn’t interest Pirius much. As a Navy brat, he was much more intrigued by military hardware. So he watched a steady stream of ships plunging into the planet’s clouds. Nilis said that the ships were descending to Saturn’s rocky heart, itself a planetoid about the size of the Earth and immersed in a hydrogen ocean thousands of kilometers deep. In the atrocious conditions of that deep murk, out of sight even of the rest of humanity, huge machines were being built.

Earth, this remote speck of rock at the Galaxy’s rim, was still the logical center of humanity. The Interim Coalition of Governance exerted a tight control on a Galaxy full of human beings, and the epicenter of that control was here, on Earth. If worst came to worst — if the Xeelee ever broke out of the Galaxy’s Core and struck at Sol system itself — Saturn would be the bastion of the last defense of Earth, and those mighty engines would come to life.

The corvette was here because the Xeelee nightfighter captured by Pirius Blue had been hauled across the Galaxy and placed in orbit among Saturn’s moons.

“There was really no other choice,” Nilis murmured. “Bringing back a Xeelee has been enough of a sensation as it is. At least here it will be under Navy guard. If we took it deeper into the inner system we’d be asking for trouble.”

Pirius said, “You mean the risk to Earth would be too great?”

“Oh, no, Pirius, not that. We have come here not to protect mankind from our Xeelee, but to protect the Xeelee from us.” He winked.

After six hours, the corvette slid cautiously away from Saturn and its cordon of technology. As it was carrying celebrities of various degrees of reluctance, the corvette’s crew were granted permission to shorten the remainder of the trip by using their FTL drive within the boundaries of Sol system.

So Pirius saw Saturn wink out of existence, to be replaced immediately by a wall of light, blue- white, that flooded the corvette with dazzling brilliance.

At first Pirius and Torec couldn’t understand what they were seeing. It was an immense shield of blue-gray, almost like metal, that curved smoothly away on all sides. It even looked polished, for Pirius saw a dazzling highlight from the sun. And yet the surface was subtly textured, and there were flaws, darker masses scattered irregularly across the shining surface. Each such mass was surrounded by a fringe of paler blue, flecked with white. Other objects crawled across the shield, trailing arrow- shaped wakes behind them.

Nilis seemed to have anticipated their difficulty. Rather than explain, he encouraged them to use the corvette wall’s magnification facility, to explore the view and figure it out for themselves. Slowly the strange truth of what they were seeing opened up in Pirius’s mind.

He was looking down at a planet, a hemisphere dominated by a single great ocean — an ocean of water, open to the sky. It was kept liquid not by technology, but by thermodynamic equilibrium; its curved surface not shaped by human design, but following a simple gravitational equipotential. Even the wispy clouds he saw were water vapor. Although humanity had by now mapped the Galaxy, this was still, remarkably enough, the largest open-water ocean encountered anywhere.

This was Earth.

Those crawling forms were ships, scudding like insects over the ocean’s surface. But some of the larger forms looked oddly familiar. They turned out to be Spline, which had themselves evolved on a watery world, and now gamboled ponderously in the deep-ocean waves of the Pacific. After millennia of war, the seas of Earth had become a nursery for living starships. But the Spline schools weren’t the strangest thing Pirius saw.

He focused on an island, one of the irregular masses of rock that protruded into the air from the ocean’s patient hide. He peered down at buildings, docks, landing strips. He could even see people moving between the buildings. One little girl, skipping down a path to a beach, glanced up at the sky, as if she could see him staring down at her. Her face was a tiny button. And she was quite naked; the child wore no mask, no skinsuit, no protection of any kind — naked and in the open.

It was too much. Pirius and Torec fled to the enclosed security of their cabin, where they clung to each other, trembling. But they could feel the corvette shudder subtly as it dipped into the air of Earth.

After their landing at a spaceport, a small bubbletop flitter took them in a short suborbital hop to their final destination, Nilis’s home.

As the flitter shot briefly back out of the atmosphere Pirius saw that the primary spaceport had been at the heart of one of the larger land-masses. Now the flitter took them over a strip of ocean to a large offshore island. On this island Pirius spotted crumpled hills and rocky outcrops, obviously natural formations, no use to anybody. In the lowlands, though, and near the coasts and along the river valleys, the land was covered by wide green rectangles and cut through by arrow-straight canals.

But this cultivated land was marred by clusters of silver-gray, irregular, bubbling masses, like blisters. You could see these were not the work of humans, for they lacked both the symmetry of deliberate human design and the more organic patterns of unplanned settlements. But these alien scars were the cities of mankind, Pirius learned; they were called Conurbations.

Conurbations were officially referred to only by numbers. Thus the corvette had landed at the fringe of Conurbation 2807, while the flitter would bring them to Conurbation 3474, a sprawling city surrounding a broad, languid river. These numbers had been assigned by the long-vanquished Qax — pronounced Kh-axe, the alien occupiers of Earth in the years before Hama Druz. The huddling domes of the Conurbations, bubbles of blown rock, were essentially Qax designs; they had been preserved as a kind of permanent memorial of that dreadful time. But Nilis, with a wink, told them that the locals referred to their cities by much older, pre-Occupation names, though not a trace of those older settlements had survived the time of the Qax. Thus they had first landed at Berr-linn, and Nilis’s base was in a city called Lunn-dinn.

They landed by the bank of the river, close to one of the great domes of Lunn-dinn. As they prepared to leave the flitter, Pirius glimpsed the river itself, sparkling in the low sun. Even that was a stunning sight: open water, billions of tonnes of it just sliding by, in miraculous equilibrium with an atmosphere that was itself open to space.

It was a short walk through a covered passage from the pad to Nilis’s apartment, which was just inside the skin of the dome. Nilis briskly walked through dusty rooms. Maintenance bots clustered in Nilis’s wake demanding instructions, and self-proclaiming “urgent” Virtuals fluttered around him, evanescent and noisy. There was a musty smell, a faint staleness. It had evidently been some time since he had been home.

Nilis showed the ensigns to the room he had assigned them. Thankfully, it was without windows to the outside. Torec simply pulled off her uniform, threw it to the floor and climbed into the single wide bed.

Pirius followed her, a little more slowly. In this strange new place fear and curiosity warred in him, making him restless. But he held Torec until her trembling had stopped and she slept.

He woke after two hours. Torec was sleeping soundly; for now she had escaped from the strangeness.

Pirius watched her for a while. The curving skin of her shoulder was smooth, flawless, and her small face, turned away from him, was blank, as if she were a child, unformed. He felt a surging warmth toward her, an urge to hold her, so they could protect each other in this bewilderingly strange place.

If you’d asked him before they left Arches, he thought, he’d surely have said Torec was no more than a squeeze to him, and vice versa. Now she seemed a lot more. Was his feeling for her because they were alone here, the only bit of familiarity for each other so far from home? Had he felt this way about her, underneath, even before they had left Arches? Or maybe the crisis they had been through on the ship had drawn them together, as if they’d been through combat.

It was complicated. He wasn’t used to digging into his own emotions so deeply; in a Barracks Ball you didn’t get a lot of quiet time to think.

There was plenty to distract him here, of course. He slid carefully out of bed.

He explored the room. He found doors to a lavatory, and a shower room — not a clean-cloth store, but a place where running water came pouring out of a slot in the roof at his commands. Pirius tried it. Though it was hot and clear, the water left him feeling vaguely unclean; perhaps it came from the safety of a recycling tank, but it could have come from the river, or the ocean. He didn’t imagine he would ever enjoy this strange experience.

He dried off and dressed in a fresh uniform.

He stepped to the door and hesitated. He hadn’t come all the way to Earth itself to hide. He tapped the door; it slid open silently, and he left the room.

The apartment was astoundingly big, and astoundingly empty; Pirius thought you could have lodged five hundred ensigns in a space this size, but it was all devoted to one fat Commissary. As he wandered, small maintenance bots scuttled silently after him, scuffing at the carpet, removing all traces of his presence as he passed. The apartment was just under the outer skin of the dome, and large picture windows had been cut into the outer wall. The rooms were flooded with light that poured unfiltered from the parent star. Pirius, trying to acclimatize, shied away from the light.

Some of the rooms had functions that seemed obvious. One contained a long conference table, for instance, flanked by rows of chairs. Pirius touched the surface of the table. It was pale brown and textured with a kind of grain, a material he had never seen before. Other rooms seemed designed for leisure; typically, they had chairs and low tables set up before the windows.

Every room was cluttered, full of artifacts, memorabilia perhaps, or the objects of Nilis’s study. Some of this stuff was Virtual, complex three-dimensional sketches left half-finished, hovering in the air. But there were much older technologies, too. In one room Pirius even found a row of books — though he would learn that word only later — blocks of paper you held in your hand.

One room held a kind of display: certificates and plaques covered the walls, and in open cases medals and little statues shone. There was even a Virtual display, a double-helix representation that whirled and sparkled. Many of these items bore small plates marked with lettering. Pirius’s reading was poor — in his line of work, reading was just a backup data-access system — but he recognized Nilis’s name repeated over and over. It wasn’t hard to see that these artifacts were prizes, awards, certificates: tokens of achievement, of congratulation. Once again, this was horribly un-Doctrinal. You were supposed to do your duty for its own sake, not for recognition, not for pride. But the little tokens did not shout for attention; they were gathered here with a quiet, untidy pride, the marks of a life of achievement.

Indeed, the whole place was like a projection of Nilis’s personality: rich, cluttered, fusty, baffling.

At last Pirius came to a room where, between two vast windows, the wall was broken by an open door.

Pirius stood on the thick carpet, frozen, ingrained panic rising. But this was Earth, the only world in the Galaxy where you could walk out of a dome without so much as a skinsuit and expect to live. He remembered the little girl on the island, who had shown no fear.

In the open space beyond the door, Pirius glimpsed Nilis. Barefoot, his Commissary’s robe hitched up around his knees, he walked cheerfully through the bright light. He was carrying something green and complex, cradling it in his hands. Whistling, he passed on out of sight.

Pirius took a deep breath. After all, he must already be breathing the unprocessed air of Earth. It seemed fresh, a little cool, and there were strange scents: a sharp tang, like nothing he had smelled before, yet somehow familiar even so. A green scent: the thought came to him unbidden. He didn’t allow himself to hesitate further. He walked across the room, to the door, out onto the platform beyond.

The light blasted his face, hot, intense, coming from a sun so brilliant he couldn’t even bear to look toward it. But he made out something of the sky. It was blue, he saw, stunned. There were objects floating in that blue sky, fat, fluffy, irregular, shaded gray beneath. Surely the size of starships, they must be clouds, masses of water vapor.

Nilis was standing beside him. His hands, empty now, were grimy, black dirt trapped under his fingernails. He smiled. “You’re doing well, Ensign,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Pirius glanced about. He was on a terrace, a broad rectangle of concrete. Much of the terrace was given over to a series of troughs, each of which contained heavy black earth. Things were growing in there: plants, Pirius supposed, with leaves of green, blood red, black. Small hand tools were scattered about. Though maintenance bots hovered hopefully, Nilis, barefoot, sweating, black-nailed, had evidently been tending this little garden himself.

Beyond the lip of the terrace the land fell away to the river, which swept by, its surface glistening like the hide of some immense animal. Pirius felt dwarfed, naked.

“So,” Nilis said. “What do you think?”

“The sky,” Pirius said.

“Yes?”

“It’s blue. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Nilis pondered that. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” He wiped his brow and lifted his face; the light of the sun seemed to smooth out the wrinkles etched in his brow. “You could know everything about the physics of light, Pirius, but you would never guess a sky might be blue. Earth, drained as she is, continues to remind us of our limits, our humility.”

“Drained?”

“Look again, Ensign. What else can you see, beyond the lid of sky?”

Pirius shielded his eyes from the sun. Everywhere he looked, sparks slid by. “Ships,” he said.

Nilis pointed to a drifting tetrahedral form, faintly visible, white against blue. “See that? It’s a Snowflake. Its builders, whom the Assimilators called ’Snowmen,’ lived far out in the halo of the Galaxy. A billion years ago they built their giant artifacts to record the slow cooling of the universe. We destroyed the Snowmen and confiscated their technology. Now Snowflakes orbit Earth in a great shell as deep as the Moon’s orbit: they are watch stations, I suppose, waiting for any threatening move from the Xeelee — and those huge eyes are turned on Earth, too, seeking out signs of insurgence from dissident human factions. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Ensign; in any age there are always plenty of rebels.

“Now — see those streams of ships? At night it’s easier to see their formations as they enter and leave orbit. You know, a surprising amount of the matйriel for this war comes from Earth itself. At the equator there are mines that tap the liquid iron of the planet’s core, for mass and energy. The home planet’s very lifeblood is poured into the throat of the war! Already, so it is said, the structure of the core has been so distorted by such mining that the planet’s natural magnetic field has been affected. But don’t worry. The Coalition lifts great stations into low orbit to protect us from any magnetic collapse…”

Pirius had learned that Nilis wanted him to speak openly. So he said boldly, “Commissary, I’m still not sure what you do all day.”

Nilis laughed. “Nor are my superiors.”

“But your achievements must be significant.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they earned you trophies. And this.”

“The apartment? Well, perhaps, though those jealous idiots on the Conurbation council always keep the best views for themselves!” He tapped his teeth. “You don’t know much about me, do you, Pirius? No reason you should. I suppose my enduring claim to fame is that I am the man who doubled the output of Earth’s farmland — and, of course, of every food production facility in the Galaxy.” He patted his generous belly. “It was long before you were born, of course. But every time you enjoy a hearty meal you should think of me, and offer up thanks.”

“How?…”

Ecology had long been deleted from the Earth. Outside of a few domed parks, the land was given over to nanotechnological machines, which, powered by sunlight, toiled to turn the raw materials of the air and the soil into the bland paste, nano-food, that was the staple diet of the whole of mankind.

“All I did was double the efficiency of those laboring little critters.” Nilis sighed. “The technology was simple enough. But still, it was a marvelous day for me when the speaker of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave herself brought a handful of nano-dust to a scraped-clean bit of ground — not far north of here, in fact — and released my food bots into the wild.”

Pirius didn’t know how to phrase his questions; he had never met a scientist before. “How did you figure out what to do?”

“By reading history, my boy. Who invented the nanobots that feed us, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come, come. What race?”

“I — human, of course.”

“Not so.” Nilis shook his head. “The Commission doesn’t lie — that would be very anti-Doctrinal. But it is happy to allow certain inconvenient truths to fade into forgetfulness. Pirius, it was the Qax, our occupiers, who first seeded Earth with nanobots. They did it to make us reliant on them, and later as a deliberate act of the Extirpation: by destroying our ecology they sought to cut our links to our past. And then, when the Qax fell and the Coalition took over, there were simply too many mouths to feed, too much ancient knowledge lost, to resist using the bots to feed the liberated swarms. Nobody knows that Qax machines are feeding them! But I knew, because I was curious, and I dug into various old libraries and found out. Then I checked to see if the Expansion had yet reached the Qax home World. Of course it had, long ago. So I applied for a study grant from my Office. I learned that the Assimilation officers had gathered a great deal of data on Qax nanomachinery, though their studies had been allowed to gather dust for centuries. With that, it was straightforward for me to revisit the basis of the food nanobots, and find ways to improve their operation. Straightforward — the work of ten years, but that is a mere detail.”

Pirius was impressed. “It was a great contribution to the war effort.”

Nilis looked at him quizzically. “Well, I suppose it was, though I didn’t intend it that way. My nano- food got me this apartment, and a source of funding — and, more importantly, a power base, of a sort; at least, a position of independence. Yes, I’m proud of my work, and I’m certainly not shy of shouting about it when it’s useful. But I certainly didn’t achieve it by thinking in the way we’re all supposed to, with that peculiar mixture of arrogance and narrowness that characterizes the Druz Doctrines. I was prepared to look into the murky corners of the past — I was prepared to accept the uncomfortable, paradoxical truth that though we have conquered a Galaxy we are utterly dependent on an alien technology!

“And, of course, the latitude I won as the Man Who Fed The Galaxy has allowed me to cultivate my garden. Come see. Don’t worry; I won’t ask you to get your hands dirty…”

Nilis’s “garden,” confined to the concrete troughs, was unprepossessing, just tangles and clumps and spindles of green, crimson, and black, some curled together. Everything was small, compact, tough- looking.

Nilis watched Pirius’s reaction. “So what do you think?”

Pirius shrugged. “All I’ve seen of nature is rats, and the algae you have to scrape out of air ducts, and nobody makes a pet of that.”

Nilis laughed. “Well, my little gatherings here are nobody’s pets either. I suppose you’d say they are weeds.” He picked up one scrawny growth, a green stem topped by a gaudy yellow flower. “This is a native plant, obviously. Its chlorophyll green has become mankind’s symbol, hasn’t it? Even though we try to stamp it out wherever we find it. Ironic! We understand its biochemistry, of course, but we’ve long forgotten the name our forefathers gave it. I found it growing in the heart of the city — of Lunn-dinn, right here. Our Earth is supposed to be managed, Ensign: paved over, milked as efficiently as possible by the nanobots. But even in the cities, where the concrete cracks, a little earth gathers. And where there is earth, plants grow, welcome or not. But look here.”

From a tangle of vegetation, Nilis pulled out leaves: one a neat oval shape but jet black, the other almost square, and brick red. Nilis said, “I found this black leaf on Earth — but it’s not a native! It’s actually from a planet of Tau Ceti. And this red leaf isn’t a native either; it comes from a system a thousand light-years away. I doubt if these little creatures were brought here on purpose; they traveled as spores in the recycling systems of starships, perhaps, or lodged in the sinuses of unwary travelers. Both come from worlds basically like Earth, though, worlds of Main Sequence suns and carbon-water chemistry, or else they couldn’t survive here.

“But even on worlds so similar to Earth, life can develop in radically different ways. All these leaves are photosynthetic; they all gather energy from sunlight. But only Earth life uses chlorophyll; the others use different combinations of chemicals — and so they aren’t green. Interesting; you would think that this black shade is actually the most efficient color for a gatherer of sunlight… On each world life is born, like and yet unlike any other life in the universe. Once it’s born it complexifies away, endlessly elaborating, until it has filled a world. And then we come along, with our starships and Expansions, and mix it up, complexifying it further.”

Pirius frowned. “If their biochemical basis is so different, they can’t eat each other.”

“Well, that’s true. But these plants coexist anyhow. At the very least, they compete for the same physical resources — the sunlight, say, or room in the soil; whoever grows fastest wins. There may be reasons to eat something even if not for the biochemistry; a concentration of some essential mineral fixed by your prey, perhaps. And look at this.”

He moved to another trough and showed Pirius a kind of trellis, no more than ten centimeters high, covered in tiny black leaves, with a green plant draped over it. “The miniature trellis is a tree- analogue from the Deneb system,” Nilis said, “and the green plant is a pea, from Earth. The pea has learned to use the frame as a support. And probably the trellis is using the pea for its own purposes, perhaps to attract other Denebian life-forms; I haven’t figured it out yet.” He smiled. “You see? Cooperation. The first step to an interstellar ecology, and all happening by accident. It wouldn’t surprise me to come back here in, oh, ten or fifty million years, and find composite life-forms with components from biochemical lineages once separated by light-years. After all, our own cells are the results of ancient mergers between beings almost as divergent, between oxygen-haters and oxygen- lovers.”

As he pottered around the little plants, cupping each gently with his dirt-stained fingers, Pirius suddenly saw how lonely this man was. I’m not sure why you’re showing me this, sir.”

Nilis straightened up, massaging his back. “I wish I’d had these troughs built a little higher! Just this, Ensign. We live in a universe of endless, apparently inexhaustible, richness. Everywhere life complexifies, finding new ways to combine, to compete, to live; endlessly exploring the richness of the possible — indeed, as in this example, actually expanding that richness. Once, human society itself showed the same tendency to complexify: no surprise, as we are children of this rich universe. But the Druz Doctrines deny that tendency. The Doctrines try to hold us static, in form, thought, intention — for all time, if necessary.”

Pirius said, “The Doctrines have kept mankind united for twenty thousand years, and have taken us to the center of the Galaxy.”

“There is truth in that. But it can’t last, Ensign. The Doctrines are based on a falsehood — a denial of what we are. And, in the weeds that grow through the tarmac of our spaceports, we see clear evidence of our lack of ability to control. In the social realm it’s just the same — remember those Virtual fan messages you had! The world is much more messy than Commission propaganda allows us to believe.

“And that is my philosophical objection to the Doctrines, Pirius. That is why I have strained every sinew for years to find a way to win this war — before we lose it, as otherwise we inevitably must. You wouldn’t think we are in peril, looking around. We have covered the Earth, enslaved nature, spread across a Galaxy. We are strong, we are united — but it is all based on a lie, it is all terribly fragile, and it could all fall apart, terribly easily.”

Pirius heard a soft tapping sound. He looked down, puzzled. The concrete platform was becoming speckled with dark little discs: water splashes. Then he felt a pattering of droplets on his bare skin — his hands, his brow, even his hair. Perhaps some climate-control system had broken down.

Nilis sighed and pulled the hood of his robe over his head. “Oh, my eyes. Not another shower! I will never finish.”

Pirius looked up. One of those clouds hovered right over his head, its underside dark and threatening. And water was falling toward him, fat drops of it. By tracking back along their paths, Pirius could see the drops were falling out of the sky itself.

It was too much; the last of his courage failed him. He turned and ran for the controlled environment of the apartment.

Later that night Pirius was restless again.

The apartment was dark. But as he walked through the rooms, a soft light gathered at his feet and washed into the corners of the room. It didn’t dazzle his night-adapted eyes, but was bright enough for him to see where he was going.

A colder light came pouring in from outside, through the window: a silver light tinged with green.

He walked forward, not allowing himself to think about what he was doing. Maintenance bots followed him with silent, discreet efficiency.

The terrace door was closed. He pressed his hand to its surface, and it dilated.

There was no rain. It looked safe.

Pirius stepped forward. That cool light picked out the lines of the terrace, washed over Nilis’s tiny garden, and sparkled from the broad back of the river beyond. It was an eerie glow that seemed to transform an already strange world.

Deliberately, he looked up.

The source of the light was the Moon, of course, the famous Moon of Earth. It was a disc small enough to cover with his thumb. But it was a transformed Moon — and one of Earth’s legendary sights, whispered of even in the Barracks Ball of Arches Base.

The face of this patient companion had gazed down through all of man’s turbulent history. But the face was unchanged no more. Patches of gray-green were spreading across the pale highlands and the dusty maria, the green of Earth life rooting itself in the Moon’s ancient dust. That was why moonlight was no longer silver, but salted with a green photosynthetic glow.

And a great thread arced out of the center of the Moon’s face, and swept across the night sky toward the horizon. Pirius thought he could see a thickening in that graceful arc as it swept away from the Moon toward the Earth. The arc was the Bridge, an enclosed tunnel that joined the Moon to the Earth — or at least to an anchoring station a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. The Bridge had been built with alien technology captured millennia ago; now the important folk of the Interim Coalition of Governance could travel from Earth to Moon in security and Comfort, as easily as riding an elevator shaft.

The Bridge itself, defying orbital mechanics, was unstable, of course, constantly stressed by tides, and it had to be maintained with drive units and antigravity boxes studded along its length. The whole thing was utterly grandiose, hugely expensive, and quite without a practical purpose. Pirius laughed out loud at its folly and magnificence.

The next morning he tried to describe his feelings on first seeing the tethered Moon.

Nilis just smiled. “We travel to the stars, but we still must build our pyramids,” he said enigmatically.

Chapter 9

Two weeks after his return to Earth, Nilis set up a meeting with a man called the Minister of Economic Warfare.

As he prepared for this meeting, Nilis made no secret of his nervousness, nor how much was riding on the outcome. “I suppose you’d call Minister Gramm my champion. My nano-food innovation was fundamentally an economic benefit, you see, and so its deployment in the war effort came under the purview of Economic Warfare. Since then, Gramm has supported me in my various initiatives — hoping I will pull out another gem!” He sighed. “But it’s difficult, it’s always difficult. The Coalition is very ancient, and has its own way of doing things. Mavericks aren’t treated well. Without the shelter of Gramm’s patronage, I’m quite sure I would have been sidelined long ago…

And so on. Pirius and Torec listened patiently to all this, for Nilis in his blundering way seemed to appreciate having someone to talk to. But it was hard to be sympathetic. To Pirius Red the bureaucratic problems of working at the higher levels of the Interim Coalition of Governance were somewhat esoteric.

On the day of the meeting, to their dismay, Nilis suddenly decided to take both ensigns with him.

Before they set off, Nilis insisted on checking over their uniforms. It did Pirius no good to point out that the smart uniforms took care of themselves better than he or Torec ever could; Nilis nervously examined every seam, every centimeter of beading.

“Anyway,” said Pirius, “I don’t see what we can add to a meeting with a Minister.”

“Oh, you’re my secret weapon,” Nilis said, smiling edgily. “You are unruly defiance made flesh! Even when tangling with the Coalition, you must never underestimate the power of psychology, Ensign.”

Nilis insisted that they were going to walk to the Ministry building — walk across the Conurbation, an Earth city, in the open air. It was a dreadful prospect, but Pirius knew by now that it was no use arguing with the Commissary when he had made up his mind.

Still, Pirius and Torec hesitated on the doorstep of Nilis’s apartment. Pirius had acclimatized to the point where he could sit out in the garden with Nilis, even eat in the open air, but Torec was further behind. And after all, to venture out of doors without a sealed-up skinsuit violated every bit of conditioning drummed into them since before they could talk.

“But it has to be done,” Torec said grimly.

“It has to be done.” Hand in hand they took the first step, out into the light.

Nilis strode off along a road that arrowed between the hulking shoulders of blown-rock domes,

straight to the heart of the Conurbation. His robe flapped, the watery sun shone from his shaven head, and a small bot carrying his effects labored gamely to keep up. For all his insistence on checking the ensigns’ appearance, Nilis himself looked as if he had come straight from his rooftop garden; he wasn’t even wearing any shoes.

He didn’t look back. The ensigns had to hurry after him.

The surfaces of the domes were smooth, polished, some even worked with other kinds of stone. One massive dome, coated with a creamy rock, gleamed bright in the sunlight. “The Ministry of Supply,” Nilis called over his shoulder. “Supplied themselves with marble readily enough!”

There wasn’t much traffic, just a few smart cars. But there were pedestrians everywhere, even off the ground. Walkways connected the domes, snaking through the air at many levels, in casual defiance of gravity and logic. People hurried along the ways, chattering; others were accompanied by shells of glowing Virtual displays, as if they carried their own small worlds around with them. In some places the walkways would tip up steeply, or even run vertically, but the crowds bustled over them blithely. The people were so immersed in their own affairs they didn’t even notice the unfailing miracles of inertial engineering that enabled them to walk without effort straight up a wall.

Torec was muttering under her breath, some comforting nonsense. But she kept walking. She was doing well, and Pirius felt proud of her — not that he’d have dared to tell her so. You didn’t look up at the open sky, that was the key. You didn’t think about how exposed you were to the wild. You concentrated on the manufactured environment; you kept your gaze on the smooth surface of the road, or on the buildings around you.

But at one point Torec stopped dead. Through a crack in the road surface a bit of green showed, a weed. It was a bit of raw life pushing through a hole in the engineered reality around them. Pirius was more used to green things than Torec, thanks to Nilis’s garden. But here in the wild it was an oddly terrifying sight.

As they pushed into the dense heart of the city, things got still more difficult for the ensigns. People started to notice them. They stared openly as the ensigns passed, and pointed, and peered down from the walkways. The ensigns’ uniforms didn’t help; their bright scarlet tunics stood out like beacons in the Conurbation crowds, who mostly dressed in plain black Commissary-style robes.

Nilis grinned. “They’ve never seen soldiers before. And you’re famous, Pirius!”

“Commissary, it wasn’t even me—”

Nilis waved a hand. “Never mind temporal hairsplitting. To these crowds you’re the kid who beat a Xeelee. Don’t let them worry you. They’re just human, as you are.”

Torec frowned. “Human maybe, but not like us.”

It was true, Pirius thought. In Arches Base everybody was the same — small, wiry, even with similar features, since most of them had been hatched from the same birthing tanks. “But here,” he said, “everyone is different. Tall, short. There are old people. And they’re all fat. You don’t see many fat people at the Front.”

“No,” Nilis said. “But that’s policy, you see. If you’re kept hungry, if everything in your world is shabby, you have something to fight for — even if it’s just an inchoate dream of somewhere safe and warm, and with enough to eat.”

Torec said, “So you let us fight for you, while you starve us and let us live in shit.”

Pirius was alarmed, but Nilis seemed to admire her outspokenness. “Like it or not, that’s the policy — and since very few frontline troops ever come here, to the heart of things, few people ever know about it…”

In the immensity of the city, Pirius tried to keep his bearings. The whole of human society was like a great machine, so he had always been taught, a machine unified and dedicated to a single goal: the war with the Xeelee. The people around him, absorbed in their important and baffling bits of business, might seem strange, but they were parts of the greater machine too. He mustn’t look down on them: they were warriors in their way, just as he was, as was every human being.

But he thought of Nilis’s extraordinary ambition of ending this war. Perhaps he, Pirius, a mere ensign, would play a part in a revolution that would transform the lives of every human in the Galaxy — including every one of the confident, jostling crowd around him. In that case he had nothing to fear. Indeed, these people of Earth should fear him.

It was a deliciously non-Doctrinal thought. He always had wanted to be remembered.

“Ah, here we are,” said Nilis.

They stopped before another dome, as grand and busy as the rest. Nilis led them out of the glare of day into an antechamber. Much of this dome had been left open; there were partitions and internal walkways, but once inside you could look up and see the great rough sweep of the old Qax architecture itself.

They were subjected to a ferocious security check. Bots clambered over them, their identities were verified, they were scanned for implants, given quick-fire tests for loyalty and mental stability, and subjected to many other examinations whose nature Pirius couldn’t even recognize. Most of this was performed by automated systems, but a single human guard was there to overview the process, a blue-helmeted woman from the Bureau of Guardians. Nilis endured it silently, and Pirius and Torec followed his lead.

At last they were released. A small Virtual marker materialized before them and floated off. It led them to a roofless office, deep in the heart of the dome, with a long conference table and a nano-food niche. With a sigh, Nilis ordered hot tea.

“And now we wait,” he said to the ensigns. “We’re on time, but Gramm won’t be. It’s all part of the game of power, you know…”

This dome belonged to Gramm’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, he told them. Aside from its specifically military arms, like the Navy and the Green Army and the Guardians, mankind’s police force, and agencies with cultural goals such as the Commission for Historical Truth and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, the three greatest Ministries at the heart of the Interim Coalition of Governance were the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Ministry of Supply, and the Ministry of Production.

Nilis chattered on, “Even though they all report in to a single Grand Conclave member — Philia Doon, the Plenipotentiary for Total War — to get anything done you have to deal with all three. Even Minister Gramm can’t deliver anything by himself. But Economic Warfare’s aim is to ensure the dedication of all mankind’s resources to the great goal. To some extent it acts as an intermediary between the other two. And that gives Gramm some leverage. He can be a difficult man, but I couldn’t ask for a more useful ally… Ah, Minister!”

Minister Gramm came bustling into the room. Even by the standards of Earth, Pirius thought, he was stupendously fat; his great belly pushed out his gray cloak so that it hung over his legs, and his fingers, clasped before his stomach, were tubes of pasty flesh. His scalp was shaven and his cheeks heavy, so that his head was like a round moon.

He brought two people with him, both women. The first he briskly introduced as Pila, a senior advisor, whom Nilis had evidently met before. Golden-haired, she was slim, beautiful, expensively dressed, and oddly detached, as if all this was somehow beneath her. She showed no interest in the ensigns.

The second person with Gramm was quite different. Small, round-shouldered, the shape of her body was hidden by the severe cut of her black robe. Her skin was an odd weathered brown, as if she had been irradiated. All her features were small, her nose a stub, her mouth pinched, and her hair was just a gray scraping over her scalp. Pirius found it hard to judge her age. The smoothness of her skin had nothing to do with youth; it was as if her features had been worn by time. Indeed, it wasn’t until she spoke that Pirius was even sure this was a woman.

Nilis bustled forward to greet the Minister, his hand extended, his big bare feet slapping on the polished floor. But the small woman spoke first.

“So here are our young heroes from the Front.” She stood before Pirius. Her eyes were deep and dark, hidden in sockets that seemed to have receded into her head. “I wish I could smell you — you have about you the burned-metal stench of vacuum, no doubt.” She reached out a small hand, and made to brush his cheek. To his shock her fingers passed through his flesh and broke into a swarm of blocky pixels. “Yes, I’m a Virtual,” she said. “An avatar, actually. I’m too many light-minutes from here to be able to contribute. But I couldn’t miss this.”

To Nilis, Gramm said uncomfortably, “This is Luru Parz, Commissary. My… ah… consultant.”

Pirius had absolutely no idea who this woman was or what she wanted, and it baffled him that Gramm didn’t even seem to want her here.

But there was no time to think about that, for now Gramm was looming over Torec. “What an exotic little creature. The color of her uniform — the texture of her flesh — why, she’s like a little toy.” He reached out and laid his fat fingers on her shoulder.

Torec endured this, expressionless. But when his hand slid down her shoulder to her breast, she grabbed his finger and bent it back.

He recoiled, clutching his hand to his crotch. “Lethe. I think she broke it!”

Luru Parz was laughing. “No, she didn’t. You deserved that, you fat fool.”

Gramm glared up at Nilis. “I’ll hold you responsible, Commissary.”

Nilis was trembling with anger, Pirius saw. “Well, you have that right, sir. But I point out that it is exotic little creatures like these who are fighting and dying on our behalf, even as we speak, right across the Front. It has been difficult enough for me to persuade these two that Earth is more than a cesspit of decadence. They certainly deserve more respect than to be treated as playthings, even by a Minister.”

Luru Parz opened her mouth to laugh louder. Her teeth were quite black, Pirius saw. “He has you there, Gramm!”

Gramm glared at her. “Shut up, Luru; sometimes you go too far.”

The slim woman, Pila, watched all this with an air of detachment. “If the pleasantries are over, shall we start?”

Still cradling his hand, Gramm slumped in a chair. “Let’s get it over.”

Nilis bustled to the head of the room with his bot.

Pirius and Torec cautiously took their seats as far from the others as possible. Luru Parz sat, too, but Pirius saw that her Virtual wasn’t perfect, and she seemed to hover above her chair.

A servant appeared — not a bot, Pirius saw, wondering, a human servant — with drinks and a tray of some kind of hot, spicy food, which he set before the Minister. Gramm pushed the fingers of his uninjured hand into the food and began to eat steadily.

A glass of water, Virtually generated, materialized before Luru Parz, and she picked it up and sipped it gently. She saw the ensigns staring at her, and she smiled. “Here on Earth, children, there is even an etiquette for dealing with a Virtual guest. High culture, you see. Isn’t that something worth fighting for?”

Nilis was ready to make his presentation. “Minister, Madam Parz, Madam Pila, Ensigns—”

Gramm growled, “Get on with it, Nilis, you bumbling idiot.” The servant discreetly wiped grease from his mouth.

Nilis pointed dramatically at Pirius. “I brought these child soldiers back from the Front for two reasons. First they symbolize our endless war. All across the Front, bright young people are fighting — and dying in hordes. And it has been that way for three thousand years.”

Gramm asked, “Is this to be one of your interminable moral lectures, Nilis?”

Nilis said urgently, “Moral, you say? Don’t we at least have a moral responsibility to try to curtail this endless waste? Wouldn’t that be moral? And that’s the second reason I brought these two home. Because this one, Pirius, will — or would have, in an earlier timeline draft — would have found a new way to strike at the Xeelee. You can see the results in the derelict I brought home to Saturn. Minister, Pilot Officer Pirius showed that we can think differently about the war, even after all this time.”

“Tell me what you’re proposing, Commissary.” The Minister sounded languidly bored.

Nilis snapped his fingers. His bot unfolded a white screen, and produced a clutch of styluses with a kind of flourish. And above its hide, a Virtual of the Galaxy coalesced. The central bulge was bright enough to cast shadows on the polished surface of the conference table, and its paper-thin disc sparkled with supernova jewels.

“Here is the Galaxy, with its four hundred billion stars,” Nilis said. “I have consulted the archives of the Navy, the Green Army, and other military groups. And here are their current targets for military action.” He snapped his fingers again. A series of bright green specks lit up across the Galaxy’s image. “You can see there are still a few in the disc — pockets of resistance we’ve yet to clear out — and more in the halo, beyond the range of this image. But the main action is of course at the Front.” This was a sphere, emerald green, embedded in the Galaxy’s central bulge. “It’s an impressive disposition, the culmination of a grand military ambition. But our strategy is missing one crucial element.”

A new Virtual coalesced in the air, before the Galaxy image. It was another spiral, looking like a cartoon version of the star city behind it.

Pirius recognized it immediately. “That’s the Baby Spiral,” he said. “It’s inside the Front — the system at the very center of the Galaxy.”

Nilis said, “Quite right, Ensign. But look here…” The image magnified, until the center of the Baby Spiral loomed large and bright, and its crowded arms feathered off into the surrounding darkness. Nilis pointed to an unassuming speck of white light, just off-center from the spiral’s geometric heart. “Ensign Pirius, can you tell us what that is?”

“That’s Chandra. Sir, the Xeelee’s Galactic Prime Radiant is based at the three-million-stellar-mass black hole at the center of the Galaxy. The Xeelee seem to use it as their operational command post.”

Nilis nodded. “Good, good.”

“Yes,” said Luru Parz. “And a summary appropriately hedged with qualifications.”

Gramm glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”

“Seem to use it for this and that — Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, Minister, that after three thousand years of siege warfare around this Prime Radiant, we know so little about it, and indeed about our foe?”

Gramm turned away from her. “Make your point, Commissary.”

Nilis said, “My point is this.” He pointed dramatically to the display. “The Prime Radiant is surrounded by military targets, as you can see. But the Prime Radiant itself is not a target.” He looked at their faces, waiting for comprehension to dawn.

“And,” Gramm said around a mouthful of food, “you’re saying it should be.”

“Of course it should! The Prime Radiant is properly named, for it is in a real sense the source of the Xeelee presence in our Galaxy. And if we could strike at it—” He snapped his fingers again. Suddenly the center of the Baby Spiral glowed emerald green, and one by one the other lights went out. “Minister, take out the source, and all these other targets, which are downstream of it in a logical sense, are essentially taken out too. Why, it’s a question of economics. If you shut down the factory, you are saved the expense of picking off its products, one by one. Take out the power plant—”

“Yes, yes. Get on with it, man.”

“This, sir, is how I believe we should be fighting this war. What I’m asking for is the initiation of a new project. Its ultimate goal will be specific: the destruction of the Xeelee Prime Radiant.”

Through the fog of his verbiage, Nilis’s meaning suddenly became clear. Pirius felt a deep thrill run through him. To strike at the Prime Radiant itself!

The meeting was continuing. Pirius tried to focus.

Gramm picked his teeth. “What a wonderful imagination you must have, Commissary. But is that all you have?”

“Minister—”

“Do you imagine that in the long millennia of this war that nobody has come up with such an obvious tactic? Don’t you suppose that if it were ever possible it would have been done by now?”

“But if you won’t even think it through—”

Unexpectedly Gramm turned to Pirius. “Why don’t you take the floor, Ensign?”

“Sir?”

“You’re the hero of the hour. You downed a Xeelee; that’s why you’re here. Why don’t you explain to us why the Commissary’s suggestions are a fantasy? If I asked you to take out the Prime Radiant,

how would you respond?”

Pirius stayed where he was, uncertain and embarrassed. But Nilis shrugged and sat down.

So Pirius stood up, walked to the front of the room, and thought for a moment. He waved his hand to banish Nilis’s expensive Virtual displays, leaving only the whiteboard, and he picked up a stylus. With an apologetic glance at Nilis, he drew a red asterisk at the right hand side of the board. “Sir, I believe there are three fundamental problems. First, even if we could get through the Xeelee defenses in the region of Chandra” — he tapped the asterisk — “we don’t have any weapons that can strike at a black hole, and whatever the Xeelee are doing with it.”

“Of course not,” said Luru Parz. “How could we, since we’ve put no effort into finding out what the Prime Radiant actually is?… Go on, Ensign.”

Pirius drew a red circle around the asterisk. “Second problem. We can’t get through to Chandra anyhow, because if we could get close enough to engage the Xeelee’s inner defensive cordon, they would surely outfly us, outthink us. Their equipment is better than ours. Most important, their computing capability is superior.

“And third” — Pirius drew a dotted line reaching back to the left of the asterisk, and cut it through with a vertical line — “we can’t even get that close, because of FTL foreknowledge. The Xeelee would see us coming, and shoot us down before we left our bases.” He hesitated, looked at his sketch, and sat down.

He won an ironic slow clap from Gramm. “Admirably summarized.” The Minister raised an eyebrow at the Commissary. “Nilis? I hope you won’t claim now that you have a solution to all these problems?”

“No, sir. Not all of them. But, thanks to Pirius and his companions, I can solve one.” He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a stylus and tapped at the red circle Pirius had drawn around the Prime Radiant. “We may have a way to beat Xeelee processing power. It’s uncertain — Pirius Blue and his colleagues improvised it in the middle of combat — but we can take the concept, and build on it. Minister, we can outthink the Xeelee. I know that’s true, because we’ve done it once already. And if one of these ancient obstacles can at least in principle be overcome, then perhaps we can defeat the rest. Suddenly we see a chink of light; suddenly we have hope.”

Luru Parz was nodding. “Yes, yes. It was this strange news from the Front which drew my attention, too. A new hope.” And that was why she had forced her way into this meeting, Pirius saw, apparently over the objections of a Minister. Whoever this strange woman was, she had power — and her ambition seemed to be a mirror of Nilis’s.

Gramm glared at Nilis. “And that’s all you have to say? This is the case you’re going to make? Can you not see, Commissary, how you will make an enemy of almost everybody in authority if you go around claiming that better minds than yours have, for millennia, been pursuing the wrong targets — with the wrong weapons, too?”

Pirius saw that Nilis was struggling to control his anger. “Those ’better minds’ have been locked into a rigidity of thinking for all those long millennia, Minister.”

“Don’t go too far, Commissary,” Gramm said.

Nilis dismissed that with a wave. “I’m well aware that it wouldn’t be your decision alone, Minister, so let’s not play games. All I want at the beginning is seed-corn funding, enough to get us to proof-of- concept of the pilots’ new closed-timelike-curve computing paradigm. When that’s successfully demonstrated, we can move to the next stage, and ask for further funding to be released, stepwise. The political and financial control of the Coalition and the relevant Ministry over every stage of the project would be absolute—”

“You can bet your life it would,” Gramm shouted.

“Ask for more,” Luru Parz said immediately.

Nilis looked confused.

“Ask for more,” she said again. “We work in ignorance. We’ve seen that today. We have to start a new program of inquiry; we have to understand our enemy, at last. We can begin with your captive Xeelee, Commissary. But we have to find out more about them — especially their Prime Radiant — if we are to defeat them.”

Nilis had no choice but to nod. “You’re right, of course.”

Luru pressed Gramm. “Minister, these requests are undeniably reasonable — and politically, will be hard to refuse. After all, Nilis and his heroes and his captive Xeelee have made a real stir here on Earth. If there was no follow-up, questions would surely be asked. Even under the Coalition, public opinion counts for something.”

Gramm grunted. “The power of the mob. Which the Commissary no doubt intended to stir up when he marched his two pet soldiers through the streets of the Conurbation.”

Pirius glanced at Nilis. Could it be true that Nilis had been so manipulative as to use them to further his own ends in such a way? There was much of the doings of Earth he had yet to understand.

But he had listened to this meeting unfold with increasing irritation. He felt bold enough to speak again. “Minister, Commissary — I’m sorry — I don’t understand all this talk of control and caution and stepwise funding. Isn’t winning the war what this is all about? Why don’t we just do this?”

Gramm raised his eyebrows. “Bravely spoken,” he said with quiet menace. “But no matter what gossip you’ve heard in your barracks at the Front, we don’t have infinite resources, Ensign. We can’t do everything.”

“But it’s not just that,” said Luru Parz. “Ensign, my dear child, how sweetly naive you are — but I suppose you have to be or you wouldn’t be prepared to fight in the first place. Is winning the war really what we want to achieve? What would Minister Gramm do all day if there were no more need for a Minister of Economic Warfare? I’m not sure our system of government could withstand the shock of victory.”

Gramm glared at Luru Parz, but didn’t challenge her.

Recklessly Pirius said to Gramm, “I don’t care about any of that. We have to try to win the war. It’s our duty, sir.”

Gramm looked at him, surprised, then threw his head back and laughed out loud, spraying bits of food into the air. “You dare lecture a Minister on duty? Lethe, this pet of yours has spirit, Commissary!”

“But he’s right,” Nilis said, shaking his shaven head gravely.

Luru pressed again, “So he is. You have to support this, Minister.”

Gramm growled, “And I will be flayed in Conclave for it. I would have thought you would be the most conservative of all of us, Luru Parz.”

She smiled. “I am conservative — very conservative. I just work on timescales you can’t imagine.”

Gramm actually shuddered, hugely. Again Pirius wondered who this woman was, what hold she had.

Pila, Gramm’s elegant advisor, watched this wordlessly, her lips upturned with disdainful humor. Throughout the whole of the meeting, as far as Pirius could remember, she hadn’t said a single word.

When the meeting broke up, Nilis came to the ensigns, his eyes shining. “Thank you, thank you. I knew my hunch was right, to bring you here — you have made all the difference! Project Prime Radiant — that’s what we’ll call it — Project Prime Radiant was born today. And the way you spoke back to the Minister — I will be dining out on that for years to come!”

Torec glared at Pirius, who said dolefully, “Yes, sir.”

“And now we have work to do, a great deal of work. The Minister has given us seven weeks to report — not long, not even reasonable, but it will have to do. Are you with me, Ensigns?”

Pirius studied this flawed old man, a man who had dragged him from his training, from his life, had hauled him across the Galaxy and then paraded him to further his own ends — and yet, flawed though he might be, Nilis was working for victory. Pirius could see no higher duty. “Yes, sir.”

Nilis turned to Torec. “And you won’t worry about being turned out of your job, when we win the Galaxy?”

Torec smiled. “No, sir. There are always more galaxies.” Her tone was bright, her smile vivid.

But Pirius saw Nilis pale at her words.

On Quin Base you lived inside the Rock.

Chapter 10

Once, this Rock had been nothing but a lumpy conglomerate of friable ice and dirt. Now it had been hollowed out and strengthened by an internal skeleton of pillars of fused and hardened stone.

The Rock’s inner architecture was layered. You spent most of your off-duty time in big, sprawling chambers just under the surface. Here you ate, slept, fornicated, and, perhaps, died. Beneath the habitable quarters was another layer of chambers, not all pressurized, with air and water purifiers, and the nano-food bays which processed rivers of grunt sewage. Right at the heart of the Rock were more essential systems yet: weapons shops and stores, a dry dock area for small craft.

But Pirius Blue and his crew spent most of their time on the surface. As Service Corps recruits, their job would be to support infantry in combat conditions. And so their training began with basic infantry work.

Which turned out to be very basic indeed.

Under Captain Marta’s watchful glare, in squads of a hundred or more, skinsuited cadets were put through hours of parade drill. Then there was the physical work: they bent, jumped, lifted, wrestled, endured endless route marches.

And they ran and ran and ran, endless laps of the trampled crater rim that seemed to be Marta’s favored form of torture.

Cohl, gasping, complained to Pirius. “You’d train a rat like this.”

Pirius forced a laugh. “If they could teach a rat to hold a spade you wouldn’t need infantry grunts at all—”

“No talking!”

And off they ran again, glued to the asteroid dirt by their inertial belts.

It seemed as if every cadet on this Rock was younger than the Navy crew, save only This Burden Must Pass; every one of them was fitter, including Burden. It was galling that the Claw crew came last or near last in every exercise they were put through, and had more work inflicted on them as “punishment.” The younger ones with their hard little bodies actually seemed to relish the sheer physical joy of it.

And it went on for hours. After a few days, sleep became the most important element in Pirius’s life, to be snatched whenever there was an opportunity, in the brief hours they were left alone before reveille, or out on the surface between punishing routines. He even learned to catnap standing up.

It was very different from Navy training. Much of the training for flight crew was specialized, highly intellectual, with physical training focusing on fast reactions, fine control, endurance — it was a unifying of mind and body, so that both could work effectively and efficiently under the intense conditions of combat. The very geometry of Arches Base, with its n-body architecture of plummeting asteroids, was designed to stimulate, to train you from birth to be free of vertigo, to judge shifting distances and motions on an interplanetary scale.

But Army grunts didn’t have to fly FTL warships. Here there was nothing more stimulating than dirt. Navy jokers always said that all grunts had to know how to do was dig and die, and now that Pirius was cast down among them, he was starting to suspect it was true.

Nothing could help poor Enduring Hope, though. No amount of effort seemed to shift a gram of fat from his body, and he always trailed in last.

As Captain Marta inflicted her punishments on him, she always kept the rest of the training group, hundreds of them sometimes, waiting at attention in their sweat-filled skinsuits. As Hope slogged through his lonely circuits, their resentment was tangible.

For Pirius, things slowly got more bearable.

After a couple of weeks, he could feel some of the fat falling off his body, and his muscles didn’t ache quite as much as they had after his first outings. His body was still young and was responding to the exercise, and he was not deprived of food, which he ate ravenously. He would never admit he enjoyed it. But he knew he was growing healthier, and he took some pleasure from the glow of his muscles.

He learned to use the correct Army rankings: colonel, not commander; sergeant, not petty officer. That at least lubricated the friction with the officers, none of whom had any time for Navy “flyboys.” It turned out that most officers here belonged to the elite regiment known as the Coalition Guard, who even looked down on the rest of the Army.

The culture of these infantry troops was very different from the Navy’s, but slowly he began to perceive their fundamental pride. This war fought with starships had a surprisingly primitive base. There was ground to be held everywhere, on planets full of people and docks and weapons factories, on Rocks thrown into the battle zone. If the ground was lost, the battle was lost. And if you were infantry you held the ground; if you were infantry you were mankind’s fighting force, and everybody else was just support.

Even the horror of their surroundings in the barracks began to wear off.

At first they felt as if they had been thrown into a pit of strange, subhuman animals. They were surrounded by smooth-skinned, lusty kids; it seemed to Pirius that whichever way you looked somebody had his dick out. “It’s like being in a Coalescence,” Cohl whispered, horrified, her eyes wide.

It certainly wasn’t like Arches. There, the instructors — combat veterans, even if they were invalided out — were role models for the cadets, and discipline was comparatively light. Most adults here were keepers, not teachers. It was all very dismaying.

But gradually, in their way, these strange swarming kids seemed to accept the Claw crew. Jabbering in their own strange, rapid dialect, the cadets would show them the way to the refectories and showers and de-lousing blocks. Others showed them simple tips on how to make your life easier: for instance, if you saved some grease from your food and rubbed it into the inside of the joints of your skinsuit, the chafing was eased a lot. Once when Pirius stumbled during one of Marta’s endless route marches, a couple of them came over and helped him up.

In the barracks one night, another offered to share her Virtual with him. It was a drama, a crude soap opera full of strong plotlines and tear-jerking emotions, one of a whole series pumped out endlessly by storytelling machines, all different yet all the same. Pirius watched a little to be polite, then slipped away when his host fell asleep.

And he became accustomed to visitors in the night: a smooth, round face hovering over his, a brush of lips on lips, a small hand probing under his blanket. These approaches came from boys, girls, and various combinations. Gently, with a smile, he pushed them away. He felt his life was complicated enough for now.

There was bound to be intense companionship here. After all, this was the front line of a war zone. You grew up with the people around you, and you knew you might die with them.

Death seemed always near. The very architecture of the Rock reminded you that the Army wasn’t in the business of preserving your life. If an attack were to come, the Rock’s pressurized layers would crush down. The cadets were a shield of human flesh and blood that might protect the Rock’s really valuable cargo, the weapons and ships at the core, a little longer.

People were expendable. Of course, that was true across the Front, in every branch of the service. Pirius had been brought up to believe he wouldn’t even have been given his life in the first place, if not for the strength and steely will of the Coalition, and it was his duty to give up that life whenever he was asked.

But the economic logic of war was brutal. At least as a pilot, the extensive training invested in you made you worth something. Here, among these Army grunts, the training was a good deal cheaper, and the grunts were a lot more disposable as a consequence. It was a chilling, desolating thought, which no amount of Doctrinal justification made easier to bear.

And so these children turned to each other for comfort.

Anyhow, the situation got better, bit by bit. But not for Enduring Hope.

Hope withdrew into himself; he became gray, oddly sickly, and was always exhausted. His broad, soft face, between those protruding ears, rarely showed a smile.

Pirius knew Captain Marta wasn’t trying to destroy Hope; she was attempting to break him down to build him up. But, he feared, she was getting it wrong. Pirius couldn’t see a thing he could do about it.

It came to a head at a roll call.

It was the thirty-fourth day after Pirius’s arrival here. Once again Enduring Hope had been the last to finish his run. The silence of the waiting cadets hid a wave of resentment that would break over Hope once he got back to the barracks.

But today, as he stood in his place in the line, wheezing, his body heaving with the strain of breathing, Pirius saw a spark of defiance.

Holding her data desk, Captain Marta called him. “Tuta.”

“My name,” he said, “is Enduring Hope.”

“Two more laps,” Marta said levelly. “Increased load.”

Still gasping, Hope stumbled out of his place in the line, and prepared to resume his run. Over the open loop Pirius could hear a barely muffled grumble as the cadets prepared to wait in their skinsuits even longer.

Enough, he thought. This is my fault, after all. He stepped forward. “Captain Marta.” Every eye save the Captain’s were on him.

Marta inspected her data desk. “I told you, Cadet. No questions.”

“His name is Enduring Hope.”

Hope heard him and stopped; he turned, astonished, hands on his knees. “Pirius,” he said between gasps. “Shut it.”

Marta said, “If you’re so keen to share his punishment, you can take it for him.” She touched her chest. The weight on Pirius’s shoulders increased suddenly, like a heavy load being dropped onto his back. “Three laps,” she said.

He walked stiffly out of line, and began to plod toward the crater path.

Hope said, “No, sir. I won’t have him take my punishment for me.”

“Four laps, Pirius.”

“Captain—”

“Five laps, increased load.”

Again the burden on Pirius’s back increased. He heard nothing more from Hope, who returned to his place in line.

Pirius traced the now familiar route, around and around this ancient splash in the Rock. His footprints shone pale in regolith that weathered quickly in this ferocious radiation environment, so close to the heart of the Galaxy.

He was already tired from his own training, and the increased load was the heaviest he had yet had to bear. Even after one lap, his heart was thumping, his lungs pulling, a blistering headache locked across his temples, and his stressed knees were tender. But he kept on, and counted off the laps, two, three, four.

As he neared the end of his fifth lap, Marta came to stand at the end of the course, her artificial half- torso gleaming by Galaxy light. He didn’t acknowledge her. He ran right past her, ran past the finish line. She let him run on, but she increased the load again. And when he repeated the stunt after the next lap, she increased it again.

By the end of the tenth lap he could barely see where he was going. And yet still he raised one foot after another, still he pounded over the churned-up dirt.

This time, as he passed Marta, she touched a control on her chest.

His suit locked to immobility. Suddenly he was a statue, poised in midstep, unbalanced. He fell, feather-slow. He hit the ground and finished up with half his face buried in carbonaceous dirt. His lungs heaved, but he could barely move inside the suit.

Marta crouched down so he could see her face with his one exposed eye. Over the voice loop he thought he could hear the whir of exoskeletal multipliers. She said, “It’s not my job to kill you, Cadet.”

“Sir.”

She leaned closer. “I know your type. I could see it in your face the minute you landed. That’s why I’ve picked on your fat friend, of course. To flush you out.”

“Sir.

She hissed, “Do you imagine you’re a hero, Pirius? Do you think you’re special?” She waved a hand. “Look at the sky. At any moment there are a billion human beings on the front line of this war. And do you imagine that out of all that great host you will be noticed?”

He struggled to speak. “That’s my ambition, sir.”

She leaned back. “If I release you, will you keep running?”

“Sir.”

“What do I have to do to keep you from killing yourself?”

“Artillery.”

“What?”

“There is an artillery unit, here on Quin.” It was true; Burden had told him. “Send Enduring — uh,

Tuta there. He’s an engineer. With respect, sir.”

She grunted. “I’ll take it on advisement. But next time you pull a stunt like this, cadet, I’ll let you kill yourself for sure.”

“Noted, sir.” She got up and walked away, leaving him lying in the dirt. Cohl, Burden, and a couple of other cadets came to carry him back to the airlock, where they had to cut him out of his locked suit.

It took a couple of days to come through, but Enduring Hope’s transfer to a platoon of monopole- cannon gunners was confirmed.

Chapter 11

Pirius Red’s cockpit was just a jet-black frame, open to space, very cramped. Through the open frame, he could see the pale yellow-gold stripes of Saturn’s cloud tops turning with majestic slowness. There were no physical controls, only Virtual displays and guide icons that hovered before his chest. The only other light was the soft green glow of the suit’s biopack. It was a lash-up.

But at least the cockpit was human-built, unlike the rest of his craft.

When he glanced over his shoulder, he could see the sleek, slim form of the ship’s main body, and the flaring, stunningly graceful shape of its wings. The hull was utterly black, black beyond any human analysis, so black it seemed that not a single infalling photon of Saturn light was reflected. This was the nightfighter disabled and captured by his own future self, Pirius Blue.

It was hard to believe this was happening. Today, six weeks after arriving on Earth, in the heart of Sol system itself, Pirius Red was to fly a Xeelee ship.

For a boy brought up at the center of the Galaxy, the sky of Sol system was dismal, empty, its barrenness barely broken by the few stars of this ragged spiral-arm edge and the bright pinpoint of the sun. Even Saturn was surprisingly dim, casting little light; the immense planet might harbor the mightiest concentration of firepower in Sol system, but it seemed oddly fragile. He wondered briefly how it might have looked in the old days when its tremendous rings of ice and dust had not yet been burned up as fuel and weaponry. You couldn’t even see the Core. Nilis had told him that from here the Galaxy center should be a mass of light the size of the Moon, brighter than anything in Earth’s sky save Sol itself. But Galaxy-plane gas clouds hid it. The earthworms didn’t even know they lived in a Galaxy until a few centuries before star flight began.

But today he didn’t care about earthworms. To Pirius, sitting here, this bare Galaxy-rim sky was a wild, exotic space, and to be at the controls of a genuine nightfighter was an unimaginable adventure.

He said to himself, “Life doesn’t get any better than this.”

A scowling face, no larger than his thumbnail, popped into existence before his eyes. “What’s that, Ensign?”

“Nothing, sir.”

This was Commander Darc, a sour, middle-aged, evidently competent Navy officer. The Navy hierarchy had insisted that one of their own be Pirius’s only contact during the trial itself, and Pirius wasn’t about to argue.

“You okay in that cage? If you want us to pull you out—”

“I’m fine.” Pirius smiled, making sure his face was visible behind the visor.

Darc growled, “Yes, I bet you are. Shrunk to fit, eh, Ensign?”

That was a jab about Pirius’s compact frame. “If you say so, sir.”

“Listen up.” The mission clock was counting down, and Darc began his final briefing. “The cockpit we built for you is obviously normal matter, baryonic matter.” Pirius still wasn’t sure what that meant. “But the hull of the ship itself, including the wing stubs, is made of another kind of matter called a condensate. Now, condensate doesn’t have normal quantum properties.”

Pirius flexed his gloved fingers experimentally; icons sparkled around Darc’s disembodied, shrunken head.

If a chunk of matter was cooled to extremely low temperatures — a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or less — the atoms would condense into a single quantum state, like a huge “superatom,” marching in step, like the coherent photons in a laser beam. Such a state of matter was called a “Bose-Einstein condensate,” though Pirius had no idea who Bose or Einstein might have been.

“We don’t know how to make such stuff at room temperatures,” Darc said. “Or how to make it dense; our lab condensates are so thin they are scarcely more than vacuum. But condensate has useful properties. For instance, if you add more atoms, they are encouraged to join the condensate structure.”

Pirius thought about that. “A condensate is self-healing.”

“The physicists would say self-amplifying. But yes; so it seems. You do understand that only your wing stubs are condensate. The wings themselves, when unfolded, are the basis of your sublight drive and are much more extensive. And they aren’t material at all…”

There was a lot of tension with the Navy crew assigned to the Project. Darc had spent his career in the Solar Navy Group; Pirius had learned that he’d never been deeper into the Galaxy than the Orion Line. Solar would be mankind’s last line of defense against the Xeelee in case of the final collapse, and was itself an ancient force, whose officers were fiercely proud of their own traditions. But Pirius had heard a lot of muttering about the “inbred little freaks” from the center of the Galaxy who were getting all the attention.

But Pirius was in this seat, not any of them.

Pirius knew that Nilis was aboard one of the escort ships, no doubt listening to every word. He wished Torec were here to see this. In fact Torec had fought for the privilege of being pilot on these trials. Given where she had got to in her training back on Arches, she was in fact marginally better qualified than Pirius. But Nilis had assigned her to another part of the project, the development of his “CTC computer,” as he called it, his closed-timelike-curve time-travel computing machine. Nilis made it clear that he considered the CTC-processor work just as important as experiments with the Xeelee ship, and she had to accept the assignment.

Anyway, in Pirius’s mind there had never been any question about who should get this ship; in a sense it was already his.

Darc was still talking. “The cockpit you’re sitting in is all ours, a human construct, Pirius. You’ve got full inertial protection in there, and other kinds of shielding. And we believe we have achieved a proper interface of your controls with the ship’s control lines. It was technically tricky, they tell me. More like connecting an implant to a human nervous system than hacking into any electromechanical device.”

“Sir, you’re telling me you’re not sure if it’s going to work.”

“Only one way to find out, Ensign.”

It was hard to concentrate, sitting here in this cockpit. Of course this wasn’t all for Pirius’s benefit; Darc, a career officer, was taking the chance to grandstand for audiences of his own.

The icons before his face were tantalizing. Only one way to find out. Pirius was in the hot seat; for once in his life he had power over events — and here, not Darc, not Nilis, not even Pirius Blue could get in his way.

He spread open his hands.

There was a shiver. It was like a breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of Torec’s fingers on his back when he slept.

He turned. The nightfighter’s wings had opened. They swept smoothly out of their condensate stubs to become a billowing black plane, like a sheet thrown over some immense bed. He knew that these were not material, not even anything so exotic as condensate. They were constructs of spacetime itself.

And they pulsed. The ship seemed poised, like a tensed muscle. He could feel it.

Suddenly the ship was alive; there was no other word for it. And despite the worst predictions of the doomsayers, even though he knew he was triangulated by a dozen starbreaker beams and other weapons, the ship waited to do his bidding. He laughed out loud.

Darc’s face was hovering before him, a shining coin, purple with rage. “I’ll feed you to the recyclers if you try another stunt like that, you little runt!”

No, you won’t, Pirius thought. You won’t dare. In the Conurbations of Earth, I’m a hero. It was an unexpected, delicious, utterly non-Doctrinal thought. He had the power — and Darc knew it.

“Awaiting permission to start the trial, sir,” Pirius said, carefully keeping his voice level.

Darc’s mouth worked, as if he were chewing back his anger. Then he said, “Do it.”

Pirius selected hovering icons and gathered them together with gentle wafts of his hands. Then he pointed.

The sparse stars blurred, turned blue. Saturn crumpled like a wad of golden tissue, vanished. Then the stars settled back, like a curtain falling, and it was over, almost before he knew it had begun.

There should have been no kick in the back, no sense of acceleration; if the inertial shield failed by the slightest fraction he would have been reduced to a pulp. And yet he felt something, as if his own body knew it had taken a great leap.

“…hear me? Respond, Ensign. Darc to Pirius. Respond—”

“Yes, sir, I’m here.”

There was a perceptible delay before Darc replied. “Ensign, you traveled light-seconds at around three-quarters lightspeed.”

“Just as per the flight plan.”

“You even stopped where you were supposed to.”

Pirius glanced back over his shoulder. Saturn, the only object in his universe large enough to show a disc, had been reduced to a tiny yellowish spot. He should have felt even more isolated, he thought; exposed. But all he felt was power. With this ship he could go anywhere, do anything.

And the test had barely begun.

“Sir, do you want me to bring her back?”

“You sit tight,” Darc snapped. “That fly is going to get a thorough checkout before it moves another centimeter — as are you. We’re coming as fast as we can.” And so they were, Pirius saw. Staring toward Saturn, he made out a small flotilla of ships, gradually drifting across the background stars.

He pressed his hands to his thighs, resisting the temptation to take off once more.

Nilis loomed huge over the nightfighter. With its wings furled, the ship would have rested in the palm of the hand of this kilometers-high Virtual, Pirius thought.

It ought to have been an absurd sight, even a faintly revolting one; Nilis’s head was the size of a Spline starship, every blocked pore in his aged skin a pit like a weapons emplacement. But Pirius was back in orbit around Saturn now, and the planet’s subdued, golden light oddly filled up the Virtual image. And wonder was bright in Nilis’s tremendous eyes.

“Defects in spacetime,” Nilis said. “That’s what the wings of a nightfighter are. Flaws in the structure of spacetime itself. And look here.”

He waved his immense hands and produced another gigantic Virtual. This one showed the Xeelee nightfighter in flight, the beautiful, elusive, bafflingly complex motions of its wings of flawed spacetime. Nilis replaced the true image with a schematic. The ship was overlaid by a framework, a kind of open tetrahedron, with bright red blobs at its four corners. The tetrahedron went through a complex cycle of deformations. It closed like an umbrella, its legs shortening as they moved; then they would lengthen before the “umbrella” opened again and the frame returned to its starting configuration.

“This is a schematic of the wings’ motion,” Nilis said. “See the way the wings change their shape. You have to think of spacetime as the natural medium of the craft. It is like — like a bacterium embedded in water. To a small enough creature, water is as viscous as treacle, and in such sticky stuff swimming is difficult, because if your recovery stroke is the same as your impulsive stroke you pull yourself back to where you started. So what bacteria do is adopt different geometrical shapes, during the first and second parts of the stroke, to pull themselves forward. It’s called a geometric phase, a closed sequence of different shapes.

“Pirius, the nightfighter is embedded in spacetime as surely as any bacterium in water. By pulsing through their sequence of shapes, the wings of the nightfighter are clearly using a geometric phase to control and direct the ship’s motion. It’s a shape-shifting drive — nothing like a rocket, no need for anything like reaction mass to be thrown out the back of your ship — really quite remarkable. And quite unlike the principles on which human sublight drives are based.”

Pirius understood, if vaguely. Human-designed drives pushed, not against spacetime itself, but against the vacuum, the seething quantum foam of virtual particles that pervaded space. At the heart of such a drive was an extended crystalline substrate, made to vibrate billions of times a second. As the substrate passed through the quantum foam, electric fields were induced in its surface by the foam’s fluctuating forces, fields dissipated by spraying out photons. If you arranged things right, so Pirius had been told in cartoon-level lectures, you could use those shed photons to push you forward.

“Our drives work all right,” Nilis said. “But they are slower than the Xeelee drive. And they break down constantly. Those crystals are expensive, and they shatter easily.”

Pirius knew that. You had to carry a rack of spares for a journey of more than a few light-hours. “And besides,” he said slowly, “the Xeelee method sounds more…” He couldn’t think of the word.

Nilis smiled hugely. “Elegant?”

“I guess so.”

“Thanks to your brave work today, we understand the source of that elegance a great deal better. But still there are questions. Swimming in spacetime is an odd way to do things. This is a method that would work best in regions of highly curved spacetime, where you can get more traction — say, around a black hole.”

“We know the Xeelee infest Chandra.”

“Yes, and that offers us all sorts of clues about them. But they also have to operate in environments like this, far from any dense concentrations of matter, where spacetime is all but flat. In fact, if the spacetime were perfectly flat, the drive couldn’t work.

“And why use spacetime defects as the basis of your drive in the first place? There was a time, in the moments after the Big Bang singularity, when such things were common, for the orderly structure of the swollen spacetime we inhabit was still forming. There were points, loops, sheets—”

“The point defects are monopoles.”

“Yes. That’s why monopoles are useful weapons — one defect can interfere with another. Spacetime was heavily curved, too. I suppose if you were designing a drive system, then you might naturally pick defects and spacetime-swimming as your way to work. It isn’t nearly so obvious now — and hasn’t been since microseconds after the singularity. So why use it? And then there is the question of the Xeelee themselves. Where are they?”

That leap confused Pirius. “Sir?”

“No matter how closely I inspect this craft I can only find machinery, layer upon layer of it. No sign of a crew!”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Nor do I — not yet.” The immense ghostly Virtual leaned forward, and a glistening eye the size of a Conurbation loomed eagerly over Pirius. “Still, I do think we’re getting somewhere. The word ’Chandra,’ you know, is very ancient — pre-Occupation. Some say the black hole is named after a scientist of antiquity. Others say that the word means luminous. Well, if luminous it is, I don’t think Minister Gramm is going to enjoy the sight of what Chandra is beginning to illuminate for us!”

Chapter 12

Alone, her skinsuit stained dark gray by moondust, Torec clambered through the remains of an exotic matter factory.

This place had been built twenty thousand years ago by the Qax, alien occupiers of Earth. After the rebellion that had forced the Qax out of Sol system, all the equipment had been stripped out, and the roof smashed open to the black sky. You could still see small blast craters and bits of wreckage left over from that ancient turmoil. And the gaunt walls remained, broken sheets of lunar concrete that cast long, sharp shadows over the undulating dust of the Moon ground.

While Pirius had been flying a nightfighter among the moons of Saturn, she had been stuck here a month already. There were three weeks left before the deadline Gramm had set, and the final demonstration of Nilis’s prototype CTC processor, his time-travel computer, would be due. Torec longed for those weeks to be up.

Torec was always aware of Earth, high in the sky. The great arc of the Bridge was easily visible — stunning, unnatural, disturbingly defying logic. And she could see the layers of defenses that surrounded the home planet: the circling Snowflakes, the crawling specks of patrolling warships. Even seen from its Moon, Earth bristled with fortifications.

It was only in these ruins, half an hour’s hike from the development base, that she felt at ease. When she walked here, Earth’s bright blue was eclipsed by the broken masses of the walls, and she could imagine she was far away from here, not in Sol system at all. And the best thing was that the earthworm techs she had to work with never came here.

An alarm chimed softly in her helmet. The latest integration test was due to begin, a full-scale run of the CTC-processor prototype. It would go ahead whether she was there or not, of course. But she had her duty.

She turned, made for the open sunlight, and began to bound across the plain, legs working together in a comfortable low-gravity style.

She took her place on the low ridge that had been designated as an observation area. A countdown was proceeding, she saw, a silent flickering of numerals ticking away on monitoring displays. Techs stood patiently and bots hovered, waiting for the test to begin.

The prototype CTC processor was a maze of ducts, pipes, and tubes that connected anonymous silver-white boxes. It sprawled for more than half a kilometer over the dusty lunar plain. The ground was darkened by boot prints, but as the time of the test approached the area had been evacuated, and only monitoring bots hovered cautiously over the complex central tangle.

The prototype, gleaming silver and gold in the pure low sunlight of lunar morning, looked oddly beautiful, a scattered work of art. But Torec had come to hate this thing which governed her life.

Two Virtuals materialized, out of nothing. One was dressed in a skinsuit; the other, Nilis, was not. The Commissary, hovering a few centimeters above the lunar floor, wore nothing more than his customary scuffed robe, and his feet were bare. He had never been one for Virtual protocol, but this was actually illegal. Virtuals were supposed to “dress” suitably for the environment they showed up in; it cost nothing more than a little extra computing power, and to do otherwise risked fooling a real- life inhabitant of the target environment about conditions that could be lethal. But it was typical Nilis, Torec thought. As he watched the patient countdown, his gaze was intent, his hands clasping each other, his eyes hollow.

The other Virtual was of a woman, dressed appropriately in a skinsuit. She was tall, somehow elegant despite her functional clothing. Seeing Torec, she walked across to her, leaving no footprints in the lunar dust. “You’re the Navy child.”

Torec bristled. “I’m Ensign Torec.”

“My name is Pila. I work in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.” Her face was smooth, ageless; she gazed at Torec, apparently mocking. It was a look Torec had become very familiar with on Earth, and had come to despise.

“I met you once. You work for Minister Gramm.”

“I’m one of his advisors, yes.” Pila waved a hand at the prototype. “Very impressive. And it’s all based on time travel?”

“Closed-timelike-curves, yes.” Torec pointed to the ducts. “Pilot Officer Pirius — Pirius Blue — defeated the Xeelee because his fellow pilot used her FTL drive to bring tactical information back from the future. So we have miniature bots in those tubes. The bots are the components of the processor. They fly back and forth, and actually jump through short FTL loops.”

“Little starships in tubes! And these bots travel back in time and tell you the answer before you even pose the question?”

“Something like that.”

“How marvelous.”

The dummy problem they were hoping to run today concerned protein folding. Proteins were the structural elements of life, but remained beyond the capability of humans to design optimally. There were more proteins a hundred components long than there were electrons in the universe; to work out how many ways a long protein molecule could fold up was an ancient problem, previously insoluble even in principle. “But we hope to crack it,” Torec said. She pointed to a large blank Virtual screen. “The results will be displayed there.”

Pila eyed her analytically. “Are you enjoying your posting here, Ensign? On the Moon, this project?”

“I’m here to do my duty, ma’am.”

She nodded, her mouth pursed. “Of course. And you anticipate success?”

Torec had learned how to deal with smooth-faced bureaucrats and their slippery questions. Nilis had warned her severely that if she were pessimistic, or even overly optimistic, she could trigger the funding being pulled. “This is only the first step. A proof of principle. Eventually we will have to cram this down into a unit small enough to be carried on a greenship.”

“A clever answer,” the woman murmured. “And what is your key problem?”

Torec shrugged. “Control of those flying bots, obviously. We’ve a list of issues.”

Virtual Nilis, who had ignored them both completely, now clapped his hands in agitation. Torec saw that the silent count was nearing its close; Nilis, projected from distant Earth, could barely contain his anticipation. Even Pila turned to look.

The count reached zero. The Virtual screen stayed blank, empty of protein schematics.

In that first instant Torec knew the trial had failed. After all, the whole point of this FTL-computing exercise was to send the answer back in time to the beginning.

And an explosion flared at the center of the complex. Torec was briefly dazzled. Silent, brief, the detonation kicked up an unspectacular flurry of moondust that, with no air to suspend it, collapsed immediately back to the ground.

Torec blinked and looked around. On the lunar plain, the techs were already converging on the ruin of their prototype. Some of them, she could hear on the open loop, were actually laughing.

The woman Pila had already gone.

The Virtual of Nilis was glaring at her. She had never seen him look so angry. “In your quarters,” he snapped. “Now.” And he winked out of existence, leaving pixels sparkling briefly.

When she got back to her quarters she pulled off her skinsuit, dumped it in a hopper, and climbed into her shower.

Big droplets of water squeezed out of the spigot with infuriating low-g slowness. It was typical of the earthworms to install such a luxury in a place where water couldn’t even flow properly, where it would actually have been better to have been supplied with simple honest clean-cloths. But she slaked off her sweat, rinsed her hair, and washed moondust out from under her nails.

The project’s development was being carried out on the floor of an immense walled plain called Clavius. Though this had once been the site of a major industrial facility erected by the Qax, it was far to the lunar south, and so was still outside the scope of the current paraterraforming efforts, the vast domed colonies that were turning the Moon’s face green around the equatorial foot of the Bridge between Earth and its satellite.

For a month, Torec had been stranded in this airless, dusty place. Nilis had given her a small team of scientists and engineers, to progress his designs for a revolutionary new computer. It had done her no good to protest that she had been trained as a pilot; she was a fighter, not some kind of double- domed tech. Nilis said it was important that one of what he called his “inner team” be attached to this essential development.

So she had been put in charge of what was laughingly called the Project Office. It was her job, in theory, to make sure the techs here did their work to spec, to quality, and on time.

At first she had actually welcomed the move to the Moon. Unlike the Earth, the Moon was a proper world, in her view, a world without a freakish layer of unmodified atmosphere or surging bodies of open water. This was a world where, quite properly, if you stepped out of a dome you had to wear a skinsuit, and where if you fell over you weren’t likely to break anything — if you wanted high gravity you set an inertia field; that was the way it was supposed to be. She had even liked the look of the scenery, when Nilis had shown her images of Clavius from orbit, a spectacular crater formation with mountainous walls surrounding a cluster of settlement lights.

But it hadn’t turned out that way. For a start, the Moon itself was not like the rocky worlds she had encountered in the Core, where, thanks to the stars’ relentless crowding, few stellar systems were stable, and worlds wandered where they would. The Moon had spent five billion years stuck at the bottom of a star’s gravity well as the companion of a massive planet, and debris, sucked in by those overlapping gravity fields, had battered its surface until nothing was left. As a result, every mountain was sandblasted to a dunelike smoothness, and every scrap of the ground was covered by a thick layer of dust that crushed under your feet where you walked, or kicked up behind you, and stuck to your skinsuit until it was almost impossible to get off, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

And then there were the people.

Incredibly, she was the only person here born beyond the orbit of the Moon. Not only that, aside from a couple of essential-systems and security types, she was the only Navy personnel here. The rest of them, Ministry folk, were bureaucrats — and they were double-domes. From the beginning, they had looked on her as a bizarre, exotic creature from some alien realm, as if she weren’t human at all.

The double-domes had soon discovered that she knew little about their technical specialisms. When she tried to put her foot down, they would bluster and baffle her with jargon. And they squabbled among themselves, the whole time. From the start, the development team was organized into groups corresponding to subcomponents of the CTC processor itself, or else stages of the project: scoping, design, component prototyping, subassembly, integration. No matter how Torec tried, those groups soon became clannish, to the point where many of them wouldn’t even communicate with each other — even though their work would have to fit together seamlessly if the overall goal was to be reached.

It was a horrible frustrating mess. Soon Torec had come to hate the prototype, which developed into a baffling, mazelike complex of components that spread across the gray lunar dust. And she came to hate the techs in their expensive Ministry skinsuits, as they clambered over their equipment, prodding, tinkering, and arguing.

What was worse was that Torec really didn’t care about any of this. This wasn’t her life, her goal; she didn’t want to be here. And when the techs picked up on that they began to ignore her altogether.

She was here for Pirius, not for herself. That was the basic truth. As it happened, she had had feelings for Pirius, even before Nilis had shown up. She knew their relationship was special — though she wasn’t sure he understood it. But now things were different. She knew the situation wasn’t Pirius’s fault, but it was because of him.

She hated the Moon, her work, the people she had to deal with. She was very confused about her feelings for Pirius. And what was worst of all was that he wasn’t here.

When she came out of the shower, the Nilis Virtual was in the room.

His face was bathed in the light of an invisible sun, but he wasn’t looking her way. He had been uncomfortable in her company since that row on the corvette. He said, “Another disappointment, then.”

“Yes.”

The Moon-Earth time lag was small, but enough to be disconcerting until you got used to it. “If only we could use wormholes!”

“Commissary?”

“I know you’ve taken to hiking over to the ruins of the old Qax exotic-matter facility. But do you know why the Qax set up that factory? Because you can use exotic matter to make wormholes, superluminal bridges between two points in space and time. If you configure it correctly, a wormhole can be a tunnel to the past. In fact it was a human wormhole time-bridge that started our trouble with the Qax in the first place.”

Torec had heard some of the techs talking of those semilegendary, pre-Occupation times, and of “Michael Poole,” the great engineer who had built wormholes to open up Sol system, and past and future, too.

“Yes. Now, imagine if we could use wormholes to close our processor’s timelike curves, instead of these absurd toy spaceships we have flying everywhere! You know, it’s a Druzite myth that our progress is forever upward; the merest glance at your ruins shows that. If only Michael Poole were alive now! I’m sure he would have our prototype up and running in a day. Ensign, do you ever think that the people of the past were giants — that we are stunted, small by comparison?”

“No, sir,” she said defiantly. “We are the ones who are here, now. All we can do is our best.”

“Are you talking about duty again, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir.”

“ ’Our best.’ “ He turned to face her. She wondered how she looked to him: just another Virtual ghost, she supposed, palely lit, hovering in the air in his Conurbation apartment. “How do you feel about your work, Torec?”

She knew Nilis would not be satisfied with a bland evasion. “I can’t say I’m happy, sir.”

“You aren’t?”

“This isn’t what I’m trained for. I can see why you took Pirius to Earth; what he did — Pirius Blue — was astonishing. But I was only brought along to keep Pirius happy.”

Nilis sighed. “You feel trapped. Perhaps, you think, without my intervention, you would have ended your relationship with Pirius, moved onto somebody else… You were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and so have ended up here.”

“Something like that,” she said. She kept her face blank. What did this old fool know? Anyhow, it was none of his business.

But as it turned out he did know rather a lot. “In fact,” Nilis said dryly, “you wouldn’t have broken up with Pirius.”

Her face was hot. “How can you know that?”

“Because I asked Pirius Blue. In that other, vanished timeline, Pirius Blue stayed with, ah, Torec Blue, shall we call her, until he left for his last fateful mission. For two years, Ensign. That was a factor in Captain Seath recommending you to come on this mission. She knew, too.”

Torec’s feelings were very complex. She didn’t like discussing her emotional life with this soggy old Commissary, and it made her uncomfortable to talk about a relationship she might have had, but now never would. “You’re talking about two years I won’t live through. Two years of choices I don’t get to make.”

“True,” said Nilis. “So how do you feel now?”

She thought it over. “Just as trapped. More, maybe.”

He laughed. “The curse of predestination! Well, if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t my idea to bring you to Earth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But now you’re here you have a job to do. You are at least satisfied that you’re doing your best, are you?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Don’t lie to me.” Suddenly his face was blazing.

She flinched. But it struck her that he must have timed that riposte to beat the timelag — he knew what she would say, before he had heard her reply. “Sir?”

“We failed again today, Ensign, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“But it isn’t my fault — the techs—”

“And if we fail in three weeks, when Gramm conducts his final review, then the plug will be pulled. No more funding. Everything will be lost. I suggest you start to do the job I entrusted to you.”

“Sir—”

“And don’t tell me it’s beyond you. Let me give you three pieces of advice. First, the bot control issue. That has plagued us since the beginning.”

“The techs say it might be intractable. The problem of controlling a crowd of FTL bots—”

Nilis waved a hand dismissively; Torec saw Earth soil under his fingernails. “Then step around the problem. Think sideways, Ensign. Let the bots guide themselves. As long as each bot is aware of the position of the other nearest, and follows the overall imperative, the solution will emerge. Tell your techs to let the bots swarm. Next, discipline. Even I, from half a million kilometers away, can see the open warfare that’s broken out between some of your subteams.”

Torec said miserably, “Sir, they all say the others are fools, or even saboteurs, who must be forced to do things their way. And when we come together on the test site, nothing ever fits.”

He laughed. “Well, you’re not the first project manager who’s faced that. Interface management, Torec. Change control. Look up those terms and apply them.” He stood up and brushed dust from his robe; when it left contact with his body it disappeared. “Finally—”

“Sir?”

She saw fatigue in his deep eyes; she knew he was spreading himself thin, commuting between Earth and Saturn to give time to all the different, and all demanding, aspects of his project. “Oh, my eyes, I don’t have the words. The people here are soft-bodied technicians from the cities of Earth. They are softer than me! But you, you’re a soldier from the Central Star Mass! And you’re smart, I know that.” He waved his hands. “Kick butt! Is that how you’d put it?”

“Yes, sir,” she said dully.

He was staring at her, apparently still unsure if she had got the message. “What do you imagine failure in this project will mean, Ensign?”

“The war will go on—”

“Forget about the war. Forget about mankind’s glorious destiny. What about you? Do you imagine you will be shipped back to the Front — that you will be carried back across the Galaxy? Do you imagine anybody would go to such expense, just to get a few combat weeks out of a cipher like you? Do you think that anybody cares that much? Do you think the Coalition loves you, Ensign?”

She felt crushed.

He thundered, “I’ll tell you what will happen. You’ll be sent to Mercury. That’s Sol I, the planet closest to the sun. There are mines there, and solar energy farms. It’s a factory world, Ensign, a place of warrens where you never see the blazing sun, and you’re grateful not to. And there you will die — not gloriously, not in combat with your comrades, but miserable and alone, when your youth and strength are used up. Do you want that?”

“Sir, my duty—”

“Oh, to Lethe with your duty!” he roared. “Is that how you want to die?”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“No, sir!”

“Then I suggest you ensure we don’t fail.” His Virtual snapped out of existence.

Chapter 13

Even though his training gradually morphed away from simple endurance and fitness work, day-to- day life as an infantry cadet was a lot harder than anything Pirius Blue had suffered in the Navy.

For one thing, he now spent his whole life in his Army-issue skinsuit. In a greenship blister, at least you could crack your faceplate from time to time and scratch your nose. Here, for hours on end, you just had to endure your itches, chafes, and other discomforts.

You even got lectured at in your skinsuit, one of thousands standing on the surface of the Rock, by Marta or one of the other instructors.

“You need to grasp the basic logic of the Rocks,” Marta would say. “The Xeelee have more firepower than we do. But somehow we have to soak up that firepower. And that’s where the Rocks come in. We just throw Rocks, one after the other, in through the Front and into the Cavity around Chandra. The Xeelee come flocking out. But the big mass of a Rock just absorbs all that Xeelee juice…” It was a crude strategy, but time-tested, said Captain Marta; human troopers riding the Rocks had kept the Xeelee bottled up inside the Front for three thousand years. And soon it would be the honor of these fresh troops to join them.

Bathed in the light of the Galaxy center, the cadets stood in rows, their biopacks shining green, listening to such stuff in attentive silence. As the hours wore by, Pirius would see rustles of movement as a cadet shifted her inertial-field weight from one booted foot to the other, or her body would subtly relax as she voided her bladder or bowels into her suit’s system, all the time keeping rigidly at attention. Woe betide you if you showed any physical discomfort — and fainting was rewarded by ten days of route marches.

The theory of infantry strategy didn’t take long to impart, however. To a first approximation, Pirius decided, an infantryman’s job was to dig.

Every day, troopers would swarm in their thousands out of the great underground barracks and, under the brusque command of their officers, cut into the surface of the Rock. Much of the asteroid was already covered by latticeworks of trenches and foxholes and dugouts left by previous generations, but these were regularly plowed over, so you always had virgin areas to work.

And in these earthworks Pirius and Cohl learned how to dig.

There was actually an art to digging, if you had to do it on the surface of an asteroid in a skinsuit. The environment was microgravity, of course, with hard vacuum all around. The trick was to use your inertial belt to pin you to the ground, while digging into the dirt with your spade and trenching tools.

The upper few meters of asteroid dirt were generally loosely packed; most asteroids were coated with dust, the product of aeons of collisions and micrometeorite bombardment. Under the layer of dust you would eventually reach conglomerate, a rubble of boulders and pebbles, which was pretty much the story the rest of the way in: only the largest asteroids had solid cores. It was easy enough to collect a big spadeful of this stuff and hurl it out of the way; there was no air resistance, and the dust grains followed a spray of neat parabolas. But gravity was so low that it could take many minutes for the grains to fall back — and it took skill to aim your spadeload so that the debris didn’t rain down on your neighbor, or even more embarrassingly, back on top of you.

Inside the Front, the conditions would be worse still. There, as you dug your trench, you would be drenched by gamma rays and other hard radiation emanating from the exotic objects that crowded the Galaxy’s center. So the trainers sent up drones to pour gamma radiation down over the laboring cadets, and they had to wear stiffer, shielded skinsuits, which made the digging still more tricky. What was worse yet was that the radiation ionized the dust, which made the grains stick to each other and to your skinsuit, and a good proportion of your time was taken up just scraping debris off your suit. It took Pirius and Cohl a long time to get the hang of it.

A long trench being dug was an oddly beautiful sight, though. You would see neat lines of dust fountains, thrown up by the brisk, enthusiastic work of the cadets, and on the open loops you would hear them sing together as they worked. It was a strange juxtaposition: this very strange place, so far from Earth, with one of the most primitive human technologies.

As his muscles continued to build up, Pirius almost began to enjoy the endless labor. Even the futility of being sent back day after day to the same crater bed, with the fruits of his previous day’s labor plowed over to be dug out again, didn’t deter him. If he worked hard enough he didn’t have to think at all, and the complication of everything that had happened since the magnetar could be excluded from his mind.

The regiment known as the Guards was a strong presence on this Rock.

Pirius’s principal training officer, Marta, was one of them. Even raw Guard trainees would flow across the Rock’s surface as precisely coordinated as components of a machine. What baffled Pirius was the way they always seemed able to keep their kit shining clean, even in the clinging dust. The Guards were an elite, and they knew it, and their superiority began with their obsessive smartness.

Pirius and Cohl weren’t in the Guards, however. They were assigned to the Army Service Corps, the lowest of the low.

Their work was to support the frontline troops. Before they had come here, Pirius had vaguely imagined this might mean they would be safer. As it turned out, in combat the Service Corps had to prepare the ground for advances — which, Pirius learned, often meant going forward ahead of the first line of fighting troops. After an action began, they would have to help dig and consolidate earthworks, and move back and forth bearing supplies and maintaining comm links. Sometimes, when the electromagnetic environment was particularly ferocious, they would have to run from the front line to the rear and back, bearing messages by hand.

And when the action began its terrible grinding, the Service Corps became field medics and stretcher bearers. Infantry skinsuits were designed to keep you alive as long as possible, but they were primarily fighting armor, and traumatic injuries would be beyond any suit’s capacity to stabilize. Pirius was taught how to apply the simple medicine possible through a skinsuit, such as tying off a damaged limb. And he learned how to bundle a body, locked in a rigid suit, onto open-frame stretchers, and to crawl with casualties through the earthworks back to casualty clearing stations.

So as Service Corps, they would be exposed to fire just as much as the frontline fighters, if not more so. Not that that gained them any respect from the frontliners, who seemed convinced that the Service Corps had it soft, with the first pick of rations, unlimited benefits, and protection from the battle.

There were a few other Navy exiles, like Pirius, and other undesirables in the Service Corps. But most of their number was made up of infantry troopers who had managed to survive one or two actions and grown too old, or perhaps too wounded or shocked, to fight anymore. These superannuated misfits felt misunderstood and put-upon. As they worked, they would sing their own plaintive song: We are the ASC / We work all night, we work all day / The more we work, the more we may / It makes no difference… Few of these gloomy veterans were older than twenty.

Eventually they were introduced to more sophisticated surface operations.

The cadets were taught to move in the open. They were organized into platoons of ten, which practiced moving together. The basic technique was to advance through lines of trenches toward an enemy position. You scrambled out of one trench, running or crawling across the asteroid dirt, and then hurled yourself into the next. The instructors used drone bots to simulate enemy fire — cadets would be “killed” by laser spots that made their suits go rigid. The inertial belts were priceless; without them the simplest kick or misstep could send you floating upward — but of course you also practiced how to keep moving forward even if your belt failed. The cadets seemed to enjoy this running around, apparently not imagining how it would be to go through this in combat conditions.

Pirius quickly learned there was more to it than simple trench-hopping. The cadets had to consolidate and reinforce the trenches they found themselves in. And they practiced leapfrogging, in which a second line of troops would pass through the first to make a more rapid advance.

It got more complicated still. Platoons of ten apiece were clustered into companies of maybe a hundred warm bodies. They practiced maneuvering as a company, in which one platoon would advance under the covering fire of another, all the while keeping the line intact. The next level up was a battalion, in which a thousand cadets would wash forward in coordinated waves. The instructors would throw unexpected problems in their way, and the cadets learned how to accommodate holes appearing in their lines, or being forced to back up from unexpectedly fortified positions. The cadets did this over and over, until every one of them knew what was expected in any given situation.

These elaborate maneuvers were all about mutual protection. Each company was covered by those to either side of it, just as each platoon was protected through mutual cover by the fellows down the line — which was why it was so important to keep the line together.

But for an individual trooper, in the end your only real protection was the presence of those around you, in your own platoon. You had to rely on them to watch your back — and if the worst happened, you had to hope that one of them would take the hit that might otherwise have taken you out.

The cadets seemed to understand that. If you were stuck in your skinsuit on a Rock falling into Xeelee fire, the great sweeping strategy of the war meant little. You were there to fight for your comrades. Very close bonds formed between the cadets — bonds that were strictly non-Doctrinal, as you weren’t really supposed to have loyalties to anything but the greater cause. But the instinct to fight for your comrades seemed as deep as humanity itself. It couldn’t be denied — indeed it had to be encouraged, quietly, whatever the Doctrines preached.

Pirius tried not to think about his situation. He knew he wasn’t here to think. But there were obvious questions he couldn’t help asking. For instance, why use human muscles to dig when you could get machines to do it for you?

He heard a whole series of rationales. Even after millennia of development it was difficult to shield equipment from the blistering radiation environment inside the Mass. Machines were liable to break down — and of course they drew the fire of the Xeelee. Humans were comparatively robust, at least for a while. Then there was the psychological factor: the trenches and foxholes were there to provide cover for the infantry, and nobody trusted a trench dug by a machine as much as one you dug out yourself. It was good for morale, then, to keep digging, digging.

But his pilot’s training prompted more questions. Why stick to such a crude strategy? Even using ground troops you could imagine more subtlety. You could coordinate your forces, strike with precision, move on.

He wasn’t about to ask such questions of Captain Marta, but, soaking up his training, he could figure out what the answers would be. A Rock offered shelter, so you had to stick to its ground. But in combat a Rock was drenched in firepower — and, even if the Xeelee didn’t show up to play, in the hard radiation of the Core. You couldn’t rely on communication, coordination, in such circumstances; you had to train for a worst case, in which every platoon, maybe every trooper, was cut off from everybody else, save for what she could see of the battlefield around her. In this ultimate war, only the crudest of tactics could be relied on to work.

But, guided by his conversations with This Burden Must Pass, he began to suspect that the truth behind the strategy was ideological. Clinging to humanity was the essence of the Druz Doctrines, the principles that had kept mankind united across twenty thousand years and the span of a Galaxy. So humans had to wage this war, humans had to dig their trenches, and fight and die, not their machines.

Pirius built up a new image of the Front in his head. It was a great shell enclosing the center of the Galaxy, and it was studded with worldlets like this one, and on every one of them there were human beings, digging and burrowing. They were digging for victory; that was what the instructors told them. And whether or not they ever achieved that victory, Pirius thought, with every spadeful of glistening asteroid dirt, the Druz Doctrines and the unity of mankind were reinforced that little bit more.

Chapter 14

Two weeks after Pirius Red’s first test flight of the Xeelee nightfighter, Nilis set up a briefing for the Minister. It was held on Enceladus, moon of Saturn. Minister Gramm attended with his peculiar Virtual “advisor” Luru Parz, and Commander Darc and one of his adjutants represented the Navy.

And Nilis began to lecture. Even before this glowering crew, in his typical overly academic way, the Commissary would never just state his conclusions: no, that wasn’t his style. He had to establish the facts first; he had to educate his audience.

Since analyzing the results of the tests on the Xeelee craft, Nilis said, he had hardened his ideas about the nature and origin of the Xeelee. He tried to talk his way through a very complex series of graphics which supported, he said, his hypothesis about the nature of the Xeelee nightfighter: that it was not just a machine.

“Life on Earth is of course built on oxygen-carbon chemistry. But a wide range of such compounds are possible under chemical law. If you analyze the contents of carbon-compound material scraped from a lifeless comet, you get a broad, smooth distribution like this.” A flat, even curve. “An indiscriminate melange of many compounds. Whereas if you analyze a scraping of my skin, for instance, a sample from a living being, you get this.” A spiky distribution showing a heavy concentration of certain compounds, nothing of others. “We call this the building-block principle, and it’s believed to be a universal feature of life. There is a strong selection toward standard building blocks, you see: living things from Earth use the same handful of key components — amino acids, sugars — over and over, out of all the theoretically possible compounds—”

“A Xeelee nightfighter isn’t made of amino acids,” Gramm growled.

“No. But look here.” Nilis showed displays of substructures he had observed in the Xeelee’s design, in its condensate hull, even its spacetime-defect wings. The distributions were spiky. “You see? A characteristic building-block pattern. And that has certain consequences. Of course any life-form must have certain features — notably an information store.”

He began to speculate about how a Xeelee genome might be stored. A genotype of an organism was the internal data store that defined that organism’s growth and structure; Nilis’s own genotype was stored in DNA. The phenotype was the expression of that data, like Nilis’s body. Nilis said that extended quantum structures had been discovered in the “spine” of the craft. So far it had only been possible to hack into the simpler communications loops that controlled the ship’s basic operations. But if he was right, somewhere in there was stored the equivalent of Xeelee DNA.

“They may reproduce through some exotic principle, much more sophisticated than our own molecule-splitting. We know they use quantum entanglement to communicate. Perhaps for a Xeelee, giving birth is more like teleportation, making a copy of oneself outside the body.” He imagined what might be possible if human hackers could break into that genotype, how Xeelee technology could be hijacked…

His listeners took this in with resentment and impatience. Pirius thought it was remarkable how a genius like Nilis could continually misjudge the mood of his audience. Pirius himself was sanguine. He had become a veteran of incomprehensible technical briefings long before he left Arches Base, and he knew how to keep up a show of attentiveness while letting his thoughts wander.

Pirius had picked up some gossip from the locals. An ice-coated ball of rock, Enceladus wasn’t even Saturn’s largest moon — that was called Titan. On Titan, vast factory ships cruised seas of hydrocarbon slush and processed it into nano-food, to feed ever-hungry Earth. Of course, these days all this was controlled by the agencies of the Coalition, but Titan had a racy history. Titan had once been the most populous human world beyond the orbit of Earth itself. Even now — so the locals informed him — in the great ports with their ice-carved harbors, where kilometer-long factory ships put in to offload their stores and hundred-meter-high waves lapped like dreams, there were exotic adventures to be had, if you knew where to look.

But Pirius hadn’t seen Titan. He was stuck here on Ensh, as the locals called it, which was just another Navy base that could have been anywhere from here to the Prime Radiant itself. Once, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to feel restless. But now he felt as if his curiosity had been opened up by his time in Sol system. What else was out there to be experienced — what else might he already have missed, if not for the strange irruption into his life of Pirius Blue?

He tried to focus on the discussion.

Commander Darc was out of his depth. “Forgive me, Commissary. I’m just a humble tar. Are you saying that the nightfighter is alive? That the Xeelee are their ships?”

“I, I—” Nilis stumbled, wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was overworking, Pirius knew, stretching himself thin across Sol system. “Yes, if you want a short answer. But it isn’t as simple as that. I’m saying there is no distinction between the Xeelee and their technology.”

Luru Parz seemed amused by all this. “But, Commissary, spacetime defects or condensate — neither seems very promising material to make a phenotype out of. Unlike the carbon-compound molecules of which you are made, for instance, there simply isn’t much of it about.”

“Quite true.” Nilis smiled at her. “Most life-forms we have encountered have a certain commonality. Space is full of prebiotic chemicals, the carbon-based chemistry that underlies our kind of life — stuff like simple amino acids, ammonia, and formaldehyde. This stuff is manufactured in interstellar clouds and rains down on the planets. Even today, thousands of tonnes of the stuff fall on Earth, for instance. So carbon-water chemistry is really an obvious resource for making life. Of course there is little in common in the detail between humans and, say, Silver Ghosts. But we derive from the same prebiotic interstellar chemistry; in a deep sense we are indeed cousins.

“But, as you say, Luru Parz, the Xeelee are different. These spacetime defects of which they have been baked aren’t common at all. Or at least, not now… but there was a time in the universe’s complicated history when they were common. The Xeelee — or their progenitors — must surely have arisen in an earlier age of the universe, an epoch when spacetime defects proliferated. But that era was in the first moments after the singularity. If that’s true, the Xeelee have very deep roots in time.”

Gramm made an explosive noise through his plump lips. “You goad me beyond endurance, Commissary. This is supposed to be a military briefing! Will — you — get — to the point?”

Nilis leaned on a desk and glared at Gramm. “The point, Minister, is that we now may understand why the Xeelee cluster around Chandra, the black hole. They need its deep gravity, its wrenching spacetime curvature.”

“Ah.” Luru Parz nodded. “To them, Chandra is like a last fire in a universe grown cold.”

“But there’s more than that,” Nilis said. He started to describe the condensate superstructure of the craft. “Now, condensate matter was common at a certain stage in the early universe — but a different stage from that when the spacetime defects emerged. It was a cosmic age as alien to the first as will our own far future be to us, that age when all the stars have died, and dark energy dominates the swelling of spacetime… But the Xeelee, or their forebears, managed to form a partnership, a symbiosis, with these remote beings. Through that symbiosis they have managed to survive the slow unravelling of the universe — and it persists still, in the fabric of their craft.

“How do we compare, then, with the Xeelee? There are some who argue that there have been ten crucial steps in the evolution of humanity…”

The ten began with the development of a DNA-based genetic code, and continued with steps Pirius understood only a little: the exploitation of oxygen to provide free energy, the use of glucose in energy metabolism, the development of photosynthesis, and the incorporation of mitochondria — like miniature power plants — into complex cells. “The first great triumph of symbiosis,” Nilis said enigmatically. His remaining steps were the formation of a nervous system, the evolution of an eye, the development of an internal skeleton to allow the colonization of dry land, the evolution of the backboned animals.

“And finally,” said Luru Parz dryly, “the magnificent emergence of Homo sap ourselves.”

Nilis said, “You might get picky about some of the steps — and alien creatures, of course, would have their own set of developmental steps — but the idea is clear enough. And certainly, for better or worse, humanity has not progressed beyond my step ten.”

“But perhaps in the Xeelee,” said Luru Parz, “we get a glimpse of what step eleven might be.”

“Yes,” mused Nilis. “We see extensions of the possibilities of life. A deep merging with technology. And a symbiosis, not just with other denizens of the same biosphere, but with aliens, different biospheres altogether — even with creatures from different ages of the universe, creatures governed by different physical laws. It’s actually a remarkable vision,” he said, almost dreamily. “It’s as if the Xeelee are more deeply embedded in the universe than we are.”

“Oh, but this is all—” Gramm seemed outraged. “Is that the message you want me to take back to the Grand Conclave, Commissary? That the Xeelee do not only possess better firepower, processing capability, tactics — they are also, in some sense, biologically superior?”

Nilis sighed, the hollows around his eyes deepening. “Minister, to destroy something, you have to understand it. We now know that the Xeelee are far older than we are, that we are dealing with relics of the antiquity of the universe. This battle of ours concerns the past as much as the present, or future.”

That hung in the air for a long moment. Then the meeting continued, even more stormily than before.

Chapter 15

On the Moon, Torec spent long days and sleepless nights researching, chairing meetings, forcing face-to-face confrontation with recalcitrant techs, and scouring over every centimeter of her prototype setup.

Following Nilis’s advice, she tried to impose discipline on the project. She forced her warring bands of technicians to agree on the designs for the interfaces between their components, and to work to those designs. And she imposed a series of freeze points beyond which change outside certain boundaries wasn’t allowed. The techs grumbled, but they got on with the job. She even suspected they were glad to have her show a bit of toughness, as if this was how they had expected her to behave since the beginning.

But it took three weeks before she was satisfied; three weeks that used up all her remaining time before Gramm’s deadline. The next test run would be the last, come what may. It had to work.

This time she was the first on the viewing mound, not the last. Again Nilis’s anguished Virtual was here, and Gramm sent a copy of his advisor, the supercilious woman Pila.

But this time Luru Parz showed up, too.

Once more the monitor bots floated into their ready positions, and the technicians cleared away from the ungainly prototype. As numerals on a hundred glowing clocks counted down, Luru Parz came to stand beside Torec.

There was an extraordinary stillness about Luru Parz, Torec thought; she was as still as the ancient Moon itself. And she was dark. The light was bright, for this was noon of the long lunar day. But Luru seemed to soak up the light; though her Virtual cast no shadow, she looked oddly like a shadow herself. Torec was given to understand that this Virtual was not an avatar, a semisentient copy of an original with whom its memories would be merged after it had fulfilled its function. This Virtual was a mirror of life, which must mean, given the lack of any perceptible time delay, that Luru Parz herself was somewhere within the Earth-Moon system — or else she was linked to the Moon by some FTL channel, which would be hugely expensive.

Luru Parz said to Torec, “So you have codified Pirius’s time-hopping technique.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Describe your algorithm.”

Torec took a breath. Despite the way she had hammered away at her techs to get them to talk to her comprehensibly, the theory of the CTC software was still her weakest point. “We give the system a problem to solve, in the case of our prototype to find a particular protein geometry. And we give it a brute-force way to solve the problem. In the case of protein folding, we instruct the processor simply to start searching through all possible protein geometries. And we have a time register, a special cache that stores a flag if a signal has been received from the future.

“The basic CTC program has three steps. When the processor starts, the first step is to check the time register. If a signal has been received — if the solution to the problem is already in memory — then stop. If not, we go to step two, which says to carry out the calculation by brute force, however long it takes. When the answer is finally derived, we go to step three: go back in time, deliver the solution and mark the time register.”

Luru nodded. “So the timeline is redrafted. In the first draft timeline, the problem is solved by brute force. In the final version of the timeline, the answer is sent back through time to the moment when the question is posed. So it isn’t necessary to run the computation at all.”

“That’s correct.”

Luru sighed. “The joy of time-travel paradoxes. You can get the answer to a problem without needing to work it out! But there must be a good deal more to your design. Your closed-timelike- curves must be pretty short.”

“Actually just milliseconds.”

“Surely you can solve no problem which would take longer to solve than that length of time.”

Torec smiled, her confidence growing. “No. By breaking a problem down into pieces you can solve anything.” She described how the problem was broken up into a hierarchy of nested subcomponents. At the base level were calculations so trivial they could be handled within the processor’s short CTC periods. The answers were passed back in time to become the input for the next run-through, and so on. That way an answer was assembled piece by piece and looped back repeatedly to the zero instant, until the overall problem was resolved. “The technical challenge is actually decomposing the problem in the first place, and controlling the information flow back up the line,” she said.

Luru laughed, an odd, hollow sound. “You’re computing with multiple time loops, and you think that’s the only challenge? Ensign, you’re a true pragmatist… I think it’s nearly time.”

Over the glittering, much-patched array of the prototype processor, the bots hovered, utterly motionless against the greater lunar stillness. Behind the prototype, the blank Virtual screen hovered, waiting to display the solution.

The last seconds wore away.

And at zero, the screen filled with a molecular diagram. Just like that, with no time elapsed. It was almost anticlimactic, Torec thought.

There was utter silence on the common loops; nobody moved, none of the techs or the observers from the Navy or the Ministry, not even a bot. But on the screen the diagram whirled, as it was ferociously analyzed for verification. After ten seconds, the screen turned green, and numerical results scrolled over its surface.

Torec didn’t need the details, nor would she have understood them; she just knew what that green color meant. “Lethe,” she whispered. “We did it.”

There was a howling. She turned and saw Commissary Nilis capering barefoot on the surface of the Moon. Some transmission glitch was pixellating his image, and his voice sounded feathery, remote.

But his yell of triumph was echoed by the techs. One of them came sprinting clumsily up the slope to Torec. “It worked!” A burly girl from Earth, she grabbed Torec and tried to kiss her on the lips. It was typically inappropriate earthworm behavior, resulting only in a clash of visors, but Torec let it pass.

The bots descended on the prototype complex, checking its physical integrity. But ironically, Torec knew, there should be little for them to find, for as the processor’s paradoxical operation had worked, there had been no need for the problem to be brute-force solved, and no need even for the little toy ships to chatter back and forth on their FTL hops — in this draft of the timeline anyhow. The curves in time had served their purpose — and had rendered their own existence unnecessary. It was another peculiar advantage of a time-travel computer. If it worked correctly, it never actually ran at all — and so it should never wear out. Some of the techs had even debated whether they could get away with the economy of making the processors shoddily, almost at the point of failure — for that failure would never be tested.

The four of them stood in a rough circle: Torec, Luru Parz, Nilis and Pila. Of the four, only Torec was physically present, though they all wore skinsuits, save the stubbornly uncouth Commissary. The light falling on each of the Virtuals came from different unseen sources, subtly different angles, and that, set against the black sky and shining ground of the Moon, added to Torec’s sense of unreality.

Pila said coolly, “The trial was obviously a success.”

“Thank you,” Nilis said. “But it’s more than that.” He waved a hand, and a crude Virtual diagram appeared before him. It was Pirius’s early whiteboard sketch, Torec saw, the asterisk standing for the Prime Radiant, and the obstacles surrounding it marked in red — the FTL foreknowledge symbolized by a bar across the approach path, the superior Xeelee computing and defensive ability a circle around the Radiant. Now Nilis snapped his fingers, and the circle around the asterisk turned green. “Today we have removed one of the three fundamental barriers lying between us and the conquest of the Galaxy. We can outthink the Xeelee, outmaneuver their final defenses!

“But you all understand this prototype is just the beginning, the proof of concept,” he said. “Much more work will be needed to turn this crude, sprawling prototype design into a battle-hardened unit. Now is the time for a fresh tranche of funding to be released.”

“We at the Ministry do understand,” Pila said, with the faintest condescension. “That’s why I’ve been authorized to tell you that, with the successful completion of the trial, the project will continue under the auspices of the Navy. The technology is obviously of strategic potential, and funds for its full development will be made available.” She beamed, as if she were handing out gifts.

Torec quietly clenched a fist. She felt vindicated. But Luru Parz stayed silent.

Nilis stepped forward. His face, pocked by resolution flaws, was working as he tried to maintain his smile. “The Navy? But the CTC processor is just the first step to the greater goal, the strike at the Prime Radiant.”

“Which was only a pipe dream, wasn’t it?” Pila said sweetly. “You still have nothing, not even concepts, for overcoming your remaining obstacles. Commissary, it’s time to stop. The Minister feels he has done his duty in backing you this far, on the basis of your previous accomplishments. You’ve done well! Bask in the glory. Once again you’ve done your duty for the cause of the Third Expansion, and now your garden needs you.”

Nilis laughed. “And you’ll throw this miracle to the Navy? Who will use it to lose even more battles in ever more ingenious ways — oh, you fools, can’t you see what you’re doing?”

Pila flinched, and her face closed up. But her Virtual image shuddered.

In a silent explosion of pixels it burst open, and the slim woman was replaced by the massive form of Minister Gramm. He was without a skinsuit, and grease was smeared on his chin. And he was trembling with rage. “You call me a fool? I am warning you: take the get-out, Commissary. Go home. If you make any more trouble, I will cast you down in the pits of Mercury with this child soldier of yours.”

Nilis trembled too, through anger and fear. But he held his ground.

Luru Parz stepped between the two of them. “Enough.” Her Virtual form grazed Gramm’s, and his belly exploded in a hail of muddy pixels.

Gramm lumbered back. “Stay out of this, Luru Parz.”

“I will not. You may not be able to see the potential here, Minister, but I can. For the first time in three thousand years we may be glimpsing a way to end the relentless friction of this war — end it before it ends us.”

“My verdict is final,” shouted Gramm, eyes bulging.

“No,” Luru Parz said simply. “It isn’t. The project continues.” She held his gaze.

To Torec’s amazement Gramm was the first to back down, a Minister of the Coalition somehow beaten by this small, worn-smooth, mysterious woman. Not for the first time, Torec longed to know the secret of Luru’s power.

Luru turned away. “There is nothing left to do here but detail. We must move to the next stage. We meet in one week. In person, if you don’t mind; these Virtual confrontations are unsatisfactory.”

Torec asked, “Where?”

“Port Sol,” said Luru Parz. And she allowed her Virtual to break up, the pixels fading from view in the bright light of the late lunar morning.

Chapter 16

On Quin Base, after the initial flurry of curiosity died down, Pirius Blue tried to keep his distance from the other cadets. He was too old, too different, too outside ever to fit in with these swarming kids.

But, despite his reserve, Pirius became an unlikely favorite of three girls who called themselves Tili One, Tili Two, and Tili Three. They were alike in their slight build, their dark coloring, and their small toothy faces. They were actually triplets, products of the same ovum. That wasn’t terribly uncommon, he learned, if you came from a certain big hatchery on the periphery of this star cluster, where for some reason multiple births were common. “But it makes sense,” Cohl said with her usual sour humor. “This is the Quintuplet Cluster…”

The Tili triplets spent almost all their time together. They always seemed to fix it so they worked together during training exercises, and when they were off duty they stayed even closer. Eating, working on their gear, they were always giggling, talking, their three so-similar heads clustered together. They shared one bunk, and when they slept, the three of them tangled up together in a warm heap of limbs and heads. They even made love, in full view of everybody, unembarrassed. But their lovemaking was gentle, very tender, almost presexual, Pirius thought. Of course this was all inappropriate. Family units, even twins and triplets, weren’t supposed to be left together lest the bonds they formed got in the way of loyalty to a wider humanity. But then a lot of what went on here was non-Doctrinal.

Things got complicated when the triplets fixed on Pirius. Apparently they had had some rudiments of flight training, as navigators, before falling foul of the authorities. So they had something in common. When one of them offered to show Pirius how to repair scuffs on his skinsuit or to clean out the algae beds in his backpack, he accepted with good grace.

They seemed to treat him as a big, clumsy pet. He put up with it. Maybe it was because the Tilis so obviously had each other that he felt a bit more secure with them.

There were a couple of times, though, when they tried to entice him into their crowded bed. As they ran their little fingers over his belly and calves, no offer could have seemed more tempting. But he drew back, again fearing he might somehow lose himself. He was also worried about how old the triplets were; like the other cadets they seemed very small, very unformed, very young.

But when one of them came alone to his bed — it may have been Tili Two, or possibly Three — he found it impossible to resist. And when he let himself fall among her skin and lips and soft limbs, he found an immense, consoling relief.

He tried to discuss his feelings with This Burden Must Pass.

“I felt like you once,” Burden said. He was lying on his bunk, propped up on his elbow, bare to the waist, facing Pirius. The usual meaningless clamor of the barracks washed over them. Burden said, “I was Navy, too. At first there is just a torrent of faces here. But after a time, you start to understand.”

“You do?”

“Pirius, you feel these little cadets are somehow different from you, don’t you? Not just in experience, in background — something more fundamental. And you know why? Because it’s true.”

The stock of embryos hatched out of Quin’s birthing tanks were developed from the genetic stock of the soldiers themselves. Of course: where else was it to come from? Not only that, the military planners tried to ensure that only successful soldiers got to breed. This was meant to be an incentive to make you get through your training, to fight, to survive. There were no families in this world, no parental bonds. But something deep in every human being responded even to the abstract knowledge that something of herself would survive this brief life.

Pirius knew about this, of course; it was the same on Arches. But he had never before thought through the implications.

It was selective breeding. And it had been going on, right across the Galaxy, long before the war with the Xeelee had come to full fruition. For nearly twenty thousand years mankind had been breeding itself into a race of child soldiers.

“Look at the Tilis,” murmured Burden. “They could probably crossbreed with anybody in the Galaxy, if they had the chance; we haven’t speciated yet. But their bodies are adapted to low gravity, or no gravity at all. Their bones don’t wash away in a flood of imbalanced fluids, the way our earthworm ancestors’ did when they first ventured into space. Their minds have adjusted too; they can think and work in three dimensions. The triplets don’t suffer stress from vertigo, or claustrophobia. They are even immune to radiation, relatively.

“There’s more. Here on Quin, if you survive combat, you breed, but for the genes it’s better yet not to wait, not to take that chance. So the cadets become fertile earlier and earlier, until they are producing eggs and sperm long before their bodies are developed enough to fight. Pirius, the Tilis are about sixteen, I think. But they’ve been fertile since they were ten. Infantry are an extreme case. The attrition rate is horrific; generations are very short here. But the same subtle sculpting has shaped you, Pirius. And me. Neither of us is an earthworm.”

Pirius was shocked. “Burden, I know you don’t care about the Doctrines. But why do the officers let this genetic drift go on?”

Burden shook his head. “You still don’t see it? Because it’s useful, Pirius. If you just remember that one thing, many puzzling things about life here fall into place.”

Burden spoke about himself. The boy called Quero had been born on a base inside yet another Galaxy-center cluster. He had once flown the greenships: he had been a pilot himself, in fact, and had come through one action.

But all the while his faith had been developing, he said.

The seed of the faith of the Friends of Wigner had come here in legends from old Earth, legends of Michael Poole and the rebellion against the Qax. Its supremely consoling message had quickly taken root among the soldiers of the Galaxy core. By now you could find Friends right around the Front, around the whole of the center of the Galaxy.

“I actually grew up with it. I heard kids’ stories about Michael Poole and the Ultimate Observer. I didn’t take any of it seriously, not really; it was just there in the background. And when I started going through my training and learned that it was officially all taboo, I shut up about it.”

At first none of this had made any difference to Quero’s successful career. But as he experienced conflict, he found himself deeply troubled.

“It was seeing death,” he said now, smiling. “It was bad enough from a greenship blister. It’s a lot worse here, on the Rocks. Every death is the termination of a life, of a mind, a unique thread of experience and memory. Maybe death has to come to us all. But like this? I found it hard to accept my place in this unending war.”

Seeking answers, he had turned to the faith of his childhood. He went beyond the simple personalized stories of Michael Poole and other heroes he had grown up with, and he began to reexamine its deeper philosophy for himself. And he had begun to speak out. “My officers respected Quero, I think. But they had no time for This Burden Must Pass.”

He had been here a while, Pirius gathered. Naturally smart, flexible, and courageous, Burden had already survived five combat actions. Once, he said, he had done well enough to be offered a way out, to retrain as an infantry officer. But he would have had to recant his faith, and he had refused, and so he had been cast down yet again.

Pirius asked, “You don’t regret any of it?”

“Why should I?”

“Oh. ’This Burden Must Pass.’ “

“You got it,” Burden said. “All of this suffering will ultimately be deleted. So what’s to regret?”

Cohl had listened to this. She drew Pirius aside. “And you believe all that?”

He was surprised she’d asked. “Why would he lie about something like that?”

“Then why is it so vague? Why was he sent to Quin in the first place — because of his faith? Or because of something that happened on his base, or even during combat?” Her small eyes gleamed. “See? It’s just like his preaching. He talks a lot, but it’s all mist and shadows.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t care enough not to like him. I don’t trust him, for sure.”

Pirius turned back to Burden, who had heard none of this. Burden was looking at him with a kind of eagerness, Pirius thought, as if it was important to Burden that he somehow got Pirius’s approval. Sometimes he thought he saw weakness in Burden, somewhere under the surface of composure, command, and humor. Weakness and need.

“Burden — you said the officers will tolerate genetic drift if the product is useful. But why do they put up with you?”

“Because I’m useful too.” Burden lay back on his bunk. “I told you that’s the key. Of course I am useful! Why else?”

When he saw his first death on the Rock, Pirius learned the truth of this.

Chapter 17

Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at the Berr-linn spaceport. They had been separated for eight weeks. Careless of who was watching them, they wrapped their arms about each other and pressed their mouths together.

“They’re mad,” Pirius whispered. “The earthworms. All of them!”

“I know!” she whispered back, round-eyed.

They stared into each other’s eyes, their faces pressed together, their breath mingling, hot. Again Pirius felt that deep surging warmth toward her that he’d started to feel when they first arrived on Earth. It was as if he was whole with her, incomplete when they were apart, as if they were two halves of the same entity. Was this love? How was he supposed to know?

And — did she feel the same way? It looked as if she did, but how were you supposed to tell?

But they had no time to talk about their feelings, no time to recover from their separate adventures, for the very next day they were to be shipped off, at Luru Parz’s order, to Port Sol.

To a traveler from the center of the Galaxy, a jaunt to the Kuiper Belt, only some fifty times as far out as Earth’s orbit around the sun, should have seemed trivial. But as the sun dwindled to an intense pinpoint, and Port Sol itself at last swam into view, dark, bloodred, Pirius felt that he was indeed going deep: not just deep in space but deep in time, deep into humanity’s murky past.

Nilis’s corvette entered a painfully slow orbit. The gravity of a ball of ice a few hundred kilometers across was a mere feather touch. The passengers crowded to the corvette’s transparent walls.

Port Sol was an irregular mass, only vaguely spherical, and dimly lit by the distant sun. Pirius saw a crumpled, ruddy surface, broken by craters of a ghostly blue-white. Some of these “craters,” though, looked too regular to be natural. And some of them were domed over, illuminated by a soft prickling of artificial light. People still lived here, then. But signs of abandonment overwhelmed the signs of life: shards of collapsed and darkened domes, even buildings that might once have floated above the ice but had now crashed to the ground.

But still — Port Sol!

Even to a Navy brat like Pirius, born and raised twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the name had resonance. Port Sol was the very rim of Sol system, the place where the legendary engineer Michael Poole had come to build the very first of mankind’s starships.

Nilis’s excitement seemed as genuine as the ensigns’. Minister Gramm, though, seemed tense, nervous, on the verge of anger. It was evident that Luru Parz had forced him to come out here, and he didn’t like it one bit. And Gramm’s assistant Pila peered out, analytic and supercilious, apparently as faintly amused by the spectacle of Port Sol as she had been by the Moon.

A flitter slid smoothly up to meet the corvette. It carried a single passenger, a woman dressed in a simple white robe. She had the same look about her as Luru Parz: compact, patient, extraordinarily still, her features small and expressionless. But she was slimmer than Luru, and she seemed somehow more graceful. She said, “My name is Faya Parz. I am an associate of Luru…”

When she announced her name, eyebrows were raised. Gramm turned to Pila. “Well, well,” he said. “Faya and Luru, Parz and Parz!”

Pila smiled. “I imagine the Doctrines are stretched rather thin here, Minister.”

This baffled both the ensigns, and Nilis had to explain that under archaic traditions, before the more rational approach instigated by the Commission for Historical Truth, surnames would be shared by members of the same family. It was all thoroughly non-Doctrinal.

The flitter touched down close to one of the illuminated pits in the ice. The party transferred to a ground transport, a sort of car with massive bubble wheels and hooks for traction to save it bouncing out of Port Sol’s minuscule gravity well. The car had no inertial adjustment, and as it began to roll along a road roughly cut through the ice, the cabin bobbed up and settled back, over and over, slowly but disconcertingly. Pirius and Torec were charmed by this low-tech relic.

Though Gramm and Pila looked politely bored, Nilis was fascinated by the scenery. “So this Kuiper object is primordial — a relic of the formation of the system,” he said.

“Not quite,” Faya said. “The reddish color of the ice is caused by bombardment by cosmic rays.” High-energy particles, relics of energetic events elsewhere in the universe. Over time, the surface layers became rich in carbon, dark, and the irradiation mantle became a tough crust. “Nothing is unmodified by time,” said Faya.

Nilis stood up in the swaying cabin so he could see better. “But in places, impacts have punched through that crust to reveal the ice below. Is that what we’re seeing? Those blue pits—”

Faya said, “Impacts are rare out here, but they do happen, yes. But the feature we are approaching is artificial, a quarry. It was scooped out by engineers to provision a GUTdrive starship. The present- day colonists refer to it as the Pit of the Mayflower, though we don’t have archaeological proof that Mayflower II was actually launched from here…”

In those early days, the starships that had set off from Port Sol had been driven by nothing but water rockets, using ice as reaction mass. They had crawled along much slower than light, their missions lasting generations. With the acquisition of FTL drives, Port Sol was suddenly redundant, its ice no longer necessary. Even as mankind’s great galactic adventure had begun in earnest, Port Sol’s time was already done. Since then it had orbited out here in the dark, its population dwindling, its name an exotic memory.

But now, it seemed, Port Sol had a new purpose.

An odd flash in the sky caught Pirius’s eye: a twinkle, there and gone. He knew that some of the earliest colonies here — from the days even before Michael Poole, very low-tech indeed — had relied for their power on nothing more than sunlight, gathered with immense wispy mirrors thousands of kilometers across. Even now nobody knew for sure what was out here. The Kuiper Belt was a vast spherical archipelago, its islands separated from each other by the width of the inner Sol system. In this huge place, perhaps some of those ancient communities survived, following their obsolescent ways, hidden from the turbulent politics of mankind.

His new sense of curiosity strong, Pirius felt a deep thrill to be in this extraordinary place. But stare as he might, he didn’t glimpse the mirror in the sky again.

The car nuzzled against a small translucent dome set on the edge of the Pit of the Mayflower. The dome was cluttered with low, temporary-looking buildings. There was an inertial generator somewhere, and to everybody’s relief the gravity in here was no lower than the Moon’s, and the walking was easy.

Pirius and Torec were the first out, eager to reach the transparent viewing wall on the dome’s far side, so they could see the Pit for themselves.

The Pit of the Mayflower was a smooth-cut crater a kilometer wide. Despite its size, the Pit was itself enclosed by a vast, low dome, around which lesser structures, like this habitable dome, clustered like infants. On the floor of the Pit stood the relics of heavy engineering projects: gantries, platforms of metal, concrete, and ice, and immense low-gravity cranes, like vast skeletons. Globe lamps hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white complex light through the Pit. Nothing moved.

Bustling after the ensigns, Nilis said, “What a place — a relic of the grandeur, or the folly, of the past. A mine for archaeologists! Ah, but I forget: under the Coalition we are all too busy for archaeology, aren’t we, Minister?”

Gramm was waddling at a speed obviously uncomfortable for him, and though the dome’s air was cool he was sweating heavily. “Nilis, we may be far from home. But you are a Commissary, and I suggest you comport yourself like one.”

“I am suitably abashed,” Nilis said dryly.

“But you must remember,” Faya Parz said, “that this is a place of history, not just engineering. Many of those first starships were crewed not by explorers but by refugees.”

Nilis said, “You’re talking about jasofts,” he said.

Torec said, “Jasofts?”

“Or pharaohs,” Faya said with a black-toothed smile.

It was an ancient, tangled, difficult story.

Nilis said, “Before the Qax Occupation, aging was defeated. The Qax withdrew the anti-agathic treatments and death returned to Earth. But some humans, called jasofts or pharaohs, were rewarded for their work for the Qax with immortality treatments — the Qax’s own this time. Made innately conservative by age, selfish and self-centered, utterly dependent on the Qax — well. Those new immortals were ideal collaborators.”

Faya Parz said unemotionally, “That’s judgmental. Some would say the jasofts ameliorated the cruelty of the Qax. Without them, the Occupation would have been much more severe. Nothing of human culture might have survived the Qax Extirpation. The species itself might have become extinct.”

Gramm waved his hand. “Or the jasofts were war criminals. Whatever. It’s a debate twenty thousand years old, and will never be resolved. When the Occupation collapsed, the new Coalition hunted down the last jasofts.”

Nilis nodded. “And so ships like the Mayflower were built, and crews of jasofts fled Sol system. Or tried to. We don’t know the meaning of the name, by the way: Mayflower. Perhaps some archaic pre- Occupation reference… In the end, Port Sol itself became one of the last refuges of jasofts in Sol system.”

With an almost soundless footstep, Luru Parz approached them. She said, “And of course it all had to be cleaned out, by the fresh-faced soldiers of the Coalition.”

Gramm snapped, “Did you bring us here to shock us with this revolting bit of history, Luru Parz?”

“You know why you’re here, Minister,” Luru Parz said, and she laughed in his face.

Gramm said nothing. But as he glared at Luru Parz, his eyes burned bright with hatred.

The ostensible purpose of this long trip was a discussion of the future of Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant. So Luru Parz led Nilis, Gramm, and Pila to a conference room, leaving Pirius and Torec in the charge of Faya Parz.

Faya asked if the ensigns wanted to rest, but they had spent days cooped up on a corvette, and were anxious to see the rest of Port Sol. Faya complied with good grace.

They began a slow circuit of the Pit of the Mayflower.

The great domed quarry was surrounded by a ring of satellite domes, each much smaller, with further facilities beyond that. In the unpressurized areas beyond the domes Pirius recognized power plants, landing pads, clusters of sensors, telescopes peering up at the star-ridden sky. No weapons, though; evidently this ancient, enigmatic place was not expected to be a target, for the Xeelee or anybody else.

These were obviously modern facilities. The more ancient landscape of Port Sol — the old starship quarries, the fallen towns, the imploded domes — was tantalizingly hidden beyond a tight horizon.

The domes were mostly occupied by laboratories, study areas, and living quarters. But it was a bleak, functional environment. In the labs and living areas there was a total lack of personalization: no Virtuals, no artwork, no entertainment consoles, not so much as a graffito. There were tight regulations about that sort of thing on Arches Base — across the Druzite Galaxy, personality was officially frowned on as a distraction from duty — but despite their superficial sameness every bunk in every corridor on every level of a Barracks Ball was subtly different, modified to reflect the personality of its owner. Not here, though; the people who manned this place must have extraordinary discipline.

Not that there were many people here at all, as far as the ensigns could see. Once they glimpsed somebody working in a lab, a place of shining metallic equipment and anonymous white boxes. Overshadowed by immense Virtual schematics of what looked like a DNA molecule, Pirius couldn’t even see if it was a man or woman.

“Not many of us are needed,” Faya Parz said. “There are only twenty-three of us, including Luru Parz. But Luru Parz travels a good deal nowadays.”

Torec shivered. Pirius knew what she was thinking. To a Navy brat, used to the crowds of Barracks Balls, that was a terribly small number, this an awfully remote and isolated place: to think there were no more than twenty-two other humans within billions of kilometers…

“The machines do all the work — even most of the analytical work. Humans are here to direct, to set objectives, to provide the final layer of interpretation.”

Torec said, “Don’t you get lonely? How do you live?”

Faya smiled. You don’t understand. It was a look Pirius had grown used to among the sophisticated population of Earth, but he suspected uneasily that here it might be true.

Faya said, “We have always been an odd lot, I suppose. An ice moon is a small place, short of resources. There were only ever a few of us, even in the great days. We would travel to other moons for trade, cultural exchange, to find partners — we still do. But there was no room to spare; population numbers always had to be controlled tightly. So marriage and children were matters for the community to decide, not for lovers.” Her voice was wistful, and Pirius wondered what ancient tragedies lay hidden beneath these bland words. “You know, in the olden days there were floating cities. There was dancing.”

Oddly, she sounded as if she remembered such times herself — as if she had once danced among these fallen palaces. Faya seemed heavy, static, dark, worn out by time, like a lump of rock from the Moon. It was hard to imagine her ever having been young, ever dancing.

Torec asked, “What do you do here?”

Faya said, “We study dark matter.”

“Why?”

“Because Luru Parz seeks to understand alien tampering with the evolution of Sol system.”

Torec and Pirius dared to share a glance. They’re all mad.

Pirius knew, in theory, about dark matter. It was an invisible shadow of normal matter, the “light” matter made of protons and neutrons. The dark stuff interacted with normal matter only through gravity. You couldn’t burn it, push it away, or harvest it, save with a gravity well. And it was harmless, passing through light matter as if it weren’t there. Pilots and navigators were taught to recognize its presence; sometimes great reefs of the stuff could cause gravitational anomalies that might affect your course.

Aside from that, dark matter was of no consequence. Pirius couldn’t see why anybody would study it.

But Faya showed them Virtuals. Sol system had coalesced out of a disc of material that had once stretched much farther than the orbit of the farthest planets. Most of the mass of the disc was now locked up in the bodies of the planets, but if you smeared out the planets’ masses, you got a fairly smooth curve, showing how the mass in the disc had dropped off evenly as distance from the sun increased, just as you’d expect.

“Until you get to Neptune,” Faya said. At the rim of the Kuiper Belt the actual mass distribution plummeted sharply. “There are many bodies out here, some massive. Pluto is one, Port Sol another… But they add up to only about a fifth of Earth’s mass. There should have been thousands of worldlets the size of Pluto or larger. Something removed all those planetesimals — and long ago, when Sol system was very young.”

She summarized theories. Perhaps the missing worldlets had been thrown out of their orbits by the migration of a young Neptune through Sol system, as it headed for its final orbit. Perhaps there was another large planet, out there in the dark, disturbing the objects’ orbits — but no such planet had been found. Or maybe a passing star had stripped the Kuiper cloud of much of its richness. And so on.

Pirius said, “None of that sounds too convincing.”

Faya Parz said, “If mankind has learned one thing in the course of its expansion to the stars, it is that the first explanation for any unlikely phenomenon is life. “

Luru Parz had come to this place to study the traces of that ancient plunder. Her first theory was that it could have something to do with dark matter. Dark matter was relatively rare in the plane of the Galaxy, and indeed in the heart of Sol system. “But it is to be found out here,” Faya said, “where the sun is remote, and baryonic matter is scarce.”

Pirius tried to put this together. “And you think there is life in the dark matter. Intelligence.”

“Oh, yes.” Faya’s eyes were hooded. “There is six times as much dark matter as baryonic in the universe. Everywhere we look, baryonic matter is infested with life. Why not dark matter? In the past, humans have studied it. We have some of the records. Luru even believes that a conflict between intelligences of dark and light matter is underway — an invisible conflict more fundamental even than our war with the Xeelee. The Qax destroyed much of our heritage, but there are hints in the surviving pre-Occupation records—”

“And this has something to do with the Kuiper Belt’s missing mass?”

“We haven’t ruled it out. But in the meantime we have found something stranger still.” Faya snapped her fingers. A Virtual image whirled in the air. It was a tetrahedron, Pirius saw, four triangular faces, straight edges. It turned slowly, and elusive golden light glimmered from its faces. But the image was grainy.

“What’s this?”

“It’s called the Kuiper Anomaly. Obviously an artifact, presumably of alien origin. It was detected in the Kuiper Belt long ago — before humans first left Earth, even. It was the size of a small moon.”

“Was?”

“By the time humans finally mounted a probe to study it, it had disappeared.” She snapped her fingers; the tetrahedron popped and vanished.

Pirius said, “So perhaps the missing planetesimals were used to manufacture this — Anomaly.”

“It’s possible. The mass loss looks about right, from what we know of the object’s gravitational field. But if so, it must have been there a long time, since the formation of the system itself.”

Torec said, “What was it for?”

“We’ve no idea.”

“Where did it go? Was it connected to the dark matter?”

Faya smiled. “We don’t know that either. We’re here to answer such questions.” She would say no more.

Pirius found it a deeply disturbing thought that some alien intelligence had built such a silent sentinel on the fringe of the system, long before humanity even as the sun was fitfully flaring to life. In fact, he felt resentful that somebody had used that immense resource for their own purposes. Those were our ice moons, he thought, knowing he was being illogical.

They completed the circuit of the Pit, coming back to where they had started. They longed to go further — to see more of Michael Poole’s heroic engineering, or even find the fabled Forest of Ancestors, where the native life-forms in their sessile forms waited out eternity. But they had work to do.

Regretfully, they returned to the conference room. It turned out to be set high on a gantry, overlooking the Pit of the Mayflower. It had a startling view of the gantries and cranes that had once built starships.

But nobody in the conference room was interested in the view. They were too busy with a tremendous row.

Luru Parz paced, small, cold, determined.

“In its day, the Coalition served a purpose. We needed a framework, guidance to help us recover from the terrible wasting of the Qax Occupation. But we quickly slipped into an intellectual paralysis. Do you not see that, Minister? Even now we look back over our shoulder at the past, the Occupation, the near-extinction of mankind. The Druz Doctrines are nothing but a rationalization of that great trauma. And since then, obsessed with history, we have sleepwalked our way into a Galactic war.

“But it can’t go on forever. Nilis sees that. We can’t keep up our blockade of the Core indefinitely. Now Nilis offers us a chance to win, to take the Galaxy. I’m not at all surprised you, Gramm, and your self-serving colleagues are seeking to sabotage his efforts. In fact I’m surprised you have given him as much support as you have. But it’s not enough. Gramm, you are going to give Nilis all the backing he needs — all the way to the center of the Galaxy.”

Gramm sneered. “Madam, this buffoon has nothing. Don’t you understand that yet? He is blocked! He has no way to defeat FTL foreknowledge, or to strike at the Prime Radiant itself.”

Faya Parz said, “Then we must help him. There may be answers.”

Gramm snapped, “What answers?”

“Mankind is very old; the past contains many secrets… This is a treasure which the Coalition chooses to ignore. We believe that somewhere in this deep heritage we may well discover the key to unlocking the final puzzles.”

Nilis rammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “You’re right. Yes! That’s where we must go next.”

Pirius said, “Where?”

Nilis said, “Why, to Mars. To the Secret Archive of the Coalition.”

Torec whispered to Pirius, “What Secret Archive? I don’t like this talk.”

“Nor me.”

Pila, Gramm’s advisor, had been showing increasing irritation. Now she seemed to lose patience. “Why are we listening to this heretical nonsense? What hold does this woman have over us, Minister?”

Luru Parz smiled. “Why don’t you tell her, Gramm?”

Gramm looked thunderous, but didn’t reply.

Luru said evenly, “Oh, I’m just another of the Coalition’s little secrets. Just another Doctrinal violation, tolerated because I am useful. I’ve had an uneasy, ah, working relationship with Gramm for many years, and his predecessors, long before him. Before that — well, my life has sometimes been complicated. But things are civilized these days. The Coalition tolerates our research, here on Port Sol, as long as we share the results. Of course, it could destroy us at any time. But on the other hand I could do a great deal of harm to the Coalition.” She opened her mouth wide, showing blackened teeth.

Nilis suddenly seemed to understand. His jaw dropped, and he gulped before he could speak again. “All this talk of the depths of time… Port Sol always was a notorious den of jasoft refugees. And they weren’t all cleared out, were they? And you are one of them, Luru Parz. You are a jasoft.”

Pila flinched, as if she had been struck; her bland, pretty face curled in disgust, the strongest expression Pirius had ever seen her show. Nilis merely stared, utterly fascinated, his intellect overriding his emotions, as it did so often.

Pirius was stunned. He stared at Faya, who had conducted them around the Pit. Was she an ancient too? She had talked of dancing among the floating palaces of Port Sol — but the ice moon had been all but abandoned for twenty thousand years. Was it possible it wasn’t just a dream?

Torec’s hand slipped into his. In this cold place, far from home, surrounded by so many gruesome secrets, the touch of warm flesh was comforting.

Pila turned on her superior. She seemed more upset by the violation of orthodoxy than by the cold biological reality of the jasofts. “Minister, if this is true — why are these monstrosities tolerated?”

Gramm said nothing, his round face crimson.

Luru said, “Well, I’m useful, you see. And I know too much to be dispensed with. Don’t I, Gramm?”

“You old witch,” Gramm said tightly.

“Witch? If so, I brought you here to remind you of my spell,” she said, her tone dark.

Gramm glared. But it was clear he had no choice but to give her what she wanted.

When the meeting broke up, Torec approached Luru. She was clearly fascinated.

“But how do you live?”

Luru winked at her. “Most days I sleep a lot.” She put her hands on the ensigns’ shoulders; her skin felt warm, soft to Pirius: human, not at all strange. She said, “You children must be as hungry as I am. We have a lot of work to do. A great mission — a Galaxy to conquer. But first we eat. Come!” And she led them away.

Chapter 18

Out on the surface of the Rock, the cadets were learning to advance behind an artillery barrage.

It was another brutally simple, unbelievably ancient tactic. Behind the advancing troops was a bank of monopole cannon, mankind’s most effective weapon against Xeelee technology. The guns opened up before the advance began, firing live shells over the heads of the troops. The idea was that the hail of shells would flatten enemy emplacements, and the troops would rush forward and take the positions without a fight. Then the barrage would work its way forward, a curtain of fire always just ahead of the advancing troops, steadily raking out the opposition before the troops even got there. So the theory had always had it.

But in practice, Pirius Blue found himself lying in clinging asteroid dust as the barrage flew, so thick it was a curtain of light over his head, and shells of twisted spacetime fell not half a kilometer from him. The shells’ pounding seemed to shake the whole asteroid. The sense of physical energy erupting around him was overwhelming, as if all the violence of the Galaxy center were focused on this one battered old Rock.

The order to advance, actually to run into the fire, all but defeated his courage.

The success of this tactic depended on precise timing, coordination between artillery and infantry, and extremely accurate firing by the gunners. But the cannon were only machines, the gunners only human, the infantry were rattled and confused, and in an imperfect universe all were liable to error. The strategy depended a good deal on simple luck. And, today, his platoon’s luck ran out.

Pirius actually saw the fatal shell incoming. It was like a meteor, streaking down from the barrage that flew over his head. On the comm loops he heard officers yelling warnings. But for those directly under the path of the shell, no warning could help.

It was the triplets, Pirius saw, recognizing their customized uniforms. For a last instant, they clung to each other. The shell landed directly over them. There was a soundless flash of light, another giant’s footstep, a fountain of dirt.

Pirius ran to the site of the impact. A perfectly pristine crater had been dug into the asteroid.

Tili One had somehow escaped unharmed. Three had lost a hand, but was conscious, though distressed. Of Two there was no sign. Her very substance had been torn apart, Pirius thought, her very atoms dissociated.

Over the heads of the little group, the monopole barrage was dying, as if apologetically.

Marta, Cohl, Burden were all here, standing gravely as the surviving sisters wailed and clung to each other. “At least it was quick.” Captain Marta said gruffly. “There can have been no pain.”

One of the Tilis turned on the officer. “What comfort is that? It was a stupid accident.”

Burden stepped forward. He placed a big hand on each of the Tilis’ skinsuit helmets. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of this matters. There will be a better time, a better place, where you will be reunited with your sister, when all of this is wiped clean…” And so on. Gradually his words were comforting the girls. They bent their heads to his chest, and he held them as they wept wretchedly.

This was too much for Cohl. She turned on Captain Marta. “What happened to the Doctrines? If you let him spout words like these, what did she die for?”

Marta eyed her coldly, the human half of her reconstructed face as still and expressionless as the metallized side. “His words are useful,” she said simply.

And so they were, Pirius saw now, just as Burden himself had said, and that was why they were tolerated. It didn’t matter whether anybody believed in Michael Poole and the rest or not. Everything here was dedicated to the purposes of the war: even the tolerance of a faith which undermined the war’s very justification. Just as long as its adherents were prepared to march off to die.

The Captain snapped, “Clean up here.” She turned and walked away.

Pirius and the triplets’ other friends helped the surviving sisters get back to the barracks. Pirius had never seen anything like their grief.

But there was no time for consolation. The very next day new orders came: Pirius’s company was to be thrown into the Front.

For their final preparation Pirius and Cohl were taken to a sick bay.

Here nanomachinery was injected into their eyes. Their retinas were rebuilt, overlaid with a layer of technology whose purpose was to help their eyes cope with the blinding light of the Galaxy’s heart — and perhaps enable them to survive another few seconds. They had both taken many implants before, of course, even deep inside their skulls. But none of them had felt so directly violating.

They endured a night of agonizing pain. Pirius and Cohl had never been lovers, but that night they shared a bunk, weeping in each other’s arms.

The next morning, when Pirius looked in a mirror, he saw the silver in his eyes, and his own face reflected back from his pupils. It was as if his very soul had been coated in metal.