Exultant

Chapter 19

Pirius Red wasn’t impressed by Mars.

From low orbit it struck him as a dull, closed-in little world. Aside from the scrapings of ice at the polar caps, its color was a uniform, burned-out red. Mars was dead, or all but; you could tell that even from space, just by looking at its worn craters and soft-edged mountains.

Given this world had been the most earthlike world in Sol system after the home planet itself, it was surprising how little mark humans had made on its surface. There were plenty of ruins, though. Once, extensive arcologies had splashed the ancient face of this world with Earth green-blue. But those bubble-colonies had been smashed during the Qax Occupation. The largest of them had been in a region called Cydonia, and from space you could still make out where it had been: the neat circle of the dome’s perimeter, the blocky shapes of a few remaining buildings, a tracery of foundations. But the ubiquitous dust had covered it over, washing away lines and colors.

A more striking ruin, in fact, was a massive building put up by the Qax themselves: an exotic-matter factory. Its walls were massive and robust, enduring even after twenty thousand years. In the wars that had followed the expulsion of the Qax, the factory ruins had been used as a fortress, as human fought human. Pirius sent Virtual images back to Torec to remind her of the similar factory she had explored on the Moon. But Torec was at Saturn, still working on the CTC processor project, out of touch.

Pirius’s reaction to Mars seemed to disappoint Nilis. Apparently Mars held a sentimental place in earthworm hearts. Mars was a small world, but it had as much land area as Earth, Nilis said. It had canyons and mountains and huge impact craters — in fact the whole of the northern hemisphere appeared to be one immense basin — and its range of elevations, from the depths of the deepest basins to the heights of the highest mountains, was actually greater than anything on Earth, even if you were to strip away that world’s oceans.

Geology was never going to appeal much to a Navy brat. But Pirius was intrigued by Mons Olympus, the tallest mountain in the whole of Sol system — and their destination. For in a grandiose, astonishingly arrogant gesture, the Interim Coalition of Governance had built its Secret Archive into that mightiest of monuments.

The corvette landed at Kahra, the modern capital of Mars. This was a city in the Earth style, a Qax- design Conurbation, a series of domes blown out of the bedrock. But only a few hundred thousand people lived here. In fact there were only a few million on Mars, Pirius learned, less on the whole planet than in a single one of Earth’s great cities.

The Martian citizens seemed about as bland and fat as those Pirius had encountered on Earth, though a little taller, a little longer-limbed, perhaps an adaptation to the one-third gravity here. But the officials who processed their arrival stared at Pirius’s bright red Navy uniform. Even here, it seemed, his unwelcome fame had spread, which was why Nilis had brought him in the first place. Nilis said conspiratorially, “You are my battering ram as I smash through layers of officialdom, complacency, and sheer obtuse bureaucracy.”

They had a day to wait in the city. Pirius spent some time in fitful exploration.

But even Kahra itself turned out to be something of a fake. During the Occupation the Qax had come to Mars only to destroy its human colonies. They had shipped the surviving settlers back to Earth — where they had almost all died, unable to adapt to a more massive planet’s clinging gravity and dense air. Even the exotic-matter factory had required only a handful of indentured humans to oversee its automated operation.

So for humans to throw up a Conurbation here, where none had existed before, was an absurdity. There was no Martian Occupation to memorialize; it was an “empty gesture by earnest Coalition politicos eager for advancement,” as Nilis put it. This Conurbation didn’t even have a number, as did those on Earth; it was known as Kahra, the name of the older city which had been demolished to make way for it, and whose foundations now rested under the dull pink-gray domes.

Kahra, and Mars itself, struck Pirius as an oddly halfhearted place — a Conurbation without a number, a world whose most interesting ruin was alien, a sparse population of unenthusiastic people. The ancient stasis of this world, which had given up on geological processing about the time the first oceans were pooling on Earth, seemed to have sunk into the minds of the settlers. Little controversy from this small dead world trickled up the chain of command to trouble the councils on Earth. There wasn’t much news on Mars.

The next morning Pirius left Kahra without regret.

From Kahra it was a short hop to Olympus.

Their flitter landed on an uninteresting, gently sloping plain, featureless save for a massive hatchway set in the ground. Nothing else showed of the Secret Archive above the surface of Mars.

But this was, after all, the highest mountain in Sol system. So Pirius asked permission to spend a few minutes out on the surface. He pulled on his skinsuit, inflated the flitter’s blister airlock, and dropped a couple of meters to the Martian ground.

He landed in dust. He broke through a crust of darker, loosely bound material, and sank into thicker material beneath that compacted under his weight. Perhaps that crust was an irradiated mantle, like Port Sol. When he took a step he found the going wasn’t so difficult, but soon his legs and back were stained by the dust, which was fine and clinging. He remembered Torec’s complaints about Moon dust, and how hard that had been to clean off.

The slope was featureless save for a gully a few meters away, cut into the ground. The sky was reddish, too, and the sun was a shrunken yellow-brown circle, still rising on this Martian morning. The light of the more remote sun was diluted, and the shadows it cast, though sharp, were not deep. The only motion was near the horizon, where a narrow pillar, tracking across the ground, seemed to be shorting between ground and sky. Perhaps it was a dust devil. It was rarefied, feeble compared to the mighty meteorological features he had glimpsed on Earth.

All he could see of the works of mankind were the flitter and the white-painted Archive hatch, set in the ground. And he could see no mountain, no mighty summit or precipitous cliffs.

The air shimmered; a Virtual coalesced. It was Luru Parz, appropriately dressed in a skinsuit of her own.

Pirius felt his heart hammering. He had been unable to come to terms with Luru Parz’s revelation that she was effectively immortal, millennia old; it defied his imagination. Standing on this inhuman planet, the most alien thing in his universe was the patient, silent woman before him.

From the flitter the Commissary called, “Luru Parz. I wasn’t expecting you to accompany us.”

“I’m not. Gramm has bent a little, but he won’t allow me anywhere near the planet, let alone into the Archive. He won’t even let me send a Virtual in there. Isn’t that petty?” She winked at Pirius, with a kind of gruesome flirtatiousness. “Still, I thought I should come see you off. What do you think of Mars, Ensign?”

“Dusty.”

Luru barked laughter.

Nilis sighed. “I suppose that sums it up. On Mars there is dust everywhere. It piles up in the craters; it covers these great Tharsis mountains. Even the air is full of it — scattering the light, whipping itself into murky storms…”

Luru Parz said, “And Mars is old. The oldest landscapes on Earth would be among the youngest on Mars. But of course even the old can hide a few surprises.” She was still staring at Pirius.

Pirius dropped his gaze, his cheeks hot. But he wasn’t much interested in comparative planetology; born in a tube and raised in a box, he had no preconceptions about how planets were supposed to work. “So where’s the big mountain?”

Nilis said, “Ensign, you’re standing on it. Olympus is a shield volcano, seven hundred kilometers across at its base, rising some twenty-five kilometers above the mean level. Its caldera juts out of the atmosphere! But the whole thing’s so vast it dwarfs human perspectives.”

Luru was watching him again. “Disappointed, Ensign? Everything about Mars seems to disappoint. But before spaceflight, Mars was the only world whose surface was visible from Earth, save for the unchanging Moon. And it was the repository of a million dreams — wasn’t it, Commissary? We even dreamed of making Mars like Earth. Of course, it’s technically possible. Can you see why it was never done?”

Pirius glanced around at the worn landscape, the dust-choked sky. “Why bother? If you want to make an Earth there are better candidates.”

“Yes,” Nilis said sadly. “By the time we had the capability to terraform, we had already found other Earths. Nobody could be bothered with Mars. What an irony! And so Mars was bypassed. This is very ancient stuff, Pirius. But I sometimes wonder if something of those lost dreams still lingers in the thin air of Mars, an ineradicable whiff of disappointment that makes Martians as dull as they are today.”

“We aren’t here to dream of the past,” Pirius said.

Luru Parz laughed. “Well spoken, young soldier! All this talk of pre-Coalition fantasies is of course non-Doctrinal. Let’s get on with it.” With a flourish she gestured at the Archive hatch.

The great door began to swing open. The thin air brought only the faintest of sighs to Pirius’s ears. A semitransparent tube snaked out of the hatchway and nuzzled against the hull of the flitter.

“Don’t forget your face masks,” Luru Parz said. She snapped her fingers and disappeared into a cloud of scattering pixels.

The woman smiled at them, though the gaze of her pale gray eyes slid away from their faces. “My name is Maruc. I am an Interface Specialist.”

Pirius and Nilis had climbed down a metal-runged ladder into a kind of antechamber, roughly cut from the rock. They faced this Maruc, their mouths and noses hidden by snug semisentient masks. It had been made clear that though the air in the Archive was breathable, such masks were to be worn at all times; nobody had explained why to Pirius, but he wasn’t in the habit of asking such questions.

Nilis introduced the two of them in his typically boisterous and avuncular way. “I can’t begin to tell you how privileged I feel to be here — here, the greatest repository of knowledge in Sol system, why, I dare say, in the human Galaxy!” He clapped Pirius fon the back. “Doesn’t it make you fall in love with the Coalition all over again?”

“Yes, sir,” Pirius said neutrally.

Maruc led them out of the anteroom and down some shallow steps into a chamber dug deeper yet into the rock. This vast library, dug into the cooling corpse of Olympus Mons, was evidently a place of low ceilings; Pirius had to duck.

Maruc struck him as odd. She had her head shaven, she wore a standard Commissary-style floor- length black robe, and she was short; both Nilis and Pirius towered over her. The robe he had expected. This Archive had once been an independent organization, but it had long ago been swallowed up by one of Earth’s great Academies, which had in turn been brought under the wing of the all-powerful Commission for Historical Truth. Nilis had set out this long bureaucratic saga for him, not seeming to realize that Pirius was even less interested in the organizational history of the Coalition’s agencies than he was in the dusty landscape of Mars.

But Pirius was surprised at Maruc’s height, given the general tallness he had noticed in the Martian population. And at first glance he would have said she looked young, only a few years older than himself, perhaps early twenties. But her face was pinched, marked with deep lines on her brow, and her gray eyes, though clear, were sunk in pits of dark-looking flesh. She was a strange mixture of youth and age.

He was staring. When she caught his gaze she hunched in on herself a little.

Pirius looked away, embarrassed. More secrets, he thought wearily.

They passed through a final door, and walked into a corridor, a long one; its low arched profile, lit up by floating light globes, receded in both directions until a slow curve took its farther stretches out of sight.

Maruc led them along the passageway. It was punctuated by doors on either side, all identical, none of them labeled. The corridor was evidently very old; the floor was worn, and the walls rubbed smooth. The only people he could see were running, back and forth along the corridor, off in the dusty distance. Pirius automatically began to count the doors; without that instinctive discipline he would soon have been lost.

One of the doors opened as they passed. A man came out, carrying a stack of data desks. Thin-faced, he was like Maruc in his slight build, but he looked young, with none of Maruc’s odd premature aging. He let them walk ahead, and then trailed them a few paces behind, his gaze cast down on the worn floor. This seemed peculiar to Pirius. But Maruc didn’t say anything, and Nilis was of course oblivious to everything but the contents of his own head.

One of those corridor runners passed the little party. They all had to squeeze back against the wall to let her pass. She wore black, but her robe was cut short to expose bare legs. She ran intently, eyes staring ahead, arms pumping, her long, spidery legs working; her upper chest was high, though her breasts were small, and she seemed to be breathing evenly. She ran on past them without breaking stride, and disappeared down the corridor, following its bend out of sight.

“Remarkable,” Nilis said, watching her go. “She looks as if she could run all day.”

“Perhaps she could,” Maruc said mildly. “That is her specialism.”

“Really? Well, well.” Nilis was playing the visiting dignitary, trying to put Maruc at ease, though without much success, Pirius thought.

They walked on. And behind them the strange young man with the data desks still trailed, unremarked.

Maruc opened a door and led them into a room. “A typical study area,” she said.

Brightly lit by light globes, the room contained desks and cubicles where people and bots, crammed in close together, worked side by side. Most of the scholars worked through flickering Virtual images, but some labored over data desks. The people were small, neat, their heads shaven like Maruc’s. Men and women alike were slim, and it was hard to distinguish between the sexes.

Some of those bare heads looked oddly large to Pirius, their skulls swollen and fragile. It was probably a trick of the light.

The visitors seemed to disturb these scholars. Some of them looked up, nervously, before cowering into their work, as if trying to hide. Others touched each other, clasping hands, rubbing foreheads, or even kissing softly. Not a word was spoken. Pirius could feel the tension in the room until he and the others receded again.

They walked on.

Maruc spoke of how the Archive had been digging its way into Mons Olympus for millennia. In many ways it was an ideal site for a library. Mars was a still, stable world, geologically speaking, and even this, its greatest mountain, had been dead for a billion years. The bulk of Olympus was basaltic rock, and under a surface layer smashed and broken by ancient impacts — in Maruc’s peculiar phrase, impact gardened — the rock was porous and friable, quite easy to tunnel into. It grew warmer the deeper you dug, Maruc said, but that wasn’t a problem; some of the deepest chambers even used Mars’s remnant inner heat as an energy supply. The tremendous shield of rock above was of course a protection from any deliberate aggression, as well as from natural disasters up to a small asteroid strike.

Pirius built up a picture of a great warren burrowed through the vast mound of Olympus, people everywhere, running along corridors and laboring in chambers. After twenty thousand years the Archive must run far, he thought, tens of kilometers, even hundreds: under Sol system’s greatest mountain, there was always more room.

Maruc stopped at a doorway and opened it to reach another corridor, identical to the first. They walked down this until after a time they turned through another door into yet another passageway, and then they turned again. Pirius kept trying to build up a map in his head, based on the turns they made, the numbers of doors they passed. But all the corridors were identical, and looked the same in either direction, and he began to be unsure which way he was facing.

Besides, the air was thick, increasingly clammy and warm, and despite his face mask he thought he could smell an odd scent — a milkiness, oddly animal. Disconcerted, disoriented, he began to worry that he was getting lost.

But no matter where they went, the little man with the data desks followed them.

They came to another room, full of more scared-looking archivists. Maruc said that some of these had been assigned to assist Nilis.

Only about half the people living here under the mountain were devoted to the data itself. The rest had administrative functions, like Maruc herself, or they were concerned with support work that kept the facility going: there were specialist groups for digging fresh corridors ever deeper into Olympus, others to maintain the flow of air or water, and others to tend the big nano-food banks, warmed by Olympus’s residual heat.

Data from all across the Galaxy poured into the gigantic holdings here. But after twenty thousand years the new material was a drop in the ocean. These days the bulk of the work was classification — there were whole hierarchies of indices here, Maruc said — and maintenance. There was a constant danger of physical degradation — one function of the rock of Olympus was to shield electronically stored data from damage by cosmic rays — and data items were continually transcribed from one medium to another. With each transcription, elaborate checks were made from multiple comparison copies to ensure no errors were introduced.

She said, “You can see we would have plenty of work to keep us busy even if not a single new item of data ever came in. Because our main task is to fight entropy itself. The Archive is here for the long term.”

“Marvelous, marvelous,” Nilis said.

The community was the result of generations of specialism, she said: you were born to be a librarian, you grew up in cadres of librarians, your seed would go on to produce more librarians, for millennia after millennia. Maruc stood straight, and her eyes shone within their nests of wrinkles. “We, the community of the Archive, have devoted generations past to this project, and we dedicate future generations too. We are proud of what we do. We believe our project is in the best traditions of the Druz Doctrines.”

“Oh, my eyes, no doubt about that,” said Nilis. He still looked thrilled to be here, Pirius thought, like a glutton let loose in a food store. “But let me set you a test…” He outlined his requirements quickly.

Maruc raised a hand, and within seconds a runner was at her side. This one was a boy, surely younger than Pirius. His long, thin legs and short body made him look ungainly, as if he might topple over. But after sprinting up he wasn’t even breathing heavily. Maruc told him what she wanted, and he immediately ran off.

Within five minutes, a different runner came to them, accompanying a floating bot. The bot carried a small, battered-looking data desk, just a slab of some shiny black material held invisibly in place, perhaps by an inertial field.

Nilis stood over it, his mouth a round O. “My eyes, my eyes,” he said.

Maruc smiled. “I’m afraid we can’t let you handle it. Any valid spoken command will be accepted, however.”

The floating data desk was so old that its interface protocols were quite alien. But soon Nilis was speaking to the desk, and his words were translated into a strange, distorted version of standard.

Finally a voice spoke from the desk, a stored recording, a clipped, rather stiff voice speaking the same peculiar dialect.

Nilis’s eyes widened further. He said to Pirius, “Do you know what this is? Do you know who this is speaking?”

“No.”

“Hama Druz himself used this very desk, on his return journey from the moon Callisto, where he had gone to hunt jasofts. He used this desk to compose his Doctrines, the very words which have governed our lives ever since. And that voice, cautiously reading out an uncompleted draft — that voice belongs to Hama Druz himself! Listen, listen…”

At last, Pirius heard that clipped and overprecise voice say words so familiar that even the antique dialect could not mask them: “A brief life burns brightly.”

Nilis said, “Madam, thank you. I can’t tell you — all of mankind’s true treasures are here, and you are worthy custodians.”

Maruc observed Nilis’s ecstatic reaction with quiet pride.

His face set, Nilis straightened his battered robe. “But enough indulgence. I have work to do. Madam, if you’ll assist me — Pirius?”

“I’ll be fine,” Pirius said. “I’ll explore a little more.”

Maruc said, “I’ll assign somebody to guide you.”

“Thank you. I’ll wait.”

Eagerly Nilis turned away. Pirius watched Maruc lead him down the corridor.

The second they were out of sight, Pirius turned, strode up to the little man who had shadowed them all day, grabbed him by the front of his tunic, and lifted him up until his head rammed against the low ceiling.

“Tell me who you are, and what you want.”

The little man was sweating, trembling, but he forced a grin. He gasped, “Gladly. If you’ll just, you’ll just…”

Reluctantly Pirius released him. The man dropped to the worn floor of the corridor. He had dropped his data desks; he scrabbled to pick them up. But still he grinned, calculating.

Pirius snapped, “Well?”

“My name is Tek,” he said. “I’m a Retrieval Specialist.”

Pirius thought that over. “A filing clerk.”

“If you want. But we’re all specialists here. The lovely Maruc is an Interface Specialist — she interfaces between us and the rest of humanity. Then there are the runners with their long legs, the archivists and indexers with their bubble brains — don’t tell me you didn’t notice that! Wait until you see the mechanic types who crawl up the big air ducts.” Still clutching his desks, he let one arm trail on the floor and loped about comically.

Pirius had to suppress a laugh.

“All specialists, you see, all of us. But we fit together like the parts of a smoothly running machine.”

“I’ve never met anybody like you, Tek.”

“Nor I you. But then that’s the point — isn’t it, sir?”

“What is?” Pirius stepped forward and loomed over the little man, until he stopped his capering and stood still.

“Do you think there is divergence here? From the human norm. This place is at the heart of the Coalition, but is it Doctrinal?”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing, nothing. Not if you don’t see it. But look at Maruc, for instance.”

“Maruc?”

“Poor thing. Growing old fast, don’t you think? She’s only a year older than me, just one year. But she looks a decade older. But you see, she can’t last long. That’s the trouble with being her kind of specialist, an interfacer. You have to know a lot — you have to know too much. And so you have to die, and take your poisonous knowledge with you.” His grin widened, nervously.

Pirius understood little of this. “Maybe you know too much,” he said menacingly.

Tek laughed, but Pirius thought he had struck a nerve.

“What do you want, Tek? Why did you follow us?”

“I only want to help you. Whatever you want in here, maybe I can help you find it.” Tek actually winked. “And in return you can help me.”

Pirius bunched his fists. “I could kill you in a second.”

“I daresay you could, I daresay. But this is Sol system, sir, not the Front. And here you need different skills. Subtler skills.” Tek hugged his desks to his chest and backed away. “Here comes your escort.”

Pirius glanced over his shoulder to see another worker approaching.

Tek said, “If you need me—”

“I won’t.”

“ — ask a runner. Just ask. And in the meantime, be nice to Maruc, even though she’s only a drone.”

A drone. That word made Pirius shiver. “Why should I?”

“Because she’s my sister.” Tek laughed again. “But then, who isn’t?” Suddenly he stepped close to Pirius and grabbed his arm. Pirius flinched; Tek’s skin was pale, pocked, and his breath was sour. “Tread carefully, Ensign.”

Pirius pulled his arm away.

Breaking into a run, Tek turned a corner and was gone.

Pirius instructed the runner to find him a private room. There he slept until Nilis called for him.

Nilis seemed unhappy. His air of enthusiasm was gone, and his energy had turned into an anxious anger that showed in the fretful set of his face, the way his big hands plucked at his frayed robe. Interface Specialist Maruc trailed behind him, looking uncertain.

“Commissary? What’s wrong?”

Nilis was distracted, as if he barely saw Pirius. “What a place. What a place!” He mopped sweat from his neck. “You know, in their obsessive toiling, here in this huge subterranean mound of data, the Archivists never throw anything away. And their search engines are remarkably effective. There is so much here, Ensign. So many secrets — so much treasure! And all of it buried under the coffin lid of Hama Druz…”

“We came here looking for weapons.”

“Weapons?” he said vaguely. “Ah — yes, of course. Weapons. The Prime Radiant — you needn’t look at me like that, Ensign; I haven’t forgotten our mission!”

“So did you find anything?”

“As a matter of fact, I think I did. Ensign, in your base at the Core, did they teach you about gravastars?”

They hadn’t, but this was what Nilis had turned up in his first hasty search for techniques to counter FTL foreknowledge. And as it turned out, Nilis started to explain, Pirius was going to have to make yet another journey into strangeness, here in Sol system, to track down what Nilis thought he had discovered.

But Nilis stopped and stared at Pirius’s arm. “Ensign, what’s that on your sleeve?”

Pirius glanced down. A lozenge shape, glittering brightly, rested on his uniform sleeve; it was no larger than his thumbnail. And it was just where Tek had touched him. Without thinking he clapped his hand over the chip. “Nothing, sir. Uh, an insect.”

Nilis raised bushy eyebrows. “An insect? In here? It’s possible, I suppose — who’s to say? I think our business is done for today. Tomorrow we will return and start digging properly into this business of the gravastars.”

As they were led out of the Archive and back to the golden-brown surface of Mars, Pirius glanced again at the chip. He wasn’t disturbed by it so much as by his own reaction. Why had he concealed it from Nilis?

He felt deeply troubled. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good soldier after all.

They fell down to Factory Rock.

Chapter 20

A dropship was small and basic, just a transparent cylinder big enough for two platoons, twenty infantry, crammed in shoulder to shoulder with their bulky rad-shielded skinsuits and equipment. When Pirius Blue looked out through the ship’s curving hull, he could see the fleshy bulk of the Spline warship that had brought them here from Quin. His own ship was one of thousands committed to this action. From a dozen orifices in the Spline’s hull, the dropships poured out in gleaming streams. And when he looked down he could see how the little ships were falling all across the broad face of the target Rock.

The surface of the Rock was covered by a zigzag lattice of trenches. He was already low enough to see people, tiny figures like toys scurrying clumsily along the trenches or hurling themselves over stretches of open ground. But everywhere points of light sparkled, pink and electric blue, bright on a gray background, and some of those running figures fell, or exploded in soft bursts of crimson. As far as he could see, the whole surface of this asteroid was covered by the crawling figures and the sparkling lights. The fire was reaching up to the sky too; a thread of cherry-red light would connect the ground to one of the falling dropships, and it would burst, spilling bodies into space.

And all this in utter silence, broken only by the hiss of air through his suit’s systems.

He had known in abstract what to expect. He had seen such Rocks before, from the comfortable cockpit of his high-flying greenship. But he had not imagined this. The scene was even beautiful, he thought.

But there was no more time. The ground flew up at him.

They had been briefed by Captain Marta.

This was an unusual action, she said, because it was taking place outside the Front.

This Rock — known as Factory Rock — wasn’t an assault platform but a human base, a munitions dump and the site of several monopole factories. Monopoles were defects in spacetime, each a nasty little knot with the mass of a trillion protons. They had been manufactured in the early universe during its period of GUT-driven inflation, and now GUT energy was used to churn them out, to a uniform mass and charge, in the vast numbers required by the human war effort. They were useful weapons; they would cut through Xeelee construction material, or even the spacetime-flaw wings of their ships, like steel through flesh.

Factory Rock was an old establishment. It lay in the hinterland beyond the Galaxy center, a little closer in to the Front than most. In a thousand years of operation, it had had no significant problems save for quagmites, the odd little virus-like critters that were attracted to all GUT engines in factories and ships.

But now the Xeelee had seen a chance to break out of their usual cordon. They had taken this Rock, and had set up well-fortified positions across it. It was a terror tactic. As this Rock went sailing on its own slow orbit behind the human lines, like a rat loose in a barracks, it was causing disruption far out of proportion to its size and direct threat.

So Pirius and his buddies were being dropped to clear the Xeelee emplacements, and if possible to take back the monopole factories.

Captain Marta hadn’t tried to hide the fact that these frontline troopers were raw. Some of them had had only days’ training on their weapons, their laser rifles and starbreaker pistols. But as this target was well behind the main front line, more hardened troops couldn’t be spared.

“Remember, all that matters is that one of you gets through to the objective. And you will make that happen. I know you will all do your duty.” She smiled, her metallized half-face gleaming. “The Coalition has invested a lot in each of you, in giving you life and in your training. Now’s the time to make it worthwhile.”

“Yes, sir!”

The dropship didn’t so much land as crash. It just plummeted to the ground, burying its nose in a meter of asteroid dirt.

The hull immediately popped, and the inertial shielding turned off. Following his training, Pirius threw himself out of the ship and into the nearest trench.

The trench was shallow, barely enough to cover him. In fact it was a piece of shit, he thought, surveying it with a now-professional eye; he could dig better in half an hour. But lines of cherry-red light already stitched the air above him, and he pressed himself into the dirt.

The members of his platoon, 57 Platoon, all made it to this crudely dug trench. He saw the corporal, a very young man called Pace, and his sergeant, and Cohl, and the two surviving Tilis in their gaudily customized skinsuits. The Tilis seemed to be functioning, even though it was only three weeks since the death of Two, and Three was still getting used to her prosthetic hand. Many of the troopers were wrestling with their clumsy weapons. But Pirius and Cohl, as Service Corps, were laden with trenching tools, flares, comm posts, med supplies, and other nonlethal essentials.

As the enemy fire intensified above them, they were all pushing themselves into the broken dirt, their gleaming new weapons already scuffed and coated with dust. He wondered if Burden had made it down safely. His platoon had been scheduled to land some distance away.

Corporal Pace whirled a finger, ordering them to switch their comms to the platoon’s dedicated loop. “Listen up,” he said heavily. “We’re down safe. The line’s intact and we’re in a strong section of it. We have Guards to the left, and more to the right, further down the line.” That was good. Guards were pains in the ass on the base, but in action, Guard units were reassuring to have close, protecting your flank. “We’re about two kilometers from our target factory, which is that way.” He pointed. “In thirty seconds the artillery barrage will start, and in five minutes we’ll move. Everybody clear? Good.”

And then, to Pirius’s amazement, he snapped his fingers and a Virtual appeared in the air above him, floating over the trench like a multicolored specter.

It was a pep talk. A smiling woman’s face mouthed words — no doubt uplifting Doctrinal propaganda — that Pirius couldn’t hear. They were shown images of field guns, mostly monopole cannon. These were in batteries a couple of kilometers behind Pirius’s position, and he knew there were emplacements of more massive siege guns, “heavies,” further back still. The slanting tubes were oddly graceful, Pirius thought, oddly fragile-looking for such powerful weapons. They were lodged on the ground, sacrificing flexibility of deployment for the shelter of the asteroid’s bulk.

But the first guns were already firing. The heat generated was obvious; the cannon’s breeches were red hot, their inertial-control recoil mounts battered and smoking. In the heat, the gunners had stripped to the waist, though they wore skinsuit helmets. Sweating, their skinny torsos gleaming red in the glare of their red-hot cannon, they swarmed around the guns like rats. Pirius wondered if Enduring Hope was working in some such inferno.

But if the Virtual was meant to boost the infantry’s morale, it wasn’t working. They were supposed to march safely behind the guns’ fire, a tactic in which everything depended on precision and coordination between artillery and infantry. But even in this sanitized image Pirius saw things go wrong, like a recoil mount snapping under the strain.

And the Virtual itself was suddenly stitched through by cherry-red beams. Pace, digging his face into the dirt, shut down the Virtual; it dissipated in a cloud of pixels.

Cohl lifted her head. She was heavily shadowed, but Pirius could see her snarl of contempt. “At least now we know where the Xeelee emplacements are. The trouble is they know where we are.”

And then the artillery barrage started for real.

Pirius felt it before he saw it. The ground’s shuddering penetrated the inertial damping of his suit, reaching deep into his belly.

The first shells, piercing electric-blue pinpoints, sailed overhead. Each shed energy as it flew, creating a sparkling contrail of exotic particles. He imagined the rows of guns, the lighter cannon and the tremendous “heavies” behind them, blasting their munitions into the sky, thousands of them along lines that stretched kilometers.

The first shells sailed out of sight, landing somewhere beyond his horizon. He could feel their shuddering impact. Answering fire came from the Xeelee emplacements, he saw. A line of pink- purple beams snaked up as starbreakers sought to shoot down the shells before they had a chance to fall. But more shells followed. Soon there were so many of them that the contrails merged to become a solid glare, and the sky was covered by a curtain of shifting blue. It was a battle of lights in the sky, human blue washing down against defiant Xeelee red.

The violence was immense. It seemed surprising the whole asteroid didn’t simply break apart under the strain. He felt fragile, a mote; he knew that one misstep of the mighty beasts treading the ground around him would result in a death so sudden he wouldn’t have time to know about it.

Burden was wrong, he thought suddenly. No matter what happened in the future, no matter who or what waited at time-like infinity, nothing could ever erase the blunt reality of this moment. This was real, this tortured ground, this outpouring energy. This was life and death — this was the war.

And still that relentless pounding went on. Pirius pressed his face into the dirt, but he couldn’t get away from it. It went right through him, working deep into his bones, right into his nerves, until it felt as if he had never known anything else.

Then a piercing whistle filled his ears. It was Pace’s command; they were to leave the trench.

Pirius didn’t let himself think about it. He blipped his inertial belt. Hauling his pack, a bulky med kit and a comm post, he scrabbled at the dirt with one gloved hand, and pulled himself over the lip of the trench.

He floated like a balloon, up into a field of horizontal light beams. All around him other troopers rose; they were all swimming in light.

But the starbreakers cut into them, coming from his left. Bodies burst open and blood spurted into space, instantly freezing. Pirius was falling through a vacuum threaded with fire, an utterly inhuman and lethal environment. It was like a dream of light and carnage. It seemed impossible for him to survive.

He slammed once more into the asteroid dirt, dragged down by his inertial belt, set to two gravities. Now he was in a shallow bowl, perhaps a crater; it might even have been natural, an ancient impact feature. He was astonished he was still alive.

A body fell heavily on top of him. It was Cohl. Even through the thick layers of her rad-hardened suit he could see how she was breathing hard.

He snapped, “How many fell?”

“I don’t know. Four, five?”

Five dead already, in the first instant.

“It could have been us,” she gasped, wondering. “It could have been me. It was just chance.”

Pirius said, “Did you see anyone shoot back?”

“No. No, not one.”

They had been trained to expect losses. But the barrage should have cleared the ground before them.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He thought about the pattern of fire he’d glimpsed. “The fire came from the left. It came from an emplacement behind where the barrage is landing. Something’s wrong. The barrage should have cleaned that emplacement out.”

Cohl didn’t seem to be listening. She lifted her pack curiously. A hole had been punched clean through it.

“They got the Guards.” That call sounded like one of the Tilis.

“Which unit?” And that was the corporal, Pace; evidently he was still alive.

“To our left. I can see them from here. Every one of them wiped out.”

And now other voices joined in, from Pace’s platoon, and another close by. “To our right, too.”

“We’re on our own here.”

It didn’t seem possible to Pirius that Guards — arrogant, elite Guards, with their perfect, unmarred uniforms, their trenches as straight and well-defined as geometric exercises, their unshakeable confidence — that Guards had fallen so easily.

Pirius tried to think. The barrage hadn’t worked, then. Perhaps the timing had gone wrong. Perhaps monopole shells were falling out of place, falling harmlessly far beyond the Xeelee emplacements, maybe even coming down on human troops. The hole in the barrage had allowed at least some Xeelee units to survive, and in those moments when the infantry had burst into the open, the enemy had picked targets at will. Now the line was shattered; the survivors were exposed, with no cover to left or right. Everybody knew that an uneven advance was worse than no advance at all, because your flank was exposed.

Pace spoke over the platoon loop. The corporal sounded ragged. “We have to go on,” he said.

Pirius knew the theory. The “creeping barrage” ahead of them was a sweeping curtain, continually progressing at about walking pace. The infantry were to follow, coming in right behind it, to mop up whatever was left before the Xeelee weaponry had a chance to recover. So they had to move on, or the protection of the barrage would soon leave them behind. But everything was wrong.

“Corporal,” Pirius said. “We’d be advancing into fire. It would be suicide.”

“Do your duty, Service Corps. On my mark in three.”

Pirius and Cohl exchanged a glance. They had no choice. Again that ear-splitting whistle sounded.

Pirius roared, “Shit, shit!” He blipped his inertial field and pulled himself out of the dip.

Again he flew, his armored chest a few centimeters above the ground, his bulky pack an awkward mass behind him. Around him he glimpsed ten, maybe fifteen others, floating like ghosts above the churned-up dirt. Some of them aimed and fired their weapons as they swam.

But cherry-red light flared immediately, threading more bodies which burst and writhed, before they subsided in dreamlike microgravity slowness back to the ground. One of them was Pace, he saw; the corporal, recognizable by his bright command armband, took a hit even before he got out of the trench.

Pirius hit the dirt again. He was breathing hard, his pack bumping at his back, his faceplate pressed to the dirt. Starbreaker light continued to flare over his head, and detonations in the ground sent dirt flying up all around him. He could feel no pain, and was amazed he still hadn’t been hit.

He risked looking up. The barrage still crept forward, smashing its way across the asteroid away from him. Silhouetted before its unearthly light he saw figures moving, troopers trying to work their way from one bit of cover to the next, maybe even trying to advance. But there was no semblance of coordination, and few of them were even firing their weapons. Xeelee starbreakers picked them off with impunity.

He was exposed here; he was on a shallow ridge that actually raised him up above the mean surface. He would last only seconds in this spot.

He saw a line in the ground, a faint shadow a couple of meters ahead. If that was a trench he might live a little longer. If not — if not, he had no choice anyhow.

Again he didn’t allow himself time to think. Three, two, one. He blipped his inertial field, and with a single thrust he threw his body through a shallow arc at the shadow in the dirt. He slammed down at three gravities, hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs. It was a trench: worn, its lip broken by the scrabbling of gloved hands, but a trench nonetheless. Starbreaker light flared over him, frustrated, a cherry-red lid over this bit of shelter.

But there was something in the bottom of the trench, hard, complicated shapes that shattered and broke under him.

Bodies. The trench was lined with bodies. Pirius could see contorted faces, chests and bellies cut open to reveal internal organs, solid, like anatomical models. Their skinsuits sliced open, these fallen troops had frozen where they lay. As Pirius had struggled, he had shattered some of the frozen corpses. But there was no horror for him; the cold and the vacuum had sucked out the last of the humanity from these relics.

The trench had been well-constructed and was evidently deep. He could see some meters to left and right; the trench zigzagged so it couldn’t be cleaned out by a single sweep of raking fire. And as far as he could see it was filled with those frozen, cut-open corpses, a tangle of rigid limbs and guts and skulls, like a ditch full of smashed statues.

Cohl came sailing in and landed as he had, hard on her belly. Bits of smashed bodies flew high; where they sailed above the lip of the trench, starbreaker beams picked them out, vaporizing them, as if playing. Cohl thrashed in shock.

Pirius held Cohl’s shoulders. “Take it easy.”

She subsided, breathing hard, eyes wild. She fixed her gaze on his face. “This is a nightmare.”

“I know.” He glanced around. “They must be lying six, seven deep. We aren’t the first to come this way.”

“We’re going to die here, as they did.”

“We’re not dead yet.” Pirius took a comm post from his back and thrust it into the trench wall. “This is Pirius. 57 Platoon. We made it to a trench. There are two of us here. If you can hear this, triangulate on my signal and assemble here.” He let the message repeat, and ducked his head back down into the deeper safety of the trench.

It took only seconds for the first trooper to come plummeting into the trench, heralded by a burst of starbreaker fire. It was a girl, dark and serious, her face contorted with fear; Pirius didn’t know her name. She had lost her weapons. And when she saw what she had landed in she thrashed in panic as Cohl had.

In the following thirty seconds four more followed. The two Tili sisters were among them, to Pirius’s relief.

And then no more.

Seven of them, in the trench, out of twenty in the two platoons who had been dropped here. He looked around at their faces, the faces of these terrified children lost in this terrible place — all of them looking at him.

He felt a weight pressing on his shoulders, as if his inertial field was malfunctioning. Was this what a galactic war had reduced to — him and Cohl in a scratch in the ground, with five frightened kids?

He set his comm loop to open, linking him to the whole of the force in this area. Maybe somebody else would hear him, could converge on this place. There was only silence. After a few seconds, it occurred to him to cut out the morale filters.

Immediately he was aware of a roar, like a noisy barracks. The voices merged into a mass, a mob cry, but every so often one of them would bubble to the foreground, and he would hear screaming, muttering, gasping, weeping, calls for help, delirious shouts, even a kind of deranged laughter. It was the sound of the wounded, the sound of thousands of voices calling out together from all over the Rock. They made an unearthly, inhuman sound.

He knew that some of the troopers were listening too. Their faces were round with shock. But even as they listened, in those first few minutes, the cries dwindled and faded away, one by one. If you were wounded in vacuum, with your skinsuit broken, you didn’t last long.

And still the bombardment continued, the blinding light overhead matched by the relentless shuddering of the ground. But the shells’ immense footfalls marched away into the distance, leaving them far behind.

He risked glimpses out of the trench.

From here, according to his visor displays, they were only about half a kilometer from the target monopole factory. As far as he could see only a single Xeelee emplacement stood between him and the factory; the shells had evidently taken out the rest. The emplacement looked like a small shack of a silver-gray material. It was probably Xeelee construction material, among the toughest substances known: self-renewing, self-repairing, said to be a living entity in itself. Surrounding the central shack were small pillars, each bearing rings that glowed blue.

He let himself slide back into the trench. The others watched him, six pairs of eyes, large in the shadows of their visors.

He said, “We have to try to get to the factory.”

“No,” said one trooper.

“What’s your name?”

“Bilin.” He was bulky, but just a boy, despite the massive surface-to-surface weapon he carried on his back. He was scared, and right now Pirius was the focus of his resentment. “I say we wait for the pickup.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

“We can’t stay here,” Pirius said bluntly.

“We can traverse in the trench—”

“There’s no point. We couldn’t get any closer to the factory that way. Remember the standing orders. The only pickup will be at the factory itself. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here, in this trench. We’ve nowhere else to go but forward.” Bilin glared at him, but Pirius stared steadily back, “Can’t you see that? We’re not the first here. Look around you. Do you want to die like this?”

The boy dropped his gaze.

Pirius rooted in the grisly bank of frozen body parts beneath him. It didn’t take him long to retrieve a laser rifle. He threw it aside. He kept searching until he found a starbreaker gun; this gravity-wave handgun, essentially a design stolen from the Xeelee, was far more potent. “Search the dead,” he snapped. “If you don’t have a weapon, find one. Take anything else you need: water, med-cloaks.”

Cohl went at it with a will. The privates — cadets until yesterday, Pirius reminded himself — were more reluctant; they had been trained to accept death, but nothing in their upbringing had prepared them for this gruesome grave robbing.

Pirius checked over the starbreaker weapon. It was massive in his hands, reassuring. He’d been given only minimal training in it, but its operation, designed for simplicity and robustness on the battlefield, was obvious. He fired a test shot; pink light snaked out. There was no recoil. The gun anchored itself in spacetime, while sending out lased gravity waves that would rip apart anything material.

After a few minutes they were all equipped.

“All right,” said Pirius. “If you want to live, do as I say.”

He’d expected Bilin to challenge him, and he wasn’t disappointed. “Who appointed you, Service Corps?”

Pirius just stared him down. Again Bilin blinked first.

Pirius sketched in the dirt on the side of the trench, showing the Xeelee emplacement, and behind it the factory that was their target. “We have to take out the emplacement. We’ll break into two sticks. I’ll lead one. Cohl, you take the other. We’ll go right, you go left…” They would take it in turns, the two parties leapfrogging, alternately covering each other. This routine fieldwork was very familiar to the troopers; they knew how to do it. They started to relax.

He glanced around at their faces, glowing like red moons by the light of the continuing bombardment overhead. Now that somebody was giving them orders again they almost looked confident, he thought. But Pirius couldn’t unwind the coiled spring inside himself, not a bit.

He split the seven of them into their two groups. In her group of four, Cohl would take the twins, who he wasn’t about to separate. Pirius took the troublemaker Bilin with himself, along with the slim, intense-looking girl, the first to have tumbled into the trench, who as far as he remembered hadn’t said a word. The two teams moved subtly apart.

Pirius readied his starbreaker. “We’ve nothing to gain by waiting. We’ll go first. Give us five seconds’ cover, then follow.”

“See you on the shuttle,” Cohl said.

The troopers shifted their positions, ready to move again. One boy moved stiffly, staring down at the layer of bodies, obviously reluctant.

Pirius barked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t like treading on their faces.”

Pirius forced himself to yell, “Never mind their faces! Just do it!”

The kid responded with jerky haste.

Pirius held his hand up. “On my mark. Five, four—”

Cohl’s troop put their heads over the lip of the trench and began firing.

“Three, two.” Pirius snapped off his inertial belt and allowed himself one deep breath. “One.”

He launched his body out of the trench and into the fire-laced vacuum once more.

The quiet girl fell before she had even got out of the trench, her visor melted open, her face reduced to char. He had never even known her name. But there was no time to reflect, no time to look back, nothing to do but go on.

Fly, float, scrabble across a hundred meters, less. Fire your weapon if you can, anything to engage the Xeelee guns, and try to ignore the stitching of fire all around you, the way the ground beneath you is constantly raked up by miniature explosions. When you find shelter — a pock-hole in the dirt, a chance heaping — let the inertial belt pull you down as hard as it can. No time to rest. Head above the lip of your cover, start firing again immediately, to cover Cohl’s crew.

This close to the factory, the ground was littered with bodies, tangled up and frozen, a carpet so deep you sometimes couldn’t see the ground at all. Frozen solid, there was no way of knowing how long they might have been there. There was no decomposition here, no smell; it wasn’t even a human enough place for that. Pirius wondered how many had died here, how long this desperate battle for a desolate piece of rock had gone on.

Three, four hops, and he was still alive. Their laser beams were invisible save where they passed through kicked-up dust; the starbreakers glowed with their own light.

At last he found himself in a foxhole fifty meters from the emplacement. The Xeelee structure was a squat, plain box, unbroken by windows. Starbreakers spat from vicious-looking mounts on the roof. Those pale blue rings on their pillars gleamed, set around the structure.

Bilin tumbled after him into the trench, laden by the heavy surface-to-surface weapon.

“Those hoops,” Pirius said. “We’ll take them out.”

“Why?”

“Enemy comms.” It was probably true. The cerulean hoops were another bit of Xeelee technology. They appeared to use spooky quantum-inseparability effects to allow instantaneous communication. No human scientist knew how they worked; you weren’t supposed to be able to use quantum entanglement to pass meaningful data.

Bilin, now that he was in action, had shed his petulance and uncovered a kind of steely doggedness. He could make a good soldier some day, Pirius thought. He nodded and said, “Three, two, one.”

They lunged over the rim of their foxhole and blasted away at the sky-blue hoops. The emplacement’s own starbreaker mounts spat back ferociously, but fire was coming in at the structure from both sides now; the survivors of Cohl’s team were mounting a simultaneous assault.

When the last hoop had exploded, the enemy starbreakers continued to fire, but wildly.

Pirius nudged Bilin. “Take it out.”

With practiced ease, Bilin pulled his surface-to-surface over his shoulder, rested it on the asteroid ground, sighted. When the weapon fired there was no recoil. A bright blue monopole shell shot across the ground, less than a meter above the dirt, tracking a dead straight line.

The shell hit the emplacement. That construction-material wall buckled and broke, like skin bursting. Inside the structure Pirius glimpsed hulking machinery. All the troopers poured their fire through the breach in the wall, until the machines slumped and failed. Still the starbreaker mounts on the roof continued to fire, but they spat erratically, their aim ever more wild.

Bilin stood up and whooped. “Nice work, Service Corps!”

Pirius snapped, “Get down, you idiot!”

Bilin grinned, and the out-of-control Xeelee starbreaker severed his head, clean at the neck.

The bombardment curtain was now far away, and Pirius could see no starbreaker light. But still the ground shook, still that deep shuddering worked into his nerves. It took a lot of courage to cross the last bit of open ground to the Xeelee emplacement.

Cohl and her people were already here. They had taken shelter beneath a wall that seemed to have melted and curled over on itself. On the far side of the wall, away from the huddling humans, the ruined alien machines slumped, as if sleeping.

Of Pirius’s team, only he had survived, but three of Cohl’s team lived: Cohl herself and the two Tilis. So four of the seven who had come to the trench of corpses were left; in the last couple of minutes another three had died.

Cohl had taken a shot to her leg. Her suit had turned rigid and glowed orange as its rudimentary medical facilities tried to stabilize her. There was nothing Pirius could do for her.

Tili One was worse. She had some kind of chest wound. Tili Three cradled her sister’s head on her lap, her mouth round with shock. Pirius saw that to be left alone, to lose both her sisters, was literally unimaginable for this triplet.

Pirius took his last comm post from his back, stuck it in the ground, and set up a repeater signal. He said to Cohl, “If anybody’s left, they’ll come here. Make the others wait in the shelter.” Then he stood up, hefting a starbreaker, and peered out of the ruins of the emplacement.

Cohl asked, “Where are you going?”

“To the factory. It’s only two, three hundred meters from here. It’s the pickup point, remember. I’ll leave a marker to lead the stretcher crews here.”

Cohl clearly didn’t want him to go, but just as clearly she saw the necessity. “Be careful.”

He crawled out of the ruins of the emplacement, out into the open. He moved cautiously, as he had been taught. He ducked from ridge to crater to trench to foxhole, no more than ten, twenty meters at a time. It was slow going, and exhausting. The condition of his skinsuit got worse quickly; perhaps it was damaged. The air grew increasingly foul, his faceplate so enclosing he felt as if he was choking, and his mouth and throat grew so dry they were painful.

It took him half an hour to cross two hundred meters.

Maybe such caution wasn’t necessary; he hadn’t seen the glow of a starbreaker since the emplacement mount had finally been shut down. But after what had happened to Bilin he wasn’t about to take a chance now.

When he reached the site of the factory, he only knew he was at the right location because his visor displays told him so. There was no factory left: no landing pad, no power plant, no surface tracks, no machinery. Save for a bit of smashed wall jutting at an angle from the dirt, and a line of white dust that might have marked a foundation, there was nothing here but more broken ground. He saw no sign that anybody else had been here recently, none of the thousands he supposed had been dropped with this target as their objective. Perhaps the Xeelee had destroyed it, or perhaps humans had, or perhaps it had been leveled by the barrage. The artillery was supposed to have spared the factories, which were the objective of the operation; but then the barrage was meant to do many things it had failed to do.

Pirius built a small cairn of bits of rubble and set a marker on it, with an indication of where the others were sheltering. He felt quite cold, without emotion; perhaps that would come later.

He looked ahead, to the asteroids horizon. The bombardment continued, but far away now. The ground was full of bodies, the relics of previous assaults, and where the shells landed the bodies were hurled up by the explosions. The bodies rose up and tumbled in the dust before falling slowly down to the ground again. It was very strange to huddle there with his dry mouth and his stinking skinsuit, watching those bodies going up and down.

He shook himself alert. He made his slow, cautious way back to the ruined emplacement, where Cohl and the others were waiting.

When he got there Tili Three was weeping, utterly inconsolable. Her sister had died in her arms.

Chapter 21

The corvette completed its final FTL hop. Suddenly Pluto and Charon hovered before Pirius Red, twin planets that had ballooned out of nothing.

Nilis flinched and threw his hands up. “My eyes! They might have warned us.”

Pirius had spent his life training for combat in space. He showed no reaction before the soft old Commissary; he was much too proud for that. But he felt it too. After all, they were both products of a billion years of common evolution at the bottom of a gravity well, and when whole worlds appeared out of nowhere, something deep and ancient inside him quailed.

The twin worlds’ forms were visibly distorted from the spherical, for they were close to each other. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto diameters; Earth’s Moon was by comparison thirty of its parent’s diameters away from Earth. It was an authentic double planet. This strange little system was dimly lit by a remote pinpoint sun, and the faintness of the light gave the two worlds a sense of dreaminess, of unreality. But the worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue.

Nilis commented absently on the colors. “That’s to do with a difference in surface composition. Much more water ice on Charon’s surface… it’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir.” So it was.

They had come here in search of the “gravastar” technology, hints of which Nilis had dug out of the Archive on Mars. Pirius peered at the double world, wondering what he was going to have to confront here before they got what they wanted.

A Virtual swirled before them, coalescing from a cloud of blocky pixels. It was a short, plump man dressed in the drab costume of a Commissary. His belly was large, his legs short, his shaven head round and smooth. The Virtual image was projected clumsily, and the little man seemed to be floating a few centimeters above the floor.

When he saw Nilis and Pirius, this figure barked a nervous laugh, and small hands fluttered before him. “Welcome, welcome! Welcome to Pluto-Charon, and our facility. My name is Draq. You must be Commissary Nilis — and are you the ensign from the Front? I’ve watched all your Virtuals.”

Pirius had seen some of these. They were cartoonish renderings of Pirius Blue’s maneuvers around the magnetar, produced for popular consumption by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Pirius didn’t recognize much of himself in the lantern-jawed, shaven-headed, Doctrine-spouting caricature that shared his name. “Don’t believe everything you see, sir,” he said. “And besides, the whole episode has been edited out of the timeline. It won’t happen.”

“Oh, but that hardly matters, does it? In the Library of Futures that sort of editing goes on all the time. But I’ve always thought that potential heroism is as admirable as actualized.”

Nilis broke in. “Draq, you say? You’re in charge here?”

Draq blustered. “Yes and no! There are very few of us curators, you see, Commissary Nilis, and we have been here rather a long time. Things are, well, informal.” His hands fluttered again, and the Virtual drifted until it collided silently with the hull, and pixels flared across his round back. “You’ll have to forgive my excitement. We don’t get many visitors.”

“I’m not surprised,” Nilis said dryly, “since your facility doesn’t officially exist.”

Draq pulled a mock-solemn face. “It is odd, I admit, to be a legal paradox! But the work is fascinating enough to compensate, believe me.”

Pirius felt a tightening of his gut, a subtle shifting of the universe around him as the corvette’s drive cut in. Pluto-Charon slid silently across his field of view.

Draq said, “I have requested your crew to bring you down at our spaceport at Christy. Oh, we’re so excited!” He blurred, and crumbled out of existence.

Pirius said, “Commissary, what kind of place is this?”

“Wait and see, Ensign. Wait and see.”

The final moments of the descent were unremarkable. Pirius glimpsed a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon, but as Christy itself approached the flitter flew over ravines and ridges. Here, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer.

“Christy,” a very archaic name, turned out to refer to what the corvette’s pilots called the “sub- Charon point” on Pluto. This bit of ground was unique in Sol system. Like Earth’s Moon, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days these worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly. Within Sol’s domain, Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked; they danced like lovers.

And so this place, Christy, was forever suspended directly beneath the looming bulk of the giant moon, and the feeble geological energies of these small worlds had been focused here.

The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.

They arrived in a dome that was all but transparent. Charon, suspended directly overhead, was visible through the dome’s scuffed surface.

Draq was here in person. As agitated as before, he bustled up, grinning, as Nilis and Pirius approached. Eight more people stood behind him. Some, smoother-faced, might have been female, but they all looked alike to Pirius, round-faced and potbellied.

Draq’s robes were clearly old, heavily repaired, and he smelled stale. “Welcome, welcome again. We’re delighted you have visited us, and we’re ready to assist you any way we can…” As the little man chattered on, Pirius wondered how true that was; Draq must be concerned his covert facility had even been noticed. His colleagues gathered around the Commissary like infants around a cadre leader. They reminded Pirius of the tiny isolated community on Port Sol: these characters weren’t so far from the sun, but they seemed even odder.

But they weren’t paying any attention to Pirius. He walked toward the dome’s clear wall and gazed out at Pluto.

There were clouds above him, wispy cirrus, occluding bone-white stars: they were aerosol clusters, according to Nilis’s briefing material, suspended in the atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines — although perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting away from Christy. Sol was a point of light, low on the horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cloud. The inner system was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Pirius to cover with his palm. It was strange to think that that unprepossessing blur had contained all of man’s history before the first pioneers had risked their lives by venturing out to the rim of Sol system, and beyond.

Charon hung directly over Pirius’s head. It was a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. He had been trained for spectacles like this, but he flinched from the sight of a world hanging over him like a light globe. Charon’s surface looked pocked. No doubt there was plenty of impact cratering, even here in this misty, spacious place, but many of the gouges he could make out, even with his naked eyes, were deep and quite regular.

“They are quarries.”

He turned. One of Draq’s gaggle of followers had come to stand beside him. She was evidently a woman; her face, turned up to the light of Charon, had a certain delicacy about the brow, the cheekbones.

“Quarries?”

“My name is Mara. I work with Draq.” She smiled at him, then looked away. Though she seemed rather awestruck, she evidently didn’t share Draq’s giggling foolishness. “Michael Poole himself came here, thousands of years ago. Our most famous visitor — before you, of course! He traveled from Jupiter on a GUTdrive ship, and he and his engineers used Charon ice to make exotic matter—”

“To build a wormhole mouth.”

“Yes. Here, Poole completed his cross-system wormhole transit network. When it was done, why, you could travel from Pluto all the way to Mercury almost as easily as you walked through that tunnel from your ship… there.” She pointed up toward Charon’s limb. Pirius made out a spark of light, no brighter than the remote stars, but it drifted as he watched. “That’s Poole’s interface station — or the ruins of it.” The Qax had of course shut down Poole’s venerable spacetime engineering, and over the millennia since, most of his interface stations had been broken up, their raw material reused.

Not here, though; nobody had bothered to do even that much.

Mara defended her adopted world. “It’s true nobody lives here — nobody but us, that is. The Coalition has tried to establish settlements, but they always fail. There has never been enough to keep people here, no resource you couldn’t find on a thousand Kuiper moons, and in more shallow gravity wells at that. But we do have our marvels.”

Pluto’s orbit was so elliptical it sailed within the orbit of Neptune. At the closest approach to Sol, the atmosphere expanded to three planetary diameters. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.

Mara described all this lyrically. She seemed eager to have someone new to talk to. Those exiled here called themselves Plutinos, she said. Pirius was drawn by her sense of this remote world, which swam through immense, empty volumes while slow, subtle seasons of ice came and went.

“Ah,” she said now. “Look up.”

Puzzled, he glanced up at the looming, misty shape of Charon. “I don’t see anything.”

She waved a hand, and the light intensity in their corner of the dome reduced.

As his eyes dark-adapted, more stars came out, peering around Charon’s limb, and he made out more detail on the moon’s mottled surface. He leaned close to Mara’s shoulder to see, and his cheek brushed the coarse cloth of her robe. There was a mustiness about her, but he was not repelled, as he had been by Draq; she was strange, he thought, even eccentric, but oddly likeable. He wondered what her story was, how she had come to be assigned to a covert establishment on this remote world.

She pointed again. “There — can you see? Look along my arm.”

Suddenly he saw it, stretching between Pluto and its moon. Only dimly visible in Sol’s reduced light, a glimmer here, a stretch of arc there, it was nothing like the Bridge that had been erected between Earth and its Moon — this was finer, more elegant, more organic than that. But it was a line that spanned worlds nevertheless.

Pirius had heard of this. “It’s natural, isn’t it?”

“It’s spiderweb,” she breathed. “Pluto-Charon is swathed in spiderweb.”

Nilis came bustling up. “One of Sol system’s more memorable spectacles,” he said. “And it is only possible here, where both worlds are locked face to face.” He slapped Pirius on the back. “But we aren’t here to sight-see, Ensign! We have work to do.”

Reluctantly they rejoined the rest of the group, who were crowding into a flitter.

The journey was going to be long, Pirius was told; they would be taken right around the curve of the world. He was dismayed that the little craft was already full of these exiled scientists’ peculiar odors.

As they took their places, Mara sat beside Pirius. She said, “You must come back in the spring, when the spiders of Pluto come out to sail between the worlds and build their webbing all over again.”

“Spring? When’s that?”

“Oh, about another seventy years…”

The flitter lifted smoothly.

They flew silently through the geometry of the double worlds.

Pirius, retreating from the chattering group, spent the journey preparing a long Virtual message to Torec, who was stuck at Saturn, still working on the development of the CTC processor. He fixed a cloak of antisound around himself so the Plutinos would not be offended by what he had to say about them.

When the cramped little craft began at last to descend, Charon was long lost beneath the horizon. There was nothing to be seen here, nothing but the fractured, ancient ground. But before the flitter, the ground rose to a ridge. Beyond this, evidently, was what they had come to see.

Draq said, “We’ll walk from here, rather than fly. It’s best if you come to the facility yourself. There’s nothing quite so striking as a purely human experience — don’t you think, Commissary?”

Pirius was glad to seal up his skinsuit, which smelled of nothing but him. But the Commissary, as usual, demurred, and insisted that a Virtual projection would do just as well for him.

So Pirius stepped out onto the surface of yet another world. Sol was halfway up the sky, a diamond of light.

He took a few experimental steps. Gravity was only a few percent of standard. The ice crunched, compressing, but the fractured surface supported his weight. Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. He made out patterns, dimly, in the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing up around his footsteps.

The group began to climb the shallow ridge. There were five of them out on the ice, if you included Nilis. Draq led the way, and Pirius and Nilis followed, with two other Plutinos, including Mara, who walked with Pirius. Nilis floated serenely a few centimeters above the ice, barefoot and without so much as a face mask, once more blithely ignoring all Virtual protocols. It was crassly discourteous, Pirius thought, irritated. But the Plutinos were too polite, or too cowed, to mention it.

Where the ground was steeper, the frost covering had slipped away. The “bedrock” here was water ice, but ice so cold it was hard as granite on Earth, and Pirius thought he could feel its chill through the heated soles of his boots. But it wasn’t slippery; at Pluto’s temperatures even the heat his suit leaked wasn’t sufficient to melt the surface.

And when Pirius stepped onto the bare ice, he thought he heard music. He stopped, surprised. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization he could feel in his chest. It was as if he heard the frozen planet’s beating heart.

Mara smiled. “Wait and see,” she said.

They reached the shallow breast of the ridge. Pirius saw now that the ridge was one of a line of shallow, eroded hills that circled a basin. It was a crater, he realized, but clearly a very ancient one. Though the floor was cracked and tumbled, its unevenness was worn down almost to smoothness. Over perhaps billions of years, the remnants of the great scar had sublimated away, the icy hillocks of its rim relaxed to shallowness, and the invisible hail of cosmic rays had battered at the crust, turning it blood red, like the ice of Port Sol.

And Pirius saw what he had been brought to witness. On the floor of this palimpsest of a crater nestled a city.

At first all Pirius could make out was a pale, scattered sparkle, as if stars from the silent sky had fallen down to the ice. Then he realized he was seeing the reflections of the stars, returned from silvered forms that nestled on the crater floor.

He tapped his faceplate to increase the magnification. The basin was covered by reflective forms, like mercury droplets, glistening on a black velvet landscape. It was a forest of globes and half- globes, anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air. A city, yes, obviously artificial, and presumably the source of the deep harmonics that traveled to him through the ice. But it wasn’t a human city, and as the ground throbbed beneath his feet, Pirius felt his heart beat faster in response.

Every child in every cadre in every colony across the Galaxy would have recognized this city for what it was, and who must have built it. Every child grew up learning all there was to know about mankind’s greatest enemy save the Xeelee — long vanquished, scattered, its worlds invested and occupied, its facilities destroyed, and yet still a figure of legend and nightmare.

Pirius sensed something behind him, something massive. He turned slowly.

He found himself facing a silvered sphere perhaps two meters across. Pirius could see his own reflection, a bipedal figure standing on blood-dark ice, distorted in the sphere’s belly, and Sol cast a flaring highlight. The sphere hovered without support above the ice, wafting gently as if in some intangible breeze. Its hide was featureless, save for an equipment belt slung around its equator.

Draq stood alongside the sphere, which loomed over him, and slapped its hide. “Now, sirs — what do you think of that? Isn’t it a magnificent beast?”

It was a Silver Ghost. Pirius wished he had a weapon.

The Commissary, taller and bulkier than any of the Plutinos, drew himself up to his full height. Pirius wondered if he had pumped up his Virtual a little for effect. Nilis seemed coldly furious. “Curator Draq, I thought Ghosts had been driven to extinction.”

“Evidently not,” Pirius growled. Mara looked at him uneasily.

Draq gazed at the Ghost’s hide. “Look at this stuff! A Ghost’s skin is the most reflective material in the known universe — and so the most effective heat trap, of course. But it is actually technological. It contains what we call a Planck-zero layer, a sandwich around a zone where the very constants of physics have been tweaked. And the Ghosts incorporated that technology into their own biology. Remarkable: at one time, every living Ghost went about its business clad in a shell that was effectively part of another universe!”

Mara, standing by the Ghost, actually stroked its hide. Pirius thought her gesture was soft, perhaps meant to be reassuring — reassuring to the Ghost.

Pirius’s confusion deepened further. “Commissary, this is a Silver Ghost. It shouldn’t even exist, let alone be bouncing around on Pluto!”

Draq was intimidated by a Commissary, but evidently not by a kid like Pirius. He even seemed triumphant. “We’ve done this to further the goals of the Coalition, Ensign. To serve the Third Expansion!”

Nilis turned on him. “But the boy’s right, curator.”

Draq’s restless hands, encumbered by his skinsuit gloves, wriggled and pulled at each other. “But can’t you see — that’s the sheer excitement of the project. The Ghosts were of course wiped out. But perhaps you know that the Ghosts were composite creatures — each of them symbiotic communities, comprising many living beings, some from worlds alien to the Ghosts themselves, and with their technology merged into their structure, too. And their technologies were simply too useful. For example, hides like this are grown on controlled farms across the Galaxy. Strange to think that bits of what might have been Ghosts are at work, in the service of mankind, all across the Galaxy. If we had been defeated, perhaps the Ghosts would use human leg muscles and livers, hearts, and bones in their machinery!

“And so when, ah, the decision was made that the Ghosts themselves should be revived, under controlled conditions of course, it wasn’t hard to reassemble a self-sustaining community. They are quite at home here, on Pluto; perhaps you know they came from a chill world, colder than Pluto, and their technology, what we’ve been able to recover, serves them well.”

“But why?”

“Because Ghosts are a valuable resource.”

Ghosts were… strange.

Early in their history, their sun had failed, their world had frozen. The universe had betrayed them, literally — and this had taught them that the universe contained design flaws. And so their science turned to fixing those flaws. They ran experimental programs of quite outrageous ambition. Humans certainly had cause to fear them, before they were crushed.

Draq said, “Long ago, the Coalition councils decided that the Ghosts’… ah, ingenuity should be revived — put to use as an engine of ideas, a resource for the benefit of mankind. This was done over and over with other races during the Assimilation, you know. Why not the Ghosts?”

Pirius said, “A resource you had to conceal.”

“Yes! For security — both for humanity’s protection from the Ghosts, and vice versa. And for deniability, I won’t pretend that isn’t true. But you’re here for the Ghosts, whether you know it or not, Commissary. The gravastar idea is theirs—”

Mara said coldly, “This ’valuable resource’ can talk.”

The Ghost hovered impassively. There was no change in its appearance, yet the grammar of the group changed. Suddenly the Ghost stopped being an object, but became a person, a contributor to the conversation.

Nilis walked up to the silvered hide, his Virtual projection casting a blurred reflection on the Ghost’s belly. “It can talk, can it? I see it has a translator box on that belt.” He stood before the Ghost, hands on hips. “You! Ghost!”

Mara said, “There’s no need to shout, Commissary.”

Nilis said, “Do you have a name?”

The Ghost’s voice was synthetic, a neutral human-female voice generated by the translator box it carried, and transmitted to their receiving gear. “I am known as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.”

Nilis seemed startled. He prodded the Ghost’s hide, but his Virtual finger slid into the reflective surface, shattering into pixels. “And do you know the meaning of the name?”

“No,” the Ghost said bluntly. “I am a reconstruction. A biological echo of my forebears. We have records, but no memory. There can be no true cultural continuity.”

Nilis nodded coldly. “Despite all our ingenuity, extinction is forever.”

“Yes,” the Ghost said simply.

Mara’s expression was dark. “What do you think now, Ensign?”

Pirius spoke without thinking about it. “The Ghosts killed millions of us.” He faced the Ghost. “I’m glad you are conscious. I’m glad you know about the elimination of your kind. I am glad you are suffering.”

The Ghost didn’t respond.

Mara’s bleak gaze was on Pirius. He had to look away, disturbed by the turmoil inside him.

Nilis seemed fascinated by the Ghost, as his scientist’s curiosity overcame his Commissary’s ideology. “If you don’t know who you are, do you at least know what you want?”

“To serve you,” the Ghost said.

Chapter 22

It took ten hours for a dropship to come pick them up from Factory Rock. Pirius Blue and his two wounded charges spent all that time huddling in the ruins of the Xeelee emplacement.

When the medical-corps orderly clambered out of his little craft, he was surprised to find them. The three of them were the only survivors of two platoons. “You must be the luckiest man alive,” the orderly said.

“I must be,” said Pirius Blue.

Cohl’s injury was obvious; Tili Three was in deep shock. The orderly said he was supposed to separate able-bodied Pirius from Cohl and Tili Three, and send them back through different “processing channels,” as he put it. Pirius refused to be parted from his comrades. It boiled down to a standoff between Pirius and the small, heavy orderly, there on the churned-up surface of the Rock. The orderly caved in, shrugging his shoulders, saying the officers would sort it out later.

So they loaded Cohl and Tili onto the dropship. By now their skinsuits had turned rigid and filled up with a greenish stabilizing fluid full of nutrients, anesthetics, and stimulants. You were actually supposed to breathe this stuff. Pirius had tried it in training and, no matter what assurances he had got about the glop’s oxygen content, it had felt like drowning. But both the wounded were mercifully unconscious; as they were manhandled, the dense fluid sloshed around their faces.

The dropship lifted easily. Pirius glanced back at the ruined emplacement, the scarred bit of ground that marked the site of the monopole factory. It was just another battlefield, in an unending war of a million battlefields. But it could have been the most important place in his entire life, for he could easily have died here. He knew he would never see it again.

The ride was short, a flea-hop to the nearest clearing station. The dropship skimmed over the ground. The casualties lay like two statues, locked into their rigid suits. The ship had no medical facilities. It couldn’t even be pressurized, so the casualties couldn’t be taken out of their skinsuits.

The orderly was cheerful; he actually whistled tunelessly as he flew the ship. Pirius shut down his comm loop.

After a couple of minutes, more dropships came into sight, other bubbles of light skimming over the asteroid’s battered surface, converging from all over the Rock. A crude traffic control system cut in, and Pirius’s dropship joined a queue. Soon they were so close to the ship in front Pirius could see its passengers, and their bewildered expressions. Ships streamed the other way, too, dropships heading back out across the Rock to ferry in yet more casualties.

The clearing station had been set up in a wide impact crater. A pressurized dome perhaps a kilometer wide sat in the crater like a huge droplet of water, its skin rippling languidly. It was marked with a tetrahedral sigil, the symbol of free Earth.

The dome was studded with airlocks, to which ships came nuzzling up. Some of them were dropships, others larger boats; there was even a captain’s corvette. The ships rose steadily toward a fleet of Spline craft which drifted far above, fleshy, patient moons. Pirius could see movement inside the dome, through its translucent walls: it was a hive of frantic activity. But there was commotion outside as well, and the surface of the Rock around the dome was covered with glistening rows, as if it had been plowed up, like a big nano-food farm.

Pirius expected his own dropship to dock with one of the dome’s ports. He was surprised when the little craft began to descend a few hundred meters short of the dome. It came down on a patch of bare dust, a landing site hastily cordoned off and marked with winking globe lamps.

The hull popped open, and the orderly, still businesslike and cheery, asked Pirius to give him a hand with the casualties. They set Cohl and Tili in their rigid suits down on the bare ground.

All around the ship, troopers were lying in the dirt, their skinsuits glowing orange or red. This was what Pirius had glimpsed from above, what he had thought looked like the furrows of a plowed nano- food farm. The furrows were rows of wounded, thousands or tens of thousands of them, lying patiently in the dirt, waiting for treatment.

“It’s always like this,” said the orderly.

Pirius began to see the process. The wounded were brought here from all over the Rock. On arrival, they were organized into these rough rows. Close to the dome’s walls, tarpaulins had been cast over the dirt, and there were even a few beds. But out here you just had to lie in the asteroid dirt, still locked in your skinsuit, without so much as a blanket beneath you.

Medical officers hurried through the ranks of the newly arrived, peering into each skinsuit, trying to pick out the most severely wounded. Some were marked by a floating Virtual sigil, and the stretcher crews would come out and take prioritized cases into the dome quickly. The whole setup was like a factory, Pirius thought, a factory for processing broken human flesh.

The orderly glared at Pirius. “This your first time out?”

“Yes.”

“Rookie, you gave me shit, out there by the emplacement. If you’re ever in my boat again, be polite. You got that? We all have our jobs to do.” Then, whistling again, he made his way back to his dropship.

Back at Quin Base, the atmosphere was dismal. Casualty lists were posted, simple Virtual displays that hovered in the air. People crowded around, desperately scanning the lists of names and platoon numbers, the smiling images. They chewed their nails, cried, hugged each other for comfort, or wept with relief when they found a loved one who had survived.

Pirius was shocked by this open emotion. There was nothing like the stoicism of a Navy base during an action. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; you were supposed to give your life gladly, and accept the loss of others.

As Captain Marta had promised, the returned warriors were rewarded with extra food. Pirius opened his own small hamper, left waiting for him on his bunk. The food was sticky stuff, very sweet or salty. It was treat food for children. So few had come back that there was plenty to go around; he could have eaten as much as he liked. But he ate only a little of his portion before giving the rest away.

Pirius managed to get a message to Enduring Hope with his artillery platoon, telling him Cohl had been injured but was recovering. It occurred to him that he ought to look for the friends of the Tilis and the rest of the platoon. But he didn’t know who those friends were — and besides, what would he say? In the end, he shied away from the idea, but he felt ashamed, as if he had ducked a responsibility.

That first night there were many empty bunks. The barracks seemed to have been hollowed out. The normal sounds of play and lovemaking and trivial arguments were replaced by stillness. Once, sleepless, he glimpsed Captain Marta moving through the barracks, her metallized body gleaming, her movements silent and deliberate. She stopped by some of the bunks, but Pirius couldn’t hear what she said.

In the days that followed, Pirius learned that the Army had more “processes” for dealing with the aftermath of such battles.

The day after Pirius’s return, a massive reorganization swept through the barracks. Pirius, Cohl, and Tili were to be kept together, but they were assigned to a new platoon, number 85 under the new hierarchy. They were moved to new corners of the barracks. Once Cohl and Tili had returned, the three of them were squashed into a block of bunks with their seven new platoon comrades.

Most of the seven new platoon members were cadets, unblooded, fresh from the training grounds. Reunited cadre siblings greeted each other noisily. The survivors of Factory Rock moved in this new crowd as if they had suddenly grown old, Pirius thought. The energy of the youngsters was infectious, and the mood quickly lifted back to something like the brash noisiness it had been before. Soon it was as if the action on the Rock had never happened, as if it had all been some hideous nightmare.

But in the quietest hours of the night, when the rats sang, you could still hear weeping.

Tili Three was changed. She was nothing like the bright, happy kid who had spent her life in intimacy with her lost sisters; now, left alone, she grew hollow-eyed and gaunt.

Pirius longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. He told himself that if not for his own actions, Tili Three might well have lost her life as well. Why, then, did he feel so unreasonably guilty? And how could he feel so anguished about the loss of two privates, when, if you added up all the losses around the Front, ten billion died every year? It made no sense, and yet it hurt even so.

In the end, paralyzed by his own grief and uncertainty, he left her alone.

This Burden Must Pass had been on Factory Rock, but his platoon had been far from the main action and had suffered only one casualty, non-lethal. He had been through all this before.

And, just as the dropship orderly had said to Pirius, Burden told him it was always like this. “They chop up the platoons and push us together, so we’re all crowded in just like before. Soon you don’t see the big hollow spaces, the rows of empty bunks. You forget. You can’t help it.” He spoke around mouthfuls of the treat food.

“It’s not the same, though,” Pirius said. “Not once you’ve been out there. It can’t be.”

“Don’t talk about it,” Burden said warningly. “You’re safe in here, in the barracks. It’s as if what happens out there isn’t real — or isn’t unless you talk about it. If you do that, you see, you let it in, all that horror.” His face worked briefly, and Pirius wondered what else he was leaving unsaid.

“I don’t understand you, Burden. You’ve been in the field six times now. Six times. If none of this matters, if the Doctrines are a joke to you — why put your life on the line over and over?”

“No matter what I believe, what choice is there? If you go forward, you’ll most likely get shot. If you go backward, if you refuse, you’ll be court-martialed and sentenced, and shot anyhow. So what are you supposed to do? You go forward, because the only thing you can shoot at in this war is a Xeelee. At least going forward you’ve a chance. That’s all there is, really.” That was as much as he would say.

Pirius was mystified by Burden’s contradictions. Burden seemed composed, centered. Under his veneer of faith he seemed hardheaded, cynical, and full of a certain gritty wisdom on how Army life was to be survived. He seemed to have strength of faith, and strength of character, too, which he’d displayed once again in the most testing arena possible. But sometimes Pirius would catch Burden looking at him or Cohl almost longingly, as if he was desperate to be accepted, like an unpopular cadet in an Arches Barracks Ball.

And Pirius noticed that in this strange time of the action’s aftermath, Burden was eating compulsively. He devoured as much of the treat rations he could get hold of, and in those first days he always seemed to have food in his mouth. Once Pirius saw him making himself vomit: the ancient system of fingers pushed down the throat.

Burden’s mix of strength and weakness was unfathomable.

Chapter 23

After five days Pirius Red was still stuck on Pluto.

While Nilis spent time working with the Plutinos, Pirius skulked in the spartan comforts of the corvette with the crew. These two Navy pilots, both women, were called Molo and Huber. They categorically refused to set foot off the ship onto this murky little world. They worked, ate, slept in their compartment. They were interested only in journeys, indifferent to destinations: they were pilots.

They had heard rumors about Project Prime Radiant, though. They thought it was all a waste of time. As far as Pirius could make out, they believed that whatever you came up with, the Xeelee would counter it. You were never going to beat the Xeelee, they said. It seemed to be the prevalent attitude, here in Sol system.

Of course there was an immense gulf between the two of them and Pirius. And there was something sexual going on: not uncommon on assignments like this. But at least they were Navy officers. So Pirius shared their bland rations, and played their elaborate games of chance, and immersed himself, for a while, in the comforting routines of Navy life.

He tried to sort out his feelings.

He told himself he hated the Plutinos for what they had done here. In the four months he had spent in Sol system, Pirius had got used to a lot of bizarre ideas. He had seen the wealth of Earth, the strangeness of its people, and the casual, dismissive way the precious Doctrines were regarded here — even what seemed to him the corruption of the likes of Gramm. Perhaps this was too exotic for his simple serving man’s imagination. But the sight of a Silver Ghost drifting over the icy ground of a world of Sol system itself, as if it had a right to be there, as if it owned it, when by rights it shouldn’t even exist — it was a challenge to a soldier’s deepest instincts, violating everything he had been brought up to value.

No matter how much he thought about it, it didn’t get any clearer. And he had nobody to talk it over with. He certainly wasn’t about to discuss this with Nilis, whom he was starting to think was part of the problem. He wished Torec were here.

At lights out he slept as long as he could. But all too soon the morning came.

On the sixth day there was to be a briefing on the revitalized Ghosts’ gravastar technology.

Nilis insisted that Pirius come out of the corvette and join him.

As the two of them followed Draq, Mara, and the other Plutinos through the grubby corridors of the compound at Christy, the Commissary was actually humming. For Nilis, Pirius supposed, a day of lectures and earnest academic discussion was a day in paradise.

“We’re here to assess this material for its weapons potential, Ensign,” Nilis said sternly. “I suggest you put aside your prejudices and do your duty.”

Prejudices? “Yes, sir,” Pirius said coldly.

Mara walked beside Pirius, but she ignored him. She hadn’t said a word to him since his hostile reaction to the Ghost.

They were led to the most spacious dome of the complex. It was a chilly, cavernous place. Chairs and couches had been set in the middle of the hall, an island of furniture in a sea of empty floor. A relic of a failed colony, its surface tarnished to a golden hue by cosmic rays, this dome was far too big for the small modern population. Ancient bots hovered uncertainly, offering unappetizing- looking food and drink.

And Pirius could see a Ghost drifting over the ice just outside the dome, obscured by the tint of the aged dome wall. Perhaps it was the one who called itself the Sink Ambassador. He wished with all his heart that it would go away.

Draq climbed a little podium. Self-importantly, he began to outline the new idea of a “gravastar": based on an ancient human theory, developed by a colony of Silver Ghosts here on Pluto-Charon, discovered by Nilis in his hasty trawls of the Olympus Archive, and identified as having the potential to be useful for Project Prime Radiant. “Everybody knows what a black hole is,” Draq began. “But everybody is wrong…”

Draq spoke too quickly, made too many weak jokes, and used too many technical phrases Pirius didn’t recognize at all, such as “Mazur-Mottola solutions” and “negative energy density” and “an interior de Sitter condensate phase matched to an exterior Schwarzschild geometry.” But he had a lot of Virtual schematics, immense displays that filled up much of this huge dome’s volume. The special effects were spectacular and entertaining, and Draq, beneath his gaudy creations, gestured like a showman.

A black hole came about if a lump of matter collapsed so far that its surface gravity increased to the point where you would need to travel at lightspeed to escape it. It had happened during the fiery instants after the Big Bang, and could occur nowadays when a giant star imploded. Within its “event horizon,” the surface of no return, still the implosion continued.

Thus the basic geography of a black hole, familiar to every pilot in the Navy. If you fell through the event horizon you could never escape. You would be drawn inexorably into the singularity at the center, a place where the compression forces had exponentiated to the point where spacetime itself was ripped open. Pirius idly watched gaudy displays of exploding stars, Big Bang compression waves, and unlucky smeared-out cartoon pilots.

But now Draq said that the most productive way to think about a black hole was to imagine that the event horizon enclosed a separate universe. After all, nothing within the horizon could ever communicate with anything outside. It was as if a gouge had been ripped out of our spacetime, and another universe patched into the hole. In fact, he said, with an enthusiastic but unwelcome diversion into equations, that was how you dealt with a black hole mathematically.

Inside a conventional black hole, that new baby universe was doomed to implode forever into its singularity. But it didn’t have to be that way. What if that infant universe expanded? After all, that was how the outside universe seemed to behave, and it was possible for gravity to act as a repulsive force: the swelling of the universe itself was being driven by a field of “dark energy” with exactly that property. Draq said that — theoretically anyhow, under certain conditions — the great violence of the collapse of a massive object could shock a region of spacetime into a new configuration. And if that happened, yes, you certainly could create a new baby universe doomed not to collapse, but to expand.

But that expansion was limited. The mass of the collapsing object still drew in matter from the outside world, so there was still an event horizon, the distance of lightspeed escape. But now the horizon was like a stationary shock wave, the place where the infall from the parent universe outside met the expansion of the infant within.

This collision of universes created an “ultra-relativistic fluid,” as Draq called it, like the meniscus on a pond that separated water from air. This exotic stuff was gathered into a shell as thin as a quark, but a spoonful of it would weigh hundreds of tonnes. An unlucky infalling astronaut wouldn’t slide smoothly into the lethal interior, as she would if this were a conventional black hole. Instead, every particle of her mass would have to give up its gravitational energy at the shock front.

This “gravastar” was no black hole; it would blaze brightly with the energy of continual destruction. But even so, Draq said, outlining a paradox Pirius didn’t begin to understand, the temperature of the shell would only be a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Pirius failed to see the point of this. But he enjoyed the Virtual fireworks.

Nilis had become increasingly restless as this went on. At last the Commissary lumbered to his feet. “Yes, yes, Commissary Draq, this is all very well. But this is nothing but theory — and antique theory at that. No such ’gravastar’ has ever been observed in nature.”

That was true, Draq conceded. The conditions needed to avoid a simple black-hole collapse were unlikely to occur by chance — an imploding object would need to shed a great deal of entropy to make the gravastar state possible, and nobody knew how that might occur in nature.

Nilis demanded, “Then how do you know the bones of your theory support any meat, eh? And besides, you’re describing spherically symmetric solutions of the equations. If I were to find myself inside a gravastar I would be as cut off and trapped, not to mention doomed to incineration by the shock wave, as if I were in a common black hole! So, Commissary, what use is any of this?”

Draq was clearly nervous, but he fixed his smile like a weapon. “But that’s why we need the Silver Ghosts, Commissary. To go beyond human theory. And to give us experimental verification…”

Nilis joined Draq under his imploding Virtuals, and they launched into a complex and convoluted argument, involving asymptotically matched solutions of partial differential equations and other exotica. Pirius had a pilot’s basic grasp of mathematics, but this was far beyond him.

Mara approached him. She had her hands tucked into the sleeves of her robe. She whispered, “All this is a little rich for my blood, too. Perhaps we should take a walk.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“You don’t want to be with me.”

“No, I don’t,” Mara said. “But it’s my duty to host you. And it’s your duty to understand what we’re doing here on Pluto—”

“Don’t talk to me about duty.”

“ — even if that means you’re going to have to confront your feelings about the Silver Ghosts.”

“Why have I got to ’confront my feelings?’ “ he snapped. “The Ghosts shouldn’t be here. That isn’t a feeling. It’s a fact.”

“What are you scared of?” she asked blandly.

“That’s a stupid question.”

She didn’t react. “It probably is. Will you come?”

He sighed. It was her, or Draq’s partial, differential equations. “All right.”

Suited up, they walked out of the dome. Mara led him perhaps half a kilometer away from the domes of the Christy compound. They didn’t speak.

Once more, the sharp-grained, ultracold frost of Pluto crunched beneath Pirius’s feet, and he tried not to be spooked by the immense mass of Charon poised silently above his head.

They crossed a low ridge, perhaps the worn-down rim of another ancient crater, and approached a new structure. It was an open tangle of cables, wiring, small modules; it looked impractical to Pirius, more like a sculpture. But it seemed oddly familiar, and he dug for the memory, left over from some long-ago training session.

Mara spoke at last. “You understand that the main Ghost reservation, which you saw, is on the far side of the planet. But it was necessary to provide support facilities for the Ghosts who work with us here, at Christy. We decided to take the opportunity to recreate another bit of Ghost technology.”

Then Pirius saw it. “This is a cruiser,” he breathed. “A Ghost cruiser.” Once, millions of ships like this had patrolled the Orion Line, the Ghosts’ great cordon flung across the face of the Galaxy.

The Ghost ship was kilometers long, big enough to have dwarfed the greenship Pirius’s future self would have piloted in the Core. It had nothing like the lines of a human craft. The cruiser was a tangle of silvery rope within which bulky equipment pods were suspended, apparently at random.

And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding along the silver cables like beads of mercury.

“Of course it’s just a mock-up,” Mara said. “Basically life support. There are no drive units; it can’t fly. And no weapons! I always think it looks more like a forest than a ship. But that’s what it is, in a sense. The Ghosts are like miniature ecologies themselves, and they turned slices of their ecology into their ships. I’ve always thought that was a much more elegant solution than our own clunky mechanical systems.”

Pirius felt that deep anger welling again. “Millions of human lives were lost in the defeat of ships like this. And you’ve built a, a monument to our enemy.”

“Yes,” she said testily. “As you’ve said before. But don’t you think we need to understand what it was we killed?”

He thought he didn’t understand her at all. “Is that why you’re here? Were you always so curious about Ghosts?”

She hesitated, perhaps wary of giving away too much of herself. “I suppose so — yes. I’ve always been a Commissary. I started in the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility: very dry work! I was always blighted by curiosity. Not a good characteristic in the Commission for Historical Truth.” Her smile, behind her visor, was thin. “Then I found out about this facility, and a number of others, where life- forms generally supposed lost during the Assimilation have been preserved — or, as in the case of the Ghosts, revived.”

“There are others?… Never mind. How did you find out?”

She smiled again. “The control of the Commission isn’t as complete as some like to imagine. Truth finds a way. So I volunteered to come here. The powers that be were surprised, but they processed my application. Pluto is generally a punishment detail, you know. You come here to make amends, to end your career — certainly not to progress it.”

“And was it worth it?”

“Oh, yes, Ensign. It was worth it.” She led him around the periphery of the mocked-up cruiser. “I mean, look at this. What’s fascinating about the Ghosts to me isn’t their technological capabilities but their story: their origin, their account of themselves. You know, the Ghosts call the sky the Heat Sink — the place the heat went.” Since their world had frozen, Mara said, the Ghosts had not been shaped by competitive evolution, as humans had, but by cooperation. “They are symbiotic creatures. They derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. Every aspect of their physical design is about conserving heat, precious heat.

“And they seem to be motivated not by expansion for its own sake, as we are, but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, Ensign Pirius, there is only a narrow range of physical possibilities within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts were studying this question by pushing at the boundaries — by tinkering with the laws which govern us all.”

“But that made them dangerous.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “An enemy who can use the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But they developed their capabilities, not as some vast weapons program, but for their own species imperative. Until they ran up against humans, it had nothing to do with us…”

Pirius sensed movement behind him. A Silver Ghost hovered massively, a few meters away, just above the ice surface.

Mara said quickly, “It’s only the Sink Ambassador. It must have followed us. It’s probably curious.”

“Curious? You talk as if it’s a child.” Pirius saw himself reflected in the Ghost’s complacent hide. “You,” he said. “You are the Sink Ambassador?”

“That is what I am called.”

“Is she right? That you Ghosts follow your own logic, that you care nothing for humans?”

“I don’t know,” the Ghost said. “I have no reliable data on the past.”

Mara said dryly, “These new Ghosts won’t believe a word we say about their history. Maybe they’re right not to.”

“We destroyed you,” Pirius said. “And we brought you back. Everything about you is in our power.”

“True. But that doesn’t alter my perception of you.”

Fists clenched, Pirius stepped up to the Ghost. Suddenly all the complex emotions he had been feeling — his inbred hatred of the Ghosts, his confusion at the reaction of Mara and the others, all that had struck him so overwhelmingly since the day his own future self had docked at Arches — welled up in him. And here was a Silver Ghost, right in front of him. He said on impulse, “Perhaps Mara is right. Perhaps I must learn about you, as you have learned about humans.”

Mara was disturbed. “What are you doing, Ensign?”

“Remove your hide. Disassemble yourself. Show me what you are.”

Mara laid a gloved hand on Pirius’s arm. Her eyes were bright with anger. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

Pirius shook her off. “I command this Ghost. I am human.”

The Ghost was motionless, save for its usual subtle wafting, and Pirius, shaking with anger, wondered what he would do if the Ghost refused. He remembered his training on how to fight a Ghost. That hide was tough, but if you used all your strength you could get your knife into it, and then you could use the Ghost’s own rotation against it and open it up…

The Ghost’s hide puckered, and shallow seams formed, stretching from one pole of the glistening sphere to another, segmenting the surface. The Ghost quivered briefly — then one seam split open. A sheet of crimson fluid gushed out, strikingly like human blood. It had frozen into crystals long before it fell to the Pluto ice.

A Virtual of Nilis coalesced with a snap. “Stop this.” He stood between Pirius and the Ghost. “You, Ambassador. Heal yourself.”

The gash in the Ghost’s hide closed, leaving only a pale scar. A stark slick of frozen blood showed how much it had lost in those brief moments.

Nilis turned on Pirius. He thundered, “What were you thinking, Ensign? To deal with this I have been forced to leave a meeting I crossed Sol system to attend! Is this really your highest aspiration — the highest achievement of mankind, after twenty thousand long years of interstellar conquest — to use your petty power to cause another sentient creature to destroy itself? Why?”

Because it’s what I’m trained to do, Pirius thought helplessly. But he flinched from Nilis’s furious glare.

“Who is it you’re angry at, Ensign?” Mara asked. “The Ghost? Or is the Ghost just a target? Perhaps you are angry at the lies that you have been told throughout your life. Now you have been brought to Sol system you see the truth, and you can’t handle your rage. But you don’t know who to blame.”

“Shut up,” Pirius said.

“Perhaps you would rather have died in combat, without having to deal with such complex truths—”

“Shut up!”

Unexpectedly the Ghost spoke. Its translated words were as toneless as ever. “I gladly obeyed the ensign’s command. I am not afraid to die.”

Nilis turned and inspected the Ghost. “Is that really true?” In an instant, Pirius saw resentfully, he had forgotten Pirius, and was taken over once more by his own endless curiosity. “But what consolation can there be for death? Tell me, Ghost — do you have gods?”

Mara warned, “All it knows of its culture is what we have taught it. As if the Ghosts studied a human religion, filtered it through their own preconceptions and gave it back to us.”

“Yes, yes,” Nilis said impatiently. “I understand that. Nevertheless—”

The Ghost said, “Not gods of the past.”

“No,” said Nilis rapidly. “Of course not. Human gods were creators. But your world betrayed you, didn’t it? What creator god would do that?”

“The past is a betrayal. The future is a promise.”

Mara said, “Commissary, we have tried to study Ghost philosophy. The Ghosts have a different perception of the universe than us, a different story about themselves to tell. Nobody’s really sure if concepts like religion actually map across to such alien minds.”

“Oh, of course,” Nilis said. “But I’m of the school that holds that something like religious concepts must arise in any sentient form. Perhaps all mortal creatures, humans or Ghosts, must develop a philosophy to cushion the shock of imminent personal death.”

Mara nodded. “I’d certainly concede that religious beliefs have survival value — and are likely to play an evolutionary purpose.”

“Yes, yes! Religion provides a rationale for existence in a universe which may otherwise seem chaotic — perhaps an illusory rationale, but a way to cope. And religion has a function as social cement. Cooperation is essential, and religion fuels conformity. Really, religion ought to be a universal…”

As this academic talk went on, Pirius glared at the wounded Ghost, and he imagined it glared back. Pirius said, “I don’t care what it thinks about gods. I want to know what it thinks of the humans who destroyed its kind.”

Nilis and Mara tensed, but waited for the Ghost’s answer.

The Ghost said, “You are the ones who kill.”

Nilis said quickly, “Others kill too. The Xeelee kill. You kill.”

“Only other kinds. No Ghost would kill another Ghost; it would be a kind of suicide.”

Mara said, “The Ghosts think human war is insane — not just the war in the Galaxy, all our organized wars. Only humans spend the lives of others of our kind as if they were mere tokens. The Ghosts think nothing is so precious as sentience.”

“Humans aren’t killers,” Pirius said. He lifted his hands. “We didn’t choose this war. Before we left Earth humans didn’t wage war at all.”

Nilis actually laughed. “Ah, Ensign — another Coalition myth! Don’t pay attention to what the political officers tell you. Before spaceflight, despite the lessons of your childhood, Earth was not a paradise, where humans ruled other creatures in a kind of benevolent despotism; we were not noble savages. We have always killed, Ensign, always waged war — and as we had no alien enemy to kill in those days, we turned on each other. The proof is in the bloodstained ground of Earth.”

Pirius pointed at the Ghost. “Commissary, don’t you get it? This is why this experiment, this revival of the Ghosts, is so wrong. We’re already arguing! Give them a chance and they will worm their destabilizing ideas into our minds.”

Nilis was studying him; Pirius had the cold feeling he had become just another fascinating specimen to him. “Perhaps. But there will be no killing today.”

Mara pointed upward. “Look.”

Pirius, stiff in his skinsuit, tilted back and peered up.

The patient bulk of Charon hung suspended over its parent, half-shadowed, a misty form in the light of the pinpoint sun. But now, right at the center of its face, a spark of light had erupted, blue-white, intense — far brighter than Sol. When Pirius looked away, he saw the new light was casting shadows,

knife-sharp.

Nilis clapped his hands with childlike excitement. “That’s the gravastar! What we see is the glow of infalling matter, shedding its gravitational energy as it hits the ultra-relativistic wave front. It’s really a remarkable technical achievement — the parameters of the controlled implosion of matter needed to create the shock are terribly narrow — stability is difficult to maintain.” He sighed. “But the Ghosts always were good at this sort of thing.”

Mara said, “The test is being run on Charon. This is an experimental technology, and the energies involved are immense. There’s nobody up there to be hurt. Nobody but a few Ghosts, of course.”

“Remarkable,” Nilis said again, peering up. “Remarkable.”

That pinpoint of light, reflected, slid over the Ghost’s hide now. It was impossible for Pirius to believe that that starlike object, that bit of fire, was in fact far colder even than the ice of Charon itself.

They returned to the dome.

Nilis showed Pirius a summary of the rest of Draq’s briefing, and Pirius, his head full of anger, tried to pick his way through the jargon.

He said, “But, Commissary, I still don’t see what use this is. You said yourself that if you got stuck inside a gravastar’s horizon you would be as cut off as if you fell into a black hole — and just as dead.”

“Of course. A shock wave in the shape of a closed surface, spherical or not, would be no use to us. But Draq and his team, working with the Ghosts’ theoreticians, have come up with another solution.

“Imagine that the shock front is not closed, but open — not a sphere, but a cap. Behind it you have your expanding captive universe, just as before, and where the expansion meets the infall you get your shock wave, the cap. But this toy cosmos isn’t symmetrical. At the rear, away from the cap, the curvature flattens, until asymptotically you have a smooth transition to an external solution…”

Pirius thought he understood. “So you have your cap of gravastar horizon,” he said carefully. “That’s lethal; you can’t pass through it. And behind it is a zone that is still effectively another universe. But if you approach from the rear, you would move through a smooth bridge from our universe into the captive one—”

“Smooth, yes, save for the detail of a little tidal pull and so forth,” Nilis said.

Pirius wondered how much trouble there would be in that “detail.”

Nilis beamed. “Now do you see the potential, Pirius? Now do you see the application?”

“No,” said Pirius frankly.

“The toy universe is not causally connected to ours. And that means it wouldn’t be possible for the Xeelee, or anybody else, to have foreknowledge of what we might hide there — even in principle — because, you see, we’ll be tucked inside another universe altogether!”

With a triumphant wave, Nilis brought up a Virtual copy of Pirius’s old sketch of the assault on the Prime Radiant: the journey in, bedeviled by FTL foreknowledge, the Xeelee ring of fire around the Prime Radiant itself, and then the mysterious Radiant at the heart of it all, sketched as a crude asterisk by Pirius. All of this was in red, but now Nilis snapped his fingers. “Thanks to Torec’s CTC computer, we can outthink the Xeelee when we get there.” That crimson ring around the Radiant turned green. “With the gravastar technology we should be able to stop foreknowledge leakage.” The inward path became green too. “Now all we need is a way to strike at the Prime Radiant itself.” Smiling, he said, “See what you can achieve when you focus on a goal, Ensign? See how the obstacles melt away before determination? Now — what would you suggest as a next step?”

Pirius thought quickly. “A test flight. We need to modify a ship. Equip it with the gravastar shield and CTC processors. See if we can make the thing fly.” He grinned; for a pilot it was quite a prospect.

“Yes, yes. Good!” Nilis slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “That will make those complacent buffoons in the ministries sit up and take notice.”

Mara had listened to this, her gloved hands behind her back. She said now, “The gravastar is a Ghost technology. No transfer to purely human control would be possible in a short period. You’ll need to take the Ghosts.”

Even Nilis looked dubious. “That will be a hard sell to the Grand Conclave.”

“You have no choice.”

Pirius had managed not to think about the Ghosts for a few minutes. Now he felt his fists bunch again. “I bet the Ghosts intended it this way.”

Nilis said sharply, “Ensign, you will have to learn to overcome this rage of yours. Even the planning of war is a rational process. Hate is unproductive.”

“Commissary, don’t you see? They’re doing it again. This is what they are like — the Ghosts — they are devious, sly, always seeking leverage—”

“Ensign.” Nilis glared at Pirius, willing him to silence. Mara was studying Pirius, all trace of human warmth vanished.

Pirius, angry, confused, and ashamed, longed to be away from this place.

Chapter 24

A week later Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at Saturn. They fell into bed.

Pirius buried himself in the noisy pleasure and consolation of sex. She was the center of his universe, and he had returned to her. He wished he could tell her that, but he didn’t know how.

Afterward, he poured out his heart about what had happened on Pluto.

Torec said, “I can’t imagine it.”

But when he described how he had tried to get the Ghost to disassemble itself, she turned away. Even she seemed appalled by his loss of control.

His shame burned deeper — and his fear. They were both changing, both growing, under the dim light of Sol. Maybe that was inevitable, but he was afraid they were growing apart. He wanted things to stay the same, for them both to be just kids, Barracks Ball squeezes. But that, of course, was impossible. He could see she was maturing, finding her own place here as her achievements started to rack up. But he didn’t know the person she was becoming, or if that person would have room for him. Then again, he didn’t understand himself either — but what he did see of himself, he realized reluctantly, he didn’t much like. And if he didn’t even like himself much, how could she love him?

But they had little time together. They had a job to do here at Saturn. They were to devote themselves to work on prototypes and test flights.

Nilis told them that the cost of the Project, especially this latest phase, was continually questioned in the remote reaches of Coalition councils, but he was driving it through. “You can fill Sol system with theories and arguments,” he said. “But, my eyes, I’ve learned what makes these politicos tick. Dry-as-Martian-dust bureaucrats they may be, but there’s nothing like a bit of live technology to make them sit up and take notice! It’s the allure of war, you know, the pornography of destruction and death: that’s what motivates them — as long as it is somebody else’s death, of course.”

The ensigns had to take Nilis’s word for that. But his clarity of purpose as this new phase of his project began was undeniable.

A Navy facility was put at their disposal. It turned out to be a small disused dock in orbit around the bristling fortress world of Saturn, under the overall control of Commander Darc. Once it got underway, the development progressed rapidly, because the engineers were keen. Across the Galaxy, combat technology was pretty much static, and the crew, being engineers, enjoyed the challenge of putting together something new.

From the first Virtual sketches of how a standard greenship might be modified, and the first simulations of how such a beast might handle in flight, the two ensigns immersed themselves in the work. Torec applied the crude management techniques she had learned on the Moon, and the complex project ran reasonably smoothly from the start. Pirius felt comparatively at home here among Navy engineers, far removed from such horrors as reincarnated Silver Ghosts.

So Pirius was infuriated when Nilis called him away for yet another new assignment.

Nilis had taken himself off to the heart of Sol system once more, to initiate studies on the nature of the Prime Radiant itself. It was his way; now that the test program was underway, he regarded the gravastar work as “mere detail,” and had switched his attention to the next conceptual phase of his project, the assault on Chandra itself. And he needed Pirius, Nilis said; he wanted one of his “core team” to be involved in every phase of the project — and Torec’s newfound management skills were just too valuable on the test-flight work; it was Pirius who could be spared.

And so he summoned Pirius to what he called the “neutrino telescope,” before carelessly leaving Pirius to sort out his own travel. It was maddening — and embarrassing. Pirius had no real idea what neutrinos were, or why or how you would build a telescope to study them, or why Nilis felt neutrinos had anything to do with his project.

But his biggest problem was figuring out where the telescope was.

He asked around the Navy facility. None of the engineers and sailors knew what he was talking about. In the end, Pirius was forced to go to Commander Darc — another loss of face. “Oh, the carbon mine!” Darc said, laughing. He said the crew he would assign to Pirius would know where they were going.

Pirius spent a last night with Torec. They shared a bunk in a Navy dorm that was big and brightly lit: not as immense as the Barracks Ball of Arches Base, but near enough to feel like home. They talked about inconsequentials — anything but Silver Ghosts or neutrinos, or their own hearts, or other mysteries.

Then Pirius sailed once more into the murky heart of Sol system.

The corvette he took was spartan compared to Nilis’s, and the crew, hardened Navy veterans irritated at being given such a chore, ignored Pirius for the whole trip. Pirius ate, slept, exercised. It wasn’t so bad; perhaps he was getting used to the strange experience of being alone.

In its final approach the corvette swept around the limb of the planet, approaching from the shadowed side, and the new world opened up into an immense crescent.

Pirius peered out of the transparent hull. The light was dazzling; he was actually inside the orbit of Earth here, and the sun seemed huge. Another new planet, he thought wearily, another slice of strangeness.

But this one really was extraordinary. Under a thick, slightly murky atmosphere, the ground was pure white from pole to equator, and from orbit it looked perfectly smooth, unblemished, like an immense toy. He had never seen a world that looked so clean, he thought, so pristine. The whole surface even seemed to sparkle, as if it were covered in grains of salt.

The corvette entered low orbit and the planet flattened out into a landscape. The air was tall, all but transparent, without cloud save for streaks of high, icy haze. But Pirius saw contrails and rocket exhausts, sparking through the air’s pale gray. Once he saw an immense craft duck down from orbit to skim through the upper atmosphere. It was a kind of trawler; air molecules were gathered into a huge electromagnetic scoop, its profile limned by crackling lightning.

This close, though, the geometric perfection of the world was marred by detail. Pirius made out the shapes of mountains, canyons, even craters. But everything was covered by white dust, every edge softened, every profile blurred. Pirius wondered if the white stuff could be water ice, or even carbon dioxide snow, but the sun’s heat was surely too intense for that.

Small settlements studded the land. Around these scattered holdings, quarries had been neatly cut into the creamy ground, their floors crisscrossed by the tracks of toiling insect-like vehicles. Tiny craft rose into space from small, orange-bright landing pads, carrying off the fruit of the quarries. Many of the buildings were themselves covered with white dust; evidently some of them were ancient.

Pirius asked the Navy crew what the white dust was. Their reply was blunt: “Chalk,” a word that meant nothing to Pirius. But they called this world “the carbon mine,” as Darc had. It was only later that Pirius learned that this “carbon mine” had once had a name of its own, an ancient name with nothing to do with the purposes to which the planet had been put. Once, it had been called Venus.

“So, another stop on your grand tour of Sol system, Ensign Pirius?”

“It’s not by choice, Commissary.”

“Of course. Well, come along, come along…” Nilis led the way along bare-walled corridors, padding over floors rutted by long usage.

Nilis was working in an orbital habitat; the corvette had cautiously docked at the heart of a sprawling tangle of modules, walkways, and ducts. The habitat was devoted to pure science, it seemed; to the planet’s secondary role as a “neutrino telescope.” And it was old: the modules’ protective blankets were cratered by micrometeorite impacts, and blackened by millennia of exposure to the hard light of the sun.

Within, the facility was a warren of corridors and small cylindrical chambers. Over a stale human stink, there was a lingering smell of ozone, of welding and failing electrical systems. The station had reasonably modern position-keeping boosters, inertial control, life support and other essential systems, but everywhere you looked maintenance bots toiled to keep the place going. The power nowadays came from a couple of GUT modules, but the habitat still sported an antique set of solar- cell wings, its glossy surfaces long since blackened and peeled away.

Nilis said that, as a pure science facility, without obvious military potential, this place had always been starved of resources. “You get used to it,” he said.

He brought Pirius to an observation module. They peered out at the gleaming face of the planet, and Pirius was dazzled. But he could make out the tracery of quarries and roads on the shining surface, and the steady streams of shuttles flowing through the atmosphere.

Nilis said conspiratorially, “I rather like it here. But it’s not a happy place to work. On Pluto, say, you’re truly isolated, out in the middle of nowhere. But here, Earth is close enough to show as a double planet to the naked eye — close enough to touch. Nobody wants to work in a place like this, when home is so temptingly close.”

Pirius ventured, “Venus is a carbon mine.”

“Yes. Though nobody calls it Venus anymore. Nobody but Luru Parz and her kind.”

Pirius knew enough basic planetology to understand that this planet must have been heavily transformed. It was a rocky world not much smaller than Earth, and this close to its parent sun it should have been cloaked with a thick layer of air, a crushing blanket of carbon dioxide and other compounds baked out of the rocks by the sun’s relentless heat.

Well, the atmosphere had once been over two hundred kilometers thick, Nilis said; it had massed about a hundred times as much as Earth’s, and had exerted a hundred times as much pressure at the surface. The bottom twenty kilometers or so had been like a sluggish ocean, and the rocks beneath had been so hot they had glowed red. That was the planet humans had first visited — and in those days the clouds were so thick that no human eye had ever seen the ground.

“Venus was infuriating. A world so close to Earth, and so similar in broad numbers, but so different. For instance there’s actually no more carbon dioxide on Venus than on Earth; but on Earth it is locked into the carbonate rocks, like limestone; here it was all hanging lethally in the air. So what do you do?

“In the early Michael Poole days, there were all sorts of schemes for terraforming Venus, for making it like Earth. Perhaps you could seed that thick air with nanobots or engineered life-forms, and use the sun’s energy to crack the useless carbon dioxide into useful carbon and oxygen. Fine! But there was so much air that you’d have finished up with a planet covered in a hundred-meter layer of graphite — and about sixty atmospheres worth of pure oxygen. Any human foolish enough to step out on the surface would have spontaneously combusted!

“So then there were mega-engineering proposals to blast that annoying blanket of air off the planet altogether, with bombs, or even asteroid strikes. Happily somebody had a brighter idea.”

It was realized that carbon was actually a vitally useful element — and the air of Venus contained the largest deposit of carbon in the inner system, larger than that of all the asteroids combined. It would be criminally wasteful to blast it away. So a new scheme was concocted, the planet seeded with a different sort of engineered organism.

“They drifted through the high clouds,” Nilis said, “little bugs living in acidic water droplets, fed by photosynthesis. And they made themselves shells of carbon dioxide — or rather, of carbon dioxide polymers, cee-oh-two molecules stuck together in complex lattices.” The nanotech that enabled these engineered bugs to make their shells was based on the technology of an alien species called the Khorte, long Assimilated. “It was one of the first applications of alien technology inside Sol system,” Nilis said. “And it worked. When each little critter died, its shell was heavy enough to drift down out of the clouds toward the ground, taking with it a gram or two of fixed carbon dioxide.”

Pirius saw the idea. “The carbon snowed out.”

“Yes. On the ground, as it compressed under its own weight, it melted and amalgamated, and even more complicated polymers were formed. Those who mine the stuff call it chalk; something similar forms at the bottoms of Earth’s seas.

“It was a very long-term proposition, one of humanity’s first mega-projects. But the cost was modest; you only had to pay for the first generation of engineered bugs. The project has now been going on for twenty thousand years — at least that long; it was founded by the ancients, it’s believed, in the days even before the Qax Occupation.”

Once Venus’s carbon had been locked up in the convenient form of the chalk, it was easily mined, and had a myriad possible uses. But, said Nilis, it was only after the first few thousand years of the project that an unexpectedly useful application of Venus’s new crust of carbon dioxide polymers was discovered. “It turned out that some of the structures formed, in the hot, compressed layers of Venus chalk, had very interesting properties indeed.”

Pirius took a guess. “You’re talking about neutrinos.”

“Yes.”

Neutrinos were exotic subatomic particles. Like ghosts, they passed through matter, through Pirius’s own body, or even the bulk of a world like Venus, barely noticing that anything was in the way. “And that makes them rather hard to observe,” said Nilis.

Which was where Venus’s chalk came in. It was found that some of the more exotic polymers formed at high temperature and pressure in Venus’s gathering chalk layers were good at trapping neutrinos — or rather, traces of their passage.

Neutrinos took part in nuclear reactions: when atomic nuclei fissioned or fused, releasing floods of energy in the process. Nilis said, “There are two places in nature where such reactions are commonplace. One was in the first few minutes of the formation of the universe itself — the moments of nucleosynthesis, when primordial baryonic particles, protons and neutrons, combined to form the first complex nuclei. The other is in the center of the stars, which run on fusion power. So, you see, a neutrino telescope can see into the fusing heart of the sun.”

So Venus was given a new role: as a watchtower.

“The ancients believed a deep monitoring of the sun was important — but not for the sun itself. Stars are pretty simple machines, really, much simpler than bacteria, say, and were thoroughly understood long before the first extrasolar planet was visited. No, it wasn’t the sun they were interested in but what lay within the sun. Dark matter,” Nilis said. “That’s what Michael Poole’s generation were watching. Dark matter, in the center of the sun…”

As the sun swept through its orbit around the center of the Galaxy, it encountered dark matter. Almost as ghostlike as neutrinos, much of it simply passed through the sun’s bulk. But some interacted with the dense, hot stuff at the center of the sun, and losing energy, was trapped. Nilis said, “It orbits, lumps of dark matter orbiting the sun, even within the fusing heart of the star. Remarkable when you think about it.”

It was this strange inner solar system of dark matter, entirely contained within the bulk of the sun, that the Venus facility had been designed to study. The dark-matter particles would annihilate each other, and in doing so released more neutrinos, to be trapped at Venus and analyzed.

“I’ve glanced at the data streams,” Nilis said. “You can see structure in there: clumps, aggregates — even what looks like purposeful motion. There are some who speculate there is life in there, life- forms of dark matter. Why not, I say?”

Pirius was baffled. “What harm can a trace of dark matter do?”

“I don’t know,” said Nilis honestly. “The ancients obviously feared it, though. I’ve seen hints in the Archive of much more ambitious projects than this: engineered humans injected into the dark matter streams in the heart of the sun, and so on.”

And Luru Parz, Pirius thought, who might herself be a survivor of those ancient times, still watched dark matter at the other extreme of Sol system. Here was another deep secret, another ancient fear.

“Commissary, you aren’t interested in what’s going on in the sun.”

“No. But I am interested in primordial nucleosynthesis.” That was the other source of neutrinos. He was talking about the Big Bang.

As the universe expanded from its initial singularity, Nilis said, physics evolved rapidly. In the first microsecond, space was filled with quagma, a swarming magma of quarks, as if the whole universe was a single huge proton. But the universe expanded and cooled, and by the end of the first second most of the quarks had been locked up into baryonic particles, protons and neutrons. For the next few minutes, the universe was a ferocious cauldron of nuclear reactions, as evanescent atomic nuclei formed, almost immediately breaking up again, unstable in the ferocious heat. Neutrinos took part in this shatteringly rapid dance.

But then, as the temperature dropped further, simple nuclei like helium suddenly became stable. The universe froze out. Just three minutes after the singularity this flurry of nucleosynthesis was over, and expanding space was filled with hydrogen and helium. There would be no more baking of nuclei until much later in the life of the universe, when the first stars formed.

“And with no more nucleosynthesis,” said Nilis, “the primordial neutrinos no longer interacted with matter. To them the universe, at three minutes old, was already just about transparent. Those ancient neutrinos still drench space even today. Now, Venus was designed to watch neutrinos from the sun—”

“But a neutrino is a neutrino,” Pirius said.

“Yes. And in those primordial neutrinos can be read a story of the earliest moments of the universe. And it is a story of life, Ensign.”

“Life?”

“Quagmites.”

It had actually been the analysis of the damage suffered by Pirius Blue’s greenship, the Assimilator’s Claw, that had prompted Nilis to come here to Venus, to start thinking about neutrinos.

“It was I who ordered that your ship be subject to a proper forensic examination,” he said. “After all, it had been in close proximity to the Xeelee — not to mention a magnetar! I believed your ship might carry traces of its adventures from which we might learn more. And so I wanted it to be given more than a cursory glance in an Engineering Guild repair shop.”

What Nilis’s scientists had discovered had not, in the event, been about the Xeelee at all, or even the magnetar. It was quagmites.

Nilis said, “Have you really never wondered what quagmites actually are? And how they come to be so attracted to GUT energies?”

“No,” Pirius said honestly. To pilots, quagmites were just an odd kind of virus which gave you trouble if you used a GUTdrive anywhere in the Central Star Mass. Since GUTdrives were essentially an obsolete technology, carried as backup in case more effective sublight-drive systems failed, nobody ever gave quagmites much thought.

“Yes, yes, I understand your point of view,” Nilis said. “You aren’t even interested in the fact that these things are so obviously alive, are you?”

Pirius shrugged. Life in itself wasn’t very interesting; as mankind had moved across the face of the Galaxy, life had been discovered everywhere.

“Pirius, when its GUTdrive lit up, the Claw was peppered by small, but dense projectiles.” He clapped his hands and produced a Virtual image of the greenship. A translucent cutaway, it was laced through by a complex tracery of shining straight lines. “You were shot up, as if you had flown through a hail of bullets. The particles were bits of quagma, and they left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through. The scars cut through everything — the hull, the equipment, even the bodies of you and your crew. But those greenships are tough little vessels; your systems took a lot of damage, but there was enough redundancy to see you through.”

“We’re used to quagmites, I suppose,” Pirius said. “We design around them.”

“But look,” Nilis said, and he traced the lines with his fingers. “Look here, and here… Can’t you see, even in this simple summary image? These lines weren’t inflicted at random. There are patterns here, Pilot! And where there are patterns there is information.

“Every aspect of the lines seems to contain data: their positions in three dimensions, the timing with which they were inflicted, the nature of the projectiles which caused them. There’s really a remarkable amount of information, here in these scars — a whole library full, I suspect. Not that I have come anywhere near extracting more than a fraction of it yet. It seems a coarse way to leave a message, like signing one’s name with bullets sprayed at a wall. But you can’t deny it’s effective!

“You must see the significance of this discovery. The quagmites were attracted to your GUTdrive energy, yes; they appear to feed off it. But they weren’t attacking you. They were trying to communicate with you. And in those two facts, I believe, lies the answer to the mystery of the quagmites’ nature.

“The quagmites are alive, Pirius. They are creatures of this universe, just as we are. But the stuff of which they are made isn’t so common now. Do you see? Once again we have to confront universal history. For the quagmites — like the Xeelee! — are survivors of a much earlier age…”

He spoke of those moments before nucleosynthesis, just a microsecond or so after the singularity, when the universe was a soup of quarks, a quagma. The quagmites had swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. But the quagma cooled. Their life-sustaining fluid congealed into cold protons and neutrons, and then further into atomic nuclei. They were thinking beings, but there was nothing they could do about the end of their world.

“They found a way to survive the great cosmic transition, the congealing of their life stuff.” His rheumy eyes were vague, as he considered prospects invisible to Pirius. “I wonder what they see, when they look at us. To them we are cold, dead things, made of dead stuff. All they see is the occasional bright spark of our GUTdrives. And when they do, they come to feed, and to talk to us.”

“Not to us,” Pirius said. “To our ships.”

“Ha!” Nilis slapped his thigh. “Of course, of course. I have to say this is not entirely an original insight. Quagmites have been studied before. The lessons are still there, I found, but buried deep in our Archives. Sometimes I wonder how much we have forgotten, how little we retain — and the older our culture grows the more wisdom we lose. What a desolating thought!”

Pirius tried to bring him back to the point. “Commissary, I don’t see what this has to do with the Project.”

“Well, nor do I,” Nilis said cheerfully. “Which is why we have to find out! You see, I deduced from the captured nightfighter that the Xeelee too are relics of an earlier cosmic epoch, earlier even than the quagmites. Surely it isn’t a coincidence that we find them both swarming around Chandra!” Nilis rubbed his face, smoothing out his jowly flesh. “Clearly there is a pattern, which we must understand. That is why I have been seeking ways to study the early universe, like this neutrino telescope. And I must continue to study, to gather data, to learn… But if any of this is correct, there is the question of why.”

“Why what?”

Nilis waved a hand vaguely. “Why should the universe be so fecund? Why should it be that at every stage it is filled with life, with burgeoning complexity? It surely didn’t have to be so.” He leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. “The ancients did a lot of thinking about this, you know. You can imagine a universe that would not support life, at any stage. Of course in that case nobody would be around to observe it. There were some philosophers who speculated that our universes fecundity is no accident. Perhaps it was designed in, somehow, or at least nurtured. Perhaps the universe itself is an immense artifact, a technological womb of spacetime! But these ideas were suppressed, like so much else, when the Coalition’s grip tightened. For a mankind traumatized by near-extinction at the hands of the Qax, the idea that such powers might exist was simply too challenging. So the ancient work was buried — but not destroyed.”

Pirius knew by now that Nilis had a habit of letting his research run away, far beyond any practical use. “But what do we do?”

Nilis grimaced. “All this is very indirect, based on long chains of deductions. We need to get closer to the target. I would like, somehow, to make some direct observations of Chandra itself. But I fear that to do that I must return to the center of the Galaxy — or at least a part of me.”

Pirius didn’t know what he meant. “But, Commissary — what am I doing here?”

“The staff here will continue to work on my quagmite analysis. I want you to work with them. You have been trained in the behavior and properties of the quagmites. These habitat-dwellers are all a bit theoretical; perhaps you will give their thinking some meat! And,” he said more hesitantly, “I thought you might appreciate a little quiet time to reflect.”

Pirius nodded. “Oh. So this is a punishment for Pluto.”

“Not a punishment, not at all. I just want you to, umm, work your way through the issues that caused your breakdown.”

“Breakdown?” Pirius was indignant. “What are you, a psych officer?… Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Nilis said evenly. “What do you think was going through your head, out there on the ice?”

Pirius tried to find the words. “It was just — out in a place like Arches, you grow up in a Rock. It’s your whole world. You train, you fight, you die. And that’s it. It’s the same for everybody. It doesn’t even occur to you that other things are possible. You never question why your life is the way it is. The Doctrines are just in the background, as unquestioned as, as…”

“As the Rock under your feet.”

“Yes.”

“And then you come to Earth,” Nilis said gently.

“And then you come to Earth. And suddenly you question everything.”

“The trouble is not the state of the Galaxy, you know, not even Earth.”

“Then what?”

“The trouble is you, Pirius. You’re growing, and it isn’t comfortable. All your life you have been conditioned, by agencies with an expertise millennia old. Since I plucked you out of Arches, you have been confronted by experiences which contradicted that conditioning. Now, because you’re no fool, you’re going one step further. You’re starting to understand that you have been conditioned. Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose so,” Pirius said miserably.

“And you will discover the real Pirius — if there’s anything of him inside that conditioned shell.”

“And then what?”

“And then,” Nilis said, “you’re going to have to decide what it is you want to fight for. Of course this is my fault. I never anticipated how hard this would be for you, and Torec. But we are so different, Pirius! I live on Earth — which is after all where humans evolved. Whereas you grew up in a sort of bottle. I respond to the rhythms of the turning Earth, you to a clock. To me the day starts with dawn; to you it is reveille. There are birds in my world, birds and flowers, nothing but rats in yours. Even our language is different: I have my feet on the ground, but my ideas are sometimes blue-sky — but such metaphors mean nothing to you! And you don’t have a lover, you have a squeeze… I never foresaw how unhappy it would make you.”

“Maybe you should have,” Pirius said harshly.

Nilis drew back. “But I had higher goals. As for Venus, my instructions stand.”

He turned away and peered out at the mined surface of an engineered Venus. “You know, carbon has always been the basis of human molecular nanotechnology. Defect-free engineered diamond is much stronger and harder than any metal could ever be. Right across the Galaxy, our tools, the walls of our homes, the battleships and corvettes of our fleets, even the implants in our bodies, are made of diamond and nanotubes, carbon molecules that once drifted in Venus’s thick clouds. And it has been that way for twenty thousand years. Like Earth, this single world has exported its very substance to sustain a galactic civilization. And, like Earth…” He let the sentence tail away.

Pirius said, “Like Earth, it is becoming exhausted.” It must be true, he thought. He could see it just by looking out the window. The air was still thick, but must be only a trace of the dense air ocean of former times. “But Venus was always dead.”

“Actually, no…”

In its early years, Venus had been warm and wet, not unlike Earth — although, thanks to a peculiar history of collisions during its formation, it spun slowly on its axis. Like Earth, Venus had quickly spawned life-forms based on carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, water; and on a world where the “day” was longer than the year, a complex and unique climate and biota established itself.

Nilis said, “When the climate failed, and the ground turned red hot, survivors found places in the clouds — living inside water droplets, little rods and filaments breeding fast enough for generations to pass before the droplets broke up. Soon the lost ground wasn’t even a biochemical memory. They learned to specialize; there was plenty of sulphuric acid floating around up there, so a sulphur-based metabolism was the thing to have. And that was what the first human explorers found. It was a whole cloud-borne biota, lacking any multicelled animals, but in some ways as exotic and complex as anything on Earth or Mars. But Venus’s carbon was just too valuable.”

“And the native life?”

“I’m told there is a petri dish or two to be found in the museums.” The shadow-free glare of Venus emptied his face of expression, and Pirius couldn’t be sure of the Commissary’s opinion of this ancient xenocide.

Chapter 25

On Quin Base, a month after Factory Rock, training started again.

At first it was mindless exercises. After that came elementary surface operations: trench work, moving over open ground, the new platoons learning to operate together. Just like old times, Pirius Blue thought.

Things had changed for him, though. Now that Pirius was a veteran, even though he was only a buck private and Army Service Corps at that, he was expected to share his experience with his platoon of black-pupilled newbies. So he took the lead in the exercises, and showed them how to dig into the asteroid ground without getting electrostatically charged dirt over their faceplates.

Having some responsibility again felt good, he supposed. But most of all Pirius relished the fitness work, even the meaningless pounding around Marta’s famous punishment crater. He ran and ran, until his difficult thoughts dissolved into a fatigue-poison blur.

One night he came back from the surface through the usual route of airlocks and suit stations, and limped his way to his bunk. He was stiff and sore, and wanted nothing but to sleep off the day’s work.

But the bunks around him were empty. Even Tili was missing — even Cohl.

Pirius lay down and massaged an aching shoulder. He peered up into the shadows. His new eyes changed the way he saw the world, even a mundane scene like this, if only at the fringes. You saw new colors, to which the cadets gave names like sharp violet and bloody red. And you made out new details. He could see the hot breath rising from his own mouth, curling knots of turbulence that rose up and splashed languidly on the bunk above him. Pointlessly beautiful.

Where was everybody? Well, what did he care? But curiosity got the better of him. Besides, he felt oddly lonely; after months in this crowded barracks, he was getting addicted to company.

He rolled out of his bunk.

Barefoot, he padded down the barracks’ center aisle. The place was quieter than usual, with hardly anybody about, the general horseplay, fighting, flirting, and sex subdued. But he heard a single clear voice, speaking softly and steadily.

He turned a corner and came upon a crowd.

This Burden Must Pass was standing on an upturned locker, hands spread wide, smiling. Before him, privates and cadets sat on the floor, or crowded together on bunks, squashed up against each other with the casual intimacy of familiarity. There were perhaps fifty of them here, gathered around Burden.

Pirius sat down on the floor at the back, folding his legs under him. The cadets wriggled to make room, but he still ended up with warm bodies pressed against either side. Glancing around, he saw Tili Three and Cohl. Burden noticed him, and Pirius thought he acknowledged him with a wink. But Burden didn’t break his smooth flow.

Burden was talking about his religion, the creed of the Friends.

“Entropy,” he said. “Think of it that way. You start out with a hundred in a company. A hundred move out of some dismal trench. Ten die straight away, another ten are hit and injured. So eighty go on to the next earthwork. And then it’s over again, lads, and ten more fall, ten more are wounded… On it goes. It’s entropy, everything slowly wearing down, lives being rubbed out. It’s relentless.” He smacked one fist into another. “But entropy is everywhere. From the moment we’re born to the moment we die we depend for our lives on machines. Entropy works on them too; they wear out. If we just accepted that, the air machines and water machines and food machines would fail, one by one, and we would be dead in a few days. But we don’t accept it. Everything wears out. So what? You fix it.”

The cadets’ smooth young faces, so alike when you saw them all together, were like clusters of little antennae turned toward Burden, metallized eyes shining. Tili’s face, still young, was lined by grief. But as Burden talked, Pirius saw those lines fading, her eyes clearing. She even smiled at Burden’s poor jokes. Burden might be talking a lot of garbage, but it was clearly comforting garbage, comforting in a way that no words of Pirius could have been. He wondered, though, how Burden was feeling inside, as he absorbed the pain of these damaged children.

And it was certainly non-Doctrinal.

Burden spoke on. “We won’t last much longer. None of us will. But our children will survive, and our children’s children, an unending chain of blood and strength that will go on forever, go on to the end of time. And at the end, at timelike infinity, where all the world lines of all the particles and all the stars in the whole universe, all the people who ever lived, when all of it comes together, our descendants will meet — no, they will become — the Ultimate Observer. And the final observation will be made, the final thoughts shaped in the ultimate mind. And everything will be cleansed.” He waved a hand. “All of this, all our suffering and grief, will pass — for it will never have happened. The universe is just another balky machine. Any one of you could fix a busted air cleanser or biopack. Some day, we’ll fix the universe itself!”

Tili Three spoke up. “But Michael Poole didn’t wait for timelike infinity.”

“No.” Burden smiled. “Michael Poole went into the future. He sacrificed himself to save his children, all our children. He is with the Ultimate Observer — is, was, always will be…”

The listeners asked more softball questions. But Cohl asked a tougher one. “How do you know? Are we supposed to accept this on faith?”

Burden wasn’t perturbed. “Of course not. Past and future aren’t fixed; history can be changed — in fact, it changes all the time. You know that, Cohl. You lived through an action that got deleted from the timeline. So you know that contingency is real. It’s not much of a leap of faith to imagine that some day somebody will make a purposeful change — an intelligent change — and wipe away all our tears.”

Cohl’s expression was complex. She kept up her mask of skepticism. But she wanted to believe, Pirius realized with a shock; even Cohl, once an ultraorthodox Druzite. She might have her suspicions about the man, but she was listening to his words, and seemed to want to accept Burden’s strange and comforting faith.

A small Virtual drifted before Pirius’s eyes: it was Captain Marta’s face. “Come to my office, Private. We need to talk.”

With a mixture of regret and relief, Pirius slipped away from the little congregation. Nobody seemed to notice.

Marta’s office was unglamorous. It was just a partitioned-off corner of the barracks, the furniture no more than a bunk and a table where data desks were untidily heaped. The only luxury seemed to be a coffee machine. But in one corner there was a kind of cubicle, like a shower, with walls pocked with interface sockets. Pirius wondered if this equipment had something to do with Marta’s complex injuries.

Marta waved him to a chair. Pirius could hear the whir of motors as she sat down opposite him. “Sorry to drag you off from Quero’s lecture.” She eyed him. “And you can lower those eyebrows, private. Of course we know about Burden and his proselytizing.”

“Burden’s talk comforts them,” he said.

“Of course it does. That’s why it’s so successful in the first place, I suppose. And why we turn a blind eye.” She sipped her coffee, and Pirius saw that the metallic surface of her face extended through her lips to the roof of her mouth. “We allow them to stay in their cadre groups, or even their families if we have to, because it gives them something to fight for. And Burden’s waffle about the end of time comforts them when they fall. The ideologues at the center disapprove, of course, but out here we have a war to wage.”

Pirius wondered how to put his own doubts about Burden into words — or even if he should. “I don’t get Burden,” he admitted. “He is his own man. In combat he fights as hard as anybody—”

“Harder than most,” said Marta laconically.

“And he’s not afraid of being ostracized for his faith. But sometimes he seems — weak.”

Marta eyed him. “Burden has depths. And a past which he’s apparently not prepared to share with you. But, you know what? It doesn’t bother me. If Burden took a hit tomorrow, all his emotional complexity would disappear with him. In the meantime, he can think what he likes, feel what he likes, as long as he does such an effective job. As long as our soldiers fight, who cares what goes on in their heads?”

Pirius was silent.

“You’re judging me, Private,” Marta said more heavily.

“I’m having trouble with your contempt for us, sir.”

She nodded, apparently not offended. “Not contempt. But I have to manage you from birth to death, and send you into war. Not contempt, no. Distance, I suppose. This is the nature of command.”

“If you’re so tolerant about the Friends, why did you give Tuta such a hard time when we got here?”

“Tuta?… Oh. Enduring Hope. That had nothing to do with religion. Surely you see that. I was just trying to knock a cadet into shape. That’s my job,” she said neutrally. “So what do you think about the Factory Rock action now?”

“It was a screwup,” he said vehemently.

“You think so?”

“Of course it was. The barrage was mistimed and off target. Our line was broken before we even left the trench. Our flanks were exposed and we walked into fire. We didn’t have a chance.”

“I can see you’re a perfectionist, Pirius,” she said dryly. “There are always mistakes in war. But the important thing is that we won, despite the mistakes. We took back Factory Rock. You have to have the right perspective.”

“Perspective? Sir, I was the only survivor, of two platoons, to reach that monopole factory.”

“It doesn’t matter how many fall as long as one gets through. I told you that in the briefing. We plan for wastage. The losses were a little high this time, perhaps, but most of those who fell were wet behind the ears. The Coalition hadn’t invested much in them. They were cheap. Of course, Pirius, nobody would have got through, or still less got back, if not for the way you took the initiative.”

“I was just trying to stay alive.”

“Believe me, even that’s beyond the capabilities of most of your comrades out there.”

“Sir—”

“Tell me about the Tilis. How does what happened to them make you feel?”

He struggled to find the right words. “I was close to my crew in the greenships. You have to be if you’re to work together. But this time—”

“This time you weren’t flying around in the antiseptic comfort of a greenship; you were down in the dirt with the blood and the death.”

“I saw her sisters die, and I’ve seen Tili Three grieve. And it’s not worth it. Even if we win the Galaxy—”

“The cost of a single life is too high.” She seemed to suppress a sigh. “And so you don’t want to hear me talk about the cost of a private’s training. For you, right now, it isn’t about economics, is it, Pirius? Being one in a trillion doesn’t reduce the significance of that one person you know. War doesn’t scale that way.”

He said hesitantly, “So you feel like this?”

“No. But I know how you feel.” She gazed directly at him. “This is a stage you have to go through, Private.”

He said, “I don’t want to stop feeling like this, sir.”

“Tough. If you’re smart enough for responsibility, you’re smart enough to understand the situation we’re all in, and the choices we have to make.”

He thought that through. “Responsibility? Sir, are you offering me some kind of command?”

“You proved yourself out on that Rock, Private. You may be a wetback reject, and your service record is a piece of shit. You’ll always be Service Corps. But you could make corporal.”

“I don’t want it,” he said immediately.

“What you want has very little to do with it. Anyhow it’s academic.”

He couldn’t follow her. “It is?”

“Somebody has been asking for you. I believe you’ve met Commissary Nilis?”

Chapter 26

One minute left. Torec wriggled in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position among the equipment boxes that had been bolted into this greenship’s little cabin.

Commander Darc had made it clear he didn’t approve of countdowns. Torec’s cockpit, and the displays of the test controllers on Enceladus, were full of clocks, and you could follow the timings; there was no need for melodrama, said Darc. But Torec had always had an instinct for the flow of time, and she couldn’t help the voice in her head calling out each second with uncanny precision: Fifty-five, fifty-four, fifty-three…

It was the first full-scale, all-up test flight of a ship modified with Project Prime Radiant’s new technologies. And with every second her tension wound up further.

She looked out of the blister, directly ahead of the ship, where the misty bulk of Saturn drifted. Enceladus was a pale crescent to her starboard side. The space around her was cluttered with sparks, the observation drones and manned ships assigned to monitor this latest test. It was strange to think that among the watching Navy crews, staff officers, and academics was a Silver Ghost. More ominously, in there somewhere were rescue craft waiting to haul her and her crew out of a wreck.

And directly ahead of her, a silhouette against the face of Saturn, was a night-dark delta wing. It was the Xeelee nightfighter, captured by Pirius Blue and hauled here to the heart of Sol system itself.

The nightfighter drifted, brooding, dark on dark. It made everybody nervous. The plan was that the Xeelee would briefly be returned to autonomous functioning; the fly was Torec’s sparring partner in this test flight. The nightfighter was disarmed, of course, and its workings were riddled with cutouts and deadman’s switches. Even so, that fly was surrounded by a shell of Navy ships. But using the Xeelee was the only way to simulate something like genuine battle conditions.

But whatever the Xeelee did wouldn’t matter if Torec failed.

If all went well, ships like this might one day sail triumphantly against the Prime Radiant itself. But for now this long-suffering greenship was nothing but a mess.

The greenship was the standard design, with the stout central body and the three arms supporting its crew blisters. It was an intrinsically graceful configuration, stabilized centuries ago, and scrupulously maintained ever since by the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of the Coalition’s technical agencies. But on this ship those clean lines had been spoiled by extra modules, attached so hastily they hadn’t even been painted. It was all prototype equipment, of course. The CTC gear had come down in size an awful lot since the first proof-of-concept rigs on the Moon, but the CTC module was still a great egg-shaped pod that made the greenship look as if it was about to pup. The hull even showed scarring where the CTC had exploded in the middle of a static trial, two of its internal FTL drones losing their way and colliding.

Even her Virtual instruments had been cluttered up with additional displays. The whole thing was crudely programmed and liable to instability. And then there were the extra boxes, like a beefed-up inertial generator, and hardwired units designed to run the gravastar shield itself. All this gear had been crammed into a blister which barely had room for the pilot who had to occupy it. It was not reassuring.

Forty-one, forty…

At least her crew, sealed in their cabins, looked calm enough. They were both Navy veterans, both nearly twice her age. Emet, the navigator, was a tall, haughty man whose service had been confined to Sol system itself. But the engineer, Brea, was more approachable. She had seen action in the clear- out of a cluster of Coalescent warrens: human worlds gone bad, relics of the ancient Second Expansion in one of the Galaxy’s halo clusters.

Both Brea and Emet had been suspicious of Torec, this kid put in command of them. But the three of them worked well together as a crew, and as they had come through the stop-start misadventures, holdups, and downright disasters of the testing program they had, Torec thought, learned mutual respect. Brea had actually asked Torec to share her bunk in their Enceladus dorm the night before. Torec preferred hetero, and she missed Pirius. But she had accepted out of politeness.

Ten. Nine…

She snapped her full attention to her instruments. For once every indicator was green, the ancient color of readiness. She could hear a chattering in her communicator loops, a thousand voices talking. As she had been trained, she took deep breaths, and let the adrenaline kick lock her into full awareness of where she was, who she was, and what she was about to do.

Five. Four. A last glance at her crew, an acknowledging wave from Brea. The sublight drive was warming up, and despite her beefed-up inertial protection, she could feel the mighty energies of the gravastar shield generators gathering, like a slow, deep growl.

One. The ship jolted forward, its sublight drive kicking in -

She called, “Go, go!”

Nearby ships blurred, turning to streaks of light that exploded past her view and away. Directly ahead, Saturn itself loomed, becoming larger every second. And at the center of her view, a spider in the heart of its web, the Xeelee waited for her.

“Sublight nominal,” yelled Emet.

Maybe, Torec thought, but she could feel how sluggish the laden ship was, how poor its balance had become.

“Grav coming online,” engineer Brea reported, “in ten, nine…”

Red lights flared around the periphery of her vision — too much information to absorb in detail — bad news she didn’t want to know.

“Three, two,” Brea called. “Go for grav?”

She ignored the alarms. “Do it.”

“Zero.”

The sublight drive cut out — but the ship’s acceleration increased, and Saturn blurred and streaked, as if her view of it was being stirred by a spoon. The grav shield was working. The muddled vision ahead was a mark of the shield’s operation; the passage of light itself was being distorted by the spacetime wave gathering before her. It was a wonderful, remarkable thought: a new universe really was opening up ahead of her, a universe projected from the clumsy pods and modules bolted to her ship, and the expansion of that universe was drawing in the ship itself.

And now a harsher light gathered, as if burning through mist. It quickly formed a searing disc, two, three, four times the apparent size of Saturn. This was the shock front, the place where a spacetime wave was breaking. The light came from the infall of matter to that front, mass-energy lost in an instant.

The chattering voices cut off. She could only hear her crew, and her own breath rasping in her throat.

“Shock formed!” Brea yelled. Emet whooped.

At this moment Torec was alone with her crew in a spacetime bubble snipped out of the cosmos — the three of them, alone in a universe they had made. But the day wasn’t won yet.

“Is it stable?” No reply. “Engineer, is it stable?”

“Negative,” Brea said sadly.

There was a last moment of calm.

Then the disc swelled, rarefied, became a mesh of blue-white threads — and burst. The shock wave slammed into the plummeting greenship. It was a searing pulse of gravitational energy condensing into high-energy radiation and sleeting particles. The ship was smashed in an instant.

Torec’s blister hurled itself away. Tumbling, she saw the hull crushed like a toy, its bolted-on modules rupturing and drifting free. The three arms were reduced to truncated stumps. She could see nothing of her crew. The nightfighter glided smoothly over to the site of the wreckage, and, unchallenged, fired a token pink-gray beam into the dissipating cloud — a harmless marker, but the symbolism was not lost on Torec.

Then her pod flooded with foam that froze her limbs to immobility, and she was trapped in darkness.

The sick bays on Enceladus were like Navy sick bays everywhere. They did their job, but they were bare and cold, the staff unsmiling: it was a place where you got repaired, not a place where you could expect to be comfortable. Torec was keen to get out of here, but it was going to take another day before the bones of her broken arm knit well enough.

Navigator Emet had already gone. He had come out of the blowup with barely a scratch, but as soon as he had been discharged he had requested a transfer to another assignment.

Brea hadn’t come out of the smash at all.

After six hours, Darc and Nilis came to visit her.

Pirius was still on Venus. Nilis said he had told Pirius what had happened.

A Virtual replay of the last moments of the run cycled in the air over Torec’s bed, over and over. Torec was forced to watch her own blister, the interior milky with foam, shoot out of the expanding debris cloud that used to be a greenship.

Darc growled, “Look at that Xeelee. You know, Commissary, I’m prepared to believe it is alive. You can see the contempt.”

Nilis was pacing, barefoot. He was overstressed, and extremely distressed by what had happened. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes,” he kept saying.

Torec suppressed a sigh. “Sir, Brea died doing her duty.”

“But if not for me she wouldn’t have been put in harm’s way in the first place.”

Darc said thunderously, “Commissary, with respect, that’s maudlin nonsense. Brea was a soldier. Soldiers die, sir, by putting themselves in harm’s way, as you call it. It’s a question of statistics; that’s how you have to look at it.”

Nilis turned on him, eyes rimmed red, clearly furious. “And is that supposed to comfort me?”

Darc’s expression didn’t change. “If you want comfort, know that she died doing her duty.”

Nilis snorted and resumed his pacing. “Well, if we’re not allowed to complete the test program, she will have died for nothing.”

Darc laughed. “You aren’t going to trap me that way, Commissary. I’m not convinced that throwing away more time and money, and more lives, on this program is justified. I’ve seen no sign that you’re coming close to solving these instability problems with the grav shield.”

Torec knew the situation was delicate. Darc’s power was all negative. He couldn’t approve the continuation of the test program on his own, but he could get it shut down. And she was scared that after a failure that embarrassed him as much as anybody else, he was ready to use that power. She said brightly, “We still have another ship. It’s already being prepared.”

“That means nothing,” Darc said. “Ensign, engineers work on engines unless they’re stopped by force; you know that. It doesn’t mean I’ll be approving another run.”

Nilis glared. “For you to shut us down now, after just one run, would be criminally irresponsible, Commander!”

Darc was very still, sitting in his chair, not moving a muscle. But Torec could hear the menace in his voice. “I know you’re under stress. But I won’t have you say that about me. I’ve been under pressure to terminate this program since the first poor results came in. In fact, Commissary, I’ve been championing you, keeping you alive.”

Nilis wasn’t intimidated. “Oh, have you? Or are you looking out for yourself, Commander? Seeking whatever advantage you can gain from the project, while always keeping your backside covered, in the grand Navy tradition!”

Torec saw Darc’s hands close on the arms of his chair, his knuckles whiten.

To her relief, before they came to blows, there was a soft chime, and a small Virtual window opened up before her. It revealed a shining sphere. She gaped.

“I have a visitor,” she said.

When Darc saw the Ghost’s image, he snarled, “Send it away. I won’t have that monstrosity in a Naval facility.”

Enough, Torec thought. “It’s my visitor,” she said. “Not yours, sir, with respect.”

Darc shot her a glance, but he knew she was right; by ancient Navy tradition sick bay patients had a few temporary privileges. But he waved a hand at the Virtual of the test run, dispersing it — as if, Torec thought, the Silver Ghosts assigned to the project hadn’t seen the whole thing live and firsthand anyhow.

The Ghost’s bulk was barely able to pass through the door. It hovered beside Torec’s bed, massive, drifting slightly, the glaring lamps of the room casting highlights from its hide.

She shivered, as if the Ghost’s immense mass was sucking the warmth out of the air. She pulled her med-cloak a little higher, and the semisentient wrap snuggled more tightly into place. A Silver Ghost, a bedside visitor in a Navy hospital, come to see her…

Nilis’s characteristic curiosity cut in. He stood before the Ghost, hands on hips, rheumy eyes alive with interest. “So,” said Nilis. He held out a liver-spotted hand, as if to stroke the Ghost’s surface; but he thought better of it and pulled back, curling his fingers. “Which one are you?”

“I am the one you call the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.” The Ghost’s chill contralto voice seemed heavily artificial in this small sick-bay room. “We met on Pluto.”

“Of course we did. I should have guessed it was you. But how would I know if you were lying, if you’re a different Ghost entirely? Hah!”

The Ghost didn’t respond. Darc, still as a statue, was almost as unreadable.

Nilis went on, “And what are you doing here?”

“It’s come to see me, Commissary,” Torec said gently.

Nilis made a mock bow.

Torec plucked up her courage and faced the Ghost. She could see herself in its hide, a distorted image of a head and shoulders, clutching her med-blanket. “Maybe that’s what’s so scary about you,” she said aloud.

The Ghost said, “I do not understand.”

“That every time I look at a Ghost, I see myself.”

The Ghost rolled slowly, slight imperfections on its surface marking its movements. “Identity is a complex concept which does not translate well across cultures.”

Torec said, “Why have you come to see me, Sink Ambassador?”

“Because your project is failing,” it said.

Nilis nodded. “Yes, yes. We are battling the instability of your gravastar shield, it can’t be denied.”

Darc snorted. “And it’s a fundamental flaw. The spherically symmetric solution of the equations — a complete gravastar, a shell surrounding a ball-shaped pocket universe — would be stable. Your half- and-half solution, a spherical cap preceding a pocket universe that matches to ours asymptotically, is analytically complete, but is not stable.” He gave a thin-lipped grin. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Commissary. Even Navy grunts know a little math. The problem is simple: instability. You have your pilot balancing a ten-meter pole on the palm of her hand; she can run as fast as she likes, but sooner or later she will fall.”

The Ghost said, “But we have a solution.”

Nilis and Darc both turned to face the Ghost, startled.

Torec smiled. “So that’s why you’ve come. You weren’t concerned about my health at all.”

The Ghost seemed to think that over. “No offense.”

Nilis gaped. “Did a Silver Ghost just make a joke?”

Darc said sternly, “You say you have a solution. Describe it.”

The Ambassador rolled, and Virtual images scrolled in the air. Torec recognized a map of the phase space of a system. It was a schematic diagram of the possible states of the gravastar shield. It looked like a slice of a rolling landscape, with valleys, peaks, and plains, and it was marked with contours that showed regions of chaos and stability, attractors and poles.

“The trick,” said the Ghost, “is to use the instability, not to fight it. You are trying to emulate the stability of the strongest attractor, which is the spherically symmetric solution here.” A point on the map winked red. “So you allow the shield to form at low velocities, or even when the projector is stationary. You find an equilibrium, but it is not stable. Then when you try to fly, the smallest instability disrupts the solution. Your running child trips on a pebble, Commander, and the pole is dropped.”

Nilis laughed out loud. “You have spent a long time studying human idioms.”

“We have little else to do,” the Ghost said.

“So,” Darc growled, “what do you suggest instead?”

“It would be better to operate the projector when it is being carried at close to lightspeed.”

Nilis frowned. He walked up to the image and poked his finger into its shining innards. “But that would bring us up to this region.” It was the complex border between order and chaos. “The shield would be no more than meta-stable.”

“But solutions in this part of the phase space, on the edge of chaos, would be responsive to small adjustments.”

“Ah.” Nilis nodded. “Which would make the shield more manageable, because it would respond more sensitively; we could control out the instabilities before a catastrophic disruption.”

Darc was visibly unhappy. “How rapidly would we have to react?” He brought up a Virtual of his own, ran some quick calculations. “There,” he said in triumph. “Look at that! Your meta-stable shield will flap like a sheet in a breeze. There’s no way we could react quickly enough to respond to it.”

“Of course you could,” the Ambassador said. “You have arbitrarily high processing speeds available on your ship. Your CTC-processor technology—”

Darc shot to his feet and stalked up to the Ghost, fists clenched. “Is that the game? How do you even know about that? If you think I am going to let you anywhere near the CTC system—”

Nilis said, “Commander, please. We’re simply discussing possibilities.”

Darc remained standing, glaring at the Ghost. “Why are you doing this? Humans destroyed your kind. Why would you help your conquerors?”

“Curiosity,” the Ghost said.

“And nothing else?” Darc asked heavily.

“Nothing. You recreated us at a whim. You could destroy us as easily. We have no hope.”

Darc’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but he stayed silent.

Nilis was still thinking over the idea. “This would actually simplify the overall design, of course… You don’t seem happy, Ensign.”

Torec said, “I’m a pilot, sir. No pilot likes giving up control.”

“Hmm. I can sympathize with that. And of course this sort of active-control system isn’t without risks. You would go into battle behind an intrinsically unstable system. If the CTC failed, you would die immediately.”

“But we all die one day, Commissary.”

He embarrassed her by allowing his eyes to fill up. “Lethe, this laconic courage — I’m sorry! I can’t get used to it.”

The Ghost said, “You have one more test ship.”

“One more chance,” Nilis said. “The modifications would be straightforward.” He stared at Darc.

Darc held his stubborn stance for a moment, then seemed to give in. “All right. Lethe take this whole plagued project! But what are we to do for a crew?”

Torec sat up straight. “I’m willing to give it another go, sir.”

Nilis said, “I’d expect nothing less. But we must make this crucial trial work. I would suggest that the ensign’s ideal crewmates are in this room.”

Darc stared at him, then at the Ghost, which rolled silently. “You have got to be joking.”

But he wasn’t.

Chapter 27

“The Central Star Mass,” Nilis said. “Isn’t that what you call it, Pirius Blue? The Mass — what a mundane name for a place where you can find ten million stars in a space a few light-years across — a volume in which, at the Galactic vicinity of Sol, you would on average find one. How marvelous, that we feeble humans should have come so far!”

He had called Pirius Blue to the small quarters he had been allocated in Quin’s Officer Country. His face shining with enthusiasm, his long robe as scuffed and threadbare as ever, he bumbled around the room, setting out his data desks on the low table. The Commissary was just as Pirius remembered from the trial, though he seemed older, rather more careworn. But Nilis hadn’t been prepared for Pirius’s new eyes; at first sight he had recoiled, his shock comical.

This wasn’t the real Commissary, of course. Nilis was too busy with his mysterious projects in Sol system to come all the way to the center again in person. This was only a Virtual.

Nilis was still struggling to get political support for his schemes. He said he had forced his way into Quin Base on a pretext. He had managed to persuade his bosses at the Commission for Historical Truth that it was time somebody took a fresh look at the deviant religions sprouting here in the Core. But quizzing This Burden Must Pass about the nature of the Ultimate Observer was not Nilis’s true goal.

“Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.

Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”

But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front — into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”

“Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”

Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit — aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.

“But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”

And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.

“You want me to fly the mission.”

“To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew… Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”

“Historic? Suicidal.”

Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how long it is since a mission of this type was actually studied? I’ve looked high and low and I can’t find one — a long time indeed! — even though the information is of such obvious value. But everybody knows it’s impossible. And of course, I am reluctantly coming to see, there are plenty in high places with a vested interest in the war not being concluded…”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Anyhow, as commander it would be your duty to make the mission survivable, wouldn’t it?”

Pirius was full of doubt. Everything Nilis said sounded reasonable — and exciting. But it also conflicted with his training, everything he had been brought up to believe.

Nilis said, a little exasperated, “Look — I would not order you to do this. Yes, there are obvious dangers; yes, you might not survive — and, yes, I am asking you to have faith in me, in a fat old fool from Earth. But the mission is, quite simply, vitally necessary. We must know more.” He watched Pirius’s face with a kind of wistful longing. “Oh, Pirius, this is such a strange encounter. I feel I know you so well! Look at you now, the way you hold your head when you listen to me, your seriousness, your focus on your duty, even the play of the light in your eyes. You’re so familiar. And yet it’s Pirius Red I’ve come to know, and you don’t know me at all, save for your brief encounter with a bumbling old fool at your hearing! It’s so strange, so strange. Sometimes I think that by hurling ourselves around the Galaxy faster than the speed of light we are pushing our humanity too far.”

Pirius suddenly saw a new element in his relationship with the Commissary — or at least his FTL twin’s. This old man was fond of him, Pirius thought with a queasy horror. His unwelcome twin, Pirius Red, had allowed this ridiculous old man to form some kind of sentimental bond with him. Surely it wasn’t sexual. But he knew Nilis had a “family background.” Perhaps it was as a father might feel for a son, an uncle for a nephew, or some similarly unhealthy, atavistic tie. What a mess, he thought.

Nilis’s Virtual was of the highest quality. In the jargon, it was an avatar.

The avatar’s job was to live out this chapter of Nilis’s life on the original’s behalf as fully as was possible. The avatar was a fully sentient copy of the real Nilis, with identical memories up to the moment when this copy had first been generated. Here in Quin Base, Virtual Nilis couldn’t touch anything, of course; those data desks on the table were as fake as he was. But while here, for authenticity of experience, he would have to live according to human routines. He would eat his Virtual food, sleep, even eliminate his unreal waste. He could even smell, he said, and he declared that Quin Base stank of something called “boiled cabbage.” And when his visit was done, his records would be sent back to Earth, where they would be integrated into Nilis’s own memory.

Nilis had wanted to take home as rich an experience as he could, the better to shape his subsequent decision-making. But he would always have the odd feeling that he had lived out these ten days twice, once in his garden on Earth, and once here at the Galaxy’s crowded heart.

Pirius tried to concentrate on the mission. He could see its value. “But — why me? I haven’t even flown since the magnetar.”

“Because I know you.” His big watery eyes were still fixed on Pirius. “Because we’ve already proven we can work well together—”

“You’re still talking about my twin.”

“But your twin is you — he has all your talent, all your potential — save only that in you that potential has begun to be realized. And besides,” he said with disarming honesty, “how many frontline pilots do I actually know? Oh, come, Pirius! You know, in your shoes I would be galvanized by curiosity. We may be skirting a deep scientific mystery here, Pirius, something that could tell us a great deal about the nature of our universe, and our place in it.”

Pirius could hardly deny that. But when he thought about leaving here, about leaving Tili Three and Burden and the others, he felt deeply uneasy. He already felt guilty at having survived on Factory Rock, where so many had fallen; how could he justify walking out on them now?

Nilis leaned forward, made to touch Pirius’s shoulder, remembered it was impossible. “Pirius, you’re hesitating, and I don’t know why. You’re wasted here!” he said. “All these drone kids, their endless digging, digging. You’re meant for better things, Pilot.”

Pirius stood up. “And every one of those drone kids” he said, “is better than you, Commissary.” Nilis said nothing more, and Pirius left the room.

Pirius Blue talked it over with Cohl.

“The whole thing’s insane,” he said. In three thousand years, there had of course been many scouting missions beyond the Front and into the Cavity, deep into the nest. That complex place, crowded with stellar marvels as well as the greatest concentration of Xeelee firepower in the Galaxy, was known to every pilot as a death trap. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

“We?”

He sighed. “If I have to do this, I’d want you with me. But it’s academic, because nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Because it’s insane?”

“Correct.”

“Well,” she said, “not necessarily.” She was lying on her bunk, her hands locked behind her head; she seemed undisturbed by the usual barracks clamor around her. In fact, she had something of Nilis’s remoteness. But then, Pirius thought with loyal exasperation, Cohl was a navigator, and most navigators were halfway to double domes anyhow.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it could be done. There’s a lot of junk in there, you know, in the Cavity. Astrophysical junk. Plenty of places to hide.” She rolled over. They had no data desks here, no fancy Virtual-generation facilities, and so she started sketching with a wet finger in the dirt on the floor. “Suppose you went in this way…”

The Cavity was a rough sphere some fifteen light-years across at the center of the Mass, bounded by the great static shock of the Front. It was called a “Cavity” because it was blown clear of hot gas and dust by Chandra and the other objects at the very center. But it was far from empty, in fact crowded with exotic objects. As well as a million glowering stars, there was the Baby Spiral, three dazzling lanes of infalling gas and dust. And the Baby, like everything else in the Cavity, was centered on the Prime Radiant itself: Chandra, the supermassive black hole, utterly immovable, the pivot around which the immense machinery of the inner Galaxy turned.

Cohl said, “There are lots of ways in. You could track one of the Baby’s arms, for instance. Even so you’d have to take some kind of cover.”

“Cover?”

“Other ships. Rocks, even.” She glanced at him. “Not everybody is going to get through; you have to take enough companions with you to make sure that somebody makes it. It’s a question of statistics, Pirius.” She rubbed her chin. “Of course the navigation would be tricky. You’re talking about finding your way through all that astrophysics, and keeping a small flotilla together…”

He saw she was losing herself in the technicalities of planning such an ambitious jaunt. But technicalities were not uppermost in his own mind.

After a while she noticed his silence. “You’re not happy about this, are you?

“Am I supposed to be?”

She said, “It won’t make any difference, you know. To them. Whatever we do.”

“To who?”

“To the dead ones.”

Pirius looked at her. “I thought it was only me who had thoughts like that.”

“You ought to talk about it more. You’ll just have to make up your own mind about the mission, Pirius. But I’ll follow you, whatever you decide.”

He was moved. “Thank you.”

She shrugged. “What’s to thank? Without you, the Xeelee would have fried me already — twice. And as for the guilt, maybe you should go talk to This Burden Must Pass. He’s always full of philosophical crap, if that’s what you need.”

That made him laugh, but it seemed like a good idea. But when he went to find Burden, Nilis had got there before him.

Virtual Nilis, reluctantly fulfilling the nominal purpose for his projection here at Quin, was interviewing Burden in his small office.

Pirius wasn’t the only visitor. Perhaps a dozen cadets and privates had gathered outside the office’s partition walls. They sat on bunks, or storage boxes, or just on the floor, and they stared into the room with steady longing.

Nilis seemed relieved to close the door on them. “They’re coming in relays,” he whispered, shocked.

“That’s military training for you,” Burden said dryly. He was sitting at ease in one of the office’s small upright chairs. Unlike the Commissary, he seemed quite relaxed.

Nilis whispered, “I don’t know what they want.”

Pirius grunted. “That’s obvious. They’re here because they think you’re going to take Burden away.”

Nilis, bustling clumsily around the room, flapped his hands. “I’m here to analyze, not to condemn. Even Commissaries are pragmatic, you know; if this quasi-faith helps the youngsters out there keep to their duties we’re quite willing to turn a blind eye. But we do have to be sure things don’t go too far. Of course, by showing such devotion to their, ah, spiritual leader, those cadets are actually making it more likely, not less, that sanctions will have to be applied.”

Burden said, “Commissary, maybe you should go out there and talk to them about it. They’re the ones who are affected by my ’sermonizing,’ after all.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would be appropriate — no, no, not at all.”

Pirius thought that was an excuse. How could the Commissary possibly do a proper analysis of Burden’s faith if he didn’t talk to those actually affected? Nilis seemed afraid, he thought: afraid of Quin, or of the people in it, which was why he clung to this little room.

Pirius sat down on the room’s only other chair. Nilis, with nowhere to sit, flapped and fluffed a little more; then, with a sigh, he snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual couch. “Not really supposed to be doing magic tricks, you know,” he said apologetically. “Against the rules of an avatar!”

Pirius asked, “So, Commissary, has he converted you to a belief in the Ultimate Observer?”

“How comforting it would be if he had,” said Nilis, a little wistfully. “But I know too much! Religions have long been a theoretical interest of mine, which is how I was able to wangle this assignment — and intellectually is the only way I can respond, you see.

“That’s not to say there isn’t some merit in this new faith. Consider the Friends’ beliefs. A Friend worships her descendants, who she believes will far surpass her in power and glory. That’s not such an irrational belief, and guides behavior in an unselfish way, as any worthwhile religion should. The old legend of Michael Poole has entered the mix too. Like some earlier messiahs, Poole is supposed to have given his life for the future of mankind. Of course that’s an example always to be admired. Quero’s faith is crude and somewhat shapeless, but it does have some moral weight. And it is interesting, academically, for its novel setting…”

Most human religions, said Nilis, had originated on Earth. Once carried to the stars, they had mutated, adapted, split, and merged, but they had generally retained the same core elements.

“A religion born on Earth will have archetypes derived from planetary living — where the sun must rise and set, where seasons come and go, where living things die but are renewed, without the intervention of humans, but dependent on the cycles of the world. So you find a worship of the sun, and of water, often sublimated into blood; you find a fascination with the figures of mother and child, and with the seed which, once planted in the ground, endures the winter and lives again. Many religions feature messiahs who defeat death itself, who die but are born again: the ultimate sublimation of the seed.

“But here,” he said, “you have a religion which has emerged, quite spontaneously, among a spacegoing people. So new archetypes must be found. Entropy, for instance: to survive in an artificial biosphere one must labor constantly against decay. You can’t rely on the world to fix itself, you see; there are no renewing seasonal cycles here.

“And then there is contingency. Back on Earth, FTL foreknowledge is understood — it is an essential strategic tool — but it doesn’t affect people, which made the arrival of your FTL twin, Pirius, something of a nine day wonder. Out here, though, everyone knows that the past is as uncertain as the future, because you see the future change all the time, as those ships come limping home from battles that haven’t happened yet. It happened to you, Pirius! Here, the notion that all of this suffering may be washed away by a history change is an easy one to sell.”

Pirius said, “You make it sound almost reasonable, Commissary.”

“Well, so it is! Religions will always emerge, even in a place as emotionally sterile as this; and religions will naturally exploit elements in their environments. It would be fascinating to see how this new faith develops in the future.”

“But you don’t seem to have anything to say about why the cadets need Burden’s teaching in the first place.”

Nilis folded his fingers over his ample virtual belly. “Soldiers have always been superstitious,” he pronounced. “Something to do with a need to take control of one’s destiny in a dangerous and out-of- control environment. And the ordinary troops have always championed the Druz Doctrines. We have come so far from home.” He flexed his fingers before his face, almost curiously. “We still have the bodies of plains apes, you know. But nothing else of our native ecology has survived: nothing but us and our stomach bacteria and the rats and lice and fleas… Now we have come to a place so lethal we have to dig into bits of rock to survive. There is nothing left of our origins but us — and all that holds us together is our beliefs. Lose them and we will become shapeless, flow like hot metal.

“I think the ordinary soldier intuits something of that, and has clung to the Doctrines as a result. But the Doctrines are too severe — inhuman, lacking hope. If you were going to devise a consoling religion you wouldn’t start with them. Druz would not even have us commemorate the dead!”

Burden said, “And hope is what I give the cadets.”

Nilis nodded vigorously. “Oh, I see that.”

“Then why,” Burden said evenly, “won’t you talk to them?”

Nilis was immediately nervous again. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly — it isn’t necessary…”

Burden stood smoothly, crossed to the door, and opened it. The disciples who had gathered outside filed in immediately, a dozen or so of them, their small faces solemn. They stared at Nilis, who was probably, Pirius thought, the most exotic creature they had ever seen.

Tili Three walked boldly up to him. She ought to be more wary of a Commissary, Pirius thought. But there was none of the dread antique grandeur of the Commission for Historical Truth about Nilis. Tili reached out to touch Nilis’s robe. Nilis gaped at her silvered prosthetic hand. Her fingers passed through the hem of his robe, scattering pixels like insects. He actually backed up against the wall, his big hands fluttering defensively before his chest. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.

Burden said, “Why are you afraid?”

“They are so young,” Nilis said. “So young — just children—”

“Children who have seen their comrades die,” Pirius said.

“I’m not afraid of them but of me,” Nilis said. He made to pat Tili’s head, but when his palm brushed her hair it broke up into a spray of multicolored pixels. The little firework display made the cadets laugh, and Pirius saw tears well in Nilis’s foolish old eyes. “You see? I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear this, to come to one of these terrible nurseries — even Arches Base was like an academy compared to this — they are so young! And, my eyes, I can’t save them all — I can’t save any of them.”

Pirius Blue said, “Perhaps we can, Commissary.”

Nilis whispered hoarsely, “At any rate we must try.”

Chapter 28

In Saturn’s orbit, the modifications to the last test greenship took a week of hard work.

It may have been conceptually simplifying to hook up the grav generator to the CTC, as Nilis had suggested, but grumbling Navy engineers, trying to marry together two literally alien technologies, were quick to point out the gap between concept and actuality. At least the delay gave Torec a chance to recover from the last run.

And then, suddenly, here she was, strapped into the cockpit of a greenship once more, with the cold, dark spaces of Sol system stretching all around her. This second ship’s blister seemed to be filled with just as much clutter as before, and she had to squirm to get comfortable. It wasn’t indulgence; when you flew, the last thing you needed was to be distracted by a cloth fold up your ass.

Those sparkling monitor ships were all around her, and she could hear the subdued chatter on her comm loop, just as it was before. Saturn was ahead of her — but this time it was visible only as a pinpoint, not a disc, and her tame Xeelee wasn’t visible at all, save in the sensors. The target area was much further away. In the first step of the new mission profile, the greenship would be pushed close to lightspeed by its conventional sublight drive; a drawback of the new maneuver was that it needed much more room to work.

When she glanced at her crewmates in the other blisters of the greenship, it wasn’t two hardened Navy tars she saw, but to her right, in the navigator’s seat, the stolid form of Commander Darc — and to her left a new enlarged blister held the massive form of a Silver Ghost. It looked as if the cabin had been filled with mercury. It was scarcely believable that she, a mere ensign, was sitting here in control of such a craft, with such a strange crew, but here she was. As the last seconds ticked away, and the clock in her head counted down, she shivered with anticipation.

She polled her crew one last time. “Ambassador. Ready?”

“All my systems are nominal,” the Ghost’s translated voice said.

“Commander—”

“Don’t waste time with useless chitchat, Ensign,” Darc snapped.

“No, sir,” she said.

Once more she felt the throbbing of the gravastar generators, deep in her bones. Three, two, one.

The ship jolted forward.

“Sublight nominal,” Darc called.

“Ambassador?”

“The shield generators are ready.”

“All right. Commander, push us to ninety percent light.”

“On your order.”

A deep breath. “Do it.”

The surge was all but intangible. But as they went relativistic, the speckling of stars before her turned blue and swam closer, like disturbed fish.

Darc called, “Ten seconds to Saturn.”

A random thought passed through her mind. If this Ghost wanted to carry out some sabotage — to destroy this test ship, to kill a Navy Commander — it was in a perfect position to do it. Too late to climb out now, Torec.

“Shield on my mark,” she called.

“Ready,” said the Silver Ghost.

Three. Two. One.

The blueshifted stars swam again.

Torec didn’t even know if the trial had been successful until she brought the greenship back to Enceladus. At least this one hadn’t blown up.

The base medical officer tried to bring the crew in for checks, but neither she nor Darc was willing to take time out for so much as a shower. Hot, stiff, sweating after hours in their cramped blisters, they ran down ice-walled corridors to the briefing room where Nilis waited for them. They were trailed by the silent Ghost, with its escort of heavily armed Guardians.

In the briefing room a Virtual representation of the greenship, reconstructed from the records of a dozen monitor drones, was a toy hanging in the air, two meters long. She watched as it went to ninety percent light, and the gravastar shield opened up. The shield was beautiful, Torec thought, a banner of shining, sparkling light, pure white, like some living thing. And behind it she saw only stars. The ship she was riding had been cut out of the universe, and existed once more in a cosmos of its own.

Nilis said, “You created a perfect spherical cap, subtending an angle of around forty degrees. Congratulations, Ensign. I wonder if any human has visited not one but two new universes before. Perhaps you have set a record…”

“I’m just glad it worked.”

He grunted. “As pragmatic as ever! Well, so it did; the Ambassador’s strategy of surfing at the edge of chaos was tricky to manage, but very effective — as you can see.”

Darc said, “Coming up on the Xeelee encounter.”

The view shifted to a static image of the nightfighter. It orbited Saturn, penned in by a swarm of watchful drones. The gravastar cap was a missile that plunged at the Xeelee out of the left side of the image.

Nilis snapped his fingers, and in slow motion the incoming grav cap was reduced to a crawl. “See how the Xeelee is reacting,” Nilis said. “Here it deploys its sublight drive.” Night-dark wings swept before the clouds of Saturn, quite beautiful. “It knows the gravastar cap is coming, of course, but it knows nothing of what it is concealing.” The fly flickered out of the image, which changed to a long shot centered on a shrunken Saturn. Now the Xeelee fly was a black dart that plunged at the cap, flickering, making rapid, short FTL jumps.

Darc said, “That’s a classic Tolman maneuver. It’s trying to send images of the encounter to its own past.”

“Yes. But it’s impossible. It’s looking into a region that isn’t causally connected to the universe it inhabits; all the world lines terminate on that cap.”

The cap dissolved suddenly, turning into a thing of wisps and shards that quickly dissipated. The grav shield gone, the greenship dropped back into its parent universe. And it tore at the Xeelee, monopole cannon firing. The nightfighter tried to evade, but the greenship, controlled by its paradoxical CTC processor, was too fast; it seemed to anticipate every move. A hail of monopoles ripped through the Xeelee’s spacetime wings.

The watching audience cheered — even Torec, who had been there; she couldn’t help it. The nightfighter went limp, deactivated by its human masters, and its escorting ships closed in to return it to its pen.

Nilis closed his fist, and the Virtual died. Without its light and color the briefing room seemed empty.

“We did it,” Torec breathed.

Nilis stayed composed, apparently already thinking ahead to the next step. “It appears so. I’ve sent the records to the relevant Grand Conclave committees, with Commander Darc’s agreement. Now we must wait for approval to move to the next stage.”

“Yes. But we did it. Commissary, we did it!” Whooping, she ran to him, grabbed his arms, and began to jump up and down. After a moment he gave up his pretense of solemnity; barefoot, his scuffed robe flapping, he joined her in jumping around the room.

The Ghost hung silently in the air, and Darc watched it thoughtfully.

Torec had naively imagined that the successful test flight would have been enough to have convinced the brass to give Nilis’s project the go-ahead. All they needed now was to find a weapon that could strike at the Prime Radiant when they got there.

But days went by as they waited for a response from the oversight committees.

And when it came, it was a shutdown. Though the committee members recognized the technical achievements of Nilis and his people — and the promising new technologies would be thoroughly evaluated for applications by the Navy and other forces, et cetera, et cetera — the case for continuing with Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant remained unproven, and no more funds would be released for it. Torec couldn’t believe it. Another success had brought nothing but another canning.

Even Commander Darc seemed sympathetic. “You know I’m no supporter of your project,” he said to Nilis. “But I do admit that your research has been yielding fruit. You always made too many enemies, however, Nilis. And now they’ve caught up with you.”

But Nilis was suffused with a determined grimness that belied his shabby exterior. “It’s not over vet,” he said, and he stalked off.

Chapter 29

Pirius Red was startled to receive a call from Luru Parz. The Virtual image was so good he couldn’t tell if it was a direct broadcast or a copy.

She said simply, “I want you to get me into Mons Olympus, Ensign.”

The call came early in the morning. He was still aboard the Venus orbital habitat. He finger-combed tousled hair and tried to pull his tunic straight. The Virtual just stared at him, humorless. He said, “I’ll make a call to the Commissary—”

“I didn’t call Nilis. I called you. Every agency that knows of my existence, especially the Commission for Historical Truth, has banned me from such facilities as the Archive. I doubt if even Nilis could buck that. I’m asking for your help, Ensign.”

Such a breakdown in anything even remotely resembling a chain of command was deeply disturbing to Pirius. “I don’t know how I can even get to Mars. Or how to get you into the Archive—”

She smiled. “Spread your wings.”

He stared at her. Was it possible she knew somehow of the chip the peculiar Archive Retrieval Specialist Tek had pressed onto his sleeve? He wished he had got rid of that thing the moment he found it — but he’d chosen not to, he reminded himself, and had kept it for two months since.

“Luru Parz, why do you want to do this?”

She nodded, watching him. “A why question. No good soldier ever asks why. But you do, Pirius! Gramm and his cronies continue to block Nilis’s progress. I intend to force them to act. Ensign, our beloved Coalition is a mountain of lies and hypocrisy. Surely you know that by now. That doesn’t bother me personally; it probably has to be that way to survive. But the threat of exposure is my leverage — and that’s why I need to get into the Archive.” Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “Am I frightening you?”

“You always frighten me.”

She laughed, showing her blackened teeth. “How sane you are! But you understand I am working toward the same goal as Nilis, don’t you? A goal which you can’t help but instinctively embrace, despite your lifetime of conditioning.”

He made a decision. “I’ll help you.”

“Of course you will,” she said dismissively. “I’ll meet you in Kahra.” The Virtual broke up and dissipated.

In the event Luru Parz was right. It proved remarkably easy for Pirius to organize this strange trip back to Olympus.

He needed the Commissary’s approval to use his corvette. But Nilis, at Saturn, was still preoccupied with details of the gravastar shield tests, as well as his ongoing studies of the first moments of the universe, and some mysterious business he was conducting in the Core, and continuing battles with Gramm and the Coalition bureaucracy, and, and… When Pirius called he waved his Virtual hand vaguely. “Just get on with it, Pirius.”

As for getting into the Archive, there was Tek’s chip. It wasn’t hard to work out its interface. The clerk’s smudgy Virtual image directed Pirius to a port on Olympus — not the one he had visited before, another of the thousand or so that studded the mountain’s mighty flank.

So he had no excuse not to do as Luru Parz asked, despite his dread at the very thought of her.

The journey to Mars was uneventful. Pirius traveled alone, save for the corvette’s crew; he gambled his way through the interplanetary journey.

As she had promised, Luru Parz met him at Kahra. After an overnight stay they boarded a flitter for the final hop to Olympus.

They landed at coordinates Pirius had extracted from Tek’s chip. When the flitter settled to the ground, the situation — the gentle slope, the dust-soaked sky, the washed-out red-brown colors, the hatch set in the ground — seemed exactly the same as his last visit.

Tek kept them waiting.

Luru Parz was calm. “We have to give him time. Remember he is working covertly in there. Believe me, it’s a difficult environment in which to act independently.” Pirius didn’t know what she meant.

He was restless, anxious. The flitter was little more than a bubble a couple of meters across. Its hull was so transparent it would have been invisible save for a thin layer of Martian dust. And Pirius was stuck inside it with an immortal.

They sat opposite each other, so close in the tiny flitter that their knees almost touched. Even in person Luru had that dark, still quality, as if light fell differently on her. He could smell her, a faint dusty tang, like the smoky smell of the dead leaves that littered corners of Nilis’s unruly garden.

She was studying him. “Do I horrify you, Ensign? I am a living embodiment of everything you have been brought up to despise. Every breath I take is illegal.”

“It isn’t that.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No, it isn’t, is it? I suppose you’ve been in Sol system long enough to be able to perceive shades of gray. Then what?”

“You’re the strangest human being I have ever met.”

She nodded. “If indeed I am still human. After all, as Hama Druz himself understood, human beings aren’t meant to last twenty thousand years.”

It was the first time he had heard the actual number; it shocked him. “It is unimaginable.”

“Of course it is. It is a monstrous time, a time that should frame the rise and fall of a species, not a single life. But the alternative to living is always worse.”

She had been born during the last days of the Qax Occupation. While no older than Pirius she had been forced to make a compromise: to accept the gift of immortality in return for becoming a collaborator. “I thought it was the right thing to do, to help preserve mankind. It would have been easier to refuse.”

When the Qax fell, the jasofts, undying collaborators, were hunted down. Many of them fled, on starships launched from Port Sol and by other routes. But the nascent Coalition soon discovered much of the information and experience they needed to run Earth was locked up in the heads of the jasofts. “They could never admit what they were doing,” Luru said. “But they were forced to turn to us. And that mixture of secrecy and power gave us opportunities.”

But time flowed by relentlessly, mayfly generations came and went, and still Luru Parz did not die. She continued to build her power base, and to watch the slow working-out of historical forces.

“Every few generations there would be a fresh surge of orthodoxy,” she said dryly. “Some new grouping in the Commission for Historical Truth would decide we ancient monsters should be got rid of once and for all.” She found places to hide, and spent much of her life out of sight. “But I survived. It got harder for us as the Coalition strengthened, of course. But the Coalition’s very stability was good for us. If you live a long time in a stable economic and political system it’s not hard to accumulate wealth and power, over and over. It’s a change of regime you fear.”

Having been born with mankind under the heel of a conqueror, she had lived through the whole of the stunning Third Expansion, which had seen humans sweep across the Galaxy. And in this manner, twenty thousand years had worn away.

Pirius said, “I can’t imagine how it feels to be you.”

She sighed. “The scientists used to say that the human brain can accommodate only perhaps a thousand years’ experience. It isn’t as simple as that. Of course we edit our memories, all the time. We construct stories; otherwise we could not survive in a chaotic, merciless universe that cares nothing for us. If I think back to the past, yes, perhaps I can retrieve a fragment of a story I have lived. But I live on, and on, and on, and if I look back now I can’t be sure if I am visiting a memory, or a memory of a memory… Sometimes it seems that everything that went before today was nothing but a dream. But then I will touch the surface of a Conurbation wall, or I will smell a spice that was once popular in Port Sol, and my mind will be flooded with places, faces, voices — not as if it were yesterday, but as if it were today.”

Her eyes now were clear, bright, behind lenses of water. “And do you know what? I regret. I regret what is lost, people and places long vanished. Of course it is absurd. There isn’t room in the universe for them all, if they had lived. And besides I chose to leave them behind. But I regret even so. Isn’t that foolish?”

She leaned forward; that smoky scent intensified. “Let me tell you something. You think I have banished death. Not so. I live with death. Faces like yours flash before me, and then crumble and vanish. How can I care about you? You are just one of a torrent, all of you winnowed by death.”

“And so you work to stay alive.”

“What else is there? But I have come to see that though I will outlive you, it’s very unlikely I could outlive humanity: if I am to survive, I need the infrastructure of mankind. And that is why I have come out of hiding. I’m not doing it for mankind, Ensign, or for the Coalition, or for Nilis, and certainly not for Hama Druz and his dreary preaching. I’m doing it for myself.”

Pirius sat back. “I wonder how much of this is true. Perhaps this is all a fantastic story you tell to baffle the credulous.”

She smiled, unperturbed. “Well, that’s possible.”

“But your power is real enough. I’ve seen it. And, whatever you are, the goal is all that matters.”

She clapped her small hands. “There — I knew you were a pragmatist!”

The hatch in the flank of Olympus opened at last. A wormlike tube slid out and nuzzled against the flitters hull.

As they prepared to enter the Archive, Pirius thought of her stories of the lost starships, immense multiple-generation arks that had fled from Port Sol, most of them never to be heard from again. Perhaps they were still out there, arks of immortals, driving on into the dark. He felt an intense stab of curiosity. After twenty thousand years, what would have become of them? He supposed he would never know.

He focused on the moment.

As on his first visit, Luru insisted they both wear their skinsuit helmets.

Once again Pirius found himself in a maze of tunnels and chambers. It looked much the same as where he had entered before. But in this section, the hovering light globes were sparse, as if it was less used.

And here was Tek, small, compact, stooped, cringing. Once more he carried a set of data desks, clutched to his chest as if for reassurance. “I knew you would return, Ensign.” But then he made out Luru Parz, and Tek flinched back. “Who are you?”

“Never mind that. Take us to the breeding chambers, whatever you call them here.”

Pirius had no idea what she meant.

He sensed Tek understood. But the specialist said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He huddled over his data desks. He was actually shaking, Pirius saw; whatever he had hoped to achieve by bringing Pirius back here, he hadn’t expected this.

Luru Parz stepped up to him. “So you’re a clerk, are you?”

“Yes, I—”

“Then what are you doing out here, away from all the other clerks?” She snatched the data desks out of his grasp. “What do these contain?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Pirius touched her arm. “Luru Parz, he’s only a clerk.”

“He’s not even that. Are you, Tek?” She hurled the desks onto the rocky floor, where they smashed. Tek whimpered, covering his face with his hands. Luru Parz laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, Ensign. Those desks contained nothing of any value to anybody — anybody but him, that is. Tek, they were fakes — like you — weren’t they, clerk?”

Pirius said, “What do you mean, fakes?”

“He’s a parasite. He mimics the workers here. He runs around with data desks, he sleeps in their dormitory rooms, he eats their food. It’s a common pattern in communities like this. The genuine clerks are busy with their own tasks — and here, you aren’t supposed to ask questions anyhow. So Tek gets away with it. He’s just like a genuine clerk. Except that you don’t do anything useful, do you, Tek? And where did you come from, I wonder? Kahra, was it? And what forced you to hide here in Olympus?”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

Luru Parz said, “You sniveling creature, I don’t care enough about you to destroy you — but I will, unless you cooperate with me. So what’s it to be? Where are the breeding chambers?”

Tek shot Pirius a glance of pure hatred, apparently at the ensign’s betrayal. But he replied, “You mean the Chambers of Fecundity.”

Luru Parz laughed again. “That’s better. Now — a clerk wouldn’t know the way to such a place, because she wouldn’t need to know. But you know, don’t you, Tek?”

“Yes.”

She sighed theatrically. “At last. Move. Now.”

His mouth working, Tek led them along the corridor.

Pirius said, “I don’t get any of this.”

“You’ll see.”

Tek brought them to a door, as anonymous as the rest. When he waved his hand, it slid open silently.

The corridor beyond was packed with people. Pirius quailed. But Luru Parz grabbed his hand and shoved Tek forward, and the three of them pushed their way in.

Pirius was taller than almost everybody here, and he looked down on a river of heads, round faces, slim shapeless bodies. As they joined the crush, he was forced to shuffle forward with small steps, through tight-packed bodies that smelled overwhelmingly sour, milky — he wondered if his mask had an option to shut out the smell as well as to filter the air. There were no lanes, no fixed pattern, but the crowd, squeezed between the worn walls of the corridor, seemed to organize itself into streams. He couldn’t tell if the people around him were male or female, or even if they were adults; their slim, sexless forms and round faces were like prepubescent children. But they all wore plain Commission- style robes, and they all seemed to have somewhere to go, an assignment to fulfill.

He was touched, all the time, as slim bodies pressed against his; he felt the pressure of shoulders against his arms, bellies in the small of his back, fingers stroking his hands, hips, upper legs, his ears, his face mask — he brushed those curious probings away. Around him everybody else was in constant contact. He even saw lips touching, soft kisses exchanged. There was nothing sexual about any of this, not even the kissing.

The constant shuffling went on, off into the distance, as far as Pirius could see. Light globes floated over the rustling mass. And nobody spoke. Oddly it took him some moments to notice that. But, though not a word was exchanged, there was a constant sibilant sigh all around him. It was the sound of breathing, he realized, the breathing and the rustling clothes of thousands of people — thousands in this one corridor alone, burrowed under the mountain.

And they were all alike — all with the same pale, oval faces, the same wispy gray eyes. That was the strangest thing of all. Was it possible that they were all somehow related? It was a disgusting thought, a base, animal notion.

He spoke to Luru Parz. “I had no idea it was like this. Our visit before—”

“You were only shown the outer layers.” They were both whispering. “Where the Interface Specialists work: the acceptable face of the Archive. Everybody — I mean, every decision-maker in the Coalition — knows the truth of this place, that this is what lies beneath. But the smooth-browed interfacers allow them to ignore that fact, perhaps even to believe it doesn’t exist at all.”

“How many people are there here, under this mountain?”

“Nobody knows — they certainly don’t. But they’ve been here for twenty thousand years, remember, from not long after the time of Hama Druz himself, burrowing away. This is our greatest mountain. I doubt they’ve exhausted it yet.”

If every corridor across Olympus was like this, then surely the Archive must house billions. He tried to imagine the vast machinery that must be required to keep them alive and functioning: continents covered by nano-food machines, rivers and lakes of sewage to be processed. But what was the purpose of the effort, all these teeming lives?

They walked on. As they pushed on deeper into the mountain, it seemed to Pirius that the character of the crowd was slowly changing. It was hard to be sure — there were so many faces, all so similar, it was hard to focus on any — but the people pressing around him looked smaller, smoother-faced, younger than those he had first encountered. But they seemed more agitated, too. They recoiled from him, their blank, pretty faces tense with a baffled suspicion.

Pirius said, “We are disturbing them.”

“Of course we are,” Luru Parz muttered. “We’re outsiders. We’re like an infection, penetrating a body. The Archive is reacting to us. It’s going to get worse.”

They came to a junction of corridors. Crowds poured into the center, which was filled with a single teeming, heaving mass of bodies. Somehow individuals found their way through the crush, for as many people poured out of the junction and into the surrounding corridors as entered it. Above their heads a broad tunnel cut straight up. Its wall looked smooth save for metal rungs pushed into its surface. Perhaps it was a ventilation shaft, Pirius thought.

As they stood there, alarm spread quickly. The mob in the plaza became more disorderly, a tense, heaving mass from which scared glances were cast at Pirius and the others.

Pirius said, “We can’t get through this.”

“We have to,” Luru Parz said. She kept hold of Tek’s arm, ensuring he couldn’t get away. Then she put her shoulders down and shoved her way into the mass of the crowd.

Pirius followed, flinching from every soft contact. People quailed away from him, but there always seemed to be more, and every step was a battle.

“But how is the alarm spreading? I haven’t heard any of them speak a single word, not since we came through that first door.”

“Ah, but they don’t need words,” she said. “They’ve long gone beyond that. Perhaps all that kissing has something to do with it. Or maybe it’s something in the air. That’s why you’re wearing that face mask, Pirius!”

Communication through scent or taste? “It doesn’t sound human.”

“Whatever. Just keep your mask sealed — look up.”

They had reached the center of the plaza now, and were directly underneath the ventilation duct. Things moved over the lower walls. These creatures had skinny, spindly bodies and enormously long limbs. Their hands and feet were huge, and they clung to the vertical walls as if they were fitted with sucker pads. They looked like spiders, Pirius thought. But they each had just four limbs, two arms and two legs, and they wore orange jackets and belts stuffed with tools. They were working on systems behind opened panels in the walls. One of them turned to look down at Pirius. Despite the uncertain light, the spider-thing’s face was distinct: round, pale, with dark hair and smoky gray eyes, a human face.

They came at last to another door. Tek, battered by the crush of the crowd, cowered nervously.

“Twenty thousand years is a long time,” Luru Parz said to Pirius. “The human species has only been around a few multiples of that. It is time enough.”

Pirius asked, “Time enough for what?”

For answer, Luru opened the door.

The chamber was huge. The light from the few floating globes was low, and Pirius’s view was impressionistic, of a domed roof, a vast floor inset with pools of some milky fluid through which languid creatures swam. Like everywhere else in the complex, the room was crowded. There must have been several thousand people visible in that one glance. Pirius marveled to think that all of this was concealed under the immense basaltic pile of Mons Olympus.

He took a step into the room. The air was thick with steam, which his semisentient mask battled to keep from condensing on his faceplate.

Luru Parz placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t crack your visor in here, of all places,” she said. “Don’t.”

The people here were as small, rounded, uniform as they were everywhere else. As he walked forward they scuttled out of his way, but the sea of people closed behind him, and they hurried back and forth on their tasks. They all seemed to be women — or rather girls; they seemed even younger here than in the rest of the complex. They carried bits of food, jugs of water, clothes, what looked like medical equipment. It was like a vast, low-technology hospital, he thought.

He paused by one of the pools. It was no more than waist deep, and filled with a milky, thick fluid that rippled with low-gravity languor. Women floated in this stuff, barely moving. They were naked, and droplets of the milky stuff clung to their smooth skin.

And they were pregnant, mountainously so.

But they were all ages, from very young girls whose thin limbs and small frames looked barely able to support the weight of their bellies, to much older women whose faces bore more wrinkles than Luru Parz’s. Attendants, female, moved between the women, wading in the waist-deep milk. They stroked the faces and limbs of the pregnant ones, and caressed their bellies.

“The breeders,” Luru Parz said grimly. “It’s always like this at the heart of the warrens. Breeding chambers are the most sacred places in the complex, the most precious to the drones. See how alarmed they are. But they won’t harm us.”

Pirius was struggling to make sense of this. “And this is where the Archive is controlled from?”

“No,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Do you still not see, Ensign? Nobody controls the Archive. These mothers are its most important single element, I suppose. But even they, perpetually pregnant, don’t control anything, not even their own lives…”

At last Pirius understood what this was; he had been trained to recognize such things.

The Archive was not a human society at all. It was a Coalescence. It was a hive.

In the beginning it really had been just an Archive, a project to store the records of the Coalition’s great works: nothing more sinister than that.

But its tunnels had quickly spread into the welcoming bulk of Olympus. Very soon, there was nobody left with a firm grasp of the Archive’s overall geography. And, with sections of the Archive soon hundreds of kilometers from each other — several days’ transit through these cramped corridors — it was impossible for anybody to exert proper central control.

It was soon obvious, too, that that didn’t matter. People were here to serve the Archive — to record information, to classify, analyze, store, preserve it; that was all. You might not know what everybody was doing across the unmapped expanse of the library, but you always knew what the next guy was doing, and that was usually enough. Somehow things got done, even if nobody was sure how.

Then times of trouble came to Sol system.

For long periods, the Archive was left isolated. The corridors of Olympus were always crowded. No matter how fast new tunnels were dug, no matter how the great nano-food banks were extended, the population seemed to grow faster. And people were stuck in here, of course; if any of the librarians and clerks stepped out on Mars’s surface unprotected, they would be dead in seconds.

There was a period of complicated politics, as factions of librarians fought each other over the basic resources that kept them alive. Strange bureaucratic kingdoms emerged at the heart of Olympus, like the ancient water empires of Earth’s Middle East, grabbing a monopoly on vital substances in order to wield power. But none of these “air empires” proved very enduring.

At last another social solution was found. Nobody planned it: it simply emerged. But once it was established, it proved remarkably stable. In the end, it was all a question of blood ties.

Despite the Coalition’s best efforts to establish birthing tanks, age-group cadres, and the rest of the homogenizing social apparatus it deployed elsewhere across the Galaxy, in the dark heart of Olympus, out of sight, families had always prospered. But now some of these clerkish matriarchs shifted their loyalties. The matriarchs began to produce more children of their own. They exerted pressure on their daughters not to have kids themselves but to stay at home, and help their mothers produce more brothers and sisters. It made sense, on a social level. These close ties kept the families united, and prevented ruinous squabbles over limited resources.

And then the genes cut in. Organisms were after all only vehicles that genes used to ride to the next generation. If you remained childless yourself, the only way you could pass on your genes was indirectly, through the fraction you shared with your siblings. So, in these cramped, stifling conditions, as the daughters of librarians gave up their own chances to have babies in order to support more sisters from the loins of their fecund mothers, the genes were satisfied.

It worked. The resource wars stopped. A handful of families grew spectacularly fast, spreading and merging, until at last the Archive was dominated by a single broad gene pool. Just five thousand years after the Olympus ground had first been broken, almost everybody in the Archive looked remarkably similar.

The population swelled, united and organized by the peculiar new genetic politics. And there was plenty of time for adaptation.

The peculiar society that had developed in the Archive was an ancient and stable form. Nobody was in control. People didn’t follow orders, but responded to what others did around them. This was local interaction, as the social analysts called it, reinforced by positive feedback, people reacting to their neighbors and evoking reactions in turn. And that was enough for things to get done. Food and other resources flowed back and forth through the warren of tunnels, the vital systems like air circulation were maintained, and even the nominal purpose of the Archive, the storage of data, was fulfilled — all without central direction. It was as if the Archive was a single composite organism with billions of faces.

And that organism was bound together by genetic ties, the ties of family.

“Beyond Sol system, other Coalescences have been discovered,” Luru Parz said. “Relics of the earlier Expansions. But all warrens are essentially the same. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing. Anywhere the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, and it pays to stay home with your mother rather than strike out on your own — out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I sometimes wonder where the first Coalescence emerged: perhaps even before spaceflight, on Earth itself.

“Of course the hives are terribly non-Doctrinal. Are these women human, as you are? No. They have evolved to serve a purpose for the Coalescence. And there are many specialists. You’ve seen them yourself: the long-legged mechanic types, the runners, the archivists with their deep, roomy brains. Specialists, you see, adapted to serve particular purposes, the better to serve the community as a whole — but all diverging from the human norm. Officially, everywhere they are found, the Coalition cleans out Coalescences—”

“But not here,” Pirius said. “They left this one to develop, here, on Earth’s sister planet. On Mars.” And they gave it mankind’s treasure, he thought, the Archive of its past.

He probed at his feelings. He found no anger. He felt only numb. Perhaps he had experienced too much, seen too much. But this was even worse than finding a nest of Silver Ghosts in Sol system. To allow humans to diverge like this, here at the very heart of Sol system — it went against the basics of Hama Druz’s teachings.

Luru seemed to sense his discomfort. “Nobody meant it to be like this, Ensign. And when it did happen it was simply too useful to discard, no matter what the Druz Doctrines had to say. In the end, the powerful folk who run the Coalition are pragmatists. Like you.”

It was a relief to Pirius when a corpulent Virtual of Minister Gramm gathered in the air, shadowed by a nervous, barefoot Nilis. He and Luru Parz had been tracked down.

Nilis grasped the situation much more quickly than Pirius. He didn’t have to fake his anger and repugnance.

But Gramm was lordly, defiant. “So now you know about Olympus. Do you think I will apologize for it to the likes of you?

“Listen to me. This Archive is essential to the continuance of the great projects of the Coalition. We humans are poor at the archival of information, you know. Paper records rot in a few thousand years at most. Digitally archived data survives better, so long as it is regularly transferred from store to store. But even such data stores are subject to slow corruption, for instance, from radiation. The half- life of our data is only ten thousand years. But all our efforts are dwarfed by what is achieved in the natural world. DNA far outdoes tablets of clay or stone. Some of our genes are a billion years old — the deep ancient ones, shared across the great domains of life — and over the generations genetic information has been copied more than twenty billion times, with an error rate of less than one in a trillion.”

He sighed. “We are fighting a war on scales of space and time that defy our humanity. We need to remember better by an order of magnitude if we are to sustain ourselves as a galactic power. And so we have this place. This Archive is already ancient. Its generations of clerk-drones live for nothing but to copy bits of data, meaningless to them, from one store to another. Perhaps the hive will one day be able to emulate the copying fidelity of the genes — who knows? It’s certainly a goal that no other human social form could possibly deliver. Commissary, like it or not, hives are good libraries!”

Nilis shouted, “And for that grandiose goal you will tolerate this deviance in the heart of Sol system? Your hypocrisy is galling!” His raised voice disturbed the swimming mothers; they drifted across their pools, away from him.

“You always did think small, Nilis,” Gramm said dismissively. “In a way it’s rather elegant to turn one of our fundamental human flaws into a source of strength, don’t you think? And speaking of corruption and deviance — you,” he challenged Luru Parz. “What is it you want here, you old witch?”

“I told you I knew where the bodies were buried,” she said levelly. “Gramm, once again you’re stalling over funding Nilis’s projects. That will stop.”

Gramm growled, “You have threatened me before. Do you really think exposing this hive-mountain will bring down the Coalition?”

“No,” she said, unperturbed. “But it will show you I’m serious. There are far worse secrets in Sol system than this, Minister Gramm, as you know better than I do. And now you are going to help me find a weapon. Nilis needs something to strike at the Prime Radiant. I think I know where to find one.”

Nilis looked interested. “Where?”

“In the past, of course. But locked away, in an archive buried even deeper than this one.”

Gramm glared at her, his mouth working. But Pirius saw that Luru Parz had beaten him again.

Nilis was staring at her. “Madam, you are a nest of mysteries. But this deeper archive — where is it?”

She said, “Callisto.”

The name meant nothing to Pirius. But Nilis blanched.

The strange standoff lasted a few more minutes, until blue-helmeted Guardians in fully armored skinsuits broke into the chamber to escort them all away.

As they left, Pirius drew Luru Parz aside. “There’s something I still don’t understand. Why did Tek give me that contact chip in the first place? What did he want?”

She sighed. “He was just probing, seeking an opportunity. It’s the way a Coalescence works.”

Pirius shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Tek act on behalf of the Coalescence? He is a parasite.”

“But he’s part of the hive, too. Don’t you see that? It’s just that he doesn’t know it. None of them does.” She plucked his sleeve. “Come on, Ensign, let’s get out of here. Even through my mask, the stink of this place is making me feel ill.”

They hurried after the Guardians, making for the cool, empty surface of Mars.

Behind them, the Coalescent mothers swam in their milky pools, and naked, round-shouldered attendants scurried anxiously.

Chapter 30

Pirius Blue had almost forgotten how it was to sit in a greenship cockpit.

It was like being suspended in open space, with nothing between you and the sky. And this Galaxy- center sky was full of stars, a clustering of globes that receded to infinity. Many of them were bright blue youngsters, but others glowered red, resentfully old before their time. There was a great sense of motion about the barrage of stars, a sense of immense dynamism — and in truth these crowded stars were flying rapidly through this lethal space, though their motion was only visible on timescales of years, too slow for mayfly humans to perceive.

Huddled in a corner of Pirius’s greenship cockpit, Virtual Nilis looked faintly absurd in his skinsuit, Virtual-tailored to fit his ample girth. He said, wondering, “So many stars, giant, violent stars, far more massive than Earth’s sun, crowded so close they slide past like light globes lining a roadway… It is as bright as a tropical sky! There is an old paradox. Once it was believed that the universe is infinite and uniform, everywhere full of stars. But that cannot be so, you see, for then whichever direction you looked, your eye would meet a star, and the whole sky would shine as bright as the surface of the sun. Perhaps that paradoxical sky would look something like this.”

“It’s a beautiful sight, Commissary,” Pirius Blue said. “But remember, in this place, every star is a fortress.”

That shut him up, to Pirius’s relief. Pirius had work to do; the mission clock was counting down. He blipped the greenship’s attitude controllers, tiny inertial generators fixed to each of the three nacelles and to the main body.

Before him, the spangling of crowded Galaxy-center stars shifted. He made out seven sparks against that background, the emerald lights of the seven greenships that were going to accompany him and his crew into the unknown depths of the Cavity.

“Systems seem nominal,” he reported.

Enduring Hope called from his engineer’s position, “Sure, genius, like you can feel the ship’s degrees of freedom just by sitting there. In fact I fixed the inertial control before you started playing.”

“I knew I could rely on you, Hope.”

Now Cohl chipped in, “Do you want to give me some warning before you start throwing this tub around the sky? I’m trying to get the nav systems calibrated. I know that’s merely a detail to you two heroes, but I’m sentimentally attached to knowing where I am.”

“It’s all yours, Navigator…”

Virtual Nilis was wide-eyed. “Pirius — you must be glad to see your crew again. Back in their rightful habitat, so to speak. But is it always like this?”

“Oh, no,” Pirius said. “I think we’re a little subdued today.”

But it had been good when the three of them had been reunited, down on Quin: Cohl with the limp that had been her souvenir from Factory Rock, and Enduring Hope, back from his artillery brigade. Hope, amazingly, had lost weight. It turned out to be tough physical work, out on those monopole- cannon battalions, and after months of it, Hope had never looked fitter.

And it had certainly been a joy when the three of them had first boarded a ship again, which they had quickly dubbed The Assimilator’s Other Claw. It wasn’t much of a combat ship, as it was laden with a massive sensor pod that spoiled the sleek lines of its main body. And it could never be the same as their first ship, of course. But it was a ship nevertheless — their ship. They had marked their skinsuits with sigils that recalled the first Claw, and Pirius Blue felt an extraordinary surge of joy to be back in a greenship blister.

Nilis was watching him with his characteristic mixture of pride and longing. “I suppose the banter is a social lubricant. But I’m surprised you get anything done. Well, I’m privileged to be here. To see this. It’s so different. You know, we humans aren’t designed to function in such an environment. On Earth you are on a plain, so it seems, a few kilometers wide, with clouds a few kilometers up. In the sky everything is so remote it looks two-dimensional — even the Moon. There is no depth. The scale is kilometers, or infinity, with a gap in between. Here, though, you have stars scattered through the depth of the sky — space is filled up — and you get a sense of immensity, of perspective that’s impossible on Earth.”

Pirius shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Oh, I think so.” He peered at Pirius curiously. “To comprehend a sky like this, the very structure of your sensorium, your mind, must differ from mine, Pirius Blue. Genetically we could be identical. But our minds are so different we might as well belong to alien species.”

This was uncomfortably heretical to Pirius. Everybody was essentially the same; that was the Doctrine’s decree. If Nilis wanted to believe he was some kind of divergent, that was up to him. “I’m just trying to do my job, Commissary.”

“I know.” Nilis sighed. “And my gabbling is getting in the way! Thank you again for hosting me.”

Hosting: there was something else Pirius didn’t want to think about too hard. As the whole purpose of the mission was to take Nilis through the Cavity, it had been decreed that the safest place to lodge him was with Pirius — that is, in him. All flight crew had implants of various kinds studded through their nervous systems, serving as trackers, backup comm systems, medical controls, system interfaces. It had been trivial to download Virtual Nilis into Pirius’s head. Trivial, but not welcome. But it had been orders.

Nilis held up his hands. “I know you’re uncomfortable. I’m here to observe, not to interfere. I won’t get in your way.”

Before accepting the download, Pirius had insisted on an off switch. “No,” he said vehemently. “You won’t.”

A peremptory voice called over the common loop. “This is Dray. Shut up and listen.”

The babble on the loop immediately dried up. Pirius glanced at the array of seven ships around him. Dray’s was one of a pair directly ahead, the tip of the loose wedge formation. Commodore Dray was a formidable, muscular woman, her head shaven bare, and the leader of this expeditionary force.

She said now, “Here are your idents. I am Wedge Leader…” She ran through the other crews, numbering them in sequence, one side then the other, so that Dray, in Wedge Zero, led a line of even- numbered ships, and Wedge One led a line of odd numbers. Pirius in the Other Claw was Wedge Seven.

“And here are the rules,” said Dray. “One. I am in command, and none of you is going to so much as fart without my permission. I’m talking to you, Pirius. I’ve seen your record. If it was up to me you would still be digging graves on a Rock. But it wasn’t up to me, so here you are, and if there are any stupid stunts on this trip I’ll shoot you out of the sky myself.”

Pirius had no doubt she meant it. “Sir.”

“Rule two. We are going to fulfill our objectives. Rule three. We are eight ships going in, and we will be eight coming out, subject only to rules one and two.”

A chorus of voices replied. “Understood.”

“Now, I had imagined you had all seen the briefing, but perhaps not. I also assumed you were experienced crews, but this formation is so slack I must be wrong about that, too. Form up, damn it! I’m looking at you, Wedge Three.”

“Sir.”

The seven lights slid subtly across the sky, and Pirius blipped his sub-light drive to tweak his own position.

“We’re a minute from our first FTL jump, and we’re going to hop in formation. The first hop will be the most difficult…”

That was true, for this tiny formation was about to leap right into the heart of the Galaxy.

“When we get through that, it’s plain sailing,” Dray said. “And even if it isn’t, it will be fun. Nearly time. Good luck, everyone.” Another quick chorus of acknowledgment. “Five, four, three…”

The Galaxy’s inner structure was nested around the ferocious mass at the very center.

Within the broad plane of the spiral arms was set the Core. That immense shining bulge itself contained a denser kernel, the Central Star Mass: millions of stars crowded into a few tens of light- years.

Immense streams of molecular gases poured inward through the Mass — but a few light-years out from the center they collided with a ferocious solar wind, blowing out of the very center. That solar wind created the Cavity, a hole in the heart of the Galaxy, surrounded by a stationary shock front of infalling gas, the Circumnuclear Ring. At the Circumnuclear Ring, the human expansion through the Galaxy had stalled; the soldiers who fought and died there called it the Front. The Cavity had its own marvels: the Baby Spiral, a miniature Galaxy contained wholly within those few scraped-clear light- years, and deeper still the dense, fast-moving astrophysics around the central black hole itself.

Dray and his little flotilla of greenships planned a bold FTL jump of no less than five light-years, which would take them right through the Front and into the Cavity. They were going to make this leap in the relativistic turbulence of the Galaxy center, whose violence, even as far out as this, reached up into the higher dimensions on which FTL technology depended. And they were going to do it in formation.

That, anyhow, was the plan.

When the jump came, the sky was suddenly so bright it was as if it had exploded.

Dray was calling. “Two and Four! Wedge Two and Four, report!”

Pirius ignored everything and checked his ship’s systems. The Cavity was a lethal environment, saturated with radiation and laced with massive particles fleeing at close to the speed of light. But the Other Claw had survived the FTL jump, and was protecting her crew.

When he was satisfied, he looked up.

Suddenly he was sitting on the edge of the Cavity, actually inside the central space contained within the Front. Through a blizzard of stars he could clearly see the Baby Spiral. The convoy had emerged from its jump close to the terminus of the spiral arm called East, where it lost its coherence and merged into the mush of the Circumnuclear Ring. From Pirius’s point of view, East was a tunnel of infant stars and crimson-glowing gas that wound deeper into the Cavity. It was like looking into the guts of an immense machine, he thought, a machine of gas and dust and stars. All of this was tinged with blueshift, for he was already flying further inward; the Other Claw had emerged from the hop with a velocity a high fraction of lightspeed, a vector arrowed straight at the heart of the Galaxy.

Against this astounding background, Pirius had eyes only for the green sparks arrayed around him. The array was noticeably more ragged than it had been before the jump — and seven had been reduced to six, he saw now.

“Two, Four!”

“Four here,” came a reply. “We lost Two. The FTL shift brought him too close — I was lucky to pull away myself.”

Nilis gasped. “We lost a crew? So suddenly?”

Pirius said grimly, “You can see what kind of cauldron we’re in. FTL jumps aren’t too precise at the best of times.”

“To die in a place like this.” Nilis had lowered his hands now, and the complex light swam in his eyes. “And are we already moving?”

Cohl called dryly, “The law of conservation of momentum isn’t particularly relevant if you pass through an FTL hop, Commissary. If you tweak the hop you can emerge with any three-space momentum you want. As my instructors used to say, in operations like this, physics is just a tool kit.”

“Remarkable, remarkable.”

“Let’s go to formation B,” Dray called. “Close up.”

The green lights slid around the sky; once more Dray was at the tip of the wedge, and the other ships, including Pirius’s, formed its flanks.

Dray ran through the procedures that lay ahead. “One light-day jumps. We wait one tenth of a second at each emergence; we set our formation; we jump again. Everybody clear?”

“Sir.”

“On my mark. Three, two.”

With a gut-twisting lurch The Assimilator’s Other Claw leapt across another thirty billion kilometers, across a space that could have held three copies of all of Sol system out to Pluto side-by-side, a monumental leap completed too rapidly for Pirius’s mind even to be aware of the transition before it was done.

And then the ship did it again. And again. Virtual Nilis moaned and buried his head in his hands.

It was an uncomfortable, juddering progress, a series of flickering lurches, ten every second. The miniature spiral arm was a tunnel, a few light-days wide, that stretched out ahead of the ships, leading them toward the still more exotic mysteries of the very center. But the six surviving ships around Pirius pushed on, glowing bright defiant green, their neat wedge formation a challenge to the chaos of the cosmos.

Virtual Nilis sat up and dared look around, plucking at the threadbare sleeve of his robe. His eyes were wide, and the Virtual generators artfully reflected Galaxy-center light in his eyes. “So much structure, so precisely delineated. Do you realize, even now we know virtually nothing about the details of this place — not the geography, but the why of it. Why should this extraordinary toy Spiral exist at all? And why three arms, why not one or five or twenty? Is it really a coherent structure, or just some chance assemblage, gone in a million years? We have been so busy using this place as a war zone we have forgotten to ask such questions.”

As Pirius labored at his instruments, Nilis talked on and on, about other galaxies where the central black holes weren’t sleeping giants like this one, but voracious monsters that seemed to be actively eating their way through the gaseous corpses of their hapless hosts; he spoke of galaxies racked by great spasms of star formation, tremendous eruptions of energy that spanned hundreds of light-years.

“We rationalize all these things away with our physics, coming up with one theory after another. But we know that life’s thoughtless actions have shaped the evolution of matter, even on astrophysical scales. So how can we tell what is natural? We have been waging war here for millennia. But there is evidence that the Xeelee have been fighting here much longer, tremendous ancient wars against a much more formidable foe. And what would be the consequence? Perhaps everything we see is a relic of an ancient battleground, like the trench-furrowed surface of a Rock, worked and reworked by conflict until nothing is left of the original…” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m talking a lot.”

“Yes, you are,” Pirius said tensely. “I should have left you back at the base.”

Nilis laughed, though his face stayed expressionless. “I’ll try to—”

“Flies! My altitude fifty degrees, azimuth forty…”

Pirius quickly converted that to his own point of view and peered out of his blister. He couldn’t see the nightfighters. But in his sensor view, there they were, resolutely night-dark specks in this cathedral of light.

“Remarkable,” Nilis said. “This is a three-dimensional battlefield, with no common attitude. You use spherical coordinates, and you are able to translate from one position to another, in your head—”

“Shut up, Commissary.”

Somebody called, “I count five, six, seven—”

Cohl said, “All nightfighters, I think.”

Enduring Hope called, “I’m surprised they took so long.”

“No,” said Dray grimly. “We surprised them. Pattern alpha.”

The seven greenships turned with the precision of a single machine, and Pirius felt a stab of pride.

Now the Xeelee were dead ahead. The greenships continued to plow toward them.

“Sublight,” Dray called. “Half lightspeed.”

The greenships cut their FTL drives. The Other Claw dropped back into three-dimensional spacetime with a velocity of half the speed of light, arrowed straight at the Xeelee. The enemy was now just light-minutes away, no more remote than Earth was from its sun. The greenships were closing so fast that the background, the Spiral’s boiling clouds of gas and dust, was tinged faintly blue.

As the nightfighters neared, Pirius could see how they swarmed, flying over, under, around each other, rapid movements whose pattern was impossible to follow, like the flies that had earned them their barracks nickname. Their movements were almost like a dance, Pirius thought; smooth, graceful, even beautiful. But not human.

And they were close, terribly close. Pirius thought he saw the first tentative cherry-red flicker of a starbreaker beam.

“Break on my mark,” Dray said. “Three, two, one—”

The wedge formation dissolved. Three of the greenships peeled away, suddenly making a dash for it back along the great roadway of the spiral arm. The rest, including Dray and Pirius, closed up tighter. Only the four of them now, four green sparks in this dazzling Galaxy-center light storm, four against the dense pack of Xeelee flies dead ahead.

Nilis murmured, “I don’t understand—”

“Shut up,” said Pirius.

For a time — a moment, a heartbeat — the Xeelee held their position, and Pirius thought the subterfuge wasn’t going to work. And if it didn’t he was a dead man.

But then the Xeelee broke. Moving as one, they tore after the three departing ships.

Pirius whooped, flooded with relief and exultation. There were answering cries from the other ships. “Lethe, it worked!”

Dray briefly shut down the loop, so that only her voice sounded. “Let’s keep the partying for later,” she said dryly. “Formation C. You know the drill.”

The Other Claw banked and turned.

Nilis gripped the edge of his Virtual seat. “Oh, my eyes,” he whispered, evidently more upset by a bit of aerobatics than by a head-on approach to a pack of Xeelee fighters.

The four ships soon settled down into a new simplified wedge. Dray ordered them to sound off once in position: Three, Four, Seven called in. Pirius, in Seven, trailed Dray, the leader; Three flew alongside Dray, trailed by Four.

Nilis spoke up again. “We flew at the Xeelee. Why didn’t they repel us?”

“They thought we were a diversion,” Pirius said. “That the others, One, Five, Six, were the ones with the real mission — whatever they imagine it to be. The Xeelee made a quick decision, chased the others. But they were wrong.”

“Ah. Those others, One, Five Six — they were the diversion. Clever! Perhaps we are better liars than the Xeelee. What does that say of us?… But of course it would only work if the Xeelee didn’t know of it in advance.”

“We were flying anti-Tolman patterns.” Patterns intended to disrupt the abilities of the enemy to send signals back into their own past. “It’s all part of the game. It’s a gamble, though; you can never be sure what you’ll come up against.”

“But it worked,” Nilis said. “An ingenious bluff!”

Pirius saw a flaring of light up around azimuth forty degrees, a green nova. Somebody up there was fighting and dying, all for the sake of an “ingenious bluff.”

Dray had seen the same lights. She called gruffly, “Let’s make it count.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On my mark. Three, two, one.”

That juddering light-day hopping began again, and once more the stars swam past Pirius, as he hurtled along the glowing lanes of dust.

Chapter 31

Exerting her new power, Luru Parz brought Nilis and his little retinue to Jupiter. A week after the confrontation under Olympus, it was clear that she was the driver of events.

Pirius Red knew nothing about the “archive” to which he was being brought. Even Nilis, normally so loquacious, would say nothing. But Pirius’s psych training cut in: it was a waste of energy to worry about the unknown.

Besides, here was Jupiter. And Pirius thought that of all the ancient strangeness he had seen in Sol system, Jupiter was the most extraordinary.

The sun appeared the tiniest of discs from Jupiter, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Pirius held up his hand, it cast sharp, straight shadows, shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.

And through this reduced light swam Jupiter and its retinue of moons.

Once it had been a mighty planet, the mightiest in Sol system in fact, more massive even than Saturn. But an ancient conflict had resulted in the deliberate injection of miniature black holes into the planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart. Whatever the intention of that extraordinary act, the result was inevitable. It had taken fifteen thousand years, but at last the implosion of Jupiter into the knot of spacetime at its core had been completed.

Once, Jupiter had had a retinue of many moons, four of them large enough to be considered worlds in their own right. In the final disaster, as gravitational energy pulsed through the system, the moons had scattered like frightened birds. Three of those giant satellites had been destroyed, leaving Jupiter with a spectacular ring of ice and dust. But even now bits of moon were steadily falling into the maw of the black hole, and their compression as they were dragged into the event horizon made the central object shine like a star.

One large moon had survived, to follow a swooping elliptical orbit around its parent, and that was Luru Parz’s destination now. The moon, she said, was called Callisto.

Pirius watched Callisto’s approach. It was a ball of white, quite featureless to the naked eye, lacking even impact craters as far as he could see. But it was surrounded by a deep, diffuse cloud of drones. Some of them swam close to the corvette. They were fists of metal and carbon that glistened with weapons.

Nilis said, “A deep defense system. Even Earth itself doesn’t have such aggressive guardians.”

“And very old,” Luru Parz said. Even she seemed tense as the corvette descended through the cloud. “This cordon was first erected during the lifetime of Hama Druz himself — following Druz’s own visit here, in fact.”

“I didn’t know Druz had come here,” Pirius said. He actually knew very little about the moral founder of the Third Expansion.

“Oh, yes,” Luru said. “And what he found here shocked him into the insights that led him to formulate the famous Doctrines — and to order Callisto to be cordoned off. This little moon is a key site in the history of mankind. Twenty thousand years have worn away since then, and the whole setup has been subject to the implosion of a black hole a few light-seconds away. Some of these old drones may be a little cranky. They have been instructed to recognize us. But…”

“How ironic,” Nilis said grimly, “if we were to be thwarted by a malfunctioning antique robot.”

“There are many in the Coalition councils who wouldn’t shed a tear to see the back of me — or you, Commissary.”

The ship continued to descend. The icescape of Callisto flattened out to a frozen ground streaked with color, pale purple and pink; perhaps the ice was laced with organic compounds. It was smooth as far as Pirius could see, smooth all the way to the horizon. But a shallow pit was dug into the ice, and at the center of the pit there was a settlement of some kind, a handful of buildings and landing pads.

Luru Parz said, “Once Callisto was just a moon, you know. It was peppered with impact craters, like every other moon — not like this. At this site there was a major crater called Valhalla — I don’t know what the name means — and in the time of Michael Poole there were extensive ice mining projects. But it all changed after Hama Druz’s visit.”

Pirius said, “What happened to the craters?”

“What do you think?”

He thought it over. “The surface looks as if it melted. What could melt a moon?”

“It was moved,” said Luru Parz, watching him. “In the process the surface shook itself to pieces.”

“Moved…” Pirius knew of no technology which could achieve such a thing.

Nilis prompted, “And the reason we are here—”

“This was the last refuge of many jasofts,” Luru Parz whispered. “And here is stored their oldest knowledge. But it will take a sacrifice to retrieve it.” She wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and Nilis looked away.

Pirius still had no idea what they wanted of him. Despite his training, dread gathered in his belly.

The corvette passed through the last line of the drones and began its final approach.

Pirius descended into the deep core of Callisto.

He rode an elevator with Nilis, Luru Parz, a servant bot, and a taciturn Navy guard. They passed down a shaft cut into the ice, its walls worn smooth. Pirius touched the walls; the ice was slick, cold, lubricated by a layer of liquid water. Beneath a surface patina of dust and grime he saw that the ice had a structure, a lacy purple marbling, receding into meaningless complexity. More strangeness, he thought.

It was cold, surely not much above freezing, and their breath fogged air that stank, stale. The elevator, a simple inertial-control platform, was itself an antique, and as it descended it shuddered and bucked disconcertingly. He felt as if he was being dragged down into the strata of time that overlaid every world in this dense, ancient system.

They arrived in a chamber cut deep in the heart of Callisto. Only the handful of floating globes which had followed them down the shaft cast any light, and the party huddled, as if nervous about what might lurk in the dark.

Pirius stepped off the platform. The chamber was a rough cube maybe twice Pirius’s height, crudely hollowed out. It might almost have been a natural formation, save for notches in the floor, and a regular pattern of holes in the wall. The only piece of equipment he could see was a kind of door frame, set purposelessly in the middle of the floor.

Luru Parz walked over the ice. “Once this was a mine. Nothing more sinister than that. But when I was last here the mine had long been shut down. Chambers like this, and the tunnels and shafts that linked them, had been pressurized and occupied. There was equipment here.” She pointed to notches in the floor. “That was a kind of bed, I remember.”

Pirius had been expecting something like Mons Olympus, some kind of library with bots and toiling archivists, Coalescent or not. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Was this the library?”

“This never was a library,” Luru Parz said. “This was a laboratory.”

“Then where?”

“Through there.” She pointed to the door that led nowhere.

There was a moment of stiff silence, as Pirius looked from one to the other. He said, “I think you ought to tell me what’s going on.”

Nilis stared at him, agonized. Then, his arms tucked into his sleeves, he padded to the bot. The bot’s carapace opened to reveal a tray of drinks that steamed in the cold. Nilis picked one up, cradling it in his hands. “Lethe, I need this. What a tomb of a place!”

Luru Parz watched this with contempt. “A man called Reth Cana worked here, Ensign. Long ago. Ostensibly he came to look for life…”

Before humans came, nothing much had happened to this moon since it accreted from the greater cloud that had formed the Jupiter system. The inner moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede — had been heated by tidal pumping from Jupiter. Europa, under a crust of ice, had a liquid ocean; Io was driven by that perennial squeezing to spectacular volcanism. But Callisto had been born too far from her huge parent for any of that gravitational succor. Here, the only heat was a relic of primordial radioactivity; there had been no geology, no volcanism, no hidden ocean.

Nevertheless, Reth Cana had succeeded in his quest.

They were cryptoendoliths, Luru said, bacteria-like forms living hidden lives within the dirty ice of Callisto. They survived in rivulets of water, kept liquid by the heat of relic radioactivity, and they fed off the traces of organic matter locked into the ice at the time of the moon’s formation.

Luru Parz said, “The biochemistry here is a matter of carbon-carbon chains and water — like Earth’s, but not precisely so. Energy flows thin here, and replication is very slow, spanning thousands of years. The cryptoendoliths themselves weren’t so interesting — except for one thing.”

Reth had believed there were pathways of chemical and electrical communication, etched into the ice and rock, tracks for great slow thoughts that pulsed through the substance of Callisto. Locked into their ice moon, there had been few routes of development open to the cryptoendoliths. But, as always, life complexified, and sought new spaces to colonize. “The cryptoendoliths couldn’t move up or down, forward or back. So they stepped sideways…”

Nilis asked coldly, “Was Reth Cana an immortal, Luru?”

“A pharaoh, yes. But not a jasoft, not a collaborator. He was a refugee, in fact; he came here fleeing the Qax, and waited out the Occupation. Of course, as soon as the Occupation was lifted, he became a refugee once more, hiding from the Coalition and its ideologies. He returned here to escape. And he helped others do likewise.”

Pirius said, “What do you mean, these bugs grew sideways?”

“I mean,” said Luru Parz, “that these remarkable little creatures found a way to penetrate another universe. And not just any old universe. Ensign, do you know what is meant by configuration space?”

“Imagine there is no time. Imagine there is no space…” In the still cold of Callisto, as she described extraordinary ideas, Luru’s voice was a dry rustle.

“Take a snapshot of the universe. You have a static shape, a cloud of particles each frozen in flight at some point in space.” A snapping of fingers. “Do it again. There. There. There. Each moment, each juggling of the particles, gives you a new configuration.

“Imagine all those snapshots, all the possible configurations the particles of the universe can take. In any one configuration you could list the particles’ positions. The set of numbers you derive would correspond to a single point on a mighty multidimensional graph. The totality of that graph would be a map of all the possible states our universe could take up. Do you see? And that map is configuration space.”

“Like a phase space map.”

“Like a phase space, yes. But of the whole universe. Now imagine putting a grain of dust on each point of the map. Each grain would correspond to a single point in time, a snapshot. This is reality dust, a dust of the Nows. Reality dust contains all the arrangements of matter there could ever be…”

Slowly, as Luru explained and Nilis tried to clarify, Pirius began to understand.

Configuration space was not Pirius’s world, not his universe. It was a map, yes, a sort of timeless map of his own world and all its possibilities, a higher realm. And yet, according to Luru Parz, it was a universe in itself, a place you could go, in a sense. And it was filled with reality dust. Every grain of sand there represented an instant in his own universe, a way for the particles of his universe, atoms and people and stars, to line themselves up.

But this was a static picture. What about time? What about causality?

If you lined up reality dust grains in a row you would get a history, of a sort, Luru Parz said. But it might not make sense as a history; nothing like causality might emerge, just a jumble of disconnected snapshots one after another. But the sand grains attracted each other. If they came from neighboring points in the greater configuration space, the graph of all possible instants, the moments they mapped must resemble each other. And so the grains lined up in chains, each line of grains representing a series of instants which, if you watched them one after another, would give you the illusion of movement, the illusion of time passing — perhaps, if the grains were similar enough, even the illusion of causality.

Something like that.

And configuration space, he slowly understood, was where Luru Parz wanted to send Pirius.

It was beyond his imagination. “You want me to go into a map? How is that possible?”

Luru said, “Reth Cana discovered that, constrained in this space and time, the endoliths found a way into configuration space — and Reth Cana found a way for humans to follow. He could download a human consciousness into this abstract realm.”

“I can see the appeal of that for pharaohs,” Nilis said with dark humor. “An abstract, static, Platonic realm — a place of morbid contemplation, a consolation for ageless pharaohs as they sought to justify the way they administered the suffering of their fellow creatures.”

Luru Parz smiled thinly. “Of course it is a realm beyond our experience. So Reth constructed metaphors, a kind of interface to make its features accessible to human minds. There is an island — a beach. You’ll see a mountain, Pirius, and a sea. The mountain is order, and at its peak is that special dust grain that represents the initial singularity: the Big Bang, the unique event when all the universe’s particles overlaid each other.”

Pirius said, “And the sea?”

“The sea is the opposite. The sea is disorder — maximal entropy — the ocean of meaninglessness to which everything washes, in the end.”

Pirius stood before the doorway, set up in the abandoned laboratory of Reth Cana. It looked as if it led nowhere. In fact, Luru Parz was saying, it led to a different realm of reality altogether. “And if I walk through this door—”

“You will split in two,” Luru said. “You will still be here, walking out the other side. But a copy of you will be made.”

“Like a Virtual.”

“Yes. It will feel like you, have your memories. But it will not be you.”

“And this copy will be in configuration space.”

“Yes.”

“But why must I go there?”

“Because that is the place the pharaohs went. The pharaohs flocked there, from all over Sol system and beyond,” Luru Parz said. “Their knowledge — some of it preserved from long before the Qax Occupation — went with them, too. Configuration space is a black library — the final library — and it contains much we have lost.”

Nilis said, “You chose not to follow these undying refugees into configuration space, Luru Parz.”

Her face was blank. “Unfinished business,” she said.

Pirius said, “And this lost knowledge is what you want me to bring back.”

“Yes. The ancients had considerable powers. Don’t forget it was human action that turned Jupiter into a black hole. Perhaps they even knew how to land punches on the supermassive monster at the center of the Galaxy.”

He understood. “You want me to find a weapon in there. A weapon to strike at Chandra, in this hideous old library of yours.”

“Yes… but there’s a catch.”

“A catch?”

“Once in there, the refugees didn’t stay human for long. Which is somewhat inconvenient. Try to hold onto yourself, Ensign. Your identity. And stay away from the sea.”

Pirius peered at the portal. “Will I be able to come back? I mean, uh, he — the Virtual copy.”

Nilis strode up to him and took his shoulders. Pirius had never seen Nilis look so grave. “Pirius, I have taken you far from your home, your duty. I have asked you to face many extraordinary situations — and many dangers. But this is by far the most difficult thing I have ever asked you to do.”

Pirius said slowly, “I can’t come back.”

Luru Parz laughed. “But it doesn’t matter. Sentient or not, it will only be a copy, like a Virtual. And it won’t last long. It has to be you, Ensign.” She smiled, showing her blackened teeth. “You’re the only suitable resource we’ve got. I’m worn smooth with time, Nilis here is too aged… only you have the strength to endure this.”

Pirius looked at the frame. He felt numbed, not even afraid; perhaps his imagination was exhausted. He shrugged. “There are already two copies of me running around the Galaxy. I suppose I’m used to being split in half. When shall we do this?”

Luru Parz said, “The equipment is ready.”

Nilis gaped. “Now? Just like that?”

“Why delay?” She stepped close to Pirius, so close he could smell her musty odor through the chill tang of the ice. “Do it, Pirius. Step through and it will be over. Don’t think about it. Just step through…” She was grotesquely seductive. He felt oddly compelled to obey. It was as if he had a gun in his hand, pointed to his head; no matter how rational he was there was always a trace of a compulsion to pull the trigger — and that self-destructive compulsion was what Luru Parz was working on now. “Do it,” she whispered, like a voice in his own head.

Nilis said, “Oh, but this is so — I wish I could spare you this ordeal!”

“It will only be a copy,” Luru said. “Not you. What does a copy matter?”

Enough. Pirius turned away from Nilis. Luru Parz was right. If he had to do this -

He stepped into the frame. There was a flare of light, electric blue, blinding him. He pushed forward further, into the light.

He staggered. Gravity clutched at him, stronger than the ice moon’s wispy pull, as if inertial shielding had failed. The ground under his feet felt soft, dusty, like asteroid regolith.

The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.

He was standing on sand, bits of eroded rock. He felt the gravity stress his bones, pull at his internal organs.

He was here, then, in configuration space. He felt like himself. But he was the copy, projected into this strange realm, while another Pirius, the original, was back on the ice moon.

He struggled with fear. Callisto was only seconds in his past, yet he could never go back. He somehow hadn’t imagined his impulsive action ending up like this — or hadn’t let himself imagine it — as Luru Parz had surely calculated when she talked him into this. And he didn’t want to die.

“Lucked out,” he said to himself.

He looked around. The sky above him was open — no roof, no dome. But he was used to that by now.

The light was bright, but diffuse, shadowless, without a single source, without a sun.

A mountain loomed over the horizon, a pale cone made misty by distance. The ground sloped gently toward a sea that lapped softly. But the sea was black, like a sea of hydrocarbons, as if this were Titan. He looked the other way and saw a tangle of some kind of vegetation. He dug the words out of his memory. Ocean. Land. This was a beach, then, an interface between land and the open ocean; he was on a beach.

None of this was real, of course. All of these props — the beach, the ocean — were a rendering of a more profound reality into terms he could grasp. Metaphors, drawn from the human world. But not his world. This was an abstraction to suit a different mind, a mind that had grown up on Earth. This would have been a strange place to a Navy brat even if he hadn’t come here by such a strange route.

But he had a mission. He was here to find a weapon that could strike at a galactic-center supermassive black hole. That was something to focus on. And maybe after that, he could find some way to survive after all.

He turned and trudged up the beach, toward the vegetation. It was difficult walking on the sand, which gave with every step.

The wall of vegetation that fringed the beach was thick, apparently impenetrable. He didn’t know much about plants, save what he had seen in Nilis’s garden. But then, this tangled bank was not a true forest; the plants that grew here were not “trees.” The trunklike shapes he saw, crowded with waxy, gray-green leaves, were each composed of dozens of ropelike vines, all tangled up together.

When he looked down, he saw that the vines spread out into the dirt at the base of the vegetation. They did not dig into the ground like roots, though. Instead they spread over the surface, bifurcating further — until, he saw now, they blended into structures in the sand itself, at last dissipating altogether in a scattering of grains. It was a gathering of structure, he thought, rising from the sand, melding into these apparently living things.

Luru Parz had told him none of this had anything to do with biology, but somehow, with causality, with chains of consequences gathering in significance…

He was never going back.

Suddenly the truth of it hit him, blinding him to the place in which he found himself. He probed for a sense of loss, of abandonment, found only numbness. He tried to think of other times, other places: the ancient ice mine on Callisto, and the deeper past beyond that, the worldlets of Arches Base, the dorms, the soft warmth of Torec. It took an effort, as if the brief moments he had been here were expanding to fill his life.

After all, he remembered, he was a mere representation of somebody else. He wasn’t real, and that lost life had never been his. His fear faded.

Luru had warned he might lose himself in here. Maybe losing his fear was the first stage of that. Real or not, he had his duty; that was real enough.

Something rustled, deep inside the tangle of gray-green. He looked up, startled. Two eyes peered back at him — human eyes? But another rustle, a shake of the leaves as if a wind had passed, and they were gone.

He plunged into the vegetation. “Wait,” he cried. “Wait!” He had to rip aside the tangle of vines by main force, and even so was barely able to move forward.

There was a face before him. Two bright eyes, peering from green shadow. He froze, shocked. At first he could make no sense of it. He saw eyes, nose, a mouth. But the proportions seemed wrong — the eyes too close, the mouth too wide. Then it shifted, as if one face were melding into another, or a Virtual image were failing. But the eyes were steady, that gaze locked on his. Was it possible this was the relic of some jasoft, come here to flee from the Coalition?

And was this a glimpse of his own fate?

“Help me,” he said. It came out as a whisper, and he tried again. “Help me. Humanity is in peril. We need to strike at the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. We need a way to harm a supermassive black hole.”

It seemed absurd. What could such things matter here? What was a war, even, in a place where a handful of sand grains held a million possible instants? What indeed was life or death? And yet he remembered his duty; he tried to speak to that monstrous, shifting face. “If there is anything left of the human in you, you must answer—”

A fist slammed into his face, with impossible force. He felt his nose crunch under the impact. And something was forced into his mouth, hard enough to tear the muscles of his cheeks.

The blow hurled him backward, out of the forest, his hunched body ripping through the tangle of causality. He landed on the beach, sprawled in reality dust. And his hand was burning, as if he had dipped it in fire. The pain distracted him even from the ache of his shattered face, the bitterness of the stuff in his mouth. The black ocean was lapping close to him, much further up the beach than before. Tides, he thought. Secondhand gravitational effects, working on open bodies of liquid. Bits of facts from his training, from a life that was lost.

He held up his arm. His hand was gone, the stump neatly filmed over with pink flesh, as if the hand had never been. The black stuff wasn’t water. It must have burned off his hand like the strongest acid. Neat it might be, but the pain was agonizing.

Causality, he thought. Entropy. That’s what Luru said the sea means. I am being eaten by a sea of entropy, dissolved into disorder.

He forced himself to roll over, away from the ocean. Pain lanced up his arm.

The stuff in his mouth shifted, blocking his breathing. He could suffocate lying here. Or the blow itself might turn out to be lethal. There were ways to kill people like that, he remembered; you rammed your face into your opponent’s nose, to push a shard of bone into the brain.

He was going to die here. But he was just a Virtual — not Pirius, not Pirius Red or Pirius Blue. He was Pirius Gray, he thought, Pirius the shadow. His death didn’t matter.

His mouth worked. Perhaps he could spit the crud out from his mouth. But some instinct made him bite into it. A thick, acidic fluid spurted into his mouth. He bit again, and forced himself to swallow.

Perhaps he had succeeded. He had come seeking answers, and he had been given a cruel feeding. But what had he expected, a textbook? Some philosophers said that humans shouldn’t dream of contact with the Xeelee; their warmaking was the only possible contact. And perhaps this revolting mouthful was the solution he had been sent for.

He tried to think of his name again. It was fading, fading like a dream in the moments after waking. Gray, gray.

Pain striped along his left hand side. He cried out. The black ocean had washed a little further up the beach. He tried to scramble away.

Deep inside Callisto, Pirius stepped into the door frame. There was a flare of light, electric blue, blinding. He pushed further forward, into the light.

On the far side of the portal he felt a hard, cold surface under his feet. Ice?

The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.

Suddenly his heart was hammering. He was still in the chamber, on Callisto, standing on the other side of the portal. He was Pirius, not the copy; he would have to leave that other to do his duty for him. “Lucked out,” he said.

“My eyes,” said Nilis. “Oh, my boy, what a terrible thing…”

Luru Parz said, “Look.”

Pirius turned. A Virtual projection hovered over the service bot, a complex, fast-shifting display, elusive, dense. Even the Navy guard was staring.

Pirius asked, “What is it?”

“Data,” said Luru Parz. “From configuration space. Coming back through the portal.”

“I think it worked,” Nilis said. “You found something, Pirius!”

Luru Parz growled, “Now all we have to do is figure out what it is.”

Chapter 32

The flight approached the terminus of East Arm.

The three main arms of the Baby Spiral, three fat streams of infalling gas, came to a junction, melding into a massive knot of turbulence. Pirius Blue could see it ahead, a tangle of glowing gas filaments. He knew that just on the other side of that central knot of gas lay the brooding mass of Chandra itself, and the powerful alien presences that infested it. No human crew had ever gotten so close and lived.

The silence on the Claw’s crew loop was telling. He remembered the words of his first flight instructor. “You pretty kids are all so smart. You have to be smart to fly a greenship. But in combat there’s only one thing worse than being smart. And that’s being imaginative.”

Pirius knew he ought to come up with something inspirational to say. But he didn’t understand how he felt himself. Not fear: he seemed to be finding a kind of acceptance. He recalled fragments of conversations with This Burden Must Pass, where that proselyte of the Friends of Wigner had mused about how it would be to reach the end of time and approach the Ultimate Observer, to approach a god. Perhaps it would be like this, the calm of being utterly insignificant.

Then the Xeelee attacked.

“Azimuth eighty! Azimuth eighty!” That was Four screaming, off to Pirius’s starboard.

Pirius glared around the sky. This time he saw the nightfighters just as the instruments blared their warnings. They were a ball of swarming ships, black as night, coming at him from out of the shining clouds. Starbreaker beams spat ahead of them, a curtain of fire. The nightfighters were beautiful, he thought, lethally beautiful. In this turbulent, violent place, the Xeelee looked like they had been born here.

No time for that.

Dray shouted, “Pattern delta!”

“Locking in,” Cohl snapped.

Pirius threw the Other Claw onto its new trajectory. The Galaxy center whirled around him, the merging lanes of gas spilling about his head.

Again the little convoy split, this time into two pairs. It was a copy of their first feint. This time Three and Four peeled off and went shooting away to Pirius’s port side, haring into the shining corridor of the Arm, as if trying to escape back to the Front. Meanwhile Wedge Leader and Wedge Seven, Dray and Pirius, went straight for the Xeelee, their weapons already firing.

Again there was a heartbeat of delay, as if the Xeelee were trying to decide what was happening. But this time they didn’t follow the decoy; this time they came straight on at Dray and Pirius.

Cohl said, “Lethe. They knew.”

“I don’t understand,” Nilis said.

“They didn’t fall for the bait,” Pirius said. “We were meant to look like a rearguard. The Xeelee were supposed to chase after the others. But they didn’t.”

“Your navigator said, ’They knew.’ “

“FTL foreknowledge,” Pirius said. “You can always tell when it cuts in. Suddenly they know what you’re going to do before you do.”

“They may know,” Dray said forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean they can stop us. Pirius, you’re less than a hundred light-days from Chandra. Make a single jump. Get in there, do what you have to do, get out.”

Cohl said, “It’s impossible.”

Pirius glanced at his instruments. This was the core of the Galaxy, full of immense masses throwing themselves around, spacetime churned to a foam. He took a breath. “Yes, it’s impossible. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

He was aware of Nilis tensing beside him, his pale fingers gripping the edge of his seat. Virtual Nilis was an authentic, fully sentient re-creation; perhaps death was as dark a prospect for such a creature as for a full human.

That knot of Xeelee were approaching; ten more seconds and their weapons would find their range.

“Commodore—”

“You’re on your own, Pirius. For those who have fallen!”

Abruptly Dray’s ship threw itself at the Xeelee, monopole shells spraying. Pirius saw the formation of the nightfighters momentarily waver; as she passed through them Dray made their wings rustle. But soon the Xeelee were closing over that brave green spark.

“Another gone,” Nilis said.

But she had bought a little time. “Cohl—”

“Laid in.”

“Do it.”

In the instant of transition Pirius could feel the instability of Galaxy-center spacetime; the jump felt like a kick to the base of the spine.

Violent blue light flooded the cabin. With warning Virtuals flickering all around him, Pirius gazed out of the blister.

To his left was a bank of stars, hot, blue-white. There were pairs, and triples, and quadruples, stars close enough to distort each other; he saw one loose giant being torn to wispy shreds by a hard blue- white companion. There was much loose gas too, great glowing clouds of it, here and there scarred by nova blisters. This was shown on his maps as IRS 16, a cluster of young stars nucleating out of the rich gas and dust that poured in along the arms of the Baby Spiral. In this environment these bright young stars, huge and fast-lived, were like babies born in a furnace.

Stars to his port side, then. And to his starboard, something much more strange.

He saw more stars — but some of these stars had tails, like comets. They swarmed like fireflies around a central patch of brightness, a background glow of shifting, elusive light. It was like a solar system, he thought, with that central spark in place of a sun, and those trapped stars orbiting it like planets. The whole of this intricate, compact mechanism was cradled by one of the arms of the Baby Spiral — West Arm, opposite the one he had followed in; it looked like a jewelled toy set on a blanket of gold. But great chunks had been torn out of the arm, and blobs of glowing gas sailed away, dispersing slowly. Everything here was jammed together by ferocious gravity, and this was a terribly crowded place, crowded with huge, rushing masses that anywhere else would have been separated by light-years. This was the very heart of the Galaxy, the immediate environs of Chandra itself. But the black hole was invisible, somewhere at the heart of that flock of captured, doomed stars.

All this in a glance.

Pirius focused on his ship. The Other Claw had come out of its FTL jump with a velocity vector which had taken it through a sharp left turn and sent it screaming through the narrow gap between the IRS 16 star cluster and Chandra. As they fled, data on Chandra was pouring into the ship’s stores through Nilis’s sensor pod, he saw. This was what they had come here for: they were fulfilling the mission objectives. But they didn’t have long. All around this cluttered panorama, black flecks flew like bits of soot: the Xeelee, disturbed, were rising to drive out the intruder.

Nilis breathed, “My eyes — that I should live to see such a thing! You know, those stars won’t last long here. But their intense solar wind sweeps this Cavity clear of gas and dust. And when it hits Chandra—”

Cohl said, “The Xeelee are closing, Pirius.” She downloaded tactical Virtuals to Pirius’s station, so the pilot could see what she saw.

More Xeelee had come out of nowhere. Suddenly they were surrounded, trapped.

Pirius cursed. Another misjudgment. He snapped, “Options.”

“Pray,” said Hope morbidly.

Cohl had nothing to say.

Pirius tried to think. The plan had always been to fly through the gap between the star nursery and the central Chandra system itself, get through to the relatively flat space beyond, and then make another massive jump back to East Arm, their route home. But they hadn’t banked on being alone, with no cover, and with forewarned Xeelee rising. It was unlikely that they could survive another FTL jump all the way out, not from here.

But, unexpectedly, Nilis had an idea.

The Commissary sounded dry, calm, as if he had moved beyond fear. “Make for IRS 7.”

Pirius quickly called up another map. IRS 7 was a star, lost in the Cavity: it was a red giant, and it trailed an immense comet-like tail. “It’s only half a light-year away.”

“Lethe,” said Hope, “its tail is longer than that. What use is it to us?”

“A place to hide,” said Nilis. “And we could make it in a single, short FTL jump… Couldn’t we, pilot?”

“Too risky,” Cohl said.

“Every jump in this environment carries risks. A short jump is more survivable.”

“It will be no use, even if we live through the hop,” Cohl said. “The Xeelee are on to us. FTL foreknowledge—”

“Then we throw them off,” Nilis said.

“I’m amazed how calm you are, Commissary,” Pirius said.

“We can discuss my personality later. I suggest we get on with it.”

A wand of starbreaker light waved through space, above Pirius’s head. The nightfighters were finding their range; one touch of that pretty light and his life would be over. No more time for debate.

He waved his hand at his Virtual displays. “We need to make the hop anti-Tolman, if we can. Come on, Cohl, work with me.”

Nilis said, “A lot of people have died to get us this far. We have to get through, complete our mission.”

“We don’t need to be told, Commissary. Navigator?”

“I have a tactical solution. It’s a botch.”

“Lay it in. On my mark. Three, two—”

In the last second the Other Claw shuddered. And then Chandra’s shining astrophysical architecture vanished.

They came out tumbling. Pirius fought to stabilize the ship.

Nilis peered out curiously. They were immersed in a uniform crimson glow that utterly lacked detail, as if they had hopped into the interior of an immense light globe.

Pirius snapped, “Engineer. Report.”

Enduring Hope called, “We were hit, half a second before the hop. Bad luck… the weapons bay took it.” He laughed. “I don’t think we hit a single Xeelee. But the weapons bay soaked up the energy of that shot, and saved us.”

“Other systems?”

“The sensor pod is intact,” Nilis said. “We didn’t lose any data. And now we’re in the tail of IRS 7?”

“I think so.”

The “tail” was the remnant of the outer layers of the hapless red giant, blasted away by the ferocious stellar wind generated by the blue star cluster at the center. Pirius said, “We aimed for the root, where the tail meets the surviving envelope.”

“So we’re actually inside the body of a star… Good piloting.”

“We’re still alive. So, yes, it was good enough.”

“And the Xeelee?”

“No sign that they are on to us yet.” Pirius glanced at his displays. “I’ll wait a couple of minutes. Then we’ll work our way along the tail, a series of short hops. And once we’re out of there, if we’re lucky—”

Nilis nodded. Pirius studied him cautiously. Still he seemed remarkably calm, and Pirius thought his face seemed smoother, as if lacking some character, some detail. “Commissary, are you all right?”

Nilis smiled at him. “As perceptive as ever! I could never pass this on to him, you know.”

“Who?”

“Nilis — ah, Nilis Prime. My original. He must get the data, of course, and my analytical impressions. But I think I should keep back the rest. The emotions. I’ve already begun the process of deletion.”

“You’re a Virtual. It’s against your programming to edit yourself.”

Nilis shook his head. “You can’t hand out sentience without enabling choice.” His smile faded. “It feels… odd, though. To be closing down sections of my mind. Like a partial suicide. But it’s necessary. He wouldn’t go on, you see, with the Project, if he knew.”

“Knew what? The fear?”

“Oh, not that. Fear is trivial. Pirius, at most only three of our eight ships will make it home. No, not fear: the horror of seeing those around you die, and die for your ideas. Nilis has never really confronted this, you know, sitting in his garden on Earth, immersed in his studies. And he won’t be strong enough. I know, because I’m not. But he must go on; he has to complete Project Prime Radiant, for all our sakes.”

“Commissary—”

“I’m all right. I’ve already cut it out of myself, you see.” Nilis lifted his Virtual face, red-giant light casting subtly shifting shadows from the lines of his expressionless face. “Shall we go home?”

Chapter 33

Nilis stayed at Saturn, studying the material Pirius had retrieved from configuration space, which appeared to be a spec for a weapon system. But, apparently plagued by guilt, he sent Pirius Red back to Earth, ordering him to rest up. Pirius didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t protest.

The rest cure didn’t work out, though. Pirius Red was alone again, alone in Nilis’s apartment, aside from a few bots.

Of course here he was on Earth itself, surrounded by a vast population, a population of billions: a greater crowd than any other human world, save only the pathological Coalescent communities. Somehow that made it worse than in the Venus habitat.

He tried walking in the Conurbation’s teeming corridors and parks. He even dug out one of the Commissary’s old robes so he wouldn’t stand out from the crowd so much. But he had nothing in common with these chattering, confident swarms with their rich, intricate social lives, their baffling business, their soft hands and unmarked faces. They were so remote from everything he knew from his origins in the Core that he may as well have been from a separate species.

And even if he could stand the openness outdoors, even if he could tolerate the people, he was still on Earth. Every time the sun went down, the sky glowed bright in the lights of the Conurbations, and beyond the glow strode the immense, arrogant engineering of the Bridge to the Moon, around which interplanetary traffic crawled constantly. It was like being trapped in some vast machine.

So his days were troubled. And when he lay alone in the dark, his thoughts were drawn back to Callisto, over and over.

He didn’t understand it. Why should he feel so disturbed? All he had done was walk through a doorway. He was the Pirius who had walked out unharmed; it was not him who had been mapped to a new level of reality, with no hope of return, to be leached of his humanity. He despised himself for his weakness.

But if he didn’t think about Callisto, images of the hive in Olympus came into his mind — or of the strange immortal, Luru Parz — or, worst of all, the Silver Ghosts on Pluto, and the shameful, helpless way he had reacted, like a machine. He felt as if his mind was becoming like Callisto, ancient and battered. And he feared that if he looked too hard, he would find deep inside it the kind of strangeness Luru Parz had uncovered in that ice moon.

Perhaps Nilis had been right that he needed a break. But Nilis had not been able to see that being on Earth, alone, was precisely the wrong kind of rest cure for a Navy brat. He longed for Torec, his only point of familiarity in this strange solar system. But she was out at Saturn. He was able to speak to her; Nilis even let him use expensive inseparability channels, so there was no time delay. But it wasn’t the same. He needed to be touched, held.

And anyhow even Torec seemed cold.

After forty-eight sleepless hours he called Nilis. He begged to be brought out to Saturn and put back to work.

Pirius arrived in time for a test firing of what Nilis called the “Callisto weapon.”

He was brought to Nilis’s corvette, which the Commissary was using as his work base. The interior was cluttered, with data desks strewn on the floor, bots of all sizes tumbling through the air, and Virtuals obscuring every view. Nilis was here, with Commander Darc, Torec, and various assistants. In this noisy mess it was impossible to see how any work got done. Nilis and Darc seemed to be working closely, but their arguments crackled like lightning.

Pirius spotted Torec, peering out at the test rig. He made straight for her. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, since before Venus. She acknowledged him with a nod, but turned away. He stood awkwardly, arms suddenly heavy, longing to touch her. He just didn’t understand.

He pulled himself together. He stood with her and looked out of the hull.

Orbiting far from Saturn’s patient golden face, the test rig was a set of twenty GUTdrive engines, mounted in a loose spherical framework perhaps fifty meters across. Technicians and bots crawled over it. It had been put together in a few days, and it didn’t look much like anything, let alone a weapon for striking at the most formidable fortress in the Galaxy.

But a few kilometers away, the captive Xeelee ship waited, surrounded by its usual cordon of watchful guardian drones; today, once again, the nightfighter was the test target. Spinning slowly, surrounded by its attendant cloud of bots and techs, the test rig looked as much a threat to the patient Xeelee as a spitball.

He said, “It looks like shit.”

Even that didn’t force a smile from Torec. “Actually we’ve come a long way in a few days. But we’re as underfunded as ever. We need GUTdrive generators, but all Nilis was able to get hold of are those dinged-up, decommissioned relics. You can see the scars where they have been cut out of wrecks.”

“Darc and Nilis are at each other’s throats.”

“That’s just their way. Darc is keen, once he forgets that he disapproves of the whole thing. He likes getting his hands dirty — especially on something new like this. He’s okay.”

Pirius looked covertly at her so-familiar profile, the finely carved chin, the upturned nose, the lines of her face softened by golden-brown Saturn light. “And you’ve kept busy.”

She shrugged. “It’s not so bad right now. When, if, we get through this proof-of-concept stage, I’ll be involved in developing the flight hardware. You, too, I guess.”

His need to touch her was an ache. “Torec, listen. I—”

She held up a hand, silencing him. A green light flared beyond the hull.

The techs and bots backed away from the rig, leaving only a few drones for close-in monitoring. Pirius watched Torec silently counting down, tracking the clock in her head, as she always did: Three. Two. One.

The rig quivered. Waves of distortion, easily visible, spread out from each of the GUTdrive generators, as if they were pebbles thrown in a pool.

GUTdrive engines worked by allowing a fragment of compressed mass-energy to expand, releasing energy through the decay of a unified superforce. In this configuration, rather than using that energy to drive a spacecraft, the engines were each supposed to create a spherical wave of distorted spacetime. The engines had been positioned so that the ripples moved inward, into the rig.

As the waves converged, blue-white light flared, dazzling. The flash dissipated immediately — but now a concentrated knot of distortion was traveling along the axis of the rig. Shifting, oscillating, the distortion made the stars blur as it traveled. It was like an immense drop of water, Pirius thought. As it burst from the rig the knot broke open struts, and sent the scavenged GUTdrive engines flying — and it was aimed straight at the nightfighter.

But before it had traveled more than a few hundred meters, the ball of distortion swelled up, burst silently, and dissipated.

There was a rustle of movement in the corvette, a collective sigh of disappointment.

Darc clapped Nilis on the back. “Scratch another run. Never mind, Commissary. We’re not done yet.”

“Indeed not.”

Torec said to Pirius, “Timing is everything. The implosion in the center is what we’re trying to design. If the amplitude is large enough, you get nonlinearity — a shock wave, its profile distorting as it travels, what the techs call a ’classical scalar wave.’ I think we’ve got the amplitudes right, but not the timing. If the waves don’t converge right at the center, they just pass through each other harmlessly.”

Pirius said, “And if the timing is right — what’s supposed to happen?”

Torec stared at him, the first time she’d looked at him directly since he had got here. “You were on Callisto, and you don’t know?”

Pirius said helplessly, “I just did my job there.”

“This is a design from the Occupation era. It’s a black-hole cannon, Pirius.” She smiled faintly. “Can you believe that? We’re making a cannon to fire black holes at the Xeelee. And you know what else? It was designed by Friends. Friends, just like Enduring Hope!”

Pirius, stunned, stared at the battered test rig. The techs and drones were already going back to work.

Nilis asked Pirius to spend some time with him.

They sat together in Nilis’s cabin. It was clear to Pirius that the Commissary wanted something. But Nilis was still guilty about how Pirius had been “used” on Callisto, and he seemed to want to make it up to him by talking to him.

He said his “Callisto weapon” did indeed date from the time of the Qax Occupation. Pirius was amazed that the Friends of Wigner, in his day an illegal fringe cult out on Arches, had roots that deep.

Back then the Friends had been a group of rebels on Earth. During the early phase of the Occupation, the control of the Qax had been relatively light — and remarkably enough, the Friends had been able to assemble a whole spacecraft, equipped with black-hole cannons, under the noses of Earth’s occupiers.

The Friends had known that a wormhole bridge to the deeper past was soon to be opened; spanning fifteen centuries, this audacious stunt had been set up by none other than Michael Poole. When the bridge opened, the Friends hurled themselves and their ship into the past. Ignoring the humans of Poole’s time, they had set to work preparing their battery of black holes — but their purpose was not to use their cannon as weapons. Their target was Jupiter. In the guts of the gas giant these grenades of twisted spacetime would collide and merge, each collision sending out pulses of gravitational waves. By programming this sequence, the Friends hoped to shape the collapse of Jupiter, and so sculpt the final black hole that would result.

“So that was what happened to Jupiter,” Pirius said.

“Yes. Quite a monument!”

“But if they could make black-hole cannons, if they could go back in time, why not just fly out to the Qax home world and wipe them out?”

Nilis smiled. “Spoken like a true pragmatist! But the Friends’ objective was more philosophical…”

The first Friends of Wigner had taken their name from an ancient philosopher who had pondered the mysteries of quantum physics. Beneath the world perceived by humans was a scaffolding of uncertainty. Quantum functions pervaded space, each a description of the probability governing a particle or system; it was only when an observation was made that a particle could be pinned down to a particular place, or to a definite speed.

“But this ancient philosopher, Wigner, took that logic a step further,” Nilis said. “Any observer is herself a quantum object — everything is, we all are — and therefore herself subject to quantum uncertainty. You need a second observer to make her real, and thence to make her observation real. If Wigner is the first observer, his friend is the second.”

Pirius thought that over. “But what about the friends quantum function? That isn’t made definite until a third observer makes an observation of her.”

“You have it,” said Nilis approvingly. “And then you need a fourth, and a fifth.”

Pirius’s head was swimming with infinities. “But no matter how many observers you have, how many friends of Wigner you line up, you always need one more. So nothing can be real.”

“This was called the paradox of Wigner’s friends,” Nilis said. “But the Friends believed they had a resolution.”

The chains of unresolved quantum states will build on and on, growing like flowers, extending into the future. At last the great chains of quantum functions would finally merge at the last boundary of the universe, at timelike infinity.

“And there, argued the Friends, will reside the Ultimate Observer, the last sentient being of all. All quantum functions, all world lines, must terminate in the Observer — for otherwise, she would not be the last. The Observer will make a single climactic Observation—”

“And the chains of observations will collapse.”

“History will be made real at last, but only at its very end.”

Pirius said, “But I don’t see how this was going to help the Friends get rid of the Qax.”

The Friends had come to believe that the Ultimate Observer might not be a passive eye, but that this final being might have a choice: that she might be able to exert an influence on how the chains of quantum functions were collapsed, on which cosmic history out of the many possible was selected.

“And if a being has such power,” Nilis said, “perhaps she can be lobbied. And that was what the Friends intended to do. They were going to send the Ultimate Observer a message.”

“How? With Jupiter?”

“Singularities themselves have structure, you know. The singularity at the heart of the Jupiter black hole was to be shaped, and loaded with information. It would be a plea to the Ultimate Observer. The Friends wanted the Observer to select her chosen history to favor humanity — in particular, to pick out a causal line that would not include the Qax Occupation.”

Pirius thought that over, and laughed, wondering. “That’s astonishing.”

Nilis said, “It’s a terribly nihilistic philosophy — don’t you think? Just like their modern intellectual descendants, the Friends actually seem to have believed that they, their memories, their whole lives would be wiped out of existence when the Ultimate Observer makes her choice and some optimal timeline is plucked out of the quantum tangle. The Friends were not just escaping the Qax, Ensign. Perhaps they were escaping from themselves.”

Pirius wasn’t convinced. He thought of Enduring Hope, back in the Core; if you were stuck in the middle of an endless war, the notion of an end-of-time arbiter who would one day delete all the pain from the world was a comforting idea.

But he had believed it was myth. He hadn’t known that this airy nonsense about a cleansing at the end of the universe might actually have some physics in it. It was a spooky thought.

“Of course their scheme was overcomplicated, and it didn’t work,” Nilis said. “The Friends didn’t even manage to make their black hole properly, let alone send their plea to the end of time. They managed to destroy Jupiter, though.”

The Qax responded to the treachery of the Friends with devastating force. No longer would their rule be light; no longer could human cultural artifacts be used to camouflage rebellion. The Extirpation began: human history would be deleted, human minds wiped clean, even the fossils in the ground would be pulverized. The Qax intended that humans would never pose a threat to the Qax again. They came close to succeeding.

The Friends’ black hole technology was suppressed. And after the Occupation, when the Coalition came to power, such ancient horrors were suppressed again. But a handful of pharaohs kept the old knowledge alive, tucked away where even the long arm of the Commission for Historical Truth could not find it. The pharaohs had always known a day would come when it would be needed again.

They fell silent.

“I have a new assignment for you,” Nilis said hesitantly. “You might find it sticky.”

“Sticky?”

“I need you to think about Pirius Blue.”

Pirius hadn’t thought about his temporal twin for days. “Why?”

It turned out that Blue had been having adventures of his own. Astonishingly, he had flown a ship deep into the Cavity, to scout the Prime Radiant itself.

“I’m trying to build up a picture of Chandra — its nature, its surrounds,” Nilis said earnestly. “I have the material I discovered in the Olympus Archive, the data from the neutrino telescope, and now Blue’s firsthand experience. I need to put it all together — to assemble a theoretical model of our objective. I was there, you know,” he said with a sort of modest pride. “In the Cavity. I sent in an avatar to ride with Pirius Blue. I like to think I acquitted myself well enough! But even that experience isn’t enough. I need to know what Blue himself perceived.”

Pirius nodded slowly. “So why don’t you talk to him?”

“It is a question of nuances,” Nilis said. He reached out his big hands toward Pirius. “I’m not sure I understand you, you see. We discussed this before. Our backgrounds are so different! Of course nobody knows Pirius Blue as well as you do. Nobody will be able to understand his words, his body language — what remains unsaid — as well as you. This is very important. Listen to your time brother, Pirius Red; listen to his feelings…”

Pirius took the assignment.

For the rest of the day, he sat in Nilis’s musty cabin watching Virtual recordings of Pirius Blue, more battered, more weary, even older, as he described his extraordinary jaunt into the core.

Pirius Red still felt a lingering resentment at this stranger from the future who had sent him into involuntary exile. But mostly, Red felt envy: envy for a man who had once more had the opportunity to carry out his duty in the most testing of circumstances, and envy for the companionship of his crew. Watching this scratchy Virtual report, Pirius Red felt shut out, denied.

At the end of the day, Torec and Pirius retired to their small shared room on the corvette. They didn’t speak.

Pirius stripped off his uniform and allowed it to slither into the closet. He got into his bunk, turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. At least he wasn’t on Earth; at least he was back in space, and he could hear the comforting sigh of cycled air, feel the thrumming of the corvette’s drive.

He was surprised when Torec slid into his bunk.

He turned to face her. Her face was so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. Her eyes, dimly visible in the low light, were closed, her mouth tight shut.

He put his hand on her arm. He felt firm flesh and muscle. He whispered, “Things aren’t the same.”

He could feel her roll onto her back. “The trouble is, Pirius, things have changed for me. While you’ve been away, I’ve been useful.”

He knew that was true. There had been her work on the CTC processor, the test flights of the modified greenships, even this early work on the black-hole cannon. He remembered her confusion when they had first been brought to Sol system, when she hadn’t even wanted to get out of bed.

She said, “I know it’s chance that I’m here at all. It could have been anybody.” She shifted again. “Look, Pirius, I might have been brought here for you. But now I’ve found my own place. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t come swanning back and expect things to be as they were before.”

“I don’t think I ever did expect that,” he said.

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “I need you.”

She snorted. “Yeah. For sex.”

“Not just that.” He hesitated to say the word, knowing it sounded soft. “Company.”

She laughed. “What are you, a Coalescent drone? Life isn’t about company, Pirius. It’s about doing your job.”

Defensively he said, “Yes. But maybe we can help each other to be more effective. Have you thought of that?”

“What help do you need? It wasn’t even you who was sent into that weird other-place on Callisto.”

“It was a copy of me who went off and died, to spare me having to do it. Just as Pirius Blue is a copy of me, who saw friends die in action, who went back into the Core again — and because he lived through that, I won’t have to. All these copies of me, taken away to die. And I’m left standing here.”

“This talk is stupid.”

He whispered, “Or perhaps I’m not real. Pirius Blue could have died out there, at the magnetar. What if he did die? What if I’m just his ghost? Or perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams. Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits—”

“And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.” She pinched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp. “Is that real enough for you?”

Before she could do it again he rolled over and grabbed her. Laughing, they wrestled. He finished up above her, with his hands locking her arms above her head. Her face was a pool of soft shadows beneath him; she looked very young.

He said, “You’re tougher than me. You always were. But don’t you feel… dislocated?”

“Well, a little. But you tell anybody back on Arches I said so, I’ll kick your butt.”

Hesitantly, he bent down, and kissed her, very softly, just brushing her lips. At first she was cold, unresponsive. Then she opened her mouth, and he felt the tip of her tongue on his teeth.

Once again the test rig was readied for a fresh shot at the patient Xeelee nightfighter.

It had been decided to try hooking up the CTC processor to the control systems of the test rig’s GUTdrive engines. It was possible that the CTC’s greater processing speed would permit the refinement of the control of the spacetime wave fronts sufficiently to get the result the designers wanted. Commander Darc railed at the foolishness of hooking up one experimental technology to another, but the CTC had already proven itself, in control of the grav shield. And as Nilis said, “Compared to the rest of this lash-up, CTC is a mature technology.”

The work proceeded fast. Torec had as much experience as anybody with CTC systems, and so she had been drawn back into the heart of the project. Pirius was left stranded on the observation deck of the corvette, watching the techs work on the modified rig. It was easy to spot Torec, with her bright red team leader’s armbands over her skinsuit.

Nilis stood with him. He waved a hand in the air, and brought up Pirius’s old Virtual sketch of the Project. The path to the Prime Radiant, the Xeelee barricade around it were green, the asterisk that represented the Radiant itself was glowing red. “What do you think, Ensign? Is today the day when we will find a weapon to strike at the Prime Radiant itself?”

Pirius was embarrassed by the hubristic sketch. “I hope so, sir.”

Torec’s voice sounded softly in Pirius’s ear. “Are you watching? Three. Two. One.” Pirius pressed his face to the hull.

Again he saw flexing spacetime permeate the crude rig of struts and GUTdrive engines, again those waves of distortion washed into the heart of the rig. But the distortions seemed stronger to Pirius this time, their crowding propagation somehow more urgent.

Purple-white light flared at the center of the rig, a glaring pinpoint. The framework itself pulsed and flexed, and struts snapped. But the frame held, and that central pinpoint cast shadows over its complex structure. The pinpoint of light was a black hole. It was about as massive as a Conurbation dome, crushed into a space the size of an electron, glowing through Hawking evaporation at a temperature measured in teradegrees. It was working, then: he held his breath.

For a second the black hole waited at the heart of the rig. The framework pulsed and cracked.

And then the dazzling spark leapt straight out of the frame and hurled itself in a dead straight line across space to the Xeelee. When it hit, the nightfighter seemed to fold over on itself, as if crushed by a vast fist.

For a long moment, nothing moved: the observers, Saturn’s broad disc, the crumpled Xeelee ship, the broken rig. Then, in Pirius’s monitors, remote cheering started.

Nilis said, “My eyes. I think we’ve done it.” He snapped his fingers. On Pirius’s diagram, the crimson asterisk turned bright green.

Conurbation 11729!

Chapter 34

It was a city known only by the number given to it by alien conquerors, but it was a number known throughout the Galaxy. This place had been the base of Hama Druz himself, twenty thousand years before. Ever since, it had been the beating heart of a human Galaxy.

And it was here that Nilis and his team came to confront the mighty power that had ruled all mankind since Druz’s day, the Interim Coalition of Governance, seeking its blessing to establish a new Navy squadron and to equip it with upgraded ships, with CTC processors and gravastar shields and black hole cannons — seeking its blessing to take Project Prime Radiant to the center of the Galaxy itself.

From the air the city looked almost ordinary, just another of the Qax’s inhuman clusterings of domes of blown rock. But the ancient blisters glittered with windows and balconies, the city was covered with a shining spiderweb of walkways and monorails, and steady streams of traffic, both intra- atmospheric and from space, washed through the ports that ringed the central dome cluster. The old Qax architecture was still the foundation of everything, but the sense of power here was palpable, even compared to the rest of Earth — power, and wealth.

The flitter landed at a small pad outside the largest of the domes. It carried only Nilis and his two ensigns, in their best dress uniforms. But even so, blue-helmeted Guardians insisted on coming on board the ship and subjecting each of them to whole-body searches that lasted long minutes. This massive dome housed the principal headquarters of some of the Coalition’s most powerful ministries and agencies, and there were plenty of enemies of the Coalition who would wish to do harm here, given a chance — not just alien foe, but human rebels. Back in Arches Base, such a thing would have seemed no more than a theoretical possibility, but this was Earth. The ensigns submitted silently.

At last they were released, and Nilis led them into the dome itself.

The tremendous enclosed space was flooded with light, and spectacular buildings soared in contemptuous defiance of the laws of physics. There were arches and T-shapes and inverted cones, their frames studded with inertial controllers and antigravity generators; some of them even floated. People hurried across the floor in streams, or along walkways that threaded through the air between the buildings. There was a hubbub of noise, a constant shouting; it was the sound of merged human voices, a million of them in this one dome alone.

And above it all the gray Qax shell loomed, a rocky sky. Beneath its grand curvature, light globes clustered like stars. Some of the floating buildings nuzzled against the shell of the dome itself; perhaps they had penthouses built through the dome, to reach the sky.

Pirius reached for Torec’s hand, and they clung to each other. It was a city designed for giants, not mere humans like themselves.

Nilis hurried, barefoot as ever, his arms full of data desks. “We mustn’t be late. Mustn’t be late! All Luru Parz’s morally dubious arm-twisting has won us is a hearing before Minister Gramm and his subcommittee. It has to go well today, this latest war of words, or all our technological achievements will count for nothing.”

At last Nilis brought them to a doorway. It was itself huge, but was a mere detail at the base of the building above it. This, said Nilis, was a center of the Grand Conclave itself, the Coalition’s supreme body.

In the foyer they were subjected to yet more searches, by yet more Guardians. Nilis wasn’t allowed to take any equipment beyond here, and he had to download his data from his bots and data desks into copies provided by the Guardians. He had been prepared for this, but he fretted at the continuing delays.

When they were released, they hurried across the foyer to a narrow, silver-walled elevator shaft. In this expensive machine there was no sense of acceleration; Pirius had no idea how high they climbed — or perhaps, descended.

The doors slid back to reveal a conference room. Nilis hurried forward, muttering apologies for his lateness. Pirius and Torec followed more slowly, eyes wide.

They were in another vast chamber, a rectangular box eight or ten meters high, and maybe a hundred meters deep. There must have been hundreds of people in this one room. It was dominated by a table, a single vast piece of furniture large enough to seat fifty. Every seat was occupied, with the portly figure of Minister Gramm at the head of the table, and his advisor Pila beside him. Behind those at the table itself were more rows of chairs; the attendees all seemed to have brought teams of advisors, in some cases stacked three or four rows deep. Bots hovered, drifting over the gleaming tabletop, serving drinks and topping up bowls of food.

It wasn’t the size of the gathering that startled Pirius, though, but the decor. The shining tabletop was deep brown, and obviously grained. It was that strange substance called wood. More panels of the stuff covered the walls, and even the ceiling. Pirius had never seen wood before he had come to Sol system. Evidently, somewhere on Earth, trees still grew, and gave up their strange flesh to rooms like this; it was hard to imagine a more powerful statement of wealth.

But the ensigns were dawdling, staring. Heads were beginning to turn, sophisticated mouths turning up with mocking smiles. Nilis frantically beckoned them. Shamed, Pirius and Torec hurried to the Commissary.

Commander Darc was already here. Sitting bolt upright, evidently uncomfortable, he ignored the ensigns. The three of them were Nilis’s only “advisors,” and rows of empty seats stretched behind them. But then, who else could Nilis have brought? Luru Parz, the jasoft? A Coalescent Archivist from Mars? A Silver Ghost? The marginal nature of Nilis’s project, and his motley crew of misfits, aliens, and illegals had never been more apparent than now, as it faced its greatest political test.

Nilis sorted through his data desks. He said to the ensigns, “I will make the presentation today. You shouldn’t have to talk.”

Pirius said fervently, “Good.”

“As far as I’m concerned you two are here to make a point with your very presence. You are what this war is about. You may be asked questions; there’s nothing I can do about that. If so, confer with me or Commander Darc before answering. That’s quite acceptable in terms of the etiquette of meetings like this.”

Torec whispered, “I thought we were only presenting to Minister Gramm.”

Nilis sighed. “I’m afraid life here at the center of the Coalition is a little more complicated than that, child.”

Gramm, as Minister of Economic Warfare, served on something called the War Cabinet. Under the chairmanship of a Grand Conclave member called the Plenipotentiary for Total War, this subcommittee was dedicated to the prosecution of the Xeelee war in all its aspects. Now Gramm had been appointed head of the interagency committee which had been given the responsibility of overseeing Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant.

“But most of the great agencies have representatives on our oversight committee,” Nilis said cynically, “as they do on most initiatives that might affect their interests. Around this table there are ambassadors from the Army and Navy, the Guardians, the Ministry of Psychological Warfare who do their best to outguess the Xeelee, with no notable success, and some of the specialist guilds like the Communicators and Engineers and Navigators, and the Surveyors of Revenues, and the Auditor General’s Office. Even the Benefactors are here! — though I don’t see what our greenships have to do with their free hospitals and dole handouts. And of course, there are representatives of the many arms of the Commission for Historical Truth. Gramm, as chair of the committee, has a lot of sway. But any decision is a collective one.”

Darc grunted. “It’s amazing the Coalition doesn’t collapse under its own bureaucracy. And look at all those black robes.” Glancing around the table, Pirius saw that the few martial uniforms, like Darc’s, were far outnumbered by the glum robes of Commissaries; they seemed to swarm through the big room, a black-clothed plague. Darc said, “We are at war. But we seem to divert an awful lot of our energies to policing our own ideological drift.”

Nilis said sternly, “This is politics, Commander.”

“Hmmph. Give me combat any day!”

Minister Gramm hammered at the tabletop with a gavel — a wooden hammer on a wooden table, a remarkably archaic gesture. The susurrus of conversation around the table died. Without preliminaries, Gramm called on Nilis to make his opening remarks.

Nilis lumbered to his feet, a smile fixed on his lined face. His voice was forceful. But Pirius could see the beads of sweat on his neck.

Formally speaking, this was just another stage in the decision-making process: the mandate actually to go to war with this new weapon would not be given today. All this committee was being asked to approve was to release a further tranche of funding — granted a much bigger tranche, as Nilis was asking to establish a new Navy squadron equipped with his new technology at the center of the Galaxy. But still, Pirius knew it was the most important decision point in the project’s uncertain progress so far.

The Commissary quickly sketched the objectives of Project Prime Radiant. He set out his familiar argument that striking at the Prime Radiant, a target “logically upstream” of the many secondary targets in the Core, would if not finish the war, then at least shorten it. He described the problems to be overcome if that ultimate target was to be hit, and set out his three proposals for doing so: the use of gravastar shielding to defeat the Xeelee’s ability to see the strike force coming before it even set off; the revolutionary CTC processors to outmaneuver the Xeelee’s last line of defenses; and the black-hole cannon to strike at Chandra itself. All this was illustrated with Virtual displays, technical summaries, maps of the war zone, and bits of imagery from the Project’s work so far.

Pirius thought he spoke well, uncharacteristically avoiding excessively technical language. And Nilis included plenty of spectacular action images, such as shots of Pirius Blue’s jaunt to Chandra, the captive Xeelee ship being baffled by the grav shield, and finally yielding to the black hole cannonade. For armchair generals, he always said, there was nothing so impressive as a bit of footage of actual hardware.

He drew it together in a simple graphic summary — more sophisticated than Pirius’s old asterisk diagram, but not much. Then he sat down, visibly trembling, and mopped his brow. “Now for the hard part,” he whispered.

Gramm said there would be a recess before detailed questioning began. But he opened the floor for first reactions.

A Commissary raised a finger. With a head like a skull, and paper-thin flesh stretched tight over angular bones, he was one of the oldest people Pirius had ever seen — aside from Luru Parz, of course — older than anyone was supposed to get, according to the Doctrines. He seemed to be so prominent in this company he didn’t need to introduce himself.

Pirius was shocked when the very first question was directed at him, not Nilis.

“I’d like to ask our hero ensign what he thinks of this.” The old man’s voice was soft as a whisper. “Would he be willing to fly this lash-up into the Xeelee nest?”

Pirius glanced at Nilis and Darc; Nilis shrugged.

Pirius stood. Every face turned to him, the hard expressions of military commanders, the softer curiosity of the swarming black-robed Commissaries. “Sir, I would say—”

“What, what? Speak up!” A ripple of laughter passed around the room.

Pirius cleared his throat. “Sir, this technology is unproven in battle. That’s obviously true. But we are proposing many more proving stages before it is deployed. It will require courage to take such a new weapon into battle. I have no doubt that many will give their lives trying. But try we will.”

Nilis gently patted Pirius’s back.

The old Commissary nodded. “All right, Ensign. One thing we are not short of is the courage of our soldiers. But this melange of ancient and possibly illegal technologies — how can it work? Put it this way. If this was such a bright idea, why didn’t somebody think of it long ago?”

Pirius knew he should consult Nilis before replying. But he had heard such comments many times since becoming involved with Nilis’s project, even from military personnel. He said forcefully, “Sir, what’s behind your question is: if this is a good idea, why didn’t the Xeelee have it first?” There was an ominous silence. “I think some people believe that if it didn’t come from the Xeelee it can’t be any good — that Xeelee technology must be better than ours, simply because it is Xeelee. But if we think like that, it’s a recipe for defeat.” The old Commissary’s mouth was round with shock. What am I saying? “With due respect, sir,” he gabbled, and sat down hastily.

Gramm was glaring across the table at him. “Commissary Nilis, I suspect your pet soldier has already lost your case for you — or won it. In any case we must go through the motions. Two-hour recess.” He slammed his gavel on the table.

On the way out, Pirius was the target of amused stares. But Nilis, furious, wouldn’t even look at him.

When the committee reconvened, the grilling was ferocious.

The points raised by the military agencies, Pirius thought, were mostly fair. The representatives of the Green Army and the Navy asked detailed technical questions. Nilis was able to field most of these, others he passed to Darc and the ensigns. When a question came his way, Pirius made sure he referred to Nilis and Darc first — not that the Commissary would have given him any choice. Torec answered more than Pirius, and did so well, Pirius thought enviously — calmly, with no visible sign of nerves, and yet with a control and discipline that Pirius himself had so obviously lacked.

Toward the end of this session, though, with the military representatives still dominating the proceedings, the questioning took a direction that puzzled Pirius. Points were raised about how the technologies could be applied on other battlefields than the very center. There was a great deal of maneuvering, too, about how each military force would place representatives in the project.

When the meeting broke again, Nilis snorted. “What a distraction! It’s been a tactic of my opponents all along, to divert my discoveries to lesser targets — to waste this unique possibility.”

Pirius frowned. “But the commanders are just doing their jobs, aren’t they, Commissary? They have to think through the options—”

Commander Darc shook his head. “What is going on in this room is politics, remember. The Navy and the Green Army, to name but two, have been at each other’s throats since they were founded.

And the individuals around this table all have their own career strategies, their own rivalries and ambitions. Now they are maneuvering, you see. If our technology is promising, they each want to get hold of it for themselves to further their own careers. If our Core assault does go ahead, and it happens to go well, they will want to take the credit. Conversely, if it goes wrong, as I suspect most of those here believe is likely, they don’t want to be blamed.”

Torec was angry. “Maybe it would be better if we put our effort into fighting the Xeelee rather than each other.”

Darc laughed, not particularly unkindly. “Of course there will be honest doubts, too. I tell you, Commissary, there are many serving officers who don’t like your Project just for the feel of it. This fiddling with physics: it’s more like a Ghost project than anything humanity would devise. It has their glistening sheen all over it — that might be our biggest obstacle of all.”

In the next session, the many representatives of the Commission for Historical Truth took over, and the lines of questioning drifted away from the military justification of the Project and into realms of philosophy, ideology, and legalism.

The sinister Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, as the Commission’s ideological police force, had agents throughout the Galaxy, and assigned to every frontline unit: even Arches Base had its political officers, or “Doctrine cops,” as the troops called them. They were widely mocked, but their power was feared. And now the Doctrine cops on this committee dug into the question of the legality of what Nilis had been up to.

It was of course impossible for the Commissary to deny that he had been assisted by a jasoft, or that he had called on a posthuman colony on Mars, or that his gravastar hadn’t been developed by humans at all. But he was able to fend off their probing. It was not him, he pointed out, who had allowed Luru Parz to survive, or let a Coalescence to develop under Mons Olympus, or revived a colony of the long-extinct Silver Ghosts. These developments happened long before he was born, presumably with the full knowledge and even cooperation of the Commission.

“And why did all this happen? Because these divergences are useful. They may be non-Doctrinal, but they are valuable resources, and those who allowed such developments, far wiser than I, knew that it is sometimes necessary to compromise the purity of one’s ideology. If we were to lose the war, all our ideology would count for nothing anyhow. I am merely following in the footsteps of my wiser forebears.”

This mixture of flattery and blame-shifting seemed effective, and he deflected them further with a bit of philosophy. Was knowledge morally neutral? If a fact came from a dubious source, was its utility to be overridden by its ethically compromised origin? If so, who was to be the arbiter of what was “clean” science and what was not?…

By the time the Doctrine cops gave up, Nilis was sweating again. He had been on shaky ground. After all, it was one of Nilis’s “pragmatically useful resources,” Luru Parz, who, by threatening to expose the existence of other “morally compromised facilities,” had forced this committee to consider Nilis’s requests in the first place.

But now the Office of Cultural Rehabilitation waded in. This department of the Commission was a sister to the ancient Assimilation program, which had been tasked with absorbing the resources of conquered alien races for the benefit of mankind’s projects. Rehabilitation had the mission, still in fact ongoing, of seeking out relics of older waves of human colonization. These pre-Third Expansion pockets of humanity, having been seeded before the establishment of the Coalition, were of course non-Doctrinal by definition. Many had even lapsed into eusociality, becoming Coalescences. But all of them had to be brought into the fold, their populations reeducated. The ultimate goal of Rehabilitation was to ensure that every human in the Galaxy was assigned to the single goal of the great war.

Now, it seemed to Pirius, Rehabilitation officers were expressing concern about Nilis’s Project, not in case it failed, but if it succeeded. Would it actually be moral to end this war? The entire human economy of the Galaxy was devoted to the war: if it ever ended, the resulting dislocation would be huge. And without the war’s unifying discipline, how could central control be maintained? There would be riots; there would be starvation; whole worlds would break away from the light of the Coalition and fall into an anarchic darkness.

One dry academic even suggested that a true reading of Hama Druz’s writings showed that that ancient sage had been arguing, not for the conquest of the Galaxy, but for the continual cleansing of unending conflict. The war had to go on, until a perfect killing machine had been forged from imperfect mankind. Of course victory was the ultimate goal, but a victory too soon could imperil that great project of the unity of a purified species…

Torec and Pirius were amazed. But since they had come to Sol system, it wasn’t the first time they had heard people actually argue against victory.

Pirius thought he could see what was really going on here, beneath the dry academic discussions. These ancient agencies weren’t concerned for the myriad people in their care; they were only concerned about their own survival. If the war went away, he thought with a strange thrill, any justification for the continuance of the Coalition itself, and its Galaxy full of ideological cops, would vanish. And then what?

Perhaps he was growing cynical.

The session overran its allotted time. At last Gramm banged his gavel, and ordered the committee to reconvene in the morning.

While they had talked, the planet had spun on its axis, taking Conurbation 11729 and its busy inhabitants into its shadow.

Nilis’s party was assigned quarters on a residential floor of the huge building. The room given to Torec and Pirius seemed impossibly luxurious. After a while, they stripped blankets off the too-soft beds, making themselves a nest on the floor.

But a bot called, sent by Nilis. It contained some technical updates Gramm had requested, and Pirius,

as Nilis’s representative, was to accompany the bot to the Minister’s office. Reluctantly Pirius allowed his uniform to slither back into place over his body.

The bot led the way through a maze of carpeted corridors to the Minister’s office.

Pirius had been expecting opulence. The room was richer than anything he had seen at Arches Base, of course — and a lot richer than Nilis’s apartment, for instance. The carpet on the floor was a thick pile, and even the walls were covered by some kind of heavily textured paper.

But the room was windowless: that was significant, as Pirius had learned that the most prized rooms in any Conurbation-dome building had window views. And this was a working room. The only furniture was a desk, a small conference table, and chairs — and a couch, upholstered with maroon fabric and laden with cushions, on which rested the great bulk of the Minister of Economic Warfare himself.

Gramm had kicked his shoes off, and loosened his robe. Lying there, his stomach had spread out like a sack of mercury, and his jowly face was slack and tired. A table floated at Gramm’s right hand; Pirius could smell spicy food. Bots and small Virtual displays hovered around Gramm’s head, and voices whispered, constantly updating the Minister on whatever was happening in the corners of his complex world. Gramm’s fat hand dug into the plates, but he never so much as glanced at what he was pushing into his mouth. Pirius had never seen the Minister look so deflated, so exhausted.

It seemed to take the Minister a long time to notice the ensign standing to attention at the door. He snapped, “Oh, come in, boy, come in. I won’t bite. Not you, anyhow.”

Pirius stepped forward. “Sir, I’ve come to deliver—”

“A message, I know, from your ragged-robed master. Well, you’ve done it.” He looked away and continued to eat.

Pirius waited awkwardly. He was becoming used to these nonmilitary types with their ignorance of protocol, but he was reluctant to move until he was dismissed. Maybe he’d be left standing here all night.

At length Gramm noticed him. “You still here? I suppose it’s been a difficult day for you. Must all be very strange.” He guffawed. “Though it was a delicious moment when you told that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn that he had an inferiority complex about the Xeelee. Hah! I’ll have to make sure that’s highlighted in the minute.”

Pirius felt color rise in his cheeks. “I was only speaking my mind. Sir.”

Gramm eyed him, chewing. “Lethe, you’re a spirited one. Look, Ensign, I can imagine what you think of me.” He brushed crumbs from his vast belly. “I can see myself through your eyes.”

“I have no personal opinions, sir.”

“Oh, garbage. But what you perhaps don’t see — look here. Do you know what my job is?”

“You’re Minister of—”

“That’s my role. My function is to prosecute this damn war. I take the strategic goals of the Coalition as a whole and turn them into operational goals. Maybe you’ve seen today that given the infighting that goes on at every level, even at the highest reaches of the Coalition, those strategic goals aren’t always clear. But that’s the principle.

“Now, all the time I am bombarded.” He waved a hand, and the bots and Virtuals around his couch swarmed like insects. “I have whole teams of experts, advisors, lobby groups, all battling for my ear, even within my own Ministry. And then, of course, there are the other agencies beyond Economic Warfare to be dealt with — negotiated with, beaten back, soothed. And all of this against the background of the war.” He sighed and pushed more food into his mouth. “The war, the damn war. It’s more than just a theater for heroic exploits by boy heroes like you, Ensign. You know, you’re lucky, out there in the Core. All you have to think about is your comrades, your ship, your own hide. I have to think of the bigger picture — of all the millions of little Piriuses running around and hunting for glory.”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “And here’s that bigger picture. We’ve beaten back the Xeelee. We’ve pushed them out of the disc of the Galaxy. It’s been an epochal achievement. But they still lurk in the Galaxy’s Core. We have them bottled up there — but the cost of that containment is huge. We have turned the whole Galaxy into a machine, a single vast machine dedicated to a single goal: to keeping the Xeelee trapped. It’s dreadful, it’s costly — it’s working. But I have to be parsimonious with my resources.

“Now, whether you see it or not — and no matter what that old monster Luru Parz says — we’ve been responsible with your project so far. We’ve tried to apply resources sensibly, commensurate with the successes you’ve actually achieved, bit by bit as the concept has been proved. But now we’re being asked to take a much greater leap of faith. You might think a couple of dozen greenships isn’t much in a war that spans a Galaxy. You might think you’re under excessive scrutiny — that you’re being opposed, arbitrarily, through the mechanism of the funding. Perhaps some do have such a motive. But for me it’s not like that. We’re stretched thin, Ensign, thinner than you might understand. Even a single ship, lost unnecessarily, might make the difference, might cause it all to unravel. That’s the great fear — and Nilis’s is only one of a hundred, a thousand such requests I have to deal with right now. Do you see what you’re asking me to risk, if we commit to Nilis’s madcap jaunt?”

“You fear that if we draw resources away, the Front could collapse.”

“Yes. And if the Xeelee were to punch out of there, we’d be lost; they would surely never allow us to establish a position of dominance again. Nilis isn’t unique, you know. Especially in the Commission, there are many corners, lots of bits of unaccounted-for funding — plenty of places for the likes of Nilis to dream their dreams.”

“Nilis is more than a dreamer.”

“Well, perhaps. But, as I say, he isn’t unique. It doesn’t take a genius to perceive that our glorious war effort has stalled, that it is an exercise in monstrous waste. At any moment there must be dozens of Nilises running around with bright ideas for shortening or ending the war.” He rubbed his greasy jowl. “And maybe once a generation you will have a true Nilis, a plan so well thought-out, so convincing, that you believe it might, just might, work.”

“Once a generation?”

“It’s in the records. No doubt Nilis himself is aware of many of them.”

“But since the war began, there have been a lot of generations.”

Gramm laughed. “Quite so. And a lot of bright ideas. Some of them probably bore passing resemblances to Nilis’s scheme.”

“So what happened to them?”

“They were blocked. By people like me.” He shifted and stared at Pirius. “Look at it from my point of view. Now, I know that to win the war we’re going to have to take a risk. But the question is which risk? Is Nilis’s idea the one—”

“Or should you wait until a smarter idea comes along?”

Gramm’s eyes narrowed. “You do have qualities, Ensign; I can see why Nilis plucked you out of the mire. You see, the easiest thing for me to do would be to pass on this Project of yours — not even to turn it down; just to stall. I won’t be in this office forever. Let my successor make the difficult decisions, if she dares. This war has lasted three thousand years. The battle is not mine. I am merely… a custodian. How could I bear it if the crucial failure came on my watch?… But I fear deferral isn’t an option for me.”

“Sir? Why not?”

“Because we’re losing.”

The vast Galaxy-wide operation, held together by the rigid ideology and ruthless policies of the Coalition, was containing the Xeelee. But mankind really was stretched to the limit. And, bit by bit, entropy was taking its toll.

“You can forget about this theoretical Commissary nonsense of a perpetual war, of forging a perfect mankind in its cold fire. The machine isn’t that perfect, believe me. We won’t fall tomorrow, or the day after. I don’t know when it will come — probably not even in my time. But come it will.” He stared at the ensign again, and Pirius saw despair in his deep-sunk eyes. “Now do you see why I’m listening to Nilis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know Nilis understands this history, and he’s learned from it. He’s played the bureaucratic game with surprising skill, you know. But now we’re beyond games, and coming to the crunch decision. Can you promise me that your mentor’s lunatic scheme is going to work?”

“No, sir.”

“No. How easy it would be if you could!”

Pirius thought he understood. This man, so alien to anything in Pirius’s background, was conscientiously trying to make an impossible decision, a decision that could save or doom mankind, one of a hundred such decisions that faced him daily, against a background of half-truths, hope, promises, and lies. “We both have our duty, sir. As you implied, perhaps mine is easier.”

Gramm rubbed his eyes with fleshy fingers. “Lethe, Ensign, that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn was right. Whatever we’re running out of, at least there’s no shortage of courage. Get out of here.” He waved his hand. “Go, before I have to throw you out.”

Pirius reported this conversation to Nilis. He didn’t anticipate the Commissary’s reaction.

“You see what this means.” Nilis was whispering, wide-eyed, his hands locked together in a white- knuckled grip.

“Sir?”

“Gramm is going to say yes — he’s going to back us. Of course he has to get the decision from his committee. But if he backs it, it will be hard for any of them not to follow along. We’re going to the Core, Ensign. We’re going to have our squadron.” Nilis padded around his room, plucking at his fingers.

Pirius shook his head. “Then why aren’t you leaping with joy, Commissary?”

“Because they’ve called my bluff,” he said rapidly. He seemed terrified. “While I was pushing against a locked door it was easy to be bold. But now the door has swung open, and I have to deliver on my promises.” He turned to Pirius. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What have I done? Pirius, what have I done?”