Exultant

Chapter 35

There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.

The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.

This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.

Call them monads.

This would be the label given them by Commissary Nilis, when he deduced their existence. But the name had much deeper roots.

In the seventeenth century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined that reality was constructed from pseudo-objects that owed their existence solely to their relation to each other. In his idea of the “monad,” Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the creatures who infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of experience and community. And yet “they” didn’t exist in themselves; it was only their relationships to each other that defined their own abstract entities.

No other form of life was possible in this fractured place.

Long ago they had attended the birth of a universe.

It had come from a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the universe’s swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space, perhaps.

But once its reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It had been the usual story — and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And something of this long saga would always be stored in the monads’ dreaming.

The universe aged, as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke — and a bubble of a higher reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.

And in this bubble, where the freezing of spacetime was undone, the monads awoke again; in their supracosmic froth, they were once more briefly alive.

The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.

They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent cosmic jewel. This one — yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities.

And, embedding themselves in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even guess at.

The new universe, for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical — but unstable, like a sword standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.

Which was, of course, the joy of it.

For the inhabitants of this new cosmos, it began with a singularity: a moment when time began, when space was born. But for the monads, as their chaotic Ur-reality froze out once more into a rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages, until this universe in turn grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

But all that lay far in the future.

There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.

History began.

Chapter 36

So Pirius Red and Torec, having completed a circuit across the face of the Galaxy that had taken them all the way to Earth, returned at last to where they had started.

The flight through the complicated geometry of Arches Base lifted Pirius’s heart. Past the asteroids that wheeled like fists, he made out the burning sky of the Core, the giant stars and light-year-long filaments of glowing gas, the endless explosion of astrophysics beyond. Compared to the cold clockwork emptiness of Sol system, out on the Galaxy’s dead fringe, where you couldn’t even see the Core, this crowded, dangerous sky teemed with life and energy.

“Lethe, it’s good to be home,” he said with feeling.

When they disembarked, Captain Seath herself greeted them. She allowed the Commissary to pump her hand, and nodded curtly to Pirius and Torec. But Pirius read the expression on her reconstructed face. Whatever they had achieved in Sol system, they would always be two jumped-up ensigns to her. It was almost reassuring.

Seath told them that the accommodation for the new “squadron” that was being formed to carry out Nilis’s “project” — she pronounced those words with unmistakable disdain — wasn’t ready yet. So Nilis was offered a room in Officer Country, while Pirius and Torec were taken to a Barracks Ball.

They walked into the big central space of bunks and lavatories. They hadn’t been assigned to this Barracks Ball before. It stank, of course, as all barracks did, of piss and sweat, food and disinfectant, but it didn’t smell familiar. And among the ranks of faces that peered at them, with curiosity, apathy, or hostility, there was nobody they knew.

They were assigned bunks a couple of blocks apart. Torec stroked Pirius’s back, and made her way to her own bunk. Pirius unpacked his few personal effects, and stripped out of his gaudy dress uniform, which made him feel a little better.

But he did this surrounded by staring faces. It wasn’t just the curiosity of cadets confronted by a stranger. They gazed at him as if he had two heads. They said nothing to him, and he had nothing to say to them. They snubbed him when he went to get food. Even when he lay down in the dark, he sensed the strangers around him watching him, assessing him — excluding him.

They looked so young, he thought, their faces blank, like desks empty of data. They were like children. And what was happening to him was childish, as the factions and cliques of the barracks combined to bully a new victim. It was just as Nilis had said: they might look like adults, and they would have to fight and die for mankind. But they were not long out of childhood, and every now and again it showed.

Childish it might be, but the pressure was extraordinary.

He clambered out of bed, made his way to Torec’s bunk, and crawled in beside her. They lay nested together, his belly against her back.

“We said we wouldn’t do this,” she whispered. “We have to fit in.”

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he replied. “Don’t throw me out.”

After a time she turned over and kissed his forehead.

In many ways she was the stronger one. But he sensed that she was as glad he was there, as he was to be there. They clung to each other, innocent as children themselves, until they fell asleep.

The next morning Captain Seath led them to a flitter. The little ship slid out of port and threaded its cautious way through the crowded sky.

Seath asked coolly, “Sleep well?”

“No, sir,” Pirius said honestly.

Torec said, “Captain, I don’t understand. Why does everybody hate us?”

“I don’t imagine they hate you.”

Pirius said, “We’re just the same as we were before.”

Seath eyed him. “No,” she said, “you’re not. You’ve done extraordinary things. You’ve seen Earth, Ensign. Even I can’t begin to imagine it. And you’ve been close to power, closer than anybody here, closer than me, closer even than the base commanders. You have changed. And you can’t change back.”

“There’s no place for us on Earth,” Pirius said.

Seath laughed. “There’s no place for you here.”

“Where, then?” Torec asked.

“Why, nowhere.” She shrugged. “It’s not your fault. It’s just the way of things. The only people who understand you are each other — and each other is all you will ever have. You’ll just have to get on with it.”

As she said that, Pirius felt Torec moving subtly away from him. He sensed a return of her old resentment: they had come all the way back to Arches, and she still couldn’t get away from him.

The base for Nilis’s pet squadron was just another rock among the hurtling asteroids of Arches. Known only as Rock 492, it was a kilometer-wide lump of debris. On its battered surface was a cluster of buildings of bubble-blown rock, and a few broad pits that had once been landing pads and dry docks. But all this was long abandoned.

They had to climb out of the flitter in their skinsuits.

The buildings, long stripped of anything usable, were so old their surviving walls were pocked with micrometeorite craters, and a thin silt of dust had gathered around the bases of their walls. Some of their domes had cracked open altogether.

Only one of the buildings was airtight to regulation standard. When they clambered inside, through a temporary airlock hastily patched into a hole in the wall, they found themselves in a cavernous hollow. Bots crawled over the floor and roof, patching up defects. But even the bots looked old and worn out, and the engineers who supervised them weren’t much better. There was no gravity in here — or rather, only the micro-gravity of the asteroid, just a feather touch — and the light, cast by a few hovering globes, was misty, the air a shining silver-gray.

Pirius cracked his faceplate and took a deep breath. The air was stale, so lacking in oxygen his chest ached, and it stank of oil and metal, and of the burning smell of raw asteroid dust, oxidizing busily. As the irritating dust got to work on his sinuses he started to sneeze.

“Lethe,” he said. “Is this it?”

“Nothing works but the inertial deflectors,” Torec said. That had to be true, or else the whole Rock, plummeting through the complicated geometry of Arches, would have been a hazard. She sighed. “Don’t they realize we are trying to save the Galaxy? How are we supposed to do that if the toilets don’t work?”

But there was nothing to be done about the strange internal politics of Arches, the Navy, the Coalition, and humankind in general. So they got to work.

For the next few days they wrestled with ancient air and water cyclers, balky nano-food systems, and hovering light globes that wouldn’t stay still. Even the machines didn’t seem to like them: they resisted being fixed, and developed faults and quirks that simply seemed perverse. Their social life didn’t get any better, either. If they had been outsiders in the Barracks Ball, they were definitely not wanted here, by engineers who clearly believed they had better things to do than labor over a lump of shit like Rock 492.

But in another way it was fun, Pirius thought. Getting immersed in the guts of a broken pump or a clogged air-filter system was dirty, hard work, but it was a job that was finite and understandable and something you could finish, unlike the diffuse politicking of Earth.

The systems came online one by one. As they heard the laboring of air pumps, and felt the shuddering of water pumping through the pipes, the place started to seem alive. And because they had worked so hard over it, Pirius and Torec thought of it as theirs. Before he had gone to Earth, the only homes Pirius had ever known had been one Barracks Ball after another. Now Rock 492 was starting to feel like home — though he and Torec only dared discuss such thoroughly non-Doctrinal matters in whispers, and they would never have mentioned it to Captain Seath.

The ensigns were summoned to regular meetings with Nilis.

These were always held in the Commissary’s room in Officer Country. Even though he had assimilated the experiences of his avatar Virtual who had ridden with Pirius Blue through the Cavity, Nilis seemed as scared of Arches’ daunting sky now as when he had first come here, and he tended to hide in his room. But he had quickly made this faceless little cabin his own, spreading his clutter of data desks, clothes and bric-a-brac over every surface, and filling the air with clustering Virtuals. Torec said he made every place he stayed into a nest, as rats made nests. Pirius thought a little wistfully of what it must mean to have a real home, and to miss it, as Nilis clearly missed his.

Torec complained about the state of Rock 492. Nilis said there was nothing he could do about it for now, they would have to wait for a meeting he had scheduled with Marshal Kimmer, the senior Navy officer on the base. After this “showdown,” as Nilis called it, he was sure their requests would be properly met, as the oversight committee had mandated.

Pirius wasn’t so sure. He knew that officers like Marshal Kimmer tended to regard their bases as their private domains. He wouldn’t take kindly to what he would surely see as interference from out- of-touch bureaucrats on far-off Earth, no matter what their formal authority.

Nilis had continued to analyze the data he had gathered on Chandra, the monstrous, enigmatic black hole at the center of the Galaxy, and hypothesized on its nature and what the Xeelee were doing with it.

He knew now that the Xeelee used Chandra to make nightfighters. Somehow, Nilis had deduced from remote images, they peeled spacetime-defect wings and other structures out of the distorted environment of the black hole. That much had long been suspected by Navy intelligence. But Nilis said he suspected the Xeelee had a more profound use for the black hole.

It was all to do with computing. There were fundamental limits to computing power, he said. The processing speed and memory of any computer were limited by the energy available to it.

He picked up a data desk and waved it around in the air. “This is a sophisticated gadget, the result of twenty-five thousand years of technological progress. But what does it weigh — around a kilogram? From the point of view of the gadget’s purpose, which is computation, almost all of this mass is wasted, just a framework. This desk would be able to achieve a lot more if all of its mass-energy were devoted to computing. In the form of photons, say, this kilogram of stuff could process at the rate of ten to power fifty-one operations per second. That’s a million billion billion billion billion…” Similarly, the memory capacity of a computer depended on how many distinguishable states its system could take. If Nilis’s inert kilogram were converted to a liter of light, the capacity would become some ten thousand billion billion billion bits.

“In fact, our most advanced computers have a design something like this,” he said. “Perhaps you know it. At the core of the ’nervous system’ of a greenship is a vat of radiant energy, much of it gamma-ray photons, but some of it more exotic higher-energy particles. Energy is bled off from the ship’s GUT generator, to keep the photon soup at around a billion degrees. Information is stored in the positions and trajectories of the photons, and is processed by collisions between the particles. To read it, you open up a hole in the side of the box and let some of the light out.”

There were limitations with such a design, because the rate at which information could be extracted, limited by lightspeed, was much less than the computer’s storage capacity. “You only get a glimpse of what’s going on in there,” said Nilis. “So our best computers are massively parallel, with subsections working virtually independently.” The input-output rate could be increased if the computer were made smaller, because it took less time for information to be moved around. But as the size was reduced, the energy density would increase. “You encounter more and more exotic high- energy particles,” said Nilis, “until you pass the point at which you can control them. Gamma-ray processing is the limit of our technological capabilities right now. But of course that’s not the physical limit. If you keep crushing down your computer, keep increasing its density, you finish up with—”

“A black hole,” said Torec.

“Yes.” He beamed, and plucked at a thread dangling from the sleeve of his battered robe. “And then the physics becomes simple again.”

Pirius began to see it. “And Chandra is a black hole — the biggest in the Galaxy.”

“Exactly,” Nilis whispered. “I thought the Xeelee were using Chandra to power their central computing facility. Now I believe that the Xeelee are using Chandra itself, a black hole with the mass of millions of suns, as a computer. The audacity!”

Torec asked, “How can you use a black hole as a computer?”

Nilis said that information could be “fed” to a black-hole computer during the hole’s formation, or by infalling matter later. “The data would be stored on the hole’s event horizon in the form of impressed strings.”

Pirius was becoming baffled. “Strings?”

All of reality could be looked on as an expression of vibrating strings. Invisibly small, these loops and knots shimmered and sang, and their vibration modes, the “notes” they sounded, were the particles of the universe humans could discern. Pirius took in little of this, but he liked the idea that the universe was a kind of symphony of invisible strings in harmony.

“A black hole’s event horizon is a terminus to our universe, though,” Nilis said. “Strings can’t extend beyond it. So they become embedded in the surface — like wet hair plastered over your head. The strings bear information about how the hole was formed, and how it grew.” To get at the information you had to let the hole evaporate, as all black holes did, by emitting a dribble of “Hawking radiation.” The smaller the hole the more rapidly it evaporated.

“You won’t be surprised that the Silver Ghosts once dabbled with this kind of technology,” Nilis said ruefully. “They created microscopic black holes, with information and processing instructions encoded in the formative collapse. Small enough holes evaporate very quickly — they explode, in fact. The computation’s output is encoded in the radiation they emit in the process. You can solve some spectacularly hard problems that way.” He sniffed. “The Ghosts did get it to work. But each micro-hole computer was a one-off; you could only run one program, because it blew itself up in the process! Even the Ghosts couldn’t find a way to make the technology practical.”

“And,” Torec prompted, “this is what the Xeelee are doing?”

“Yes. But they don’t restrict themselves to mere microscopic holes.”

He showed them data extracted from Pirius Blue’s jaunt into the Cavity. They still had no good close- up images of Chandra, but somehow the Xeelee were controlling the inflow of matter to the event horizon. And through that control, they were “programming” the monstrous black hole. They allowed the Planck scale dynamics of the event horizon to process the input information, and were “reading” the results by analyzing the Hawking radiation the black hole gave off.

“At least that’s what I think they are doing,” Nilis said. “There is still a great deal we don’t know about black holes. For instance, there must be structure in the deep interior, close to the singularity. There the strings and membranes that underlie subatomic particles must be torn and stretched, perhaps reaching dimensions comparable to the black hole itself. Can this ’fuzzball’ be used for computing purposes? I don’t know — I can’t rule it out. Or perhaps the Xeelee work on some other principle entirely…

“It’s remarkable,” he breathed. “A black hole is a convergence of information and physics, a junction in the structure of our universe. And the Xeelee are using this miracle as a tactical computer!” He grinned. “No wonder they were able to fend us off so easily. But now, thanks to your CTC computer, we’ve changed the rules — eh, Ensigns? Even a black hole computer can’t beat that.

“But I don’t think I’ve got to the bottom of it yet.”

“Of what, sir?”

“Of Chandra.”

His proximity to the Galaxy’s center had inspired him to start a whole new line of research, he said. He would go to the Navy’s archives for tactical material from three thousand years’ worth of scouting missions, and perhaps even hunt out scientific data from more innocent times, when Chandra had been thought to be a mere astrophysical marvel, not a military target. “In the quagmites and the Xeelee we have already found two layers of life, from quite different cosmic epochs — and a third, if you include us! I’m beginning to wonder what else is there in Chandra’s nested layers, waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps there is more life to be found in there, still more ancient and strange, perhaps permeating the singularity itself.

“We understand so little,” he said, “even now. If you look back at the theories of the ancients you can see how they groped for understanding. Their physics made them capable of recognizing a black hole, say, and describing its broad features. But their science gave them no real understanding of what it is. Some of what we are capable of today would have seemed impossible to the ancients, as if we were defying the laws of physics themselves! But you have to wonder how incomplete our own precious theories may be.”

Pirius kept his face blank. With Torec’s hand curled warmly in his own, he daydreamed of other things.

After a week, Nilis set up his “showdown” with Marshal Kimmer in a conference room in Officer Country. Pirius and Torec were summoned to attend.

The Marshal was thin as a blade and impossibly tall, so tall that outside Officer’s Country he had to stoop or else his bald head would have scraped the ceiling. His cheekbones were so sharp they looked as if they would cut through his flesh, and his mouth was invisibly small. But he had space- hardened eyes implanted in his face, tokens of the battlefield. They masked Kimmer’s expression completely, as was perhaps their intention.

The Marshal didn’t so much as acknowledge Pirius’s presence, as if the ensign didn’t even exist. But officially, Pirius supposed, given his future crime, he didn’t.

Nilis opened with a bumbling presentation on the latest incarnation of his Project Prime Radiant, and how it would be carried out. The operational details were starting to be refined, through work with Darc, Torec, Pirius, and others. Nilis described how a squadron of modified greenships would sail into the Cavity behind a single, carefully selected Rock, known as Orion Rock, which would be used for cover.

Commander Darc sat alongside Nilis. Pila was here, Minister Gramm’s aide, and now his representative at the Core. She sat silently, obviously not wanting to be here; she seemed to regard the Base, the Core, and the whole messy business of the war with utter disdain. And here were Pirius and Torec, sitting awkwardly at the table, hoping nobody would notice them.

Marshal Kimmer sat motionless and expressionless through the presentation. He had brought various aides who sat behind him, whispering to each other.

At last Nilis finished, to everyone’s relief, including his own. He dispersed his last Virtual image with a wave of his hand and sat down, mopping sweat from his brow with his robe’s grimy sleeve. “Marshal, the floor is yours.”

The Marshal remained silent for long heartbeats, his expression thunderous. Pirius didn’t dare so much as breathe.

When the Marshal did speak, his voice was so soft Pirius could barely hear it. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want twenty greenships.”

“A full squadron of ten, yes, plus reserve craft, and others for development and training—”

“Twenty ships. And it’s not just the ships you want. There’s the crew as well, plus backups. And the ground crew. And all the facilities that will be required to modify these ships with your gadgets, and to train up the crews in their use. You want me to draw away these resources from the front line, for this wild scheme of striking at Chandra itself. Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Marshal—”

“Next, your tactical plan. You will sail into the Cavity behind a Rock. Fine, but not just any Rock. You want Orion Rock itself! Commissary, we have been developing stratagems based on Orion for a thousand years.” His voice was rising steadily. “And you want to throw away all that work, all that preparation, on this?”

Nilis was sweating harder. “Marshal, this could win the war.”

Kimmer stood grandly, and his aides scuttled to their feet. “Every few years we have to put up with one or another of you gadgeteers or armchair strategists who imagine you know how this war should be fought, better than those who have served the Coalition over three thousand years. You may have fooled them on Earth, Commissary. But this is the Front. And you don’t fool me.” He made to stalk out of the room.

Pirius glanced at Torec. He had anticipated Kimmer’s reaction, but even so he felt numb despair. There was none of the brute wisdom he had sensed in Minister Gramm in Kimmer. Gramm was a flawed man, but he had a deep, troubled sense of a responsibility for the conduct of the war. In Kimmer there was nothing but resistance to a challenge to his own power. Pirius could hardly believe that they had come all this way, achieved so much, only to be faced by yet another block.

Unexpectedly, Commander Darc spoke up. “Wait, Marshal.”

Kimmer turned, his expression cold. “Did you speak, Commander?”

“Sir, you’re my superior officer. I apologize for speaking out of turn. But I have to point out you’re wrong. The Commissary isn’t asking you for anything. The Grand Conclave has issued an executive order, and the Commissary is merely passing on its instructions. We have to give Nilis what he needs to do the job.”

Kimmer hissed, “This fat earthworm has fooled you as he fooled the Conclave, Commander.”

“No doubt you’re right, sir. But in the meantime we have our orders.”

Kimmer glared at his aides, who confirmed in whispers that Darc was right. Kimmer’s mouth worked. Pirius knew he would make the Commander pay for what he had said.

“All right, Commissary. As the Commander says, I have my orders. Until I’ve had time to appeal against the executive mandate, you and your stooges can have what you want.” He stabbed a finger at Nilis. “But I do have discretion on how I carry out those orders. I won’t take any usable resources away from our vital struggle. You’ll have your ships. But they will not come from the line: you can have the superannuated, the battle-damaged, the patched-up wrecks. And I won’t let you waste the lives of my best crews either. Do you understand?”

Nilis nodded his head. “Quite clearly.”

“Oh, Nilis — one more thing. If you mean to use Orion Rock you’ll have to be quick about it. It will be in position in ten weeks.”

Nilis gasped. “Ten weeks? Oh, Marshal, but this is — we can’t be ready—”

Darc put his soft hand on Nilis’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Commissary. Ten weeks it is, sir.”

Kimmer seemed still more infuriated. He stalked out of the room, followed by his chattering aides.

The Commissary was trembling. “I thought I had blown the whole thing,” he said hoarsely. “My stumbling and fumbling, like a buffoon — how can I deal with a Marshal if I can’t hold myself together for five minutes?”

“You did fine, sir,” Pirius said awkwardly.

Pila elaborately stifled a yawn. “It was a lot of nonsense anyhow.”

Torec was puzzled. “Ma’am?”

“Oh, come on, Ensign, even you aren’t that naive. Kimmer knows the chain of command as well as any of us. We saw nothing here but the ingrained resistance of a man who can accept no new way of doing things, even if it might resolve the deadlock of this war. And he especially can’t take advice from an outsider like you, Nilis. Kimmer had no choice but to comply, and he knew it. This was all just posturing.”

Nilis said, “Pretty formidable posturing, though!”

Pirius was troubled. “But still, if what the Marshal said comes to pass — if we’re only going to get lousy equipment and useless crew—”

“We’ll make it work,” Nilis said. “Why, you’ve already got Rock 492 up and running, haven’t you?”

Pirius shook his head. “Fixing a broken air cycler is one thing. Putting together a squadron is another.”

Darc glanced at Nilis. “Ah, but the most important element of any squadron is its leader. Isn’t that right, Commissary?”

“Oh, without a doubt, Commander. And how lucky we are to have found the right officer for the job!” Nilis clapped his hand on Pirius’s shoulder and beamed.

Pirius turned cold inside.

Torec’s mouth dropped open. “Him? You are joking, sir.”

“Thanks,” Pirius said to Torec.

Nilis said, “You’ve already been a hero once, Pirius, in another timeline. Now you have to do it again.”

“But sir, I can’t command. I’m not even commissioned.”

Darc grinned. “You are now.”

“But — ten weeks?”

Darc shrugged. “That’s the hand we’ve been dealt; we make it or we don’t.”

Nilis was watching Pirius. “Of course you have to make up your own mind, Pirius. Do you remember the conversation we had at Venus?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So tell me — where has your self-analysis got to now?”

Torec said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Pirius said, “He’s asking me if I have found anything to fight for.” He faced Nilis. “There’s only one goal worth dying for,” he said.

“Yes?”

“And that’s victory — an end to this war. And then we will have to find out what humans are supposed to do with their time.”

Nilis nodded, apparently not trusting himself to speak.

“Oh, how noble you all are.” Pila shook her elegant head. “The preening of you military types never ceases to astound me.”

Darc ignored her. “So what do you say, squadron leader?”

“Where do I start, sir?”

Darc murmured, “Well, that’s up to you. But first I rather think you’ll need to find your crews.”

It was a relief to be able to get back to Rock 492.

At first Pirius and Torec had had to live in their skinsuits, relying on their backpacks for warmth, food, water, even air when the dust got too bad. Before the lavatories had started working they had to relieve themselves in their suits, and every couple of days went out to a flitter to dump their waste. But as the systems recovered, they had begun to sleep with their faceplates open, and at last, as the air slowly became fresh and warm, they abandoned the skinsuits altogether. The filters couldn’t do much about the suspended asteroid dust, and they both suffered irritated sinuses.

That night after the meeting with Kimmer, they slept as usual, huddled together in a corner of the bubble dome, their bodies pressed together under a blanket. The touch of microgravity was so gentle they all but hovered over the floor, drifting like soap bubbles. In the quietest hour, the inertial adjustors suddenly came online. As a full gravity grabbed them they ended up in a tangle of limbs, laughing. The floor was suddenly full of ridges and knobs — they would need a mattress tomorrow, Pirius told himself — and they felt the new, uneven gravity field pull at their internal organs.

The Rock, too, adjusted to its new state. Like most asteroids, 492 wasn’t a solid mass, but a loose aggregate of dust and boulders. As the inertial machines in its core did their work, 492’s components scraped and ground against each other as they sought to find a more compact equilibrium. Pirius could hear the deep groaning of the asteroid, a rumbling that shivered through his own bones, as if they were lying on the carcass of some huge uncomfortable animal.

In the morning, they found their faces and hands were covered with a silvery patina: it was the asteroid dust, which had at last settled out of its suspension in the air.

Chapter 37

The balancing sword tipped and fell. The primordial simplicity of the new universe was lost. From the broken symmetry of a once-unified physics, two forces emerged: gravity, and a force humans would call the GUT force — “GUT” for Grand Unified Theory, a combination of electromagnetic and nuclear forces. The separating-out of the forces was a phase change, like water freezing to ice, and it released energy that immediately fed the expansion of the seedling universe.

Gravity’s fist immediately clenched, crushing knots of energy and matter into black holes. It was in the black holes’ paradoxical hearts that the sleeping monads huddled. But the black holes were embedded in a new, unfolding spacetime: three dimensions of space and one of time, an orderly structure that congealed quickly out of the primitive chaos.

Yet there were flaws. The freezing-out had begun spontaneously in many different places, like ice crystals growing on a cold window. Where the crystals met and merged, discontinuities formed. Because the spacetime was three-dimensional, these defects were born in two dimensions, as planes and sheets — or one dimension, as lines of concentrated energy scribbled across spacetime’s spreading face — or no dimensions at all, simple points.

Suddenly the universe was filled with these defects; it was a box stuffed with ribbons and strings and buttons.

And the defects were not inert. Propagating wildly, they collided, combined, and interacted. A migrating point defect could trace out a line; a shifting line could trace out a plane; where two planes crossed, a line was formed, to make more planes and lines. Feedback loops of creation and destruction were quickly established, in a kind of spacetime chemistry. There was a time of wild scribbling.

Most of these sketches died as quickly as they were formed. But as the networks of interactions grew in complexity, another kind of phase shift was reached, a threshold beyond which certain closed loops of interactions emerged — loops which promoted the growth of other structures like themselves. This was autocatalysis, the tendency for a structure emerging from a richly connected network to encourage the growth of itself, or copies of itself. And some of these loops happened to be stable, immune to small perturbations. This was homeostasis, stability through feedback.

Thus, through autocatalysis and homeostasis working on the flaws of the young spacetime, an increasingly complex hierarchy of self-sustaining structures emerged. All these tangled knots were machines, fundamentally, heat engines feeding off the flow of energy through the universe. And the black holes, drifting through this churning soup, provided additional points of structure, seeds around which the little cycling structures could concentrate. In the new possibilities opened up by closeness, still more complex aggregates grew: simple machines gathered into cooperative “cells,” and the cells gathered into colonial “organisms” and ultimately multicelled “creatures"…

It was, of course, life. All this had emerged from nothing.

In this universe it would always be this way: structures spontaneously complexified, and stability emerged from fundamental properties of the networks — any networks, even such exotica as networks of intersecting spacetime defects. Order emerging for free: it was wonderful. But it need not have been this way.

Deep in the pinprick gravity wells of the primordial black holes, the feeding began.

Chapter 38

When Squadron Leader Pirius Red went back to the barracks, with his new officer’s epaulettes stitched to his uniform, he walked into a silent storm of resentment and contempt. After a few minutes he ducked into a lavatory block and ripped his epaulettes off his shoulders.

The new squadron leader spent twenty-four hours paralyzed by uncertainty and indecision. He had no real idea where to start.

Nilis called Pirius to his cluttered room in Officer Country.

When he got there, the Commissary, irritated and distracted, was working at a low table piled with data desks, while abstract Virtuals swirled around him like birds. He seemed to be pursuing his studies of Chandra. There was nowhere to sit but on Nilis’s blanket-strewn, unmade bed. There was a faint smell of damp and mustiness — it was the smell of Nilis, Pirius thought with exasperated fondness, a smell of feet and armpits, the smell of a gardener.

Pila was here, to Pirius’s surprise. Minister Gramm’s assistant, slender and elegant, looked somehow insulated from Nilis’s clutter. Her skin shone with a cold beauty, and her robe of purple-stitched black fell in precise folds around her slim, sexless body. She didn’t acknowledge Pirius at all.

Nilis clapped his hands, and his Virtuals crumpled up and disappeared. “Fascinating, fascinating. I am studying Chandra’s central singularity now, what we can tell of it through the external features of the event horizon and the surrounding spacetime. Even there, deep in the heart of the black hole, there is structure. That thing at the center of the Galaxy, you know, is like an onion; just when you’ve peeled away one layer, well, my eyes, all you find is another layer underneath, another layer of astrophysics and life and meaning — quite remarkable — I wonder if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.”

Pirius didn’t know what an onion was, and couldn’t comment. But he could see Nilis was restless. “You seem unhappy, Commissary.”

Nilis said ruefully, “Perceptive as ever, Pirius! But it’s true. I am frustrated. I thought I would make fast progress with this work here at Arches, now that I am so close to the object of my study. But suddenly it has become much more difficult. I’m being denied access to records. When I do track down an archive I find it’s been emptied or moved — I’m even short on processing power to analyze it!” He shook his head. “I try not to be paranoid, any more than any citizen of our wonderful Coalition has a right to be. In Sol system I was given assistance with my studies. Now it feels as if I am being impeded at every step! But if it’s purposeful, what I don’t see is why — and who is trying to block me.”

Pila said, with her usual cold sarcasm, “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your absorbing work, Commissary. But you called us here.”

“Quite so, quite so.” He took a sip from some tepid drink that had been standing so long on the table it had dust on its surface. “Let’s get on, then. I wondered how the new squadron is doing. What are your priorities, Pirius?”

That was easy. “We have to assemble the hardware and the crews. Then we will run two parallel programs: technical development, to get the new equipment fitted to the ships and make them combat-worthy, and training, to get the crews ready to fly the mission.”

“Good, good; nobody would argue with that. But time is short. What actual progress have you made?”

“I’m proud to have been given this commission, sir…”

The Commissary’s sharp, moist eyes were on him, and Nilis clearly noticed the patches where Pirius had ripped off his epaulettes. “You haven’t actually got anywhere, have you, Squadron Leader?”

“He is overpromoted,” Pila said coldly.

“No,” Nilis said. “This is a battlefield promotion. Needs must, madam. Pirius is right for the job, I’m convinced of it. I’ve seen his work in two different timelines! But where he lacks experience, we must find ways to help him.”

Pila looked at him suspiciously. “Which is where I come in, is it? I think you’d better get to the point, Commissary.”

Nilis turned to Pirius. “Pilot, have you selected your adjutant yet? Every squadron leader needs one.”

Pirius felt even more out of his depth. “I’m not even sure what an adjutant does, sir.”

Nilis laughed. “Of course not. Which is why your choice is particularly important. Your adjutant is your key member of staff. She is your personal assistant, if you like. She is responsible for the day- to-day running of your squadron, leaving you to concentrate on the flying. She drafts your orders, filters demands on your time, and ensures you get the resources you need, everything from GUTdrive parts to ration packs. You see? Now, have you any thoughts?”

Pirius shrugged. “Torec, perhaps—”

Nilis said gently, “Torec is a fine woman, a warrior, and a close companion. But she doesn’t have the skills — the political, the administrative — that you’re going to need now.”

Pirius suddenly saw where this was going.

Pila’s face was extraordinary; Pirius would never have imagined that so much anger and contempt could be expressed with such stillness. She said, “Are you joking, Commissary? Me?”

“Joking? Not at all,” Nilis said breezily. “Think about it for a moment. The job won’t be so terribly different from what you do for Gramm. You undoubtedly have the administrative skills. And with your, umm, strong personality you will cut like a blade through the buffoonery and obstructionism of the various turf warriors here at the Base. You could even pull levers at the Ministry of Economic Warfare if you have to. Besides, as one of the party who came with me from Earth, you understand the nature of our unique project better than anybody at Arches.

“And,” he said with a dismissive wave, “it needn’t interfere with your primary duty, which is spying for Minister Gramm. You can do that just as effectively while getting on with some worthwhile work as well:”

Color spotted Pila’s cheeks, but she still hadn’t moved a muscle. “You wouldn’t dare say that if Gramm were here.”

“Oh, he already knows! I discussed the idea with him before broaching it with you. He’s quite agreeable. I think he finds the idea of you having to cope with frontline soldiery quite amusing.” He folded his hands in his lap, and looked from one to the other.

Pirius took that as his cue. He stood up. “I think we’re done here.”

“So we are, Pilot,” Nilis said genially.

“Madam, welcome aboard—”

“Don’t even talk to me, you twisted little freak!” In the windows of her pale eyes he saw the contempt of this earthworm for the soldiers who fought and died to protect her.

But Pirius held his nerve. “Working together is going to be interesting. But I think the Commissary is right. And we only have ten weeks. There’s an empty room down the corridor. Maybe we should start right now.”

Pila stood stock still, and Pirius wondered what even the Commissary could do about it if she refused to cooperate. But with a last murderous glance at Nilis, she stalked out.

Nilis was immersed in his Virtuals before Pirius had even left the room. But he called, “Oh, Pirius. Get those epaulettes sewn back on. That doesn’t look good, not good at all.”

Reluctant or not, Pila was remarkably efficient. Within forty-eight hours she had secured Pirius a small office of his own — small, plain, with hardly any facilities, but a room in Officer Country nonetheless. And she had already pulled various bureaucratic levers effectively enough to line up candidates for the squadron.

The first of them was a woman, a former pilot called Jees.

Long before Jees reached his office Pirius could hear the whir of exoskeletal supports as she clumped down the corridor. When she came in, he was shocked. Her lower body had been sliced away on a line that ran from her ribs on her right hand side to her pelvis on her left, the flesh and bone and blood replaced by a cold mass of silvery prostheses. When she sat down, the chair creaked at her inhuman weight.

But her hair, cut short, was a bright blond, and her skin was unlined. She was even beautiful. She could have been no more than his own age — but her eyes were dull.

She told him her history. She had been involved in two actions. She had survived the first, but had been caught by a starbreaker in the second. She had been lucky to live at all, of course. Most of her squadron, cut apart, hadn’t. She told this story unemotionally, lacing it with dates and reference numbers that meant nothing to Pirius. “If you get back to base they fix you up. The medics.” A half- smile crossed her face. “As long as there’s a piece of you left, they can replace what’s missing.”

It was impossible to feel pity for her; she was too damaged for that.

“Your current assignment is ground crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You really think you can fly again?”

“I volunteered,” she said. “I’m a pilot, not a mechanic. You’ve seen my evaluation. My reflexes and coordination and all the rest are as good as they were. Augmented, some of them are better, in fact. But—”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

Pila watched Jees, coldly evaluating.

Jees tapped her head with a metallic finger. “Everything that counts about me is still here. And what I am is a pilot. I want to get back out there and prove it.”

Pirius nodded, thanked her, and let her go.

Pila waved her hand, and a box in a Virtual checklist turned from red to green. “It’s obvious. We take her.”

“We do?”

Pila shrugged elegantly. “She’s a volunteer, one of the few we’ve had. She can handle the mission technically. Her nerve isn’t broken, according to the psychologists. In fact she’s powerfully motivated; she has a grudge against the Xeelee, and who can blame her? But we aren’t going to find many like her, Pirius.”

From the beginning Pila had complained bitterly about the pool of available candidates. “The superannuated and the criminal,” she said. “That’s all that’s being made available to us. Crew who are useless anywhere else, and so won’t impede Marshal Kimmer’s own grand goals. And there are precious few of them…”

The fact was, in this war walking wounded were rare. Day after day, the fragile greenships flew into Xeelee fire like moths into flames. If anything went wrong, your chances of surviving were slim: death worked efficiently here.

Even “criminals” were hard to find. Penal units were handed the worst, the most dangerous assignments, and if you happened to survive an action, you were thrown back out again. Life expectancy was not long, the turnover rapid. But then, if you fell out with a Doctrine cop, you had demonstrated some incorrigible character flaw — and, deemed beyond hope of rehabilitation, you were eminently disposable.”

But Pila had quickly found that even these battle-damaged antiques and failed renegades were hoarded, like every other resource, by jealous, empire-building local commanders. Pirius decided he was going to have to visit a penal detail to try to drum up volunteers. And that meant he would have to go to Quintuplet Base, where he knew at least one incorrigible rebel was still stationed — himself.

When he told her his decision, Pila grinned, her eyes quite without humor. “For the first time I am glad I have been forced into this assignment. I will enjoy watching you confronting your own unresolved issues, Pirius.”

But he was able to put that aside for a while, as he had a much more agreeable chore to complete first.

A week after Pirius’s promotion, the first test flights of greenships modified to Nilis’s full design were scheduled. Flexing his squadron leader muscles, Pirius decided to take the very first flight himself.

So he found himself sitting in a greenship’s pilot blister, with Torec as engineer and the intimidating presence of Commander Darc as navigator. Before the great dislocation of Blue’s irruption into his life, Pirius Red had actually completed his pilot training, but he had never flown in action. It was a huge relief to be aboard a greenship again, back where he belonged.

He checked over his ship. The greenship sat on its launch cradle on the tightly curving surface of Rock 492. The feather-light gravity of the dock touched the ship gently, and Pirius could see that the rails of the cradle had barely made a groove in the loose surface dust.

Light as a soap bubble it might be, but it was an ungainly beast even so. It was a superannuated fighter, one of just five begrudgingly donated so far by Marshal Kimmer and his staff. And it had been in the wars. The central body was scarred and much patched — and you could clearly see where the nacelle bearing the pilot’s pod had once been sliced clean through. This ship had been sent out again and again, until it was too battered to be worth fixing up: too worn out, in fact, for any use except Nilis’s complicated project.

This beat-up old bird would have been ugly enough if it had been left as nature and the Guild of Engineers intended. But Nilis had made things worse with his “enhancements.” Not one but two of Nilis’s patent black-hole cannons had been fixed to its flanks, along with a bulky pod where the exotic ammunition for these weapons was stored. The whole thing was swathed in a tangle of cables and wires and tubing. The ruining of the greenship’s classic streamlined finish didn’t matter, of course, since a greenship never flew in an atmosphere. What did matter was how the massive pods attached to the main body affected the ship’s dynamic stability.

The greenship was a mess, no two ways about it. Pirius thought the ironic name Darc had given it was apt: Earthworm. This poor ship looked as capable of swooping gracefully through space as fat old Nilis himself.

But still, this was the bird Pirius was going to fly today. And as he and his crew worked through their final preparations, he felt his heart beat a bit faster.

Then, with a soft command, he powered up his control systems. Much of the display was standard, concerned with handling the ship in its normal modes under the FTL drive or the sublight drives, after his years of training as familiar to Pirius as his own skin. Most of these displays were Virtual: only life-support controls were hardwired, so they wouldn’t pop out of existence no matter what hit the ship. But now Nilis’s additions booted up. Designed in haste and patched in hurriedly, they overlapped each other as they competed for space, crumbling into flaring, angry-looking crimson pixels.

Torec was grumbling about this. “Lethe,” she said. “It’s just as it was back in Sol system. You’d think they would have ironed this out by now.”

Commander Darc said, “We’re all under pressure, Engineer.”

Despite Torec’s complaints, one by one, the ship’s systems came up. When most of the flags shone green with “go,” Pirius snapped, “Engineer?”

“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Torec said gloomily.

“Then let’s get on with it.”

Pirius grasped a joystick and pulled it back steadily. He could feel the ship around him coming to life: the thrumming of the GUT-energy power plant, the subtle surges of the sublight drive. But as the ship lifted off the dirt, he could feel an unwelcome wallowing as the ship labored to cope with its additional mass. The inertial shielding seemed to be hiccupping too. He wasn’t surprised when an array of indicators turned red.

As they hovered over the dirt, his crew labored to put things right. “The problem’s the power plant,” Torec called. “The weapons systems have been patched into it. There’s enough juice to go around, in theory; the problem is balancing the demands. Greenship power plants aren’t used to being treated like this.”

“Work on it, Engineer,” Pirius said. “That’s what these trial flights are about, to flush out the glitches and fix them.”

“Well spoken, Squadron Leader,” Darc said dryly. “But you might want to look at your handling. That extra mass has screwed our moments of inertia.”

Pirius said, “The nav systems have been upgraded to cope with the changes.”

“Well, the patches don’t seem to be working. The central sentient thinks it’s stuck in one sick ship.” Darc laughed. “It isn’t so wrong.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Pirius said grimly.

The crew continued to work until they had got the blizzard of red lights down to a sprinkling. Then, when he thought he could risk it, Pirius lifted the ship away from the Rock. The ascent was smooth enough.

Pirius glanced down at the receding asteroid. He could see the shallow pit from which they had lifted. Standing around it, in defiance of all safety rules, was a loose circle of skinsuited techs. These complex trials, as Nilis’s team tried desperately to turn their prototypes and sketches into a working operational concept, had drawn a lot of cynicism from these world-weary techs, especially the Engineers’ Guild types: these observers were here, he knew, not to watch a successful trial, but to see a cocky pilot crash and burn. His determination surged. It wouldn’t happen today.

Darc sensed what he was thinking. “Give them a show, Pilot.”

Pirius grinned, and clenched his fists around his controls. The Earthworm hurled itself into the sky, straight up. The sublight jaunt, peaking at around half the speed of light, lasted only a fraction of a second, but Pirius glimpsed blueshift staining the crowded stars above him.

When it was over, Rock 492 had gone, snatched away from his view. And the target rock was dead ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be.

He felt a surge of triumph. “Still alive — oh, Lethe.” He was encased in red lights once more.

“We need to stabilize the systems,” Torec warned.

Pirius sighed. “I hear you, Engineer.” Once again the crew went to work, nursing their deformed steed; gradually the red constellations were replaced by an uncertain green.

The target, only a couple of hundred kilometers away, was just another asteroid, a bit of debris probably older than Earth. This Rock had been used for target practice by crews from Arches for generations. It was impossible to tell if the immense craters that pocked its surface were relics of the asteroid’s violent birth, or had been inflicted by trigger-happy trainees.

“Look at that thing,” Darc said. “Looks as if it has been cracked in two.”

Pirius said, “Let’s see if we can’t crack it again. Engineer, how are the weapons?”

Two threads of cherry-red light speared out from the pods on the Earthworm’s main body and lanced into the battered hide of the target rock.

“Nothing wrong with the starbreakers,” Torec said.

“Then let’s try the black-hole cannon.”

“My displays are green,” said Torec. “Most of the time anyhow.”

“Your course is laid in, Pilot,” Darc called from his navigator’s seat.

Pirius settled himself in his seat, smoothing out creases in his skinsuit. He stared at the rock, trying to visualize his flight.

Nilis had explained his latest tactics carefully. The microscopic black holes fired by the cannon had been enough to destroy a Xeelee nightfighter, but they would be pinpricks against a Galaxy-center black hole, and the living structures that fed off it — unless, Nilis had determined, two holes could be fired off together. If the holes could be made to collide correctly they would emit much of their mass- energy in a shaped pulse of gravitational waves — and Pirius had seen, in the wreckage of Jupiter, how much damage that could do. If such a bomb were set off at the event horizon of Chandra, the great black hole would flex and ripple, “like a rat shaking off fleas,” as Nilis had said.

But such a feat required huge accuracy. The greenships were going to have to fly around the black hole at an altitude of precisely a hundred kilometers above the event horizon: precisely meaning not more than ten meters out. Such a jaunt through the twisted space around a massive black hole was going to be “fun,” in Darc’s words, and the resistance of the Xeelee was going to make it more fun still. If they couldn’t achieve that degree of accuracy, the mission was a waste of time.

So today’s test was crucial. If Pirius couldn’t hit a dumb piece of rock, then Chandra was out of reach.

As the systems stabilized, the crew grew quiet. They would have to work together tightly during this maneuver. As pilot, Pirius would direct the line, navigator Darc was to check the accuracy of their trajectory, while engineer Torec worked the weapons. But the closest approach, during which they would have to fire the cannon, would happen in just a fraction of a second.

Darc said, “Pilot? I think we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“Roger that. Engineer?”

“Do it.”

Pirius took his controls. The ship quivered, poised. “Now or never,” he said. He closed his fists.

The rock flew at him, exploding to a battered wall that seemed about to swat the greenship out of space. At the last moment the asteroid swiveled, dropped beneath his prow and turned into a lumpy landscape. Closest approach — but as the black-hole cannon fired, it was as if the ship had taken a punch to the guts — and red lights flared everywhere.

And then his blister flooded with impact foam, and he was cut off, embedded in a rigid casing, in the dark. It was over, as suddenly as that.

Frustration raging, he screamed, “Tactical display!” A working sensor projected a tiny Virtual image onto the inner surface of his faceplate.

The cannon had actually fired, and dotted yellow lines, neatly sketched, helpfully showed the track of the black-hole projectiles. They missed each other, and passed harmlessly through the loose bulk of the target rock, which sailed on, ancient and serene. And at the moment of closest approach the ship had exploded. Three crew blisters came flying out of an expanding cloud of debris.

Only nine weeks left, he thought helplessly. Nine weeks.

Chapter 39

The universe inhabited by the spacetime-defect fauna was quite unlike that of humans. There was no light, for instance, for the electromagnetic force which governed light’s propagation had yet to decouple from the GUT superforce. But the spacetime-flaw creatures, huddled around their black holes, could “see” by the deep glow of the gravity waves that crisscrossed the growing cosmos.

To them, of course, it had always been this way; to them the sky was beautiful.

The basis of all life in this age was the chemistry of spacetime defects, an interconnected geometric churning of points and lines and planes. Most life-forms were built up of “cells,” tightly interconnected, and very stable. But more complex creatures, built from aggregates of these cells, were not quite so stable. They were capable of variation, one generation to the next.

And where there is variation, selection can operate.

On some of the black-hole “worlds,” fantastic ecologies developed: there were birds with wings of spacetime, and spiders with arms of cosmic string, even fish that swam deep in the twisted hearts of the black holes. “Plants” passively fed on energy flows, like the twisting of space at the event horizons of the black holes, and “animals,” exploiters, fed on those synthesizers in turn — and other predators fed on them. Everywhere there was coevolution, as species adapted together in conflict or cooperation: “plants” and “animals,” “flowers” and “insects,” parasites and hosts, predators and prey. Some of this — the duets of synthesizers and exploiters, for instance — had echoes in the ecologies with which humans were familiar. But there were forms like nothing in human experience.

The creatures of one black hole “world” differed from the inhabitants of another as much as humans would differ from, say, Silver Ghosts. But just as humans and Ghosts were both creatures of baryonic matter who emerged on rocky planets, so the inhabitants of this age, dominated by its own dense physics, had certain features in common.

All life-forms must reproduce. Every parent must store information, a genotype, to pass on to its offspring. From this data is constructed a phenotype, the child’s physical expression of that information — its “body.”

In this crowded young universe the most obvious way to transmit such information was through extended quantum structures. Quantum mechanics allowed for the long-range correlation of particles: once particles had been in contact, they were never truly separated, and would always share information.

Infants were budded, unformed, from parents. But each child was born without a genotype. It was unformed, a blank canvas. A mother would read off her own genotype, and send it to her newborn daughter — by touch, by gravity waves. In the process, depending on the species, the mother’s data might be mixed with that of other “parents.”

But there was a catch. This was a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictated that it was impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the daughter to be born, the mother’s genotype had to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.

To human eyes this would seem tragic; but humans worked on different assumptions. To the spacetime fauna, life was rich and wonderful, and the interlinking of birth and death the most wonderful thing of all.

As consciousness arose, the first songs ever sung centered on the exquisite beauty of necrogenesis.

Chapter 40

The senior representative of the Guild of Engineers at Arches Base was called Eliun. He arrived for the review of the failed test flight with two aides. The review was held in a shabby conference room deep in Arches’ Officer Country. Eliun immediately made his way to the head of the table and sat comfortably, hands folded over his belly.

Nilis bustled among his data desks and Virtuals, his movements edgy and nervous. The scratch crew of the lost Earthworm were here: Pirius, Torec, and Darc. All had survived the ordeal intact, save for Commander Darc, whose broken wrist was encased in bright orange med fabric.

Pila took her place beside Pirius. Even after working closely with her Pirius couldn’t read the expression on her beautiful, pinched face. Perhaps she thought that with this latest failure, this embarrassing and awkward project would be terminated at last, and she could return to the comforts of Earth, and her slow, complicated ascent through the ranks of the Coalition civil service.

And, in one corner of the room, a Silver Ghost hovered, a sensor pack strapped to its equatorial line. It was the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Two blue-helmeted Guardians, who had been assigned to it since Sol system, stood at its side, weapons ever ready. Nobody commented, as if having a Ghost here at a Core base was an everyday event. But the Navy guards posted at the door couldn’t help but stare.

The Guild-master was sleek, only a little plump, and his skin glistened as if he treated it with unguent. He wore a peculiar outfit covered with pockets, insignia, and little readout displays. It turned out to be a stylized skinsuit, of a very archaic design. This commemorated a time when the Engineers had always been the first on the scene in case of some disaster. Those days were long gone, though, and Pirius Red learned that Eliun’s suit wasn’t even functional.

Though he was a master engineer, Eliun didn’t seem at all perturbed to be summoned to a review of a catastrophic engineering failure. But Pirius knew Eliun need defer to nobody here. The Engineers were independent of the Navy and the Green Army, and in particular of Training and Discipline Command, the powerful interservice grouping that ran this base. In fact, the Engineers were independent all the way to the top, to the Grand Conclave of the Coalition itself. And in the comfortable form of Eliun, Project Prime Radiant had found yet another institutional opponent.

Darc glowered at Eliun with undisguised hostility, and even Nilis seemed coldly angry. The atmosphere was tense, and Pirius suspected uneasily they were in for some fireworks.

He was restless himself. Since the test flight two more days had worn away, two days of no progress toward the goal.

Nilis called the meeting briskly to order. “You know why we’re here.” He clapped his hands to call up a plethora of Virtual displays — far too much information, Pirius thought; it was typical of Nilis. “Let’s start with the basics.”

Once again the doomed Earthworm slid past the patient face of the target. Once again it blew apart, three fragile crew blisters careening out of the wreckage only just ahead of the main fireball. Pirius winced from embarrassment at having lost a ship, and at the uncomfortable memory of the breakup itself. Two days later, he was still chipping bits of solidified impact foam off his skinsuit.

Nilis ran the failure again and again, at one-thousandth speed, then one ten-thousandth, then slower still. “You can see that the black-hole cannon did fire, successfully,” he said. “But the structural failure occurred at that moment of firing.” He nodded to Torec, the ship’s engineer.

Torec walked through key moments in Nilis’s Virtuals, picking out freeze-frame images and referring the audience to bits of technical detail. “Firing the black-hole shells places the greatest stress on the ship’s systems as a whole.” To provide a stable platform when the cannon fired, the greenship’s inertial adjustors had to keep the ship anchored in spacetime. But the recoil of these spacetime bullets put far more strain on the adjustors than they had been designed for. “Remember, each shell has the mass of a small mountain. The energy drain is huge, the momentum recoil enormous. And unless the structural balance is exactly right, you get a failure. As in this case.”

She spoke well, Pirius thought with a mixture of envy and nostalgia. She had grown so much. The mixed-up cadet who had been press-ganged into flying with him to Earth just a few months ago could never have made such a presentation.

Eliun spoke for the first time. “Show me the point of failure.” His voice was like the man, oily, unperturbed.

Torec ran through a series of stop-motion images of the greenship at the moment of its terminal catastrophe, magnified so heavily they broke up into crowding cubical pixels. She showed the first instants of failure, using two bright red laser-pointer beams which intersected on the ship’s Virtual image. The point they picked out was just a flare of light, right at the junction of the cannon pod with the main hull. In that first moment the failure looked harmless, but the ship hadn’t held together for another half-second. Skewered neatly by the crisscrossing beams, the point in space and time when the Earthworm had died was unambiguous.

Pirius knew that all this was irrelevant, to some extent. For him, the greatest failures of the test flight had been navigation and accuracy. Even if they could overcome the problem of the damn ship blowing itself up in the moment of firing, to get the one-hundredth-of-one-percent accuracy of positioning Nilis was demanding, the navigational control of the ships was going to have to be improved by an order of magnitude.

Idly Pirius glanced over his shoulder at the source of the laser pointers. They came from light globes that drifted at the back of the room. The beams’ location of the failure point on the Virtual had been precise to well within the size of a pixel on that much-magnified image. An idea hovered at the back of his mind, elusive. He tried to relax his thinking -

“…Pirius.”

Nilis was calling his name. Commander Darc was glaring at him.

“Sir, I’m sorry. I was just thinking that—”

“Yes, yes,” said Nilis impatiently. “I asked if you as pilot had anything to add to Torec’s expert presentation.”

“No. I’m sorry,” Pirius said.

Nilis harrumphed. Now he turned to Commander Darc, as the Earthworm’s navigator.

Darc had clearly been waiting for this moment. His strong face blank and threatening, he turned on Eliun, who had been looking faintly bored. “I have no report, Guild-master. Only a question.”

“Go ahead, Commander.”

“You’ve seen the report. You saw the summary before you walked into the room. How will you help us resolve this issue of structural integrity?”

Eliun spread his fingers on the table. “I’m sure your analysis, if sufficiently deep, will—”

“Our analysis,” Darc cut in. “Ours. But the Commissary’s Project is a scratch operation that has been running on a shoestring for a matter of weeks. Whereas you have been running greenships for millennia.” He leaned forward and glared. “I would like to know, Guild-master, why the Engineers have obstructed this project from the day Nilis came here.”

That unexpected shot got through Eliun’s defenses; for an instant, shock creased his face. But he said with quiet control. “Commander, I’ll enjoy speaking to your seniors about your future career path.”

Nilis bustled forward, his own agitation obvious, a vein showing in his forehead. This was the crux of the meeting, Pirius saw. Nilis said, “Well, that’s your privilege, Guild-master. But before we descend into personal attacks, shall we examine the issue? You see, faced with our cruel timescale, we’ve been struggling, not only against a shortage of resources and antiquated test craft, but against — how shall I put it? — secrecy.

“After the prototype work in Sol system, we’re now trying to integrate our new systems into a greenship’s design. But as the Commander implies, we’ve been given nothing by your people on the craft’s technical aspects. Surely you have blueprints, records, practical experience you could offer us? And then there is the GUT engine itself. Again we’ve been given no documentation. Remember, we’re trying to use it to run black-hole cannon! As we’ve tried to work our way through its antiquated interfaces, we’ve felt more like archaeologists than engineers. My eyes, you must have the technical knowledge we’re struggling to retrieve here! You’ve been running ships of more or less this design for, what — three thousand years?”

“A little longer,” Eliun said smoothly. “And not of ’more or less’ this design, Commissary — exactly this design.”

Darc eyed him. “Three thousand years of stasis. And you’re proud of that, are you?”

“It’s clear that you misunderstand our objectives. Our mission is not innovation but preservation…”

The Guild of Engineers was an ancient agency. It had grown out of a loose band of refugees from the Qax Occupation, who had spent centuries stranded in space. When the Qax were thrown out they had come home, their antique technology carefully preserved. In the internecine struggles that had developed during the establishment of the Interim Coalition, mankind’s first post-Occupation government, the Engineers, with their ancient bits of technological sorcery and their proud record of resistance to the Qax, had been well-placed to grab some power for themselves. And they had kept their place at the highest levels of the Coalition ever since.

“But you’re not engineers,” Darc said contemptuously. “Not if you resist innovation. You’re museum- keepers.”

Eliun said, “Commander, our technologies reached their plateau of perfection millennia ago. There can be no innovation that does not worsen what we have. We Engineers preserve the wisdom of ages—”

“You pore over your ancient, unchanging designs, polished with use—”

“ — and we standardize. Have you thought about that? Commander, your pilots fly greenships of identical design from one end of this Galaxy to the other. Think of the cost savings, the economies of scale!”

Nilis was as angry as Pirius had ever seen him. “But your perfect designs and your standardized parts lists are not winning the war, Guild-master! And — yes, I’ll say it now — in your obstructionism you seem bent on ensuring that this project, which might hasten the war’s end, never gets a chance to fly.”

Pirius laid a hand on Nilis’s threadbare sleeve. “Commissary, take it easy.”

Nilis shook him off. “If there’s one thing I can’t bear, Pirius, it is the hoarding of knowledge as power. There’s too much of that on Earth — too much! And I won’t have it here.”

Eliun said coldly, “And I won’t take lectures in duty from rogue Commissaries and junior Naval officers.”

“Then we are at an impasse. I suggest we adjourn this meeting until I’ve heard from Earth.” Nilis turned to Pila. “Adjutant, would you please open a channel to Minister Gramm’s office on Earth? I think we must appeal to the Minister, and through him to the Plenipotentiary for Total War and the Grand Conclave itself, where I hope this issue will be resolved.”

Eliun laughed in his face. “Commissary, don’t you understand? The Engineers have seats on the Conclave, too.”

“We will see,” said Nilis darkly, and he stalked from the room.

Pirius felt oddly calm. He had sat through too many meetings like this. And he had been distracted from these fireworks by his vague thoughts about intersecting laser light. As the meeting broke up, he tapped Darc and Torec on the shoulders. “Listen. I have an idea…”

As they left the room they passed the Silver Ghost, which hadn’t moved or said a word during the interrupted meeting. Pirius wondered what emotions swirled beneath that glistening, featureless hide.

On the way, Pirius called ahead for a sim room to be set up.

Only a few minutes after ducking out of Nilis’s adjourned meeting, the three of them were once more sitting in their crew blisters, at the end of the outstretched limbs of the Earthworm. The Virtual simulation around them was faultless, although the target Rock looked a little too shiny to be true.

As they waited for the sim to finish booting up, Darc growled, “This is bringing back unhappy memories. Whatever you’re planning, Pirius, I hope it’s worth it.”

Pirius said hesitantly, “Commander — can I speak freely?”

Darc laughed.

“The way you took on the Guild-master. I was surprised.”

“Did you enjoy watching me blow my career?”

“No, sir.”

“Not that there’s much left to blow,” Darc said. “Marshal Kimmer will see to that, once this project is over.”

Pirius said frankly, “When we started this, I’d never have thought you would come out fighting for the Commissary like that. With respect, sir.”

Darc grunted. “I don’t much like Nilis. I think he’s an irresponsible idiot, and his project is almost bound to fail. Almost. But in that ’almost’ is a universe of possibility. If there’s a chance we can win the war with it, we have to resource the project until the point at which it fails. That’s our clear duty. And I never imagined the kind of crass reactions and ass-covering conservatism that we have come up against, over and over. I’ve seen a side of our politics I don’t like, Pilot, even inside the military.”

Torec said, “I suppose we have all come on a long journey.”

Darc said, “But if either of you repeat any of this to Nilis I’ll rip off your heads with my bare hands. Do you understand me?”

“Received and understood,” Pirius said.

With a soft chime the sim signaled it was ready to run.

Darc said, “It’s time you explained what we’re doing here, Pirius.”

“I want to try an idea,” Pirius said. “It came to me when Torec used those laser pointers in the meeting.”

She sounded baffled. “Lasers?”

“Bear with me. We’ll run through our approach to the rock. Everything will be exactly as before. I’ve downloaded Torec’s structural analyses of the failure—”

“So we’ll fall apart, like before.”

“Maybe. But this time, Torec, I want you to fire the starbreakers as we go in.”

“What’s the use?” she asked. “They will only scratch the Rock’s surface. And if the cannon fails—”

“Just do it. But, Torec, I want you to cross the beams…”

They both grasped the idea very quickly. It took only minutes to program new instructions into their weapons and guidance systems.

Once again Pirius took the controls; once again the ship swooped along its invisible attack arc toward the Rock. They ran the whole thing in real time, and thanks to the simulator’s precise reproduction, the ship’s handling felt as clumsy as it had before.

But this time around, one second before the closest approach to the Rock, the starbreakers lit up. They swiveled and crossed at a point exactly a hundred kilometers below the ship’s position. So the Earthworm sailed in on its target through the sim’s imaginary space with an immense, slim triangle of cherry-red light dangling beneath it.

When the ship passed the rock, the crossed starbreakers dug deep into its impact-chewed surface. Dust fountained up: that point of intersection was lost in the rock’s interior layers. Too low, then. But the guidance system, slaved to the starbreakers, jolted the ship upward until the crossing point was touching the Rock’s surface, just stroking it, leaving little more than a furrow of churned-up regolith.

All this in the second of closest approach.

When the black-hole cannon fired, the projectiles sailed down the lines of the starbreakers and collided with each other at the point of their intersection, precisely one hundred kilometers below the ship.

The simulation software wasn’t up to modeling the collision of two black holes, or to show realistically the detonation of an asteroid. But the ship, suffering the same structural failures as before, blew up pretty convincingly. The Virtuals melted away, leaving Pirius, Darc, and Torec sitting side by side in a room walled with blank blue light.

Torec said, “So we’re going to use starbreakers as an altimeter. You think big when you want to, Pirius, don’t you?”

Darc brought up a rerun of the last moments. They had to see it with their own eyes before they believed it.

“I think it worked,” Pirius said.

Darc growled, “Pilot, you are learning understatement from that fat Commissary.”

Pirius allowed himself one second of self-congratulation. Then he stood up, pushing away the restraints of his couch. “We’ve a lot to do,” he said. “We’ll need to see what we can do about improving the accuracy of the starbreaker mounts. They weren’t intended for pinpoint work like this. And we’ll have to slave the guidance properly to the starbreakers.”

“Yes,” Torec said, and she added with feeling: “I’d also like to find a way to fire these damn cannon without killing myself.”

Nilis came bustling into the sim room. “Here you are!” he cried. He was cock-a-hoop. He grabbed Pirius by the shoulders and shook him; for Nilis this was a remarkably physical display. “My boy — my boy!”

Darc said dryly, “I take it the Grand Conclave endorsed your stance, Commissary.”

“In every particular. That polished oaf Eliun and his cronies have been ordered to cooperate with us, or else simply hand over their data to my technicians. The Conclave have backed me. They backed me! I have to pinch myself to believe it. Can you see what this means historically? The logjam at the top of human government is finally breaking up! Is the madness that has gripped us for so long at last falling away? And I couldn’t have done it without you, Commander!”

“Don’t push it, Commissary,” warned Darc.

Pirius thought this over. He was starting to get a sense of the drama unfolding around this strange project. Today a power center as old as the Coalition itself had suffered a historic reversal. However this mission turned out, nothing would be left the same: twenty thousand years of history really were coming to an end here. And, in a sense, it was because of him.

With one finger Torec gently closed his mouth, which was gaping open. “So we beat another bureaucrat,” she said. “Now all we’ve got to do is dive-bomb a black hole.”

“Yes. How soon can we set up a fresh test flight?”

“Tomorrow,” said Darc. “And then we’re going to have to think about a training program — how to fly this thing in anger… always assuming you can find the crew to fly.”

“We aren’t going to get bored, sir,” Pirius said.

Darc laughed.

They made their way out of the sim room, talking, planning.

Chapter 41

As the young universe unfolded, some of the spacetime-chemistry races developed high technologies. They ventured from their home “worlds,” and came into contact with each other. Strange empires were spun across galaxies of black holes. Terrible wars were fought.

Out of the debris of war, the survivors groped their way to a culture that was, if not unified, at least peaceable. A multispecies federation established itself. Under its benevolent guidance new merged cultures propagated, new symbiotic ecologies arose. The endless enrichment of life continued. The inhabitants of this golden time even studied their own origins in the brief moments of the singularity. They speculated about what might have triggered that mighty detonation, and whether any conscious intent might have lain behind it.

Time stretched and history deepened.

It was when the universe was very old indeed — ten billion times as old as it had been at the moment of the breaking of its primordial symmetry — that disaster struck.

Light itself did not yet exist, and yet lightspeed was embedded in this universe.

At any given moment, only a finite time had passed since the singularity, and an object traveling at lightspeed could have traversed only part of the span of the cosmos. Domains limited by lightspeed travel were the effective “universes” of their inhabitants, for the cosmos was too young for any signal to have been received from beyond their boundaries. But as the universe aged, so signals propagated further — and domains which had been separated since the first instant, domains which could have had no effect on each other before, were able to come into contact.

And as they overlapped, life-forms crossed from one domain into another.

For the federation, the creatures that suddenly came hurtling out of infinity were the stuff of nightmare. These invaders came from a place where the laws of physics were subtly different: the symmetry-breaking which had split gravity from the GUT superforce had occurred differently in different domains, for they had not been in causal contact at the time. That difference drove a divergence of culture, of values. The federation valued its hard-won prosperity, peace, and the slow accumulation of knowledge. The invaders, following their own peculiar imperatives, were intent only on destruction, and fueling their own continuing expansion. It was like an invasion from a parallel universe. Rapprochement was impossible.

The invaders came from all around the federation’s lightspeed horizon. Reluctantly, the federation sought to defend itself, but a habit of peace had been cultivated for too long; everywhere the federation fell back. It seemed extinction was inevitable.

But one individual found a dreadful alternative.

Just as the cosmos had gone through a phase change when gravity had separated from the GUT force, so more phase changes were possible. The GUT force itself could be induced to dissociate further. The energy released would be catastrophic, unstoppable, universal — but, crucially, it would feed a new burst of universal expansion.

The homelands of the invaders would be pushed back beyond the lightspeed horizon.

But much of the federation would be scattered too. And, worse, a universe governed by a new combination of physical forces would not be the same as that in which the spacetime creatures had evolved. It would be unknowable, perhaps unsurvivable.

It was a terrible dilemma. Even the federation was unwilling to accept the responsibility to remake the universe itself. But the invaders encroached, growing more ravenous, more destructive, as they approached the federation’s rich and ancient heart. In the end there was only one choice.

A switch was thrown.

A wall of devastation burned at lightspeed across the cosmos. In its wake the very laws of physics changed; everything it touched was transformed.

The invaders were devastated.

The primordial black holes survived — and, by huddling close to them, so did some representatives of the federation.

But the federation’s scientists had not anticipated how long this great surge of growth would continue. With the domain war long won, the mighty cosmic expansion continued, at rates unparalleled in the universe’s history. Ultimately, it would last sixty times the age of the universe at its inception, and it would expand the federation’s corner of spacetime by a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion. Human scientists, detecting the traces of this great burst of “inflation,” the single worst catastrophe in the universe’s long history, would always wonder what had triggered it. Few ever guessed it was the outcome of a runaway accident triggered by war.

As the epochal storm continued the survivors of the federation huddled, folding their wings of spacetime flaws over themselves. When the gale at last passed, the survivors emerged into a new, chill cosmos. So much time had passed that they had changed utterly, and forgotten who they were, where they had come from. But they were heirs of a universe grown impossibly huge — a universe all of ten centimeters across.

Quin Base shocked Pirius Red.

Chapter 42

He was dismayed by the cramped corridors and heaped-up bunks of the barracks, the crowding, the stink of shit and urine and semen, the metallic odors of failing life-support systems. The people swarmed through their cavernous lairs, feeding and sleeping, shouting and wrestling and rutting. The only difference he could see between privates and cadets was the gleaming metallized pupils of the “veterans.” He thought their silvery stares made them seem inhuman, like huge, lithe rats, perhaps.

If he had been faced with hostility in the barracks back at Arches, here he was regarded with undisguised loathing. In fact, the station commander, a stern prosthetic-wearer called Captain Marta, insisted that he and Pila were accompanied by guards wherever they went.

Pila, oddly, didn’t seem disturbed by this squalor. “What did you expect? Pirius, you are a pilot; you are relatively skilled and intelligent, and in battle you would be expected to show individual initiative. The conditions of your upbringing and training reflect that. These cadets are animals to be thrown onto some dismal Rock to dig and fight and die. This is a war of economics, remember. How much do you think it is worth spending on their brief, wretched lives?”

Pirius wondered if she was wearing nose filters.

“You just don’t fit in,” said Enduring Hope.

“Thanks,” said Pirius dryly.

Hope and Pirius Red faced each other across the small room in Quin’s cramped Officer Country that had been commandeered for Pirius’s use. This engineer, who had flown with Pirius Blue aboard the Assimilator’s Claw in a different destiny, was one of the first candidates selected by Pila. Pirius Red had only met Hope from across the courtroom, during the hearing on the magnetar episode.

Hope seemed to regard Red as an inferior version of Blue. It was deeply disconcerting to be known so well by somebody Pirius had never properly met before — known, and judged, and found wanting.

“You don’t belong here,” Hope said. “Your adjutant doesn’t either, but she looks like an earthworm, and you can see she doesn’t care.”

“How perceptive,” murmured Pila.

“You, though — you’re neither one thing nor the other. You’re not an earthworm, but you walk around like one. You want us to accept you, to take you back. Everyone can see it in your face. You’re needy. But you can’t come back. You’re polluted.”

“Maybe,” Pirius said tightly. “But I had no choice about what happened to me.”

Hope shrugged. “Doesn’t change the fact.”

“And whatever you think about me, I have a job to do. I want you to help me do it.” He outlined the assignment he wanted Hope to take. On Rock 492, Hope would be in overall charge of the ground crews. He knew Hope had been assigned to artillery batteries here on Quin, and he imagined Hope, a born engineer, would be attracted by the idea of getting back to working on ships.

But Hope said, “Why me? There are plenty of other engineers stranded on this rock.”

Pirius shrugged. “I — I mean, Pirius Blue — once selected you for his crew. I have to trust my own judgment.” He forced a smile at his own weak joke. “And remember, our duty isn’t to do what we want—”

Hope leaned forward, suddenly angry. “Don’t patronize me with crиche slogans, you desk jockey. I know all about duty.”

“I’m sorry. Look, Hope, I won’t have you assigned if you don’t want it. I want to work with you, not against you.”

Enduring Hope stood up. “I’ll do it if Pirius does it. I mean,” he said caustically, “the real Pirius.”

Pirius Red faced other problems when he interviewed other candidates.

He was brought a young woman called Tili, who, it was said, had shown intuitive promise as a navigator before she had been banished to this dismal place for some irrelevant misdemeanor. Her condition shocked him. She had been wounded in action, and though her physical injuries were healed, her eyes were wide and filled with an inchoate pain. He got off to a bad start when she wouldn’t even respond to her name. It seemed she had been one of a set of triplets; since the other two had been killed, she had insisted on being known only by her “family” number, Three.

She wouldn’t volunteer for his squadron, but she would follow orders, she said. “But it makes no difference whatever we do.”

“Of course it does—”

“No. Ask This Burden Must Pass.”

“Who?”

She shrugged, and sat apathetically until he released her.

After similar experiences with other cadets, as Burden’s name came up repeatedly, Pirius realized that to penetrate the strange, deviant culture of this Base, he was going to have to meet this frontline prophet.

And, as he had always known, he was going to have to confront his own future self.

This Burden Must Pass — or Quero, as Pila insisted on calling him — didn’t fit into this colony of child soldiers. He was too tall, too old, too experienced. He sat in Pirius’s commandeered office with a relaxed calm, and yet somehow dominated the room. He was centered, that was the word; he made Pirius feel young, unformed.

Pirius said, “You’re a good flyer. Your training record is clear about that.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’re good at keeping yourself alive. I’d want you in my squadron for those qualities alone.”

Burden nodded. But as he took in the notion that Pirius was offering him a flight post he avoided Pirius’s gaze, oddly. “Whatever you say.”

Pirius delivered his standard line. “I’m reluctant to draft you. I want volunteers, if I can get them; the mission is going to be tough enough as it is without reluctant conscripts.”

“You’re wise.”

“But the point is,” Pirius said, “there are many others here on Quin who won’t consider coming with me unless you are there. I don’t understand the hold you have over them.”

“I suppose I give them hope,” Burden said.

“It’s this philosophy of yours, isn’t it? You’re a Wignerian. You believe that all of this,” he waved a hand, “will be wiped out when—”

“When we reach timelike infinity,” said Pila coldly. She regarded Burden with undisguised loathing. For all her cynicism, she was a strict Druzite, and Burden’s non-conformity shocked her. “You’re only here because you’re an opinion former.” She waved manicured fingers. “Out there, in that pit you call a barracks.”

“I don’t want to form anyone’s opinion. I’m only myself.”

“Garbage,” Pila said. “I’m astonished the commanders here tolerate your deviance. I wouldn’t, for a second.”

“You’ll get used to it. And after all, it doesn’t matter. This burden must pass,” Burden said, and he grinned.

“In any case,” she said, “it doesn’t make any difference if you join us or not. Because whatever we do, all of this will be erased anyhow, won’t it? And so what’s the point of getting out of your bunk?”

“There is always a point,” Burden said mildly. “All the worldlines contribute to the whole, in some sense beyond our understanding. And of course there are always the people around you. You must care for them, as they care for you. I do believe in timelike infinity, in the final convergence—”

Pirius nodded. “But we have a duty to behave as if it’s not so. As if this is the only chance we get.”

Burden eyed him. “You understand. You and I — I mean, Pirius Blue — have had long discussions about these points. You’re deeper than you look, Pirius Red.”

“Thanks,” Pirius said. “Look, I’m not interested in your endorsement for myself. But it seems I need it to get my job done. Will you fly with me?”

Now the moment of commitment had come, and Pirius, watching Burden closely, thought he saw a flash of fear in his eyes. There were depths to this strange man, he realized. “You can refuse if you want,” he said, groping for understanding.

But the instant had passed, and Burden’s smiling control returned. “I think you know I will accept.”

Pila snorted her disgust. But she turned another box in her checklist from red to green.

As Burden made to leave, he turned back. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“There have been rumors—”

“Rumors?”

“That you brought a Silver Ghost with you from Earth. A live Ghost.”

Pirius glanced at Pila, who rolled her eyes; they had had little cooperation from the Quin commanders over security. He said, “I can’t comment on that. And I don’t understand your interest anyhow.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Burden.

Pirius sensed it actually mattered a great deal. There was much he didn’t understand about Burden, he thought — perhaps a lot Burden didn’t even understand about himself.

But there was no time to think about it now, because he had to face a still more difficult interview.

Pirius Blue was arrogant, cocky.

His face, of course, was Pirius Red’s own. But Red was shocked by how old he had become, even compared to his memory from the trial seven months ago, as if far more than a couple of years now separated them. And the infantry-standard silvered discs that replaced his pupils were eerie, glinting.

“Let me get this straight,” Blue said. “You want me to fly in your kiddie squadron. You want me to report to you.”

Red worked hard to keep his temper under control. “It isn’t unprecedented.” That was true; he had had Pila look out the records. “There have been many instances of temporal twins serving together.”

“Yes, but not with one under the command of another.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m you,” said Blue. “Or rather, I’m what you wish you were. I’m the older, wiser, more experienced, better-looking you.” He actually leered at Pila, trying to put her off. Red felt obscurely proud of the contemptuous loathing she projected back.

In his brief few days as a squadron leader, Red had begun to learn the elements of command. Now he summoned all that up. “Get this straight,” he snapped, and Blue looked surprised at his tone. “I don’t like this situation any more than you do. But I’m stuck with it. I’ve got a mission, I’ve got my duty, and I intend to perform it.”

“Don’t lecture me, you… you—”

“What?” Pirius stood up and leaned over the table. “What? What do you think I am? I’m not your clone. I’m not a cadre sibling, or a brother, or even a twin. I’m not some failed copy of you. I’m you. Maybe you resent my existence. But believe me, I resent yours far more. I’m here,” he said. “So are you. Get over it.”

Blue shook his head. “If you’re drafting me—”

“I’ve drafted nobody. I’m looking for volunteers.” That seemed to surprise Blue. “I know you can do the job,” Red said. “Because I know myself that well.”

“So you want me to volunteer.”

“No. I want more than that. I want you to support me.”

“Why? To make you feel good?”

“No. Because you’ll bring with you good people, like Enduring Hope and Cohl.”

“I’ll think about it—”

“Crap. Tell me now, or walk away.”

Blue, staring boldly at him, shook his head. “You speak to me that way. But you’ve no idea what I’ve seen here. None at all.”

“Give me an answer.”

The silence stretched. Pila sat silently, evidently fascinated, as the two halves of Pirius, locked together by fate and mutual loathing, faced each other down.

Eventually Pirius Blue agreed. Pirius Red always knew he would, though the two of them would fight all the way to Chandra. After all, that was what he would have done himself.

As Blue turned to go, Red stopped him. “We’re going to have to learn to get along. We’ll always have seventeen years of our lives in common.”

“So what?” Blue snapped. “That’s the past.”

“Aren’t you going to ask about her?”

Blue’s back stiffened. “Who?”

“Torec. Come on, Blue. We need to talk it over.”

Blue shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s your Torec. Mine is — lost, in a timeline that’s never going to exist. You get used to it.” And he walked out.

Chapter 43

The monstrous swelling of the age of inflation was over.

The universe continued to expand, more sedately than before, but relentlessly. Still phase changes occurred, as the merged forces broke up further, and with each loss of symmetry more energy was injected into the expansion.

The release of the electromagnetic force from its prison of symmetry was particularly spectacular, for suddenly it was possible for light to exist. The universe lit up in a tremendous flash — and space filled immediately with a bath of searing radiation. So energetically dense was this first exuberant glow that it continually coalesced into specks of matter — quarks and antiquarks, electrons and positrons — that would almost as rapidly annihilate each other. There were no atoms yet, though, no molecules. Indeed, temperatures were too high for the quarks to combine into anything as sedate as a proton.

The primordial black holes, surviving from the age of spacetime chemistry, again provided some structure in this seething chaos; passing through the glowing soup they would gather clusters of quarks or anti-quarks. Though the quarks themselves continually melted away, the structure of these clusters persisted; and in those structures were encoded information. Interactions became complex. Networks and loops of reactions formed, some were reinforced by feedback loops.

Certain consequences inevitably followed. For this universe it was already an old story — but it was a new generation of life.

But this was a universe of division. For every particle of matter created there was an antimatter twin. If they met they would mutually annihilate immediately. It was only chance local concentrations of matter, or antimatter, that enabled any structures to form at all.

In these intertwined worlds of matter and antimatter, parallel societies formed. Never able to touch, able to watch each other only from afar, they nevertheless made contact, exchanging information and images, science and art, reciprocally influencing each other at every stage. Mirror-image cultures evolved, each seeking to ape the achievements of the unreachable other. There were wars too, but these were always so devastating for both sides that mutual deterrence became the only possible option. Even a few impossible, unrequitable parity-spanning love affairs were thrown up.

The fundamental division of the world was seen as essentially tragic, and inspired many stories.

The various matter species, meanwhile, were not the only inhabitants of this ferocious age. They shared their radiation bath with much more ancient life-forms. To the survivors of the spacetime- chemistry federation, this age of an endless radiation storm was cold, chill, empty, the spacetime defects which characterized their kind scattered and stretched to infinity. But survive they had. Slowly they moved out of their arks and sought new ways to live.

Chapter 44

In the end it took a whole week before Pirius had assembled his team of thirty, including himself and Torec, to serve as primary crew, and nine more as backups. But now there were only seven weeks left before Kimmer’s deadline, and serious work on training and development hadn’t even begun.

Pirius brought his recruits, from Quin and elsewhere, back to Rock 492. Even that was a budget operation; he and Pila had to scrounge spare spaces on scheduled transport ships.

On the journey back from Quin, he couldn’t avoid his other self; whenever they passed each other, their tense silence was chill. Everybody stared, fascinated.

Once back at 492, Red called Burden and Pirius Blue to the office he had had Pila set up. They stood side by side, at attention, but somehow Blue made his insolence show.

“I need two flight commanders,” Pirius Red said without preamble. “So you can guess why I called you here.”

Burden and Pirius Blue glanced at each other.

Burden frowned. Again he seemed oddly evasive. But he said, “It’s not a responsibility I want. But I wouldn’t turn it down.”

Pirius Red nodded. He turned to Blue. “And you?”

Blue was contemptuous. “Do I have a choice?”

Red snapped angrily, “More choice than you gave me when you came back from that magnetar. Look, from my point of view neither of you are ideal candidates. Burden, frankly, I’m suspicious of what’s going on in your head.” Burden looked away. “And Blue — I know you too well, and we’ll never get on. But I need you both; you’re the best I can find. Blue, you of all people know that.”

He waited. At length, Burden accepted the job, but distantly. Blue nodded curtly.

Red was relieved beyond words.

Now he was able to bring both Blue and Burden further into his confidence. All they had known up to this point, like the other candidates, was that the mission would involve difficult flying with novel technology. He began to explain what the target would be.

“You’re insane,” said Pirius Blue. “We’re going to strike at Chandra itself?” But Red saw that his eyes were alive with excitement.

Red said carefully, “You want me to take you off the mission? I could do that, though you know too much now; you’d have to be kept in custody until the flight was over.”

“And let somebody else fly this?” Blue grinned; he looked feral. “Not a chance.”

Pirius turned to Burden. “What about you?”

Burden seemed more troubled. “This could shorten the war.”

“Or lengthen it,” Blue said, “if it goes wrong badly enough.”

“Either way,” said Burden, “things must change.”

Pirius nodded. “Does that trouble you?”

“Whatever we do doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And it’s a noble action.”

Pirius had trouble decoding this glimpse of an alien mindset. “Does that mean you’re in?”

Again Pirius perceived a flash of fear. Blue saw it, too, and glanced at Burden, worried.

But Burden straightened his shoulders. “Yes, sir!”

Once the last transport had docked, Pirius Red brought his recruits to 492’s largest pressurized dome and had them draw up in good order before him. With Pila at his side, he stood awkwardly on a crate, the only rostrum he could find.

He looked along their lines, at Jees’s clunky artificial torso, at the anomalously old, like Burden, at damaged children like Three — and, Lethe, at his own sullen, other-timeline face. He found it hard to believe that there had been such a rabble drawn up anywhere on the Front in all this war’s long history.

Nevertheless they were a squadron, and they were his.

“Forty of us,” he said. “Forty, including Pila, here, my adjutant. And this is our base. It isn’t much, but it’s ours. And we’re about to be transferred into Strike Arm. We’re a squadron now. And we’re special,” he said.

There was a guffaw, quickly suppressed.

“So we are,” Pirius went on. “We are a special generation, with a special duty, a privilege. The Galaxy-center engagement with the Xeelee began three thousand years ago. And we are the first generation in all those long years to have a chance of winning this war — of winning the Galaxy itself. Whether we succeed or we fail, they will remember us, in the barracks-rooms and the shipyards and the training grounds, and on the battlefields, for a long time to come.”

The crews just stood silently and stared back at him. His words had sounded empty, even to him. His self-doubt quickly gathered.

Enduring Hope spoke up. “We need a name.”

“What’s that?”

“A name. For the squadron. Every squadron needs a name.”

Pila murmured a suggestion in his ear, and he knew it was right. “Exultant,” he said. “We are Exultant Squadron.”

They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.

When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.

She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime, Squadron Leader, we have work to do.”

Chapter 45

Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.

As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and anti-quarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed — but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce — and then, inevitably, all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.

Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter- cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.

Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe — and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.

The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and one matter particles would be formed — and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.

The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.

Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.

Another metaphorical switch was pulled.

Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.

Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished,

leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.

Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.

Chapter 46

Running behind a grav shield was like flying into an endless tunnel.

From her pilot’s blister, Torec looked ahead through the usual clutter of Virtual warning flags, at a wall of turbulence. The result of the gravastar shield’s spacetime distortions, it was like a breaking wave front, roughly circular, blue-white Core light mixed up and muddled and somehow stretched out in a way that hurt her eyes. There was something deeply unsettling about it, she thought, something that offended her instincts on some profound level.

When she glanced around she could see bright green sparks arrayed around her field of view. They were the other greenships of her flight, which was led today by Pirius Blue, high up there in Torec’s sky — Blue, the weird, embittered future-twin version of her own Pirius, who had unaccountably been made flight commander.

The squadron was learning how to fly in formation, and with the grav shield. This was Torec’s second training run of the day, her tenth of the week so far, and in the turnarounds she hadn’t caught a great deal of sleep. But she put aside her eyeball-prickling fatigue and peered ahead, trying to stay focused on the peculiar phenomenon that might one day save her life, if it didn’t kill her first.

The gravastar shield was something not quite of this universe, and the product of inhuman Ghost technology too. No wonder it looked weird. But the theory of its use was simple. Just fly in behind the grav shield, keep to your formation, follow your leader. The flaw was receding from her at nearly lightspeed, and it was her job to keep her greenship plummeting after it, tucked up into this more or less liveable pocket of smooth spacetime, not so close that the tidal stresses and fallout from the shield itself were so severe that they would destroy you, and yet close enough that the Xeelee could have no foreknowledge of your approach, because — and it still took her some hard thinking to grasp this — you were effectively in another universe.

At the center of her field of view was a greenship tucked right in behind the wall of curdled horror. That ship, the “shield-master” as the crews called it, was laden with the grav field generators. Today it was piloted by Jees, the sullen, determined prosthetic rescued from admin duties by Pirius Red, now proving to be one of the best pilots in Exultant Squadron. There was nobody Torec would have preferred to see up there at point than Jees; if anybody could manage the propagation of a kilometer- wide wave front of spacetime distortion it was her.

But as Torec watched, that central green pinpoint wavered, just subtly. It was enough to send alarms sounding in Torec’s head, long before her Virtual displays lit up with more red flags.

Jees was having stability problems. Already Torec could see the shimmering of the grav shield front, and spacetime distortions heading back down the “tunnel” toward her own ship. They made the images of the more distant stars ripple and swarm, as if seen through a heat haze.

“Here we go again,” she called. “Brace for impact.”

“Pilot, Engineer. I got it. Locking down systems.” That was her engineer, Cabel: very young, very intense.

Torec called, “Navigator? What about you?” When there was no reply, she snapped, “Three. Lethe, girl, wake up.”

Tili Three called back, “Uh — Pilot, Navigator. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry. Just do your job.” She glanced at her displays. “Impact in thirty. Twenty-nine…”

Cabel, seventeen years old, was very able, and had completed his training for this flight in days. He was one of Pirius Blue’s “baby rats,” as Pirius Red put it a bit sourly, rescued by Pirius’s older self from the lethal servitude of Quin. Having worked with Cabel intensely, Torec backed Blue’s judgment.

Tili Three was another baby rat — but she was different. If anything, she was intrinsically smarter than Cabel. Though she had come into the squadron without having completed her basic navigator training, Pirius Blue had insisted on pushing her into Exultant, and now she had wound up in Torec’s crew. Torec had no doubt about her basic ability, in the classroom. But on these training runs — Lethe, even in the sims — she just couldn’t cut it. And so it seemed to be now.

The ripples washed down the tunnel at her. They were intense pulses of gravity waves. Torec saw the lead ships thrown from side to side, like bits of dirt on turbulent water. She braced.

The spacetime wash hit. The stars frothed around her. The ship pitched so violently she could feel it in her gut, even through the inertial shielding. She struggled to hold her line.

The trouble was, the grav shield was fundamentally unstable. No, worse than that, it actually was an instability, a fizzing, nonlinear flaw in spacetime. That was why it propagated in the first place, like a breaking wave. So having set it off, if you let it run by itself, it would push up to lightspeed and then disperse in a spectacular, bone-shaking explosion — or else it would collapse back into sublight, dissipating its energy. The propagating grav shield was an edge-of-chaos phenomenon, and had to be tweaked continually by the shield-master if it was to hang together.

But even here, in the calm, flat spacetime around Arches Base, it was all but impossible to hold everything together. Sailing along behind the shield was a constant strain, even when things went well. If the shield so much as wobbled, the little ships in its wake bobbed like motes of dust.

The ships handled badly, too. In theory, the prototype stage had passed, and they were into flight development, and these ships, fitted with the project’s new technologies, were the configuration they were supposed to fly into the center of the Galaxy. But it was only ten days since the first of them had come out of Enduring Hope’s workshops; they were lash-ups, and they flew like it.

Torec was having a particularly tough time. She wasn’t the best pilot in Exultant Squadron, she accepted that. And she was in Blue’s flight. Because of their complicated past, she thought — she had been with him in some other timeline, and with his own younger self now — Torec felt Blue had given her the roughest assignments, the worst ships, the greenest crews. And she knew she was never going to be allowed a crack at the most prestigious assignment of all, which was to pilot the shield- master itself.

Well, she wasn’t going to fail, not today.

As red flags flared throughout her cabin, she grasped her controls and tried to stabilize her ship. But it wallowed, its moments of inertia all wrong. Laden with its heavy singularity cannon it was desperately unresponsive; it was like trying to run with a laden pack on her back.

When she thought she had control she called, “All right. Navigator, this is the pilot. Plot us a way out of here.”

There was no reply. When Torec glanced out of her pod she could see Three sitting in her blister, strapped in like a toy, while red-flag Virtuals flared around her, and the sky wheeled. “Three. Three!”

“Give it up, Pilot,” Cabel snapped.

“No, damn it. Navigator!”

“She’s frozen. We don’t have time for this. Aim for altitude ninety. Take us straight up and out of this shit.”

A quick check of her own tactical displays showed he was right. If they weren’t capable of plotting an orderly way out, straight up and out of the gravastar wake was the only way to save the ship. She dug her hands into her displays once more, clenched her fists, and yelled her anger.

The greenship tipped up and shot out of the turbulent wake of the grav shield, and into the sanctuary of flat, smooth space.

At the end of each day Pirius Red held an “issues meeting.” Pila was at his side, quietly running the formal side of the meeting. Pirius Blue and Burden were here, along with Enduring Hope, Red’s representative among the ground crew.

Today Torec attended too. She was a bit of human warmth, alongside his adjutant, a woman from the other side of the Galaxy who hated his guts, and two flight commanders, a distracted religionist, and his own embittered future self. But Torec’s flight had crashed out today, and he knew she was bringing him issues, not emotional support.

A lot of the problems right now seemed to center on the use of the gravastar shield. So he had asked the Silver Ghost, the Ambassador to the Heat Sink, to sit in. The Ambassador’s huge, hovering form seemed to fill the little room, somehow sucking out its warmth. Burden was fascinated by the Ghost, but the two hard-faced Guardians who accompanied it everywhere ensured the only contact it had with anybody was formalized and specific.

Over a week of meetings like this, a trick Pirius had learned was to start with positives, and that was what he did now — and they were pretty big positives, too.

The main elements of the flight training program concerned the use of the new CTC processors for rapid tactical response, precision bombing, and formation flight in the wake of a grav shield. Well, there had been no significant problems with the CTC technology. Likewise the precision flying was going well. The pilots were getting used to the new dynamics of their clumsily modified ships. The starbreaker sighting technique he had come up with, perhaps because it had been figured out by a pilot in the first place, was fitting in easily with their methodology and instincts.

“The only bad news I can see in these areas,” he said, summing up, “is that it mightn’t be possible to give everybody enough time on the new gear. I’ve requisitioned as much sim time as I can…” But everybody knew simulations were no substitute for hands-on experience in a real craft. Besides, the technology was being modified so rapidly that the sim designs were quite often a day or two behind the real thing anyhow.

Pirius Blue stared at him; as always, judgmental, hostile. “And you think that’s a minor problem? That we might fly into combat without everybody even having had time to try out the new gear?”

“I didn’t say minor,” Red said testily. “It’s something we can minimize. Juggling the schedules, accelerating sim upgrades—”

They argued on about the training issues for a while. Red let it run, trying to pick out positives, and identifying actions they could take.

Eventually the talk turned to the gravastar, the center of most of their issues.

Burden passed Pirius Red a data desk. “I’ve a summary of the stats here,” he said. “To date, the longest formation flight we’ve managed is two hours.” Everybody knew they would need to fly behind the shields for six hours to reach Chandra.

Blue said, “We just have to go back and keep trying, until we get it right.”

“But that’s wearing out the crews,” Burden said evenly.

Enduring Hope raised a hand to speak. “Not only the crews,” he said firmly. “You have to think about the ships as well. Maybe it isn’t obvious to you glamour-boy pilots, but even when you don’t get a catastrophic failure, every time you fly you’re fatiguing the structure and the systems. We are going to have to use at least some of these ships in anger. And if we’ve worn them out even before we’ve done training—”

“I hear what you say,” Pirius Red said. “What I don’t know is what to do about it.”

Blue said, “Our problem isn’t our ships, or our people. It’s that damn grav shield. If it stayed stable we could track it for six hours — or ten, or a hundred. But we can’t keep it stable. We can fly our ships, but we can’t fly the shield.”

“Ah,” said Burden. “And why? Because it’s Ghost technology, not human.”

Pirius Red took a deep breath. He’d been prepared for this moment. “So,” he said slowly, “we need a Ghost to fly it.”

In the shocked silence that followed, Torec helped him out. “That is what we did with the prototype, back in Sol system, and for the exact same reasons. A Ghost has to fly Ghost technology.”

The Ghost, which had been hovering like an immense soap bubble, suddenly drifted half a meter forward. It altered the geometry of the meeting, disturbing everybody.

Pirius Blue rubbed his nose, a gesture Red always found irritating. He said without emotion, “Are you serious? Are you suggesting that you allow a Silver Ghost to fly on a human combat mission?”

Red stared him down. “I felt the same, remember.” He had told Blue about his experiences on Pluto, how he had felt when first confronted by a Ghost. “The mission is more important than anything else.” He dared Blue to contradict him.

Blue looked disgusted.

Enduring Hope shrugged. “A Ghost in the cockpit? So what? If you’re going to stop smashing up my ships, you can train rats to fly for all I care.”

Burden’s reaction seemed more complex. “The question is, will our crews fly with a Ghost? We have all been trained from birth to despise their sleek hides.”

Pirius Red nodded. “I understand, believe me. If we do this, I’ll join the first flight myself. Show the way.”

“Good,” said Burden. “But also — I have to ask — will a Ghost fly with humans?”

“It did back in Sol system,” Torec said.

“But that was a technology proving exercise. This is combat training. We are enemies, remember.”

Pirius turned to the Silver Ghost. “Ambassador?”

The Ghost rolled, its subtle change of posture somehow indicating it was listening.

“You’ve heard what we have to say. Are you willing—”

“I anticipated the request.” Virtual schematics scrolled through the air in front of it. “I have taken the liberty of preparing a plan. We could be ready to fly tomorrow.”

That left them all speechless.

Pirius Blue said coldly, “I wonder whose agenda we are really following.”

Pirius Red broke up the meeting, trusting his people to figure out the actions required to achieve the new plan.

After the others had gone, Torec stayed behind. “Pirius — I need to talk to you. About Tili Three.”

“I saw your log.”

“She just isn’t going to cut it.” Torec shook her head, as miserable as if this was her own failure. “I don’t think it’s a lack of ability, or courage. And it’s nothing to do with her prosthesis. It’s just that she’s been through too much down on Quin. She’s burned out.”

This would be the fourth crew member Pirius had lost like this. The attrition rate was worrying, but there was nothing he could do about that; for some, this assignment was simply too tough.

Torec was upset. “I hate to raise this. I don’t want her hurt.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll sign her off as unfit for duty.” If he didn’t, she could be marked down as “Lacking Moral Fiber” — in the barracks, one of the worst stigmas you could have attached to your character. “Talk to Blue,” he told Torec. “He can break it to her.”

“Thanks,” she said. She glanced around; seeing the room was empty, she gave him a peck on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Squadron Leader.”

She hurried out. Pirius stared after her, bemused.

Pirius Red decided to hotfoot it to the refectory while he had a chance, but Nilis waylaid him.

Even here on 492, while the squadron got itself together, Nilis was continuing his multifaceted studies of Chandra’s mysteries, but he was still encountering baffling obstructions. “It’s immensely frustrating,” he would say. “After all, the clock is counting down for me too. At this rate we will have destroyed Chandra before we know what it is!”

To Pirius’s relief, though, he didn’t want to talk about the black hole today.

“I watched the transcript of your meeting,” the Commissary said. “Abbreviated, of course.”

Pirius frowned. “Do you think I’m wrong to allow the Ghost to lead us?”

“I don’t know if you’re right or wrong — and nor do you, until you try it. But it’s certainly a good idea.” Nilis smiled. “You’ve come a long way since Pluto, Pirius. I’m proud of you. You are becoming able to rise above your first reactions, your conditioning. I think it’s called maturity.”

Well, perhaps. Pirius had thought this over before the meeting, knowing he had to float the possibility. He told himself he had no qualms about using the Ghost: whatever it took to get the job done. Pluto was far away, weeks ago. But even so, it had been odd seeing Burden and Hope trailing a Silver Ghost as it headed out of the room; Blue’s face, a cold mirror of his own, had been like his own conscience. Had he really matured since Pluto? Or was he compromised by contacts with earthworms, as Blue kept telling him?

Nilis said, “If I may, I’ll ride along with you tomorrow, on this remarkable flight. As a Virtual passenger, I mean,” he added hastily.

“Why? Because it’s historic?” Pirius, overstressed, overworked, felt irritated. “To be frank, Commissary, I don’t think many of us are thinking about history right now.”

Nilis winked. “Ah, but history never stops thinking about you, pilot.”

For some reason that chilled Pirius. “We might not end up with any crew capable of flying anyhow,” he said bleakly. “We lost another one today.”

“Tili Three? I know. But you did the right thing, Pirius. You showed compassion.” Nilis smiled, his face crumpling slightly. “I’m no military man, but I believe this is called leadership. I have the feeling that if you keep this up, you’re going to become the kind of stubborn, loyal, dependable, inspirational fool who soldiers have always followed, to glory or their deaths.”

Hotly embarrassed, Pirius looked away. “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Of course not, of course not.” Nilis stared at Pirius with his big, moist eyes, and his expressive face was creased with concern. “And how are you in yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Pirius snapped. He gazed back defiantly for a moment, but when Nilis waited for more, he weakened. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “It’s just there is so much to do.”

Nilis laid his warm, heavy hand on Pirius’s shoulder. “Listen to me. You’re doing all that could be asked of you. If you manage to get your hastily assembled crews of veterans and misfits through such a challenging training program, and all in a few weeks — that in itself will be a massive achievement, regardless of how the mission turns out.” Nilis straightened up. “Remember this, though: you are your own most important resource. Make time for yourself. Lean on Pila more. Make sure you rest properly, eat, all the rest of it. Don’t neglect the biology. I’m relieved you decided to fly yourself tomorrow. Remember, I pushed for you to be squadron leader in the first place because you’re the best pilot I’ve ever encountered. So keep up your own training. And another thing…”

Pirius, his stomach rumbling, resumed his walk to the refectory. Nilis trailed him, advising, hectoring, arguing, his eyes bright and earnest.

So the next day Pirius Red found himself free of his desk, at the controls of a greenship, and “flying down the tunnel,” as the crews were starting to call it. Ahead of him was the oscillating, turbulent, eye-watering disc of a grav shield, and around him were walls of distorted spacetime.

The little constellation of greenship lights was steady. The flight, under Burden’s command — Pirius had been careful to relegate himself to a mere pilot’s role — was going well.

Right at its heart was the shield-master ship, piloted by Jees. The best pilot in the squadron, in this most difficult of environments, was once again flying steady and true. Pirius had assigned Torec to serve as Jees’s navigator today — but in her engineer’s pod was the massive form of the Silver Ghost, working the grav shield generators.

Unconventional it was, but it seemed to be working. Even Pirius’s own flight had been smooth, though he had deliberately taken on board two comparative rookies for his own navigator and engineer. Up to now, the flight couldn’t have conformed more to plan if this had been a sim, even though no flight that was a surf along the stitched-up interface between one universe and another, with a Silver Ghost as guest engineer, was ever going to be routine.

As the record time of two hours flying behind a shield approached, Pirius felt some of the tension seep out of his body.

Nilis, a Virtual uncomfortably lodged in the cockpit with Pirius, was, after the first hour or so, relaxed enough to dip into the comm loops between the ships. He was particularly intrigued by the conversation between This Burden Must Pass, the notorious Friend of Wigner, and the Silver Ghost in the lead ship. Burden was taking the chance of talking to the Ghost away from its Guardians.

“And so you believe,” came the Ghost’s simulated voice, “that this universe is essentially transient — all you sense, all you achieve, even your experiences of your inner self will pass away.”

“Not transient, exactly,” Burden called back. “Just one of an uncountably infinite number of possibilities which will, cumulatively, be resolved at timelike infinity, after the manner of a collapse of quantum functions.”

“But in that case, what basis for morality can there be?”

“There is a moral basis for every decision,” said Burden. “To show loyalty to one’s fellows — to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of one’s species. And while this is only one out of a myriad timelines, we believe that the, umm, the goodness in each timeline will sum at the decision point at timelike infinity to gather into Optimality…”

“Fascinating,” Nilis said to Pirius. The Commissary whispered, as if he might be overheard. “They are fencing, in a way. Each knows far more about the other’s beliefs than either is prepared to reveal. Fencing, and yet looking for common ground.”

Pirius Red was light on moral philosophy. “That stuff about putting one’s self in the way of harm for others — that sounded like Doctrine to me.”

“So it is,” Nilis said. “Much of the Friends’ ’philosophy’ is actually recycled Druzism — as you’d expect, given the environment it sprang from. Hama Druz seems to have believed that self-interest is the primary driver of any unthinking human action. He said that soldiers are therefore the only moral citizens of any society because only they have demonstrated their selfless morality by putting themselves in harm’s way.” He sniffed. “Of course Druz ignored the plentiful evidence of kinship bonds among the animals and insects — an ant isn’t driven by simple selfishness — and he certainly ignored Coalescences, human hive societies, which were plentiful even in his day. Druz was a good sloganeer, and he obviously was a key figure in human history. But he really wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker — I’ve always found his arguments terribly one-dimensional — haven’t you?”

Even now Pirius was horrified by such blasphemy, and he deflected the remark. “There’s more than just Druzism in Burden’s beliefs.”

“Oh, of course. The other element is this basic notion that this universe is an imperfect place that can somehow be fixed. It’s an expression of a feeling of betrayal, you see, a sense that one’s life is irredeemably imperfect and can never be made good. I can quite understand such a creed arising in a society of child soldiers — deliberately kept in miserable conditions as a motivator to fight — whose only escape is either to die young fighting, or grow old in shame. No wonder they want to believe things can be made better. They are quite right!

“But what’s interesting is that the Silver Ghosts came up with a similar belief. They too were betrayed by the universe, when their sun failed and their world froze over. They elaborated such traumas into a belief that the universe is a hostile place that must be tamed. But they sublimated their feelings of anger, not into the passive acceptance of the Friends, but into programs of exotic physics. They sought ways to change the universe — they tried to make it better!”

Pirius frowned. “You’re saying that the Friends are a Ghost cult?”

“Perhaps not as crude as that. But Ghost philosophy is the most interesting element in the whole volatile mix of this new creed.

“Humans fought Ghosts for long enough, and earlier we worked with them, too. Perhaps humans swapped beliefs with Ghosts. And if that’s so, perhaps the Friends may be the first interstellar religion, the first to fuse the traditions of two species… The Ultimate Observer could plausibly be a Ghost deity!”

Pirius frowned. “No human would follow a Ghost.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure, Pilot. People have followed more bizarre beings in the past, though they were mostly imaginary!” He sipped an invisible drink, not reproduced in the Virtual. “One has to wonder, though, if some such encounter as this wasn’t in the mind of that Ghost up there all the time — perhaps we have been given the gravastar technology as a ploy, so that the Ghosts can achieve their own ends, whatever they are. I suppose the great mixing-up that Project Prime Radiant is inflicting on the orderly pools of the Coalition is a good opportunity for subversion… I always did intend that we should shake up history, you and I. But one must wonder what great oaks might grow from the seeds we are planting today.”

Pirius didn’t like the sound of any of that. It sounded too much like the paranoia Nilis had criticized him for before. With a curt command, he shut down unnecessary chatter on the loops: the conversation between Ghost and Friend immediately stopped.

The little flotilla sailed on, huddling behind its wall of distorted spacetime, with only formal technical communications passing between the ships.

Chapter 47

The universe was expanding at half the speed of light. It was small and ferociously dense, still many times as dense as an atomic nucleus.

At least quarks were stable now. But in this cannonball of a cosmos the matter familiar to humans, composed of protons and neutrons — composites of quarks, stuck together by gluons — could not yet exist. There were certainly no nuclei, no atoms. Instead, space was filled with a soup of quarks, gluons and leptons, light particles like electrons and neutrinos. It was a “quagma,” a magma of quarks, like one immense proton.

As time wore inexorably away, new forms of life rose in the new conditions.

The now-stable quarks were able to combine into large assemblies; and as these assemblies complexified and interacted, the usual processes of autocatalysis and feedback began. The black holes were still there to provide structure, but larger clumps of matter also served as a stratum for life’s new adventures, and there was energy for free in the radiation bath that still filled the universe.

Among the new kinds, ancient strategies revived. There were exploiters and synthesizers. “Plants” fueled their growth with radiant energy — but there were no stars yet, no suns; rather the whole sky glowed. “Animals” evolved to feed off these synthesizers, and learned to hunt each other.

As always the variation in life-forms across the cosmos was extraordinarily wide, but most shared certain basics of their physical design. Almost all of them stored information about themselves in their own complicated structures, rather than in an internal genetic data store, as humans one day would: for these creatures their genotype was their phenotype, as if they were made wholly of DNA.

Their way of communicating would have seemed ferocious to a human. A speaker would modify its listener’s memories directly, by firing quagma pellets into them; it was a message carried in a spray of bullets. They even reproduced rather like DNA molecules. They opened out their structures, like flowers unfolding, and constructed a mirror-image version of themselves by attracting raw material from the surrounding soup of loose quarks. These “quagmites” were not quite like the creatures humans would one day encounter in the Galaxy’s Core, but they were their remote ancestors.

There was little in common in the physical basis of human and quagmite; a quagmite was not much bigger than an atomic nucleus. But the largest of the quagma creatures were composed of a similar number of particles to the atoms which would comprise a human body. So humans and quagmites were comparable in internal complexity, and their inner lives shared a similar richness. Many humans would have appreciated the best quagmite poetry — if they could have survived being bombarded by it.

Meanwhile, the quagmite creatures shared their universe with older forms of life.

The ancient spacetime-chemistry creatures, having survived yet another cosmic transition, gradually found ways to accommodate themselves to the latest climate, even though to them it was cold and dark and dead. In their heyday there had been no “matter” in the normal sense. But now they found they could usefully form symbiotic relationships with creatures formed of condensate matter: extended structures locked into a single quantum state. A new kind of being ventured cautiously through the light-filled spaces, like insects with “bodies” of condensate and “wings” of spacetime defects. It was the formation of a new kind of ecology, emerging from fragments of the old and new. But symbiosis and the construction of composite creatures from lesser components were eternal tactics for life, eternal ways of surviving changed conditions.

In the unimaginably far future humans would call the much-evolved descendants of these composite forms “Xeelee.”

The proto-Xeelee were, meanwhile, aware of another species of matter born out of this turbulent broth. This would one day be called dark matter by human scientists, for it would bond with other types of matter only loosely, through gravity and the weakest nuclear force. There was a whole hierarchy of particles of this stuff, even a sort of chemistry. This faint stuff passed through the quark- cluster cities and the nests of the proto-Xeelee alike as if they didn’t exist. But it was there — and, like the Xeelee, this dark matter was going to be around for good.

As the endless expansion continued, the quagmites swarmed through their quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told their legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

It seemed to the quagmites that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity. But it was a common error. The pace of life scaled to temperature: if you lived hot, you lived fast. The quagmites did not suspect that the creatures who had inhabited earlier, warmer ages had crammed just as many experiences — just as much “life” — into their brief instants of time. As the universe expanded, every generation, living slower than the last, saw only a flash of heat and light behind it, nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead — and each generation thought that it was only now that a rich life was possible.

The comfortable era of the quagmites couldn’t last forever; nothing ever did. It was when the universe was thirty times older than it was at the end of the matter-antimatter conflict that the first signs of the quagmites’ final disaster were detected.

Chapter 48

After five weeks of Kimmer’s ten, Exultant Squadron was to be transferred to Orion Rock, from which the assault on Chandra would be mounted.

It took three days for Rock 492 to be evacuated: the living areas emptied out, the squadron’s fifteen greenships lifted off the surface. When Pirius Red had first arrived on 492 it had been a garbage heap, but now that it was time to leave he was sorry. After all, he and Torec had taken this ruin and made it, not just their base of operations, but their home.

And, of his motley assembly of superannuated veterans and misfits, two had died in operations run out of this Rock. So there was blood soaked into its silvery regolith, human bones buried in its loose dirt, as they were buried on a billion other worlds and moons and asteroids across the face of the Galaxy.

On the last night, as the close-out crews did their work, Pirius kept Torec back. In their skinsuits they wandered through the empty chambers, the stripped-out barracks and refectories and dispensaries, the big engineering bays with their floors grooved and shaped to take equipment now removed. They could hear systems shutting down, one by one, the vibrations diminished, the circulation of air and water stopping, as if the Rock itself was slowly dying. As they walked from one chamber to the next, the light cut out behind them, so they were always walking out of darkness.

In the last chamber, they found a corner where they unzipped their skinsuits. The air was rapidly losing its heat, making them both shiver deliciously. They pushed the seams of their suits together and sealed themselves inside.

The inertial generators shut down. They found themselves rising from the floor. All around them specks of asteroid dust, disturbed by the Rock’s residual vibrations, rose up to make the air sparkle.

Deep inside the Cavity, a long way inside the Front, Orion Rock was buried in the North Arm of the Baby Spiral.

To reach it, Exultant Squadron formed a tight convoy. The ten prime greenships, with five backups, were at the center. All the greenships had been modified with the gear for Project Prime Radiant, but the equipment was bedded in now, and after the hours of training flights the crew knew how to handle their ungainly craft. The fighting ships were accompanied by equipment freighters, tenders, and other support craft, and a handful of command vessels, including Commissary Nilis’s corvette. One massive Spline warship loomed over them. Bristling with weapons, its moonlike bulk dwarfed its charges.

It was an unlikely flotilla, Pirius supposed. It was strange to reflect that on this handful of battered, hastily modified old hulks might rest the destiny of the Galaxy.

The group sailed through the Front and made their way down the spine of the Baby Spiral’s arm, moving in a series of FTL hops and sublight-drive glides. Despite the time pressure, the only way to proceed was cautiously: the spiral arm was a crowded corridor of molecular dust, drifting rock, and young stars, a difficult jaunt. But there was so much noise and clutter here in this tunnel of bombarded gas that there was a good chance they would remain undetected by Xeelee scouts all the way in.

After two sleepless days and nights, with the crews stressed-out and weary, they reached Orion Rock.

Pirius, sitting in his pilot’s blister, gaped. He had never seen anything like it. The Rock shone.

Like every asteroid of its size, it was an aggregate shape as lumpy as a clenched fist, deeply pocked by impact craters. But on this Rock the surface had been worked, every square centimeter of it. Every crater hosted a landing pad or a dry dock or a portal, and away from the craters the land had a peculiar ridged texture. As they approached, Pirius saw it was covered by a dense scribble of trenches and foxholes, zigzagging at precise ninety-degree corners. It was ornate, even decorative, like a maze. You could tell that people had been here for a long time.

Orion had been spawned out of random accretions in this spiral arm long ago, and had since drifted down its center line. As it had required no human intervention to steer it onto a path that directed it straight at the Xeelee concentrations, the Rock was a marvelous natural blind. It had been occupied by humans for a thousand years, and the results of that occupation were visible on its surface — and yet it was still unsuspected as a military asset by mankind’s foe.

The greenships and their escorts settled on a landing pad at the center of the largest crater — all save the big Spline, which took up a watchful position directly overhead, like a fleshy eye.

All the crews were eager to get out of their stinking skinsuits, and to eat, bathe, screw, and otherwise get the tension of the flight out of their systems. But Marshal Kimmer came on the loop and ordered the whole squadron from Pirius Red on down to form up before his command corvette. There was nothing for it but to comply gracefully.

They clambered down to a surface of some black, hard substance so smooth and flat it was almost slippery. Near Kimmer’s corvette, Pila, Nilis, Kimmer, Guild-master Eliun and various other command staff and civilians gathered in a loose circle. Captain Marta was here, the stern training officer from Quin Base who Pirius had drafted at the suggestion of his older self to oversee the set up of operations on this Rock. Their skinsuits looked bright and fresh, and the military types were adorned with animated decorations.

And a Silver Ghost rolled complacently above the polished ground, unperturbed by the vacuum and hard radiation of the Core.

Pirius had practiced no parade drill with his squadron; there had been no time for such luxuries. Still, he drew them up in good order, though he accepted a little assistance from Commander Darc, who helped get the rows spaced out and lined up properly. Compared to the glittering gathering of commanders and civilians, the greenship crews looked shabby and exhausted. But as they stood to attention — Burden and Torec, Jees with her silvery prostheses returning sharp highlights from the starlight, even his own older self, all of them in scuffed and grimy skinsuits — Pirius felt a burst of pride.

A party approached. In the lead marched a block of soldiers in gleaming white skinsuits, following a track that ran arrow-straight from the crater wall. Pirius estimated there must be a thousand of them. Their commanders stood to attention on discs that hovered a meter above the floor.

On the squadron’s comm loop, Pirius heard muttering. “I don’t believe it,” Blue said. “It’s a welcoming committee.”

“Belay that,” Pirius Red murmured. “We’re going to have to work with these characters. Let’s get off to a good start.” The muttering subsided.

The lead party on those discs slowed smoothly before Marshal Kimmer. The marching troops came to a crisp halt, as precise as bots.

As the welcoming committee clambered down from their discs, Nilis, unmistakable in his antiquated skinsuit, gestured clumsily at Pirius. Reluctantly, Pirius abandoned his squadron and walked forward to join Kimmer and the other dignitaries. He stood beside Pila; she looked amused at his discomfiture.

The leader of the party was an extraordinarily tall and skinny man who, despite the careful tailoring of his skinsuit, was stiff and clumsy, and he had some trouble getting down off his disc. This official appeared to do a double take when he saw a Silver Ghost among the new arrivals.

Wheezing, the official puffed himself up and stepped forward to face Kimmer. The two of them looked oddly similar, Pirius thought; tall, thin, elegantly formed. “Marshal, welcome to Orion Rock!”

“Thank you—”

But Kimmer was taken aback when poles sprouted out of the hoverdiscs and thrust toward the stars. Virtual flags, adorned with the green tetrahedral sigil of free mankind, began to ripple in a nonexistent breeze.

The tall official said, “My name is Boote the Forty-Third — Captain Boote, I should say. I command here, and I place my base at your disposal. I am the one-hundred-and-nineteenth captain of this station, and the forty-third to wear the proud name of Boote.” He spoke comprehensibly, but he had a very strong, clipped accent. “For one thousand and fifty-seven years, sir, we have waited for the call. If today is the day we fight and die for the benefit of the Third Expansion of Mankind — if the purpose of this station is to be fulfilled on my watch — then I, Boote the Forty-Third, will be proud to take my place in history.” He struck his sunken chest with his fist.

“Thank you, Captain,” Kimmer said dryly. “I know you will do your duty.”

The two parties faced each other, motionless. As the delay lengthened, Pirius grew puzzled.

Pila leaned toward him so their helmets touched. “Go to the backup command loop.”

Pirius tapped his chest control panel, and he heard massed voices. “…Named for a victory / Over Ghosts, a vanquished enemy / Our Rock, as firm as our resolve / Is dedicated to our duty…” Now he saw the faces of the ranks of troops, their moving mouths. They were singing, he realized, all thousand of them, singing a song of welcome to their visitors. They even sang harmonies.

“The lyrics are none too tactful in the circumstances,” Pila murmured through his helmet.

Pirius glanced surreptitiously at the Ghost, but it showed no reaction to this song of triumph about its kind’s most terrible defeat.

The song went on and on. By now Nilis had coached Pirius in the need to be diplomatic, but by the fourth verse he had had enough. He switched to the squadron loop and ordered his crews to fall out. Then he confronted Captain Boote the Forty-Third. “Sir. Thanks for the song. Where’s the refectory?”

Kimmer glowered; Nilis looked mortified. Pila laughed.

Once he’d got his skinsuit stripped off, Pirius went straight to work.

In theory, so he’d been told, the base was fully equipped with all they needed to operate the squadron. He told Pila his target for resuming training flights was twenty-four hours. Again she laughed.

Captain Boote led Pirius and Nilis through the guts of the complex that had been dug into Orion Rock.

Boote wore a robe that trailed to the floor in languid, elegant drapes. His face and scalp had been shaved of every scrap of hair, even eyebrows and nostril hair.

If Boote was magnificent, so was the base he commanded. But like him, it was odd, too. In its layout it was essentially the same as every other Rock Pirius had visited, with the usual barracks, refectories, dispensaries, science labs, training facilities from classrooms to sim chambers, and technical facilities from environment systems to huge subsurface hangars.

But every other Rock had an air of shabbiness; a Rock always looked lived-in, because it was, by a bunch of squabbling, randy trainees and troopers who cared a lot more about sack time than about hygiene and neatness — and because, by Coalition policy, every military facility was cut to the bone in resources anyhow. A base was a place you left to go fight, not a place you longed to get back to.

Orion was different. Pirius had never seen a base so neat. In the barracks there wasn’t a blanket out of place. When they passed, all the troops sprang to attention and lined up neatly by their bunks, eerie grins plastered over their faces. Even the walls were smooth to the touch — worn at shoulder height by the passage of millions of young bodies.

Neat it might have been, but everywhere was dark, lit by only a few hovering globes. Pirius thought the air was a little cold, though it tasted fresh enough. Not only that, everybody — even the youngest children in the junior cadres — crept about quietly, treading softly and murmuring. Boote said it was always like this.

“Ah,” Nilis said. “Silent running.”

“What’s that?” They were both whispering; it was contagious.

“This is a covert base, remember. The crew are sailing toward the Xeelee, who must not suspect they are here. And they strive to keep everything below the level of the background noise of the Baby Spiral — their energy expenditure, their signaling. As for the whispering and creeping about, I don’t imagine it makes much practical difference, but, though I’m no expert on motivation, I should think it is good psychology — a constant reminder to keep your head down.”

Pirius peered around curiously at the wide-eyed children who smiled hopefully at him. He tried to imagine how it must be to have grown up in this claustrophobic environment of darkened corridors and whispers. But these kids had never known anything different; to them this was normal.

As they walked on, Boote proudly explained the origin of his name.

Of course there were no true families here, no heredity; that would be far too non-Doctrinal. This was a place of birthing tanks and cadres, like most military bases. But a tradition had grown up even so. The first Boote, centuries back, had been a fine Captain who had inspired loyalty and affection from all. When her successor had taken her name on his accession, to become Boote the Second, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world, a tribute that had become a badge of honor to the Captains who had followed, right down to this fine fellow, Boote the Forty-Third. Similarly there were “dynasties” among the engineers and medics, comm officers and pilots, and other specialist corps.

Nilis raised his eyebrows at Pirius, but said nothing. Wherever you went, a little deviance was inevitable, it seemed.

They were taken out onto the surface in a covered walkway. Nilis cringed from the crowded sky, but after that gloomy enclosure Pirius was relieved to be out under the healthy glow of the Core.

They surveyed earthworks dug into the ground. Teams of troopers in skinsuits were working in the trenches. They weren’t digging so much as refurbishing, Pirius saw. He had never seen earthworks so regular and neat — their walls were precisely vertical, their edges geometrically straight and dead neat. And he couldn’t see a trace of stray dust anywhere. The troops smiled as they worked, in precise formation.

In one part of the works the troops suddenly lunged out of their trenches and flopped onto the surface, across which they began to wriggle.

“They’re maneuvering,” said Pirius. “But it’s not an exercise. It’s more like a game.”

“Yes,” said Nilis. “And these earthworks are an ornamental garden. These folk have been isolated too long, Pirius. A trench is a place to fight and die. They have domesticated these trenches.”

Pirius slowly pieced together an understanding of this place.

Rocks were an essential element in most attacks on Xeelee concentrations; they provided cover, resources, and soaked up enemy firepower. But while most Rocks were purposefully deflected onto their required trajectories, Orion Rock, and a number of others, had natural orbits that took them into useful positions in the Core without deflection. So they could be used as cover, to mount covert operations.

But as the Core’s geography spanned light-years, travel times were painfully slow. The planners behind this place had been forced to think ahead, across no less than a thousand years — for that was how long Orion Rock would have to travel before it was in a position to be useful.

Nilis said gravely, “This is the scale of this war, Pirius. Orion Rock is like a generation starship sent to war: forty, perhaps fifty generations doomed to these dark tunnels, all the possibilities of their lives sacrificed to one goal, a strike on the Xeelee, a single assault that might be carried out in their children’s time, or their children’s children.

“A thousand years, though. On pre-Occupation Earth, a thousand years was a long time: time enough for empires to rise and fall, time enough for history. To us it is just a checkmark on a war planner’s chart!”

As the troops dug and marched and played at maneuvers, their mouths moved in unison, Pirius saw. They were singing again. But, thanks to some fault in the systems, he couldn’t hear their song.

They had been assigned a hangar, a huge one, beneath that paved-over crater where they had landed. Pirius went to inspect it. The hangar was big enough for a hundred greenships, let alone fifteen, and it was fully equipped with repair and maintenance facilities. Crisscrossed by walkways, full of hovering bots, the hangar was fully pressurized, although sections could be opened to vacuum when necessary. The working areas had been kept at microgravity — greenships were built for lightness, and were too frail to support their own weight under full gravity — but the floor and walkways were laced with inertial adjustors. Brightly lit by hovering globe lamps, it was a stunning facility by any standards.

But it didn’t have the feel of a workplace. It was too clean, too orderly. It didn’t even smell right; there was no electric ozone stink, or tang of lubricants, or the hot burning smell of metal that had been exposed to vacuum. It was like a museum; a place where you looked at greenships, rather than where you got your hands dirty working on them.

Pirius joined Enduring Hope, his ground crew leader. But Hope was accompanied everywhere by Eliun of the Guild of Engineers and a couple of that worthy’s aides. Since he had been outmaneuvered back on Arches, Eliun had barely let Hope out of his sight.

The party watched as their precious greenships, crudely modified, nestled into their graving docks.

Eliun punched Pirius in the shoulder, none too gently. “Look at that!” he said. “Pilot, these docks were built more than a thousand years ago. These greenships, on the other hand, are barely five years old — some of them younger than that. And yet dock and ship fit together hand in glove, every surface contoured to match, every interface locking, just as these ships could be lodged in any similar dock across the Galaxy. And why? Because of the Guild: I am talking about uniformity, sir, uniformity on galactic scales of space and time. How do you imagine such a war can be fought without this epic sameness?

Pirius was short on sleep and overstressed. “Engineer Eliun, I don’t know anything about procurement policy. You’ll have to talk to Commissary Nilis.” The Engineer wasn’t satisfied with that, but Pirius turned deliberately to Enduring Hope. “So what do you think?”

Hope shrugged. “Technically, the hangar’s perfect. But look at this.” He led Pirius to one of the graving docks, where the battered hulk of an Exultant greenship now rested. He ran his bare hand over the massive cradle of fused asteroid rock, metal, and polymer. “It’s worn,” Hope said, wondering. “It’s the same everywhere. Every bit of equipment in this place is worn smooth, until you can see your face in it. For a thousand years they’ve done nothing but polish everything in sight.” Hope grinned nervously. “This is the strangest place I’ve ever seen.”

Pirius grunted. “Well, I don’t care about the last thousand years. All I care about is the next twenty- four hours, because at the end of it I want this place set up for our operations. Now. What about the cannon gear? Do you think you’ll have to cut through that roof to get it in here?…”

They walked on, talking and planning. Engineer Eliun tailed them for a while, but Pirius didn’t acknowledge him further, and after a time Eliun gave up and stomped away.

After the first twenty-four hours, they had achieved only a fraction of what Pirius had demanded. He called a crisis meeting in Nilis’s office.

Bootes staff were an uninspiring bunch, soft, flabby-looking administrators and clerks who seemed to have no ambition save to replace the Captain one day. Boote at bay, though, had a glint in his eye, and Pirius had the feeling that he had a bit of steel in him, and would put up a fight.

It was yet another obstruction, just as they had encountered all the way from Earth. Pirius was hugely weary, impatient to get back to his ships, and he felt like biting somebody’s head off. The only thing he wanted, he kept reminding himself, was to get the job done.

He turned to Enduring Hope. “Engineer, why don’t you sum up how far we’ve got in twenty-four hours?”

Hope consulted a data desk. He looked as ticked off as Pirius felt. “The priorities are, one, setting up a manufactory on the far side of the Rock for producing the point black holes we will need for the cannon; two, modifying the hangar for our upgraded greenships.” He snapped the data desk down on the tabletop. “So far we’ve argued a lot, and we’ve laid down the foundations for the manufactory. And that’s it.”

Pirius said, “I wanted to be flying by” — he checked the Virtual chronometer that hovered over Pila’s head — “two hours ago. You all committed to that yesterday. What’s gone wrong?”

Hope took the bait. He jabbed a finger at Captain Boote. “It’s those people. They block everything we propose. Or they defer it for discussion further up the chain of command.” His tone, dripping with sarcasm, was deeply insolent. “They’re blocking us, Pirius.”

Captain Boote sputtered. “I won’t be spoken to like that!”

“Quite right,” Nilis murmured. “Why don’t you tell us your perception of the problem here, Captain?”

The Captain turned his magnificent hairless head to Pirius. “Squadron Leader, we support your project. That’s our function. But you must recognize the practical difficulties. For a thousand years — a thousand years, sir! — we have worked and polished and honed this base until it is perfectly fit for its purpose, which is to strike a great blow against the enemy. Now you are asking us to change all that. To rip holes in our walls — to install equipment so new it won’t even interface to our kit!” He held up his hands. “Of course we must accept the challenge of the new. But all I’m asking for is time; while recognizing the pressure of your schedule, a measured and thoughtful response…”

He talked smoothly, liquidly, one sentence blending into another so seamlessly that Pirius couldn’t see a way to cut into the flow. And he was so plausible that after a while Pirius found himself helplessly agreeing. Of course these new things couldn’t be done here; what other point of view was possible?

In the end Nilis managed to break into the monologue. “If I may say so, Captain, I think there is a failure of imagination here. You and your antecedents have been here so long, loyally following the dictates laid down long ago, that I don’t think any of you quite grasp that some day all this must end.”

Boote’s mouth dropped open. But then he shook his head. “If it is my generation that has the privilege of fulfilling the mission of Orion Rock, I will grasp the opportunity with both hands…” Once again he talked on. But it sounded like another rehearsed speech, and Pirius saw that he himself didn’t believe a word he was saying.

With a smooth motion, Captain Marta produced a handgun. Darc made a grab for the weapon, but Marta fired off her shot. Boote was hit in the arm. It was a projectile weapon, and the impact threw him backward off his chair and against the wall. For a moment his spindly legs waved comically in the air, while his aides flapped around him.

When they had him upright and back on his chair again, he had his hand clamped over a spreading patch of blood on his upper right arm. His face was florid with anger and fear.

Nilis was shocked into pallid silence. Pila hadn’t so much as flinched when the shot was fired; looking faintly annoyed, she brushed blood spots off her sleeve. Hope and Torec were trying hard not to laugh.

Boote pointed a shaking finger at Marta. “You shot me!”

“A flesh wound,” she said. “A half hour in sick bay will fix that.”

“I’ll have the hide flogged off your back for this.”

“That’s your privilege, sir,” Marta said evenly. “But I thought I should introduce a little reality into the discussion. This is real, Captain. The sky really is falling.”

Pirius stared at her. Then, as the silence lengthened, he realized it was his cue. He turned to Boote. “Captain, I’m not in a position to adjourn the meeting. Time is too short. I’ll ensure Captain Marta answers any charges you care to raise later. Commander Darc, would you accept her custody for now?”

Darc inclined his head ironically.

“Captain Boote, you need to be excused to get that graze seen to. In the meantime, who would you nominate to represent you in the continuing negotiations?”

After that, things went much better.

Chapter 49

The trouble started in the most innocuous, most mundane of ways: problems with waste.

For many quagmite kinds, eliminated waste was in the form of compressed matter, quarks and gluons wadded together into baryons — protons and neutrons. You could even find a few simple nuclei, if you dug around in there. But the universe was still too hot for such structures to be stable long, and the waste decayed quickly, returning its substance to the wider quagma bath.

Now, as the universe cooled, things changed. The mess of sticky proton-neutron cack simply wouldn’t dissolve as readily as it once had. Great clumps of it clung together, stubbornly resistant, and had to be broken up to release their constituent quarks. But the energy expenditure was huge.

Soon this grew to be an overwhelming burden, the primary task of civilizations. Citizens voiced concerns; autocrats issued commands; angry votes were taken on councils. There were even wars over waste dumping. But the problem only got worse.

And, gradually, the dread truth was revealed.

The cooling universe was approaching another transition point, another phase change. The ambient temperature, steadily falling, would soon be too low to force the baryons to break up — and the process of combination would be one way. Soon all the quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of life, would be locked up inside baryons.

The trend was inescapable, its conclusion staggering: this extraordinary implosion would wither the most bright, the most beautiful of the quagmite ecologies, and nobody would be left even to mourn.

As the news spread across the inhabited worlds, a cosmic unity developed. Love and hate, war and peace were put aside in favor of an immense research effort to find ways of surviving the impending baryogenetic catastrophe.

A solution was found. Arks were devised: immense artificial worlds, some as much as a meter across, their structures robust enough to withstand the collapse. It was unsatisfactory; the baryogenesis could not be prevented, and almost everything would be lost in the process. But these ships of quagma would sail beyond the end of time, as the quagmites saw it, and in their artificial minds they would store the poetry of a million worlds. It was better than nothing.

As time ran out, as dead baryons filled up the universe and civilizations crumbled, the quagma arks sailed away. But mere survival wasn’t enough for the last quagmites. They wanted to be remembered.

Chapter 50

On Orion Rock, time flowed strangely for Pirius Red.

The days seemed to last forever, but his nights seemed very short. And the sum of those long days, as they accumulated into weeks, amounted to no time at all.

Pirius hammered home the ten-week target every time he spoke to his crews, and as the training schedule was compressed and the technical development work accelerated, the effort everybody put in was more and more frantic. But the calendars wore down, regardless.

Suddenly deadline day was here.

And it went, with no word from the Grand Conclave. One day passed, two.

Pirius figured they may as well use the time productively. The flight crews and ground staff continued their training. By now, as well as flying the modified ships on endless low-level loops past hapless target Rocks, they were running full-scale simulations with flight crews and a fully staffed operations room, everybody working together to iron out procedures. Commander Darc’s experience was vital in this — and to Pirius’s surprise, Pila proved observant and helpful, pointing out ways to improve the information flow between ships and the base. Even she seemed finally to be committing herself to the great effort.

All this was useful, as far as it went. Behind the scenes, though, those in the know became increasingly anxious. Even now it was possible that the Grand Conclave would, for its own inscrutable reasons, withhold final permission to fly the mission.

Up to now Nilis had remained remarkably calm. His design of the mission had been largely conceptual — “a mere data-desk sketch,” he said — and now that they were down to operational details there was generally little he could add. He kept himself busy with his continuing analysis of the true nature of Chandra. He said he wanted to make sure they understood what it was they were attacking before they “blew it to smithereens” — although he continued to complain about obstruction and a baffling lack of cooperation from the military authorities who were his hosts. “It’s almost as if they don’t want me to learn about Chandra!” he told a distracted Pirius.

But after the deadline expired, Nilis became increasingly agitated. He started to make lurid threats about how he would return to Earth and storm his way into the sessions of the Grand Conclave itself.

Then, two days after the formal deadline, an “Immediate Message” was handed to Pirius. It had come through the office of Marshal Kimmer, and was signed by the Plenipotentiary for Total War herself: “Operation PRIME RADIANT. Execute at first available opportunity.”

That was all. Pirius read the note again, hardly able to believe what he was looking at. He said, “Suddenly we are no longer a project but an operation.”

Pila was watching him, her beautiful, cold face intent. She seemed fascinated by his reaction. “How do you feel?”

“Relieved,” he said. Then, “Terrified.” He glanced at a chronometer. It was evening. First available opportunity. One more full day to prepare, then; after that, they would fly at reveille. “Thirty-six hours,” he breathed. “We go in thirty-six hours.” He stood up. “Come on, Pila. We’ve work to do.”

That night he called in Pirius Blue and This Burden Must Pass, his flight commanders, for a final operations meeting. With Pila at his side, he locked the door of his office, set up a security shield, and showed them the order. Red watched Burden carefully, still not quite trusting him. But neither he nor Blue showed shock, surprise, or fear. Maybe they didn’t quite believe it, Red thought.

At this point it was their job to go over every detail of the mission, and to talk through tactics regarding the resistance they might encounter, and how they would recover from any foul-ups at various points in the mission profile. After they were done, Pila would draft the final Operation Order that would be disseminated to the flight crews.

As they got to work, Red said, “Maybe this session will be quick. We’ve war-gamed this a dozen times.”

“You’d be surprised,” Burden said dryly. “The imminence of real action has a way of focusing the mind.”

Pirius Blue was watching his younger self curiously. “How are you feeling? You haven’t flown a combat mission before.”

Red said, irritated, “Yes, I’m the rookie; thanks for reminding me.”

“That may help,” Blue said awkwardly. “I mean it. There’s no substitute for going through it for real. When you lead crews into a situation where they’re likely to buy it, it frightens you — the responsibility — and that gets mixed up with your own personal fear. You can’t help it. It’s stomach- churning. But experience is one thing; the residual shock is another. You never quite recover. You have enough on your plate today. It may be better that you’re fresh.”

Red said, “I’m not frightened of dying. I’m not even frightened of the responsibility for other people’s lives.”

“But you’re frightened of screwing up,” said Burden.

“Yes,” Red admitted.

“Don’t worry,” Blue said. “We’re at your side.” He sat stiff in his chair, and he couldn’t meet Red’s eyes.

Red knew this was the closest Blue could bring himself to pledging loyalty to his own younger, less experienced, overpromoted self. It would have to do, he thought.

Red pulled a data desk toward him. “Let’s get on with it,” he said gruffly. “First, the launch sequence. We will go in two waves…

The next morning, as he began his day, Enduring Hope immediately knew something was up.

He made his usual inspection walk through the bomb dump, a hangar that had been modified as a store for the point black holes. And he walked into the big main hangar, where fifteen heavily engineered, thoroughly worn-out greenships were being treated with tender loving care by his technicians. Everywhere he went, he sensed a heightening of activity, and of tension. For one thing there were more flight crew around than usual, working with the ground crew on the ships they would fly. But there was more to this atmosphere than that. He’d been through this before, back on the other side of the magnetar incident that had cut his life in two, when he had flown his one and only combat mission.

Everybody understood the need for security. Generally you had no idea until a day or so before the launch of a mission exactly what your target was to be. This mission had been no different — save only for the novel bits of technology they all had to become used to. As always, there had been much speculation. The advantages of the new superfast processors and the formidable black-hole cannon were obvious. But nobody could figure out what the grav shield, difficult and temperamental, was actually for. Nor could anybody come up with a convincing target. It was sure to be something big, though — big and therefore exceptionally dangerous. But all this was scuttlebutt.

This morning, though, it was clear that things had changed: from somewhere in the higher echelons, it was being said, orders had arrived to proceed. Right now Pirius Red was probably briefing the senior staff, and everybody else was supposed to be in the dark. But it was astonishing how these things got out, how people picked up on almost imperceptible cues, if it really mattered to them — and this was an issue of life or death.

Hope knew his duty, anyhow. He was going to make sure each of these dinged-up greenships was ready to do whatever its crew demanded of it, if he had to crawl into the guts of every one of them himself. He went to work with a will.

In the middle of the morning, Virtual images of Pirius Red appeared around the hangar, summoning the flight crews to a general briefing in one of the big conference rooms. The crews gathered in little knots, talking quietly, and began to drift out of the hangar.

It’s real, Hope thought; it really is happening. He felt an odd pull. It wasn’t so long since he had been flight crew himself.

He walked quickly around the hangar. Work was going well. In fact, he told himself, if he hung around watching over his technicians’ shoulders, he would get in the way. He could be spared for a couple of hours.

So, as the last crews walked down the short corridor to Officer Country, Hope followed them.

Torec was on security duty at the door of the conference room. Hope found his way blocked by her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“The briefing.” Through the open door Hope glimpsed the thirty-odd flight crew milling, finding seats. They all seemed to be here, both primary crews and reserves. On a dais at the front sat the two editions of Pirius, Burden, Commissary Nilis, and others. As the officers prepared their briefing material, Virtual images flickered tantalizingly over their heads.

“Flight crew only,” Torec said. “I can’t let you in.”

“Come on, Torec,” he whispered. “I used to fly, remember?”

“I don’t know why you want to be here.”

Neither did Hope, quite. He looked into the room. “Because it’s history.”

“Yes,” she said. “There is that. Okay.” She lifted her arm. “But if anybody spots you I’ll say you slugged me.”

He grinned his thanks and hurried into the room.

The atmosphere in there was even stranger than out in the hangars. The tension in the air was like ozone. All the flight crew seemed to be talking at once, and the air was full of noise. But the talk was meaningless, just banter, ways to drain off stress. Hope spotted pilot Jees, who sat a little apart, as always, like a half-silvered statue; with no apparent nerves, she watched the platform and waited for the show to start.

Hope found space at the back, between two burly navigators. Of course everybody in this audience knew who he was, but they had all worked with him on their ships and seemed to accept him.

Pirius Red stood up on the platform. He raised his arms for silence, but he needn’t have; the hubbub died away instantly. Pirius looked out over the crews, a complex expression on his face. “You know why we’re here.” He spoke without amplification, and his voice, gruff with tension, was precise, determined. “Operation Prime Radiant is on.” There was a rumble of appreciation at that; one or two stamped their feet. “I know it’s still not much more than a name for most of you, but that’s about to change.

“I’ve already had briefings with the flight commanders, and representative specialists — pilots, navigators, engineers — and we’ve put it all together, as best we can. Commissary Nilis here will give you an overview of the objectives and strategy, and then Blue, Burden, and I will go through the operation in more detail. At the end of this briefing you’ll be given copies of the draft Operation Order by the adjutant. After that we’ll split for briefings in your specialist groups. We have more detailed Virtuals of the mission profile, including sims if you’ve the time to sit through them.

“At every stage I want you to answer back. What we’re going to attempt is something nobody’s done before. So if you spot a screwup waiting to happen, or can see a better way to do things, say so. At the end of the day the adjutant and I will pull all that feedback into a fresh draft of the Op Order, and we’ll hold another update session in here. Is that clear?”

There was no reply. He paced, as if suddenly uncertain, and gazed out at them; the crews watched him silently.

Pirius said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do tomorrow, in a sentence. We’re going to strike a blow at the Xeelee from which they cannot recover. And I’ll tell you something else. Tomorrow is our best chance, but it’s not the only chance. If you screw up tomorrow, you’ll go back out there as soon as we can patch up the ships, and patch you up, and do it again. And you’ll keep on going out until the job is done. So if you don’t want to go back, do it right first time.” He glared at them, as if daring them to defy him. Then, to silence, he sat down.

Enduring Hope glanced around cautiously. Pirius wasn’t the kind of leader who cracked jokes or expected you to applaud him. But Hope saw no frowns, no pursed lips, no skepticism. If you were a flyer you didn’t expect coddling. These crews knew Pirius by now, and his older self, and they respected him. They were ready to follow him, wherever he was about to lead them. Lethe, Hope thought, he would follow Pirius, either of them, just as he had before, if given the chance.

Nilis was next up. The Commissary, bulky and much older than the flight crews arrayed before him, was dressed in a black Commission robe that was frayed at the cuffs. He fumbled with his data desks and coughed to clear his throat. Nilis seemed a lot more nervous than Pirius had been — or maybe it was just that Pirius hid it better.

Nilis began by summarizing the novel technical elements of the mission: the grav shield, the CTC processor, the black-hole cannon weapon. “That’s as much as you know, I suppose,” he said. “That and, as Pirius said, the name of the mission: Operation Prime Radiant. Now I can tell you that the name refers to the most significant Prime Radiant of all: the base of the Xeelee in this Galaxy.” There was an audible gasp at that. He looked out at them, squinting a little, as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces. “I think you understand me. After three thousand years of inconclusive siege warfare, we — you — are going to strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, at the supermassive black hole known as Chandra, the center of all Xeelee operations.”

Enduring Hope felt numb. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

Nilis began to go through a bewildering array of Virtuals. Gradually the outline of the mission became a bit clearer.

Very shortly, after a billion years of drifting down the arm of the Baby Spiral, Orion Rock would erupt into the open. Emerging deep inside the Cavity, this heavily armed Rock was an immediate threat to the foe, who would surely attack. But Orion was a diversion. While the local Xeelee firepower spent itself on the Rock’s defenses, Exultant Squadron would slip away.

The greenships would fly deeper into the Cavity behind their grav shield, whose purpose, Nilis now revealed, was to thwart the Xeelee’s ability to gather FTL foreknowledge about the mission. Later, the CTC processors would be used so they could penetrate the Xeelee’s final layers of defenses. And then the black-hole cannon would be used to strike at Chandra itself, and the Xeelee concentrations that swarmed there.

As Nilis spoke on, the crews began to mutter. Hope knew what everybody was thinking. It was well known that nobody had flown so close to the Prime Radiant and lived to talk about it; even Pirius Blue hadn’t gone in that deep. All this novel technology was hardly reassuring either. A crew liked to fly with proven kit, not with the product of some boffin’s overheated brow.

But I would go, Hope thought helplessly.

Nilis got through his technical Virtuals. He said, “Your commanders will take you through the operational aspects of the mission in detail. But I want to tell you why it’s so important to strike at the Prime Radiant — no matter what the cost.”

He spoke of strategic theory. The Galaxy was full of military targets, he said, full of Xeelee emplacements of one kind or another. But those which were “economically upstream” in the flow of resources and information were more valuable. “It is cheaper, simple as that, to strike at the dockyard where greenships are constructed, to destroy it in a single mission, than to run a hundred missions chasing the ships themselves.” He brought up images of the Prime Radiant, heavily enhanced. Somehow the Xeelee used the massive black hole as a factory for their nightfighters and other technologies, he said, and as their central information processor. He spoke of the damage he hoped black-hole projectiles would do to such mighty machines as must exist around Chandra.

Hope thought it was very strange to hear this obviously gentle man talk of such profound destruction.

Nilis closed down his last Virtuals. He faced his audience, hands on hips. “You may say to me, why must this be done? And why now? Why you? After all the war is not being lost. We and the Xeelee have held each other at bay for three thousand years. Why should it fall to you to strike this blow — and, I’m afraid for many of you, to pay the price?

“I’ll tell you why. Because, after twenty thousand years of the Third Expansion, the majority of mankind are soldiers — and most are still children when they die. Most people don’t grow old. They don’t even grow old enough to understand what is happening to them. To our soldiers war is a game, whose lethality they never grasp. This is what we are: this is what we have made ourselves. And the numbers are terrible: in a century, more people die in this war than all the human beings who ever lived on Earth before mankind first reached the stars.”

He stalked around the dais. He was an old, overweight man walking back and forth, almost comically intense. “The Prime Radiant is central to everything the Xeelee do in this Galaxy. To strike at Chandra will be as devastating to the Xeelee as if they turned their starbreaker beams on Earth itself. And that is what we will do. We will stop this war. And we will stop it now.”

When he had finished speaking, there was a cold, stunned silence.

Marshal Kimmer stood now; he had been seated among the flight crews, at the front of the room. He said simply, “I know that you will make this attack succeed. I know you will inflict a tremendous amount of damage. And I know, yes, that you will make history.” Where Nilis had been received in silence, Kimmer won a cheer. He finished, “The first launches will be at reveille tomorrow.” And with that he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

When Pirius’s detailed briefing was over the crews dispersed quickly.

Hope hurried to the hangar. There was much to be done. But word had already filtered back to the ground crews about the nature of the mission, and the atmosphere was dark and silent. It was like working in a morgue. But they got the job done anyhow.

At the end of the day Enduring Hope went to find This Burden Must Pass.

Burden was in a barracks, surrounded by a small circle of somber-faced flight crew — and not all of them were Friends. Hope joined the little circle, and listened to Burden’s gentle conversation of love and hope, fear and endurance, and the consoling transience of all things.

But though his voice was steady, strain showed on Burden’s face, like a dark shadow.

Chapter 51

The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.

And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei — although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each nucleus was bare.

These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.

For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.

The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.

At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.

The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus- baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen — simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be — ought to be — vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.

But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.

The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium — three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.

The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.

With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.

The universe was three minutes old.

Chapter 52

That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.

He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.

They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.

Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.

Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”

“I didn’t know if I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve changed. You always were full of depths, Torec… And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”

“You’re the same person you were before you left.”

“Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for two years after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But you never lived through those two years, did you?”

“I did,” she murmured. “A copy of me did. But that copy has gone, or never existed — gone to wherever deleted timelines go… It’s so strange, Pirius Blue.”

“I know. And sad.”

“Sad? Oh. Because I’m not your Torec.” She snuggled back down to his chest. “But there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? So we may as well get on with things.”

“Get on?”

“What else is there to do?”

Pirius Blue laughed. “As Nilis would probably say, we haven’t evolved to cope with time-looped relationships.”

“I know what your real problem is,” she said. “And it’s got nothing to do with time paradoxes.”

“What, then?”

“I’ve been with him. Your evil time-clone rival.”

He stifled a laugh. “He thinks the same about me.”

“Well, you both resent each other. But you’re not the same. I think he’s in awe of you.”

“But he’s your Pirius.”

“I don’t think it works like that. You’re growing apart, becoming different people. But you’re still both you.”

“Does he love you?”

She sighed. It was the first time either Pirius had used that word to her. “You know I love you. Both of you.”

He stroked her back, a spot between her shoulder blades where her skin felt like the smoothest, softest surface he had ever touched. “It’s a mess. A stupid triangle. I don’t know how we will sort it out.”

“Wait until the mission is over,” she said.

And see if any of us come back — that was what she left unsaid.

After a time she drew away from him.

“You’re going to him,” he said.

“He needs me, too. And I need him.”

“I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

When she had gone, Blue rolled into the part of the bunk still warm from her body, and tried to sleep.

Two hours before reveille, Cohl was already on the surface of Orion Rock. In her massive, armored skinsuit, she was propped up in a foxhole with the members of her platoon around her. The monopole-cannon emplacement they were ordered to protect was a couple of hundred meters away, a complicated silhouette against a shining sky.

As it had been since its chthonic birth, this Rock was still immersed in the glowing molecular clouds of the North Arm of the Baby Spiral. But if she looked ahead, she could see a gaggle of stars through the mist, like light globes hanging in smoggy air. That was IRS 16, the cluster of very crowded, very bright stars that coalesced out of the Baby’s infalling material as it poured into the crowded space that surrounded Chandra.

Orion Rock itself was probably almost as old as the Galaxy itself, and for all that time it had been swimming helplessly along this lane of gas. For a thousand years humans had dug their way into this Rock. Now both those immense intervals of time were coming to a close, for, in two hours from now, this Rock would burst through the last veils of cloud that separated it from IRS 16. It was hard to believe that Cohl should be here at a moment like this.

What was even harder to believe was that at least half her platoon were asleep, and the rest were eating. But that was life in the infantry. Your priority was eating and sleeping, and you took whatever chance you had to do either — even now, on the brink of battle.

Cohl was an ambassador. Her mission, given her by Pirius Red, was to ensure that the two halves of the operation — the Navy fliers who would take the greenships to Chandra and the Army infantry down here on the Rock — communicated properly, shared the same objectives, and worked well together when the crunch came. That was what she had been working toward in the weeks since she had been brought here from Quin.

The senior staff and civilians were going to evacuate Orion before the action, and go back to Arches. Even Captain Boote the Forty-Third had chosen not to stick around to witness this climax of his beloved Rock’s destiny. Pirius Blue had pulled strings to ensure Cohl could go if she wanted to, but she couldn’t bear the thought of running out on the people she had worked with for so long. There was only one place she wanted to be — on the surface, waiting for the sky to fall in, along with the rest of the troopers. And so here she was.

Blayle wasn’t asleep, though. Blayle, her platoon sergeant, was a good bit older than her, in his midtwenties. She could see his eyes on her, bright blue eyes visible behind his faceplate, a cold blue like the light of IRS 16.

He asked, “How are you bearing up, Lieutenant?”

“Fine,” she said uneasily. Her rank was basically honorary, and it made her uncomfortable.

“I’m proud to be here,” he said, without affectation. “There’s a lot of tradition here on Orion.”

“I know.”

“My own birth cadre — Cadre 4677 — is mentioned in the Rock’s first operational order, which is preserved in the archives. Of course we never knew what our mission would turn out to be. And nobody ever knew when it would end. But now it’s turned out that it’s me, my generation, who has the responsibility — no, the privilege — to be here at the climax.” He sighed. “A thousand years culminates here and now, in what I do today.”

Blayle was a disciplined soldier and a good sergeant; as she had worked with this platoon she had learned to lean on him. But he was a thoughtful, soft-bodied, soft-spoken man who seemed to lack the spirit of camaraderie of some of the other troopers, the loyalty that impelled them to fight so hard. Rather, Blayle seemed to embrace the larger mission of Orion Rock, and had to argue himself into fighting. And, like most people on this Rock, Blayle was a combat rookie.

“Might be best not to think too hard about that stuff, Sergeant. Combat is difficult enough without the feeling that forty generations are looking over your shoulder.”

“Yes. What would Hama Druz say if he was here? Focus on the moment; the present is all that matters.”

“He might say, shut your flapping mouth while some of us are trying to sleep,” somebody called, to a ripple of laughter.

Cohl knew little about the mission of Exultant Squadron. What she did know and her platoon didn’t, however, was that all their elaborate preparations, all the lives that would be lost on this Rock today, were not even the point of the operation. After a thousand years of planning, preparation, and silent running, Orion Rock was to be sacrificed as a diversion. She wasn’t going to say a word about that.

Cohl tried to relax, letting the Rock’s microgravity cushion her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the situation, to think back to less complicated times, when she had been just another trainee on Arches Base…

Even reveille sounded somber that morning.

It didn’t make any difference to Enduring Hope, who hadn’t slept anyhow. He had spent those last hours checking and rechecking everything he could think of, but the novel systems grafted onto these wretched greenships were about as integrated as a third arm growing out of his own back, and he knew that the paltry weeks of developments, trials, and modifications had not been enough.

What he was really scared of was that he might be responsible for the mission’s failure. He knew his crews felt the same. So they kept on working, right up until the moment the first flight crews began to arrive, trying to be absolutely sure that this mission wouldn’t screw up because of something they had missed.

At last the crews of the first wave arrived. And Pila was with them. As the flyers clambered out of their little transporter, Pila stood to one side and began making checks on a data desk she carried. Nobody approached her.

Everybody still found Pirius’s adjutant more than a little intimidating — this woman from Earth was cold, and strange. But her duties included such mundanity as ensuring that the crews had been served the breakfast they wanted, that the transports had been laid on correctly — a hundred tiny details to make sure that nothing got in the way of the crews doing their jobs. She carried out those duties with calm, invisible efficiency, and people had slowly granted her respect.

Everybody knew a Ghost was flying this mission. Hope was relieved that it didn’t show up this morning.

The crews, meanwhile, did what flight crews usually did. They allowed the techs to check over their suits, but ran double checks themselves — if you were flight, you never trusted ground crew with something like that. Some of them quizzed their engineers on the state of their ships, as if anything they could ask now would make a difference. Others indulged in various superstitions, such as walking around their ships, or kicking at their landing rails. One man vomited up his breakfast. A tech cleaned it up for him. The atmosphere remained tense, quiet.

Hope saw one stocky pilot pull open the front of his skinsuit to squirt a jet of urine over his ship’s landing rail.

“Pirius,” he called.

The pilot turned, his face shielded by his visor. “I’m Blue, by the way, to save you making a fool of yourself.”

“I knew it was one of you from the lumpy shape of your dick,” Hope said, walking over to him. “Where’s your clone?”

Pirius pointed. Another copy of Pirius, in his own skinsuit but with a commander’s red flashes on his shoulders, was working his way around the hangar, shaking hands, having a final word with his crews. “Red’s doing his job,” said Pirius Blue.

“Just what you’d do,” Hope said.

“I’m glad I don’t have to.”

“I bunked into the briefing. I heard Nilis speak.”

“Nilis, yes,” Blue said uncertainly. “What an oddball the man is. Red claims to understand him; I never will.” He regarded Hope. “I don’t think he gave us the truth about what he’s thinking, in that briefing.”

“The truth?”

“He has all these ideas about how Chandra is hosting antique life-forms, and if we were to keep on burrowing into it, we’d find more and more. He’s becoming fascinated with Chandra for its own sake, I think. Falling in love with the damn thing.”

“How does that help us destroy it?”

“It doesn’t,” Blue said. “You can’t control these Commissaries, though. We had better get the job done before he digs so far he comes up with a reason for us not to attack it in the first place.”

“Pirius—” I know how scared you are, he thought. But he could never say such a thing.

Blue held up his hand. “You know how it is. The fear goes away. I’ll be fine once I lift.”

“I won’t be, though,” Hope said fervently.

Pirius Blue grasped his hand briefly. “I wish you were flying with us.”

“Me too.”

“Just don’t steal my stuff until after I’ve lifted. Show some respect.” And with that, Blue turned and clambered up a short ladder to his cockpit.

It took only minutes for the crews to load themselves into their blisters. The last maintenance hatches were closed, the last bomb trolley withdrawn. The ground crew pulled out of the hangar floor.

The roof of the hangar cracked open, and the air vanished in a shiver of frost. The harsh blue light of the Galaxy’s heart flooded into the chamber, overwhelming the glow of the globe lamps that hovered around the ships.

Hope watched from the hangar’s observation area. Here was Marshal Kimmer, and Captain Marta, and the reserve crews who weren’t making this flight, and others like Tili Three who hadn’t made the grade, and many, many of this strange base’s child-soldier inhabitants, all come to see the launches. Hope suspected that the military types longed to be in those ships, as he did, rather than be stuck here watching them leave. But he wondered how many were here because, morbidly, they expected these crews not to return.

Pirius Red’s own ship was to be the first to lift. As they worked through their final preparation, the crew’s comm was piped into the observation areas.

“Waiting for the red flag to power up sublight… We’ve got a red, we’re clear.”

“Start number three…”

“Primed.”

“Engage three…”

The greenship raised itself a handsbreadth above its cradle. Hope could feel a pulse in the asteroid’s own inertial field as it tried to compensate for the shift in mass.

“Pressure rising in the generators.”

“Copy that. Watch the compensation for the bomb pod, Engineer.”

“On it.”

“Waiting on the green for takeoff, crew. Waiting on the green. Green acquired, we’re cleared.”

As the greenship lifted, its main body bulkily laden with its unfamiliar technology, it wallowed a little.

“Passing through the roof.”

“Turn to port, port on my 129. Let’s give them a show, crew.”

Beyond the hangar’s open roof, in clear space, the greenship spun once, twice, its three crew blisters whirling about the craft’s long axis, an exultant gesture. Then it squirted out of sight.

There was a hand on Hope’s shoulder. It was Marshal Kimmer. “Fifteen hours,” the Marshal said. “Six hours out, three on station, six back. Then it will be over, one way or the other.”

“Yes, sir.”

All over the hangar now, the greenships were rising.

Cohl hadn’t believed it was possible she would sleep. But she needed a nudge in her ribs from Blayle to jar her awake.

When she glanced up at the sky, those shining gas clouds were burning away, and a shoal of bright blue stars, hot and crowded, swarmed above her. After billions of years of flight through the glowing clouds of the Northern Arm, Orion Rock, obeying the blind dictates of celestial mechanics, was at last emerging into the open. And for the humans who crawled over and beneath its surface, the moment of destiny was coming.

Chapter 53

The impoverished universe expanded relentlessly.

Space was filled with a bath of radiation, reddening as the expansion stretched it, and by a thin fog of matter. Most of this was dark matter, engaged in its own slow chemistry. The baryonic matter — “light” matter — was a trace that consisted mostly of simple nuclei and electrons. Any atoms that formed, as electrons hopefully gathered around nuclei, were immediately broken up by the still- energetic radiation. Without stable atoms, no interesting chemistry could occur. And meanwhile the ionic mist scattered the radiation, so that the universe was filled with a pale, featureless glow. The cosmos was a bland, uninteresting place, endured with resentment by the survivors of gaudier eras.

Nearly four hundred thousand years wore away, and the universe inflated to a monstrous size, big enough to have enclosed the Galaxy of Pirius’s time.

Then the epochal cooling reached a point where the photons of the radiation soup were no longer powerful enough to knock electrons away from their nuclear orbits. Suddenly atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium, coalesced furiously from the mush of nuclei and electrons. Conversely, the radiation was no longer scattered: the new atomic matter was transparent.

The universe went dark in an instant. It was perhaps the most dramatic moment since the birth of light itself, many eras past.

To the survivors of earlier times, this new winter was still more dismaying than what had gone before. But every age had unique properties. Even in this desolate chill, interesting processes could occur.

The new baryonic atoms were a mere froth on the surface of the deeper sea of dark matter. The dark stuff, cold and gravitating, gathered into immense wispy structures, filaments and bubbles and voids that spanned the universe. And baryonic matter fell into the dark matter’s deepening gravitational wells. There it split into whirling knots that split further into pinpoints, that collapsed until their interiors became so compressed that their temperatures matched that of the moment of nucleosynthesis.

In the hearts of the young stars, nuclear fusion began. Soon a new light spread through the universe. The stars gathered into wispy hierarchies of galaxies and clusters and superclusters, all of it matching the underlying dark matter distribution.

Stars were stable and long-lasting fusion machines, and in their hearts light elements were baked gradually into heavier ones: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When the first stars died, they scattered their heavy nuclei through space. These in turn were gathered into a second generation of stars, and a third — and from this new, dense material still more interesting objects formed, planets with rocky hearts, that swooped on unsteady orbits around the still-young stars.

In these crucibles life evolved.

Here, for instance, was the young Earth. It was a busy place. Its cooling surface was dotted with warm ponds in which a few hundred species of carbon-compound chemicals reacted furiously with each other, producing new compounds which in turn interacted in new ways. The networks of interactions quickly complexified to the point where autocatalytic cycles became possible, closed loops which promoted their own growth; and some of these autocatalytic cycles chanced upon feedback processes to make themselves stable; and, and…

Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.

Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their birth, and wondered where they had come from.

It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead. They thought that it was only now that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.

But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished times before.

Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.

For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.

Chapter 54

Suspended over the glistening surface of Orion Rock, bathed in the fierce light of the Cavity’s crowded stars, Pirius Red formed up his squadron.

Jees was the shield-master, of course, his best pilot — with a Silver Ghost in her engineer’s blister. Pirius Red himself tucked in just behind and to Jees’s starboard; Commander Darc, the backup shield- master, took the matching position to port. The rest of the ships took their places behind him, one by one calling off, making a formation that after all the training had become as familiar as the inside of Pirius’s own head.

Pirius felt a peculiar, nervous thrill. Despite the training, this was the first time the squadron, his squadron, had formed up to fly in anger — the first and, if it went well, the last.

But he was too busy for such reflections. Scout drones were already returning warnings of a Xeelee response to the Rock’s sudden emergence from the spiral-arm clouds. If the squadron didn’t get out of here now it wouldn’t be going anywhere, and the preparation would have been for nothing.

He went around the loop one last time. The familiar voices called in from the ships: Jees herself, Darc, Torec, This Burden Must Pass, even his own older self, Pirius Blue, all ready to go.

He called, “Squadron. Go to sublight.”

He felt a subtle push as his ship’s drive cut in. The stars ahead swam, blueshifted. In seconds, the squadron’s ten ships reached ninety percent of lightspeed, the optimum for setting up the grav shield. The formation still looked good; the hours of training were paying off.

“On your call, Jees,” he said.

Directly ahead of Jees’s tiny ship the grav shield coalesced. It was like an immense lens that muddled the fierce light of the Galaxy’s heart.

“Shield stable,” Jees called.

“Good work. Form up, form up.”

The squadron edged forward, perfecting the formation.

Already they were no longer even in the same universe as Orion Rock, Pirius thought; tucked up in this pocket cosmos, streaming through the prime universe at a fraction below lightspeed, the Xeelee would be quite unable to see them. That, anyhow, was the theory.

Before going to FTL, his last duty was to check with his own crew. His engineer was Cabel, the best of the bunch. His navigator was a kid called Bilson. A promisingly bright boy, but woefully inexperienced, for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to get the flying hours of some of the others — which was why Pirius had pulled rank and insisted he fly in his ship.

They were as ready as they would ever be.

If you had to ride behind a grav shield, the first FTL jump was the worst. During the endless training flights, that had been learned the hard way. You had to go into the jump at ninety percent light — and come out at the same velocity, smoothly enough to keep the grav shield stable — and keep your formation. They had done it in training; now they had to do it for real.

“Okay,” Pirius called, keeping his voice steady with an act of will. “On my command…”

Locked together by a web of artificial-sentient interactions, the ships jumped as one.

Cohl had seen the squadron rise out of its hangar. The greenships clustered in a tight little knot, right at her zenith.

She had done her duty, here on the surface, forging her links between infantry and flyers. She knew how important she had been to the overall mission, and she had welcomed Pirius Red’s trust in her. But now that it was all about to start, she longed to be up there in those ships, where she belonged. And she wondered if it could be true, as the barracks gossip had it, that there was a Silver Ghost somewhere aboard one of those ships.

The greenships seemed to shimmer, as if she were looking through heat haze. She had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was the grav shield, she thought, wondering.

She whispered, “Three, two, one.”

The greenships, ten of them, squirted out of sight, arrowing toward the very center of the Galaxy. Exultant Squadron was gone.

But a cherry-red glow was rising, all around the horizon.

Her platoon tensed, taking their positions. She gripped her weapon harder, and tried to keep her voice light. “Get ready,” she called.

The ground shuddered, and little puffs of dust floated up before her, immediately falling back. The Xeelee assault had begun.

Pirius felt the familiar FTL inertial lurch deep in his gut, and the shining sky blinked around him.

He hastily checked his displays. His ship had come through fine, he saw immediately, and had fallen back into the universe with its ninety percent lightspeed vector maintained.

Jees reported that the shield remained stable. The plan was to hold their positions for fifteen seconds, while they checked the functioning of the shield and other ships’ systems, and if they had been able to hold their formation in these unique conditions.

But there were only nine ships in the sky, not ten.

“We lost Number Six,” called Bilson.

“I see that,” Pirius snapped. He barked out unnecessary orders for the ships around the gap to close up. The ships were already moving into their well-practiced nine-ship formation, just as they had rehearsed for eight and seven and six, and on down.

One jump, they had barely left the hangar, and already a ship was lost. This mission was impossible.

The others seemed to sense his hesitation. “We go on,” Pirius Blue barked.

“Yeah,” Torec growled. “Nine out of ten through the jump is better than we war-gamed.”

They were right, of course. “We go on,” said Pirius.

“Lethe.” That was Bilson. “Look at that.” He brought up a Virtual feed of Orion Rock, already light hours away.

The Rock was under attack. A swarm of black flies was drifting down over its surface, obscuring the earthworks and weapons installations. Human weapons spat fire in response.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pirius said. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just make it worthwhile. Kick in the jump program. Number One—”

“The shield is still nominal, commander,” Jees called.

“On my command.” Again the sentients locked the ships together; without sentient support, the slightest inaccuracy in such enormous and complicated leaps would have left the squadron scattered over the sky. But the ships’ limited sentience, like every weapon in this immense battlefield, was subservient to human command; this was a human war.

“Three, two, one.”

After the second jump the flight got rougher, and nobody had time to look back anyhow.

Cohl’s own monopole-cannon bank had begun to fire. From its banked muzzles, point lights swarmed into the sky, and at its base she could make out human figures running back and forth, tending its ferocious machinery. This bank was one of hundreds emplaced on the Rock’s surface, all firing now, and looking up she could see streams of sparks, each a minuscule flaw in spacetime, washing up toward the bright blue stars of IRS 16. As its great engines of war opened up, the Rock shuddered and shook. It was almost joyous, as if the Rock itself welcomed this sudden conclusion of its own long genesis.

Ships were rising too, disgorged from underground hangars. Most of them were greenships, but of the standard design, lacking the modifications of Pirius’s squadron. They hastily gathered into tight formations and hurled themselves after the monopole fire. But Xeelee nightfighters came barrelling out of the blue starlight, and those brave green sparks flared and faded, starbreaker light stitching through them.

A whistle sounded on the general comm loop, a sound she had learned to dread. She couldn’t hesitate. She had to lead the way.

Her rifle gripped in one hand, she hauled herself over the earthwork’s lip. She didn’t get the move quite right. Her body was a clumsy, ungainly mass with too much inertia in a gravity field that was too weak, and she sailed perilously high over the churned-up asteroid ground. Light flared ahead of her, a battle already underway around the cannon emplacement. But though a few starbreakers flickered nearby, nobody was shooting at her right now. She didn’t look back. It was up to Sergeant Blayle to ensure the rest of the platoon followed her lead.

She careened down into the dirt, face-first. She was still alive, still in one piece. She was huddled in a shallow crater that afforded her a little cover, a few seconds’ breathing space.

She raised her head cautiously. The monopole-cannon emplacement was still firing, but shapes drifted around it, spheres and ellipsoids, all of them jet black. They were Xeelee drones, and they swarmed around the weapon emplacement like bacteria around a wound — as black as night, chillingly black, in a sky that glowed bright as day. The Xeelee would often send in drones like this as a first wave to try to neutralize a Rock, before deploying the heavier weaponry of the nightfighters and other ships. Even the Xeelee conserved their resources, it seemed.

But already the infantry were doing their job. Shadowy figures threw themselves toward the drones, firing as they arced on their short hops from one bit of cover to the next. Their weapons fired pellets of GUT mass-energy that shimmered as they hurled themselves toward their targets, and then burst open like miniature Big Bangs.

One lucky shot took out a drone — but it exploded, a booby trap. Debris showered, a vicious rain that lanced through the bodies of several troopers before digging itself into the chumed-up dirt. The endless chatter on the comm loops was interrupted by screams, the first of the action, before the morale filters cut them out.

Cohl’s platoon caught up with her. She checked her telltales. One trooper had fallen already, hit by a bit of shrapnel from that drone. Nine left, then, nine huddling in shallow pits in the broken ground.

“Let’s go!” She dug her hands and feet into the dirt and thrust herself forward again, firing as she flew.

Most of the drones sailed through the fire unperturbed. Xeelee construction material was tough stuff. The trick was to hit a drone at a point of weakness, at a pole of an ellipsoid, or an edge or vertex of a more angular shape. The spheres were toughest of all, but you still had a chance if you could get your shot close to one of the little windows that dilated open to allow the drones’ weapons to fire. Aiming was pretty much out of the question, though; all you could really do was add your rounds to the general fire that washed down over the drones. Cohl never even knew if her shots hit the target.

And meanwhile the Xeelee were firing back, with lances of some focused energy that were invisible except where they caught the churned-up asteroid dust.

Another of Cohl’s platoon fell in that hop. Still another was hit after they landed, her left arm sheared neatly off. The trooper was left alive but stunned, and blood briefly fountained, turning to crimson ice. A medical orderly was soon on her. He slammed his palm against her skinsuit’s chest panel. The wound was cauterized with a flare of light, and her skinsuit sealed itself up and started to glow a bright brick red, the color of distress. The medic began the process of hauling the wounded back to the earthworks she had just come from.

Cohl could see troopers all over the surface of the Rock, firing, falling, dying. There was a constant attrition, a hail of killings and terrible wounding that somehow seemed banal. The medic teams were working between the waves of advancing troops, right up to the front line. As casualties began to flow back from the lines all over the Rock, the strange industry of processing the wounded and the dead had already begun. And they still had a hundred meters to fight through before they closed on the weapons station.

Cohl checked her platoon once more. Three down, seven up. “Let’s go,” she called again. “On my mark. Three, two, one.”

And she threw herself into the fire.

Then there were eight.

Two hours in, Number Three suffered an instability in its GUT-energy generator: it had to turn back and run for home base. Pirius suspected that this failure had been human rather than technical. A major challenge in these bastardized ships was to keep the systems balanced to avoid excess stress on the power systems; a better pilot or engineer might have held it together.

But they were all feeling the strain. His own eyes were gritty, his face pooled with sweat that his skinsuit’s conditioning systems didn’t seem able to clear, and his hands were locked into claws by the effort of applying just the right touch to his controls, as he tried to balance the FTL jumps and sublight glides. But he couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse, not for a second, not if he was going to get his own laden, lumbering ship through this, and not if he was to keep his squadron together.

As they inched their way toward Chandra the astrophysical geography was slowly changing. The squadron was now tracing a feature the planners called the Bar: it was the pivot of the Baby Spiral, a great glowing belt of molecular gas that marked the bridge that joined the East and West Arms. Pirius could see the lane of gas like a shining road beneath him. He knew that road led straight to the system surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole itself, though that central mystery was still invisible to him.

And if he looked up, through a cloud of lesser stars he could see the bright blue lamps of the IRS 16 cluster. Orion Rock was somewhere up there, its human cargo fighting and dying.

Pirius, tucked into the shield’s pocket universe, saw this in a Virtual display. The light that fell on them through the grav shield was heavily stirred and curdled, but with tough processing you could get some information out of it.

As the fourth hour wore away, the squadron began to attract more attention. Suddenly they had an escort — Pirius counted quickly — a dozen, fifteen, twenty nightfighters, flying in loose formation around them. The Xeelee probed the squadron’s formation with starbreaker beams that folded, wavered, and dispersed as they penetrated the pocket universe. The greenships were able to evade these random thrusts easily enough without bending their formation too far. But the Xeelee weren’t serious; for now they seemed to be more intent on simply tracking this strange new development.

“That’s got to be good news,” Torec called. “They are surveilling us, not attacking. We’re something new, and they don’t understand.”

“Just as well,” Pirius Blue growled. “These lumbering beasts couldn’t defend themselves anyhow.”

“The grav shield is working,” Torec insisted. “The Xeelee don’t have FTL foreknowledge of what we’re up to.”

Commander Darc called, “I think you’re right. And maybe Orion is doing its job; they may not have the resources to spare for—” But he was cut off.

Pirius, immediately anxious, glanced up and to his right. The green spark that was Darc’s ship was falling away from the formation.

“Darc! Number Four, report!”

For an agonizing second there was silence. Then Darc came on the loop. “Leader, Four. A lucky shot, I’m afraid. I lost my engineer. Lethe, Lethe.”

“Can you hold formation?”

“Not a chance. I’m wallowing… dropping out now.”

Pirius’s heart sank. Losing Darc was like a punch to the heart.

But even as he was wrestling with whatever was left of his ship, Darc was watching him. “Squadron leader. Snap out of it. Call the seven.”

Pirius shook his head. “Form up the seven, the seven,” he ordered. Around him the surviving ships swam into the seven-strong formation they had practiced against this eventuality. “But, Lethe,” Pirius snapped, “we just lost our reserve shield-master.”

“In that case,” Jees said, “we’ll have to get by with one. Sir.”

Darc called, “Remember my final instruction, Squadron Leader.”

Darc had sworn to kill the Silver Ghost on Jees’s ship immediately, if it gave him the slightest excuse. Pirius said, “I won’t forget, commander.”

Darc laughed defiantly. “Get it done, Pirius! I’ll see you when it’s over.”

Pirius Red could see the Xeelee had triangulated on Darc: he was at the tip of an arrowhead sketched out by lancing crimson light. It was an oddly beautiful sight, Pirius thought, beautiful and deadly.

Blue said, “He’s taking on our escort. Trying to draw them away.”

“A brave man,” Burden murmured.

“He’s showing us the way,” Pirius Red said firmly. “Form up — Six, you’re slack! What do you think this is, a joyride? Form up, form up.”

He tried to settle down once more to the steady strain of nursing his ship and his squadron, in the wake of the imperturbable Jees. But another distracting display showed him what was happening at Orion Rock, which was now under heavy and concentrated attack. The Rock was fulfilling its primary purpose in the operation, which was to divert Xeelee fire. But such was the energy poured over it that the Rock glowed like a star itself.

Around the cannon emplacement, Xeelee drones still soared and spat. The fire from both sides had churned up the asteroid dirt, and all signs of the earthworks over which generations had labored had been erased in hours.

For a moment the action was washing around to the emplacement’s far side, and Cohl had nothing to fire at. She threw herself into a trench, panting. She lay as still as she could, locked in with the stink of her own shit, piss, sweat, blood, and fear, trying to let the fatigue work out of her limbs, and sucked water and nutrients from nipples in her helmet. Even here, the fire of the continuing battle lit up the furrowed surface of asteroid dirt before her, and glared off the scars on her faceplate.

The morale filters seemed to have been overwhelmed. The comm loops were dominated by wailing now, the massed crying, screaming, pleas for help from thousands of wounded troopers. But the wounded were far outnumbered by the dead. The noise was harrowing and useless.

There were only four left of Cohl’s platoon, four including herself. They had fallen back to a final perimeter just outside the platform on which the monopole cannon stood. She stole a glance over the lip of the trench. The cannon were still firing, but fitfully; Cohl had no idea how many gunners were alive. But still the Xeelee drones swarmed, a cloud of swimming black forms that seemed to grow denser the more you fired into it.

She knew it was only chance that had kept her alive long enough to be seeing this.

Cohl had been sealed up in her suit for four hours already. It was too long, of course. Every soldier knew that if an action took too long it had gone wrong, one way or another. And if the casualty rates inflicted on her own platoon were typical, soon those drones would get through and shut down the cannon for good.

But there was scuttlebutt on the comm loops that worse was to come: that in the angry sky above, the nightfighters were breaking through the picket line of greenships, and were moving in to finish off the Rock altogether.

Blayle was beside her, his face an expressionless mask. “A thousand years,” he murmured. “A thousand years of building — of belief, bloodlines forty generations deep, for nothing but to throw a handful of soldiers into Xeelee fire—”

“Don’t think about it,” Cohl muttered.

“I can’t help it,” he said, almost wistfully. “The more tired I get, the more I think. A thousand years devoted to a single purpose, gone in hours. It defies the imagination. And what is it for?” He craned his neck to peer up at the brilliant blue lamps of IRS 16. “I don’t know if the action is succeeding. Why, I don’t even know what the Xeelee are doing here, let alone why we’re attacking them.”

“We don’t need to know,” Cohl said, falling back on Doctrine. Then, more thoughtfully, she said, “But it’s probably always been that way.” If you were a soldier, war was small scale. All that mattered was what was going on around you — who was shooting at you, which of your buddies was still alive and trying to keep you alive. Whatever you knew of the bigger strategic picture didn’t matter when you were at the sharp end.

And as the enemy’s fist closed around this Rock, she could see no end point but defeat.

She had long burned off her initial adrenaline surge, long gone through her second wind. Now she was like an automaton, going through the motions of fighting and keeping herself alive almost without conscious thought. She had trained for this, been burned hard enough by her instructors on Quin for this strange condition to be familiar. But it was as if she were no longer even in her own head, but was looking down on her own hapless, dust-coated form in its failing skinsuit, scrunched down in a ditch in the dirt, trying to stay alive.

She glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her faceplate display. She’d had five minutes’ break; it felt like thirty seconds.

“It shouldn’t have been me,” Blayle said now.

“What?”

“Why me? Why, after all the generations who lived out fat, comfortable lives in this Lethe-spawned Rock, why is it me who has been pushed out here to fight and die? It should have been those others, who died in their bunks,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t have been me—”

Electric-blue light flared, and asteroid dirt was hurled up before them. Cohl twisted and fired into the blue-tinged fog of dust. She glimpsed Xeelee drones, pressing down on her trench. There was something above her; she felt it before she saw it. She rolled on her back, preparing to fire again.

But the ship was a flitter, small, unarmored. Its door was open and a ladder hung down.

“Cohl!” She recognized the voice; it was Enduring Hope. “Evac!”

“No. The cannon—”

“The Xeelee shot the heart out of it. The Rock is finished. There’s no point dying here.”

“I have to stay.” Of course she did; that was Doctrinal. You weren’t supposed to keep yourself alive, not while there were still enemy to shoot at. “A brief life burns brightly,” she said reflexively.

“Balls,” Hope said with feeling. “Come on, Cohl; I’ve risked my ass to come flying around this Rock looking for you.”

She made a quick decision. Reluctantly she turned to Blayle. “Sergeant…”

He didn’t respond. There was a small scar on Blayle’s faceplate, a puncture almost too small to see. A thousand years of history ends here, she thought. She wished she could close his eyes.

In the end only two of Cohl’s platoon were lifted out with her, two out of the nine she had led out of the trench.

As the flitter lifted, she saw the landscape of the Rock open up. Its whole surface crawled with light as Xeelee drones and human fighters hurled energy at each other, all in utter silence. It was an extraordinary sight. But already the nightfighters were closing in to end this millennial drama for good.

The flitter squirted away. Cohl, still locked in her skinsuit, closed her eyes and tried to control her trembling.

Pirius tried not to watch the chronometer. And he tried not to think about his own fatigue.

He felt as if he had been walking a high-wire for six hours. He tried to concentrate on the moment, to get through the next jump, and the next, and the next. If you didn’t survive the present, after all, future and past didn’t matter; that old earthworm Hama Druz had been right about that much. For all their training and sims, however, they hadn’t realized how exhausting this was going to be, this tightrope walk through the center of the Galaxy. He hoped he would have the physical and mental strength to actually fight at the end of it.

He shut the passage of time out of his mind. So he was surprised when a gentle chime sounded on the comm loops, but he understood its significance immediately.

Ahead, the grav shield was dissolving, and in the sky around him the stars and gas masses of this shining, complex place were swimming back to where they should be.

“No sign of our escort,” Bilson said.

“We got through,” Pirius murmured.

“Yes, sir.” Even Jees’s steady voice betrayed an edge of fatigue now. She should have been spelled by Darc, and Pirius knew that for the last hour she had been nursing one failing system after another.

Still, she had delivered them here, just as the operational plan had dictated, and with no more losses: seven ships had survived, out of ten that had started.

Somebody called, “What’s that?”

It was a star, a hot, bright, blue star, a young one — not part of the IRS 16 cluster, though; they were far from that now. And there seemed to be a cloud around it, a flattened disc, like the shields of rock from which planets formed.

“That,” said Bilson, “is SO-2. We’re exactly where we are supposed to be, sir.”

Engineer Cabel was less clued in. “And SO-2 is—”

“The innermost star in orbit.”

“In orbit around what?”

“Chandra,” said Bilson simply.

Pirius, for all his fatigue, felt a thrill of anticipation.

Blue called, “And what is that cloud around the star? Dust, rock—”

“Wreckage,” Bilson said. “The hulks of human ships — greenships, Spline. Some other designs I can’t recognize. Older ones, perhaps.”

Burden said grimly, “Even here the Galaxy is littered with corpses.”

“Xeelee in the scopes,” Bilson said softly. “They know we’re here. Pilot, we don’t have much time.”

“So we’re not the first to come this way,” Pirius said crisply. “Let’s make sure we’re the last. Defensive formation, seven-fold — come on, you know the drill.”

The greenships slid into place around him and the squadron edged forward. Pirius scanned the sky, looking for Xeelee fighters, and for Chandra, the strange black hole that was his final destination.

Chapter 55

In this age of matter the proto-Xeelee found new ways to survive. Indeed, they prospered. They formed new levels of symbiosis with baryonic-matter forms. The new form — a composite of three ages of the universe — was the kind eventually encountered by humans, who would come to call them by a distorted anthropomorphic version of a name in an alien tongue: they were, at last, Xeelee.

But soon the new Xeelee faced an epochal catastrophe of their own.

They still relied on the primordial black holes, formed in the earliest ages after the singularity; they used the holes’ twisted knots of spacetime to peel off their spacetime-defect “wings,” for instance. But now the primordial holes were becoming rare: leaking mass-energy through Hawking radiation, they were evaporating. By the time humanity arose, the smallest remaining holes were the mass of the Moon.

It was devastating for the Xeelee, as if for humans the planet Earth had evaporated from under their feet.

But a new possibility offered itself. New black holes were formed from the collapse of giant stars, and at the hearts of galaxies, mergers were spawning monsters with the mass of a million Sols. Here the Xeelee migrated. The transition wasn’t easy; a wave of extinction followed among their diverse kind. But they survived, and their story continued.

And it was the succor of the galaxy-center black holes that first drew the Xeelee into contact with dark matter.

There was life in dark matter, as well as light.

Across the universe, dark matter outweighed the baryonic, the “light,” by a factor of six. It gathered in immense reefs hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Unable to shed heat through quirks of its physics, the dark material was resistant to collapse into smaller structures, the scale of stars or planets, as baryonic stuff could.

Dark and light matter passed like ghosts, touching each other only with gravity. But the pinprick gravity wells of the new baryonic stars were useful. Drawn into these wells, subject to greater concentrations and densities than before, new kinds of interactions between components of dark matter became possible.

In this universe, the emergence of life in dark matter was inevitable. In their earliest stages, these “photino birds” swooped happily through the hearts of the stars, immune to such irrelevances as the fusion fire of a sun’s core.

What did disturb them was the first stellar explosions — and with them the dissipation of the stars’ precious gravity wells, without which there would be no more photino birds.

Almost as soon as the first stars began to shine, therefore, the photino birds began to alter stellar structures and evolution. If they clustered in the heart of a star they could damp the fusion processes there. By this means the birds hoped to hurry a majority of stars through the inconvenience of explosions and other instabilities and on to a dwarf stage, when an aging star would burn quietly and coldly for aeons, providing a perfect arena for the obscure dramas of photino life. A little later the photino birds tinkered with the structures of galaxies themselves, to produce more dwarfs in the first place.

Thus it was that humans found themselves in a Galaxy in which red dwarf stars, stable, long-lived and unspectacular, outnumbered stars like their own sun by around ten to one. This was hard to fit into any naturalistic story of the universe, though generations of astrophysicists labored to do so: like so many features of the universe, the stellar distribution had been polluted by the activities of life and mind. It would not be long, though, before the presence of the photino birds in Earth’s own sun was observed.

The Xeelee had been troubled by all this much earlier.

The Xeelee cared nothing for the destiny of pond life like humanity. But by suppressing the formation of the largest stars, the birds were reducing the chances of more black holes forming. What made the universe more hospitable for the photino birds made it less so for the Xeelee. The conflict was inimical.

The Xeelee began a grim war to push the birds out of the galaxies, and so stop their tinkering with the stars. The Xeelee had already survived several universal epochs; they were formidable and determined. Humans would glimpse silent detonations in the centers of galaxies, and they would observe that there was virtually no dark matter to be observed in galaxy centers. Few guessed that this was evidence of a war in heaven.

But the photino birds turned out to be dogged foes. They were like an intelligent enemy, they were like a plague, and they were everywhere; and for some among the austere councils of the Xeelee there was a chill despair that they could never be beaten.

And so, even as the war in the galaxies continued, the Xeelee began a new program, much more ambitious, of still greater scale.

Their immense efforts caused a concentration of mass and energy some hundred and fifty million light-years from Earth’s Galaxy. It was a tremendous knot that drew in galaxies like moths across three hundred million light-years, a respectable fraction of the visible universe. Humans, observing these effects, called the structure the Great Attractor — or, when one of them journeyed to it, Bolder’s Ring.

This artifact ripped open a hole in the universe itself. And through this doorway, if all was lost, the Xeelee planned to flee. They would win their war — or they would abandon the universe that had borne them, in search of a safer cosmos.

Humans, consumed by their own rivalry with the Xeelee, perceived none of this. To the Xeelee — as they fought a war across hundreds of millions of light-years, as they labored to build a tunnel out of the universe, as stars flared and died billions of years ahead of their time — humans, squabbling their way across their one Galaxy, were an irritant.

A persistent irritant, though.

Chapter 56

The seven surviving greenships of Exultant Squadron formed up into a tight huddle. In the sudden calm, the crews gazed around at the extraordinary place they had come to.

Of all the Galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars, SO-2 was the one nearest the black hole. And now they were within its orbit. This central place, a cavity within a cavity light-weeks across, was free of stars — because any star that came closer than SO-2 would be torn apart by black hole tides. It was filled with light and matter, though, with glowing plasma, but Pirius’s Virtual filters blocked that out. It was as if the seven of them hovered within a great shell walled by crowded stars, like flies inside a Conurbation dome.

And at the very center of this immense space was a pool of light. From this distance it was like a glowing toy, small enough to cover with a thumbnail held at arm’s length. It was a floor of curdled and glowing gas, as wide as planetary orbits in Sol system. This was the black hole’s accretion disc, the penultimate destination of debris infalling from the rest of the Galaxy — the place where doomed matter was compressed and smashed together, whirling around the hole like water around a leak in a bucket, before it fell into the black hole.

Of the monstrous black hole itself Pirius could see only a pinpoint spark, an innocent light like a young sun, set in the center of the disc. Somewhere in there was an event horizon that would have engulfed ten Sols side by side; indeed, in Sol system it would have stretched to the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury. The glow was the final cry of matter, compressed and heated as it fell into the hole, the flaw in the universe into which the Galaxy was steadily draining.

And it was Pirius’s target.

Cabel was studying magnified images of the accretion disc. He found a bright arc, traced across the churning surface of the disc, glowing brightly. “What’s that?”

“I think it’s a star,” Bilson said. “A star that came too close. Lethe, there is still fusion going on there.”

Cabel said slowly, “A star, being torn to pieces. Lethe, what a place we’ve come to.”

Blue called, “Heads up. Take a look at your tactical displays.”

Pirius Red’s Virtual maps of the region lit up with virulent crimson sparks, the locations of Xeelee concentrations. Most of them were around the rim of the accretion disc itself.

Blue reported, “The good news is that I don’t see any nightfighters or other combat ships in this region — none within the orbit of SO-2. So the feint with the grav shield worked. The Xeelee really didn’t anticipate we would get this far, and their reactions are slow. We have some time. But those red points in the accretion disc are Xeelee emplacements, Sugar Lumps, probably used as flak batteries. They are static — they aren’t going to come after us — but they pack a punch.”

So, Pirius thought, studying his display, to get at the black hole his greenships were going to have to fly through a hail of Xeelee flak, as well as pushing through the hazardous zone of the accretion disc.

“Let’s get it done before they wake up,” he said. “I’ll go in first. Engineer? Navigator? Are you with me?”

“Ready, Pilot,” Bilson said, his voice tight with tension.

Cabel called, “It’s what we came here to do.”

“Prep the weapons.”

Pirius worked through his checklist quickly, trying to set aside his own doubts, his fear. He knew they only had a few chances to make this work. Each of the ships carried only one pair of black-hole bombs: they would be able to deliver just one blow each. And this first run, with the Xeelee totally unprepared, was their best chance of all. If he succeeded on this very first strike, they could go home. He desperately hoped he could make it happen.

The other crews were quiet as they worked. He didn’t want to speak to Torec: he felt it would help neither of them. But he couldn’t forget she was there. Even if he got himself killed, he told himself, if he did his job, nobody else had to die today — she wouldn’t have to die.

It occurred to him he hadn’t heard a word from This Burden Must Pass since they had arrived in this cathedral of stars. It was a troubling, niggling thought, but he had no time to deal with it.

Green flags lit up. The ship was ready for the attack run. Pirius said, “Let’s do it.” He clenched his fists around his controls.

With Cohl and the rest of the final evacuees from Orion, Enduring Hope was lifted to Arches Base. The journey took two hours, so Hope arrived six hours after the greenships had been launched — when, he realized, Pirius should be arriving at Chandra.

Hope’s feelings were complex. The weeks he had spent preparing for the moment of the launch were over. He felt a great sense of relief, even anticlimax, that he had managed to get his ships away with only one major foul-up, only one ship lost; it had been better than he had expected, in his heart of hearts. And he was pleased to have been able to pull a few strings to get Cohl off Orion.

And yet frustration was knotting up inside him. He was after all a flyer, and his crewmate from the last, fated mission of Assimilator’s Claw was at this moment flying into a pit of Xeelee fighters at the center of the Galaxy, and he, Hope, wasn’t there. He was stranded here on Arches Base, and until and unless those ships came home, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Some consolation his creed was now, he thought dismally. He did believe intellectually that all he lived through was just one road among many, all to be resolved at the confluence at the end of time. But it certainly didn’t feel like that, not at moments like this. He wished he could talk it over with This Burden Must Pass — but Burden too was fighting at Chandra.

Lacking a better alternative, Enduring Hope made his way to his barracks. Perhaps he could get some sleep. He had a duty to keep fresh; when the ships came limping home again, the skills of himself and his engineering crews would be crucial.

But at the barracks a runner found him. He was to report to Officer Country. Hope was even more surprised when the runner led him to Arches’ main operations room.

He stood in the doorway, mouth agape. The room was a broad, deep arena, with walkways on several levels surrounding a huge Virtual display at the center. Today the main display was a diorama of the center of the Galaxy, with a brilliant pinpoint that must be Chandra itself, surrounded by an accretion disc and other astrophysical monstrosities. This main display was surrounded by more Virtuals, graphs, diagrams, and scrolling text that were, he recognized, diagnostic data on the Exultant ships themselves. Some of the walkways crossed the pit so that you could walk through the displays, studying them as closely as you liked. Around this pit of ever-changing information, staff worked, talking rapidly, tapping bits of data into the desks they carried. On one high balcony, Hope glimpsed Marshal Kimmer himself, standing gravely with his hands clasped behind his back, surrounded by a cluster of aides.

It was a Navy ops room at the height of a major operation; it was a nest of tense, coordinated activity. But the discipline and organization were obvious, and despite the complexity of the task and the tension of the hour, not a voice was raised.

And the information displays changed constantly. The central diorama had obviously been based on the information retrieved by Pirius Blue during his earlier pass through the central regions. But Hope saw now that sections of it were changing all the time, evidently updated with data returned from the ships of Exultant themselves.

Which meant they got through, he thought hotly. Exultant Squadron had survived, and had pushed through to its target, the very center of the Galaxy. He clenched his fist.

And now he looked more closely he saw a little cluster of brave green sparks, hovering above the accretion disc. One of those green gems broke from the cluster and was swooping down toward the accretion disc. It was utterly dwarfed, like a fly dropping toward a carpet, but it was advancing anyway. It had begun, Hope realized, thrilled; they were going in for the raid. And if he had survived, that lead spark must be Pirius Red himself.

“I know you.”

A woman approached him. She wore a plain white robe, and was short, shorter than he was. The skin of her face was smooth, but it was not the smoothness of youth, and her eyes were hard and sharp, like bits of stone. She said, “You’re Tuta. Who calls himself Enduring Hope.” She opened her mouth and laughed. It was an ugly, throaty noise, and her teeth were black.

He replied, “I think I know you, too. After he returned from Sol system, Pirius told me about you.”

“My fame spreads across the Galaxy,” Luru Parz said dryly. “I’m sure Pirius is much happier now that he’s away from Earth’s politicking and scheming, and is able to fly his toys around the center of the Galaxy again.”

Enduring Hope stared at her; he couldn’t help it.

Luru snapped, “Speak, boy! Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Hope licked his lips. “I’m thinking I don’t know whether I should offer you a chair, or report you to the Guardians.”

She laughed again. “You have a better sense of humor than Pirius, that’s for sure. I think I like you, Tuta.”

He asked hesitantly, “And is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That you are” — he glanced around and spoke quietly — “immortal?”

“Oh, I doubt that very much. I just haven’t gotten around to dying yet.”

“Why are you here? And how are you here?”

“As it happens I played a major part in initiating this project in the first place — as Pirius ought to have told you, though I doubt he understood it himself, Pirius or his bed warmer, those poor baffled children. I’ve come here to see the climax of what I started. I think I’m entitled to that much. As to how I got here, I leaned on Nilis to arrange it. Even so detached a Commissary as that bumbling oaf can still pull strings.”

“Where is the Commissary?”

“Frankly he was getting so anxious he was making a nuisance of himself, and the officer in command of the room sent him away. But he was distracted anyway. He’s still analyzing his fragments of data about Chandra, still seeking to discern what he calls its ’true nature.’ No doubt you know about that. But of course Chandra’s importance to the Xeelee is all that counts. And if we get a chance, we should smash it, simple as that. That’s why I supported this project in the first place. If it were up to me I would stop Nilis’s pointless rootling. All he is likely to find is a reason to pull our punches, and what use would that be?”

If this woman was one-tenth as old as Pirius’s unbelievable claims, then she must have seen so much, lived so much: Hope’s imagination failed as he tried to grasp what that must mean. “I wouldn’t have thought you would care what happens today, one way or another.”

“It’s a significant day in the long history of mankind, Tuta, whichever way it turns out. And I intend to be here to see it, triumph or disaster — or, more likely and a lot more fun, a bit of both — eh?” And she opened that hideous mouth again.

A bustling form emerged onto one of the higher walkways. It was Nilis himself, back despite his banishment. The Commissary recognized Hope and summoned him with a wave. Hope climbed a staircase, and found himself, dauntingly, on the balcony with Marshal Kimmer himself.

It turned out that it was Nilis who had called for Hope to come to the ops room, during this crucial hour. “I think I know you people by now. You would rather be there — but, given that you’re stuck out here, you will burn up if you don’t know what is becoming of your friends. I asked for Cohl, too, but she’s in sick bay. I arranged a data feed for her though.” He smiled at Hope almost fondly, and again Hope had thought how strange it was that such a gentle, thoughtful man should be responsible for a weapons system of such stunning destructive power.

Kimmer said softly, “Commissary. The moment approaches.”

Nilis looked at the display. “So it does. Oh, my eyes…” He went to stand with the still, statuesque form of Marshal Kimmer.

The room grew silent. That lone green spark was creeping toward the center of the main display. The Commissary’s hands were folded over each other, his knuckles white with tension.

In a series of short FTL hops, Pirius flew low over the surface of the accretion disc. He and his crew were alone now, the rest of the squadron lost in the glare behind him.

Below him fled a broadly flat, curdled surface, glowing white, a pool of gas that rotated visibly, churning like storm clouds on Earth. This was all that was left of the mass of stars and planets and living things that had been unlucky enough to fall into this lethal pit. He knew that a black hole destroyed all information about the matter it took into its event horizon, everything but spin, mass, and charge; but whatever the turbulent plasma below had once been, it was already reduced to nothing but fodder for the endlessly voracious Chandra.

He had long passed the closest approach achieved by his older self, Pirius Blue, on his scouting jaunt. Nobody in human history had ever approached the event horizon of a supermassive black hole so closely — and he had to go in a lot closer yet.

Nothing he saw was real, of course. All he saw was a Virtual rendering, reconstructed in wavelengths he was comfortable with, the glare turned down; if he had looked out of his blister he would have been blinded in an instant. But he thought he could sense the churning of this dish of plasma the size of a solar system, perhaps even the gut-wrenching gravities of the event horizon itself. He could feel the vast astrophysical processes around him. He was a mote trapped inside an immense machine.

“One minute to closest approach to the horizon,” Bilson warned.

Pirius felt his heart beat faster, but he tried to keep his voice light. “Remember your training. We practiced on rocks a couple of hundred kilometers across. Today we’re hitting a target a hundred million klicks wide. It ought to be easy.”

“But,” Cabel said dryly, “it’s a hundred million klicks of black-hole event horizon.”

“Shut up,” said Bilson, the fear sharp in his voice.

“No flak,” Cabel said. “They still haven’t seen us. We might actually live through this.”

“Thirty seconds,” the navigator called.

“Stand ready.”

And suddenly it was ahead of him, the center of everything, a sphere of glowing gas like a malevolent sun rising from the curdled accretion disc. The event horizon itself was invisible, of course: dark on dark, it was a surface from which not even light could escape. The glow he saw was the final desperate emission of infalling matter.

Under the control of its CTC processor, the ship rose up from the plane of the disc.

Pirius looked down as the accretion disc fell away. At the disc’s inner edge the infalling matter, having been spun and churned and compressed in its final frantic orbits, at last reached the event horizon. Wisps and tendrils, gaudy and pathetic, snaked in from that inner edge, glowing ever more feverishly.

He looked ahead into the ball of churning gas that surrounded the event horizon. The horizon was a sphere, but vast, a sphere as wide as Mercury’s orbit. The greenship’s path should take it skimming up toward its pole, kissing the surface tangentially at the point of closest approach, a precise one hundred kilometers from the mathematically defined surface of the event horizon itself.

A shining, electric-blue path appeared in the complicated Virtual sky before Pirius. Projected by navigator Bilson it was his computed course, designed to take him to the hundred-kilometer closest approach distance. Though they would pass vanishingly close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, there was nothing to fear from tides: Chandra was, paradoxically, too big for that, and in fact they could fall all the way down through the event horizon without feeling a thing.

Seconds left. The last million kilometers fell away, the immense curved surface started to flatten beneath the prow, and the mist of tortured matter cleared ahead of him -

To reveal a shining netting.

“Pull up!” Bilson screamed.

Pirius dragged at his controls, but the ship’s proximity sensors had reacted before he did. The ship climbed up and away. The electric-blue path disintegrated and vanished.

Suddenly the texture of that wall was fleeing beneath his prow. He made out an irregular mesh of shining threads, spread out like the lights of an immense city, all of it obscured by a storm of infalling plasma. This close he could see no signs of curvature; the event horizon was effectively a plain above which the greenship fled.

Bilson started to bring up magnified images. That structure really was a kind of net, a mesh of silvery threads. Small black shapes crawled along those threads — but they were “small” only on this tremendous scale; the shortest of those threads must have been a thousand kilometers long. The dominant structure was hexagonal, but the hexagons were not regular, and the effect was more like a spiderweb than a net.

Bilson breathed, “A web big enough to wrap up the whole of the event horizon. I think those black things are ships.”

Cabel asked, “Xeelee?”

“I guess. Not a design we’ve seen before. They seem to be trapping the infalling matter. Feeding off it. And look, there are more ships coming up from inside the mesh.”

“Then this is the central Xeelee machinery,” Bilson said. “What they use to make their nightfighters, to run their computing. This netting is the engine of the Prime Radiant. It must have taken a billion years to build.”

Lethe, Pirius thought. What have we got ourselves into?

Cabel called, “I hate to hurry you. But those flak batteries are waking up.”

Pirius called, “Bilson—”

“Understood, Pilot.”

A new path was laid in, a shining blue road that ducked down into the netting. The ship started to track the new course — but it bucked and swept up again.

“It’s that mesh,” Bilson shouted. “We weren’t expecting structure over the event horizon. The netting is actually under our hundred-kilometer ceiling, but the ship’s fail-safes won’t let us get close enough.”

Pirius thrust his hands into the controls. “I’ll override.” Even as he pushed the ship’s nose down, the systems fought back, and the ride was bumpy. “But I can’t hold this for long. Cabel, get the range finder working.”

Two cherry-red beams lanced out beneath the fleeing ship. Their paths were deflected in arcs, extraordinarily elegant, by Chandra’s ferocious gravity. Pirius, glancing down, saw the triangulating starbreakers slice through the netting as they passed, like burning scalpels passing through flesh. The intersection point should have been at about the level of the event horizon, but he couldn’t make it out.

“We’re doing a lot of damage,” Cabel reported. “Those flak batteries are definitely growing interested.”

“Never mind the flak,” Pirius growled. “There’s nothing we can do about the flak. Prepare the weapon. Bilson, are we at the right altitude?”

“I can’t tell,” Bilson said. “It’s not working — not the way it’s supposed to. There’s some kind of distortion when the beams pass through that netting.”

Cabel said, “We’re running out of time—”

Lethe, Pirius thought. To have come all this way and to fail, here… He held the ship steady on its course. “Do your best.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cherry-red light flooded Pirius’s cockpit.

“They found us!” Cabel yelled.

He was right; the ship was about to be triangulated by two, three, four starbreakers. Pirius snapped, “I need an answer, Navigator!”

“Now!” Bilson screamed.

“Engineer! Fire!”

Cabel didn’t acknowledge, but Pirius felt the shudder, familiar from training, as the cannon was fired, and twin point black holes shot out of the heavy muzzles mounted on the greenship’s main hull.

Once the shells were away Pirius relaxed his grip on the manual controls. The ship lifted itself up and away, twisting to evade attack, its CTC processor enabling it to respond faster than any human reaction. The cherry-red starbreaker glow dissipated.

Pirius lay back and sucked in a deep breath. Still alive.

The greenship shuddered, as if it were a toy boat bobbing on a bathtub.

“That was the detonation,” Cabel said.

Bilson was silent for a few seconds, gathering data. Then he said, “No damage. The weapon worked, but we must have missed the horizon.”

Pirius felt a heavy despair descend. “All right,” he said. “Keep gathering data. Maybe we can figure this out yet.”

“I didn’t screw up, Pilot,” Bilson said miserably. “I gave you the best I could.”

“I know,” Pirius said wearily. He believed him. But he knew that Bilson would blame himself for this for the rest of his life. “We still have work to do. We have six more chances, six more ships. The others will need our help. Keep your heads up. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Cabel said blankly.

“Navigator?”

“Sir.”

The mood among the remaining crews, at their station high above the plain of the accretion disc, was bleak.

Torec tried to make the best of it. “Whoever went in first was almost bound to fail. But we learned a lot.”

Bilson remained very down. “We didn’t know about that mesh. We can’t see through it, and our starbreakers are distorted by it somehow, so we can’t aim. And we haven’t got time to rewrite the attack plan.”

“He’s right,” said Pirius Blue. “Those flak batteries didn’t see you coming in, but they chased you back out, Red. And the ops room say there are nightfighters on the way.”

“We have to go back in,” said Pirius Red. “Now, before it gets any worse.”

“I’ll go,” said Jees abruptly. It was the first time she had spoken since Pirius’s return.

Pirius Red said, “But your ship’s configured to carry the grav shield.”

“We don’t need it on the way back. We’ll just be running for home.”

“No, but your bird will wallow even more than the rest.”

“Then I’m expendable. And I’m your best pilot,” she said simply. “If anybody can make this work, I can.”

Torec pointed out: “Pirius. She has a Silver Ghost on board.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Jees snapped. “Its presence doesn’t affect the operation of the weapon. And now that we’re done with the shield, its usefulness is at an end. The Ghost is just cargo now; it has no say.”

“She has a point,” Pirius Blue said.

But, Pirius Red thought, the Ghost was probably listening to every word.

He called his second flight commander. “Burden? What’s your recommendation?” But, though his comm channel was clearly open, Burden didn’t reply. Again Pirius felt a flicker of unease.

“Come on, Pirius,” Jees said evenly. “We need a decision.”

Enough. “Go,” he said.

Jees had evidently been waiting for the go-ahead. Her ship immediately looped out of formation and streaked down toward the accretion disc.

She got about as far as Pirius had. Then starbreaker beams from those Sugar Lump flak stations, four of them probed for her. She held her position, got her own range-finding starbreakers working, and reported doing a little more damage to the net. But her green spark winked out before she even launched her bombs.

When it was over, just minutes after Jees had left the formation, Pirius forced himself to speak.

“Okay. Okay. Maybe there’s another way.”

Enduring Hope was still on the balcony with Nilis, Kimmer, Luru Parz.

When the news of the second failure, and the loss of Jees and her crew, filtered through to the ops room, Nilis was distraught. He wandered along the walkway, wringing his hands and wiping the soft flesh of his face. “Oh no,” he said, over and over. “Oh no, oh no. It’s my fault. We are failing, and their lives are burning up like sparks, and all for nothing…” It was a distressing sight. But Enduring Hope reminded himself that Nilis was, at heart, a civilian, with a civilian’s lack of understanding of war.

Marshal Kimmer did not react, either to the bad news from the target or to Nilis’s loss of control. There was little he could do to shape the course of events, but in this difficult time he was a pillar of rectitude, Enduring Hope thought, a model of strength and determination. Hope had never thought much of Kimmer as a commander, what little he had seen of him; but this dark moment seemed to be bringing out the best in him.

Pila came hurrying along the walkway. She whispered to the Commissary, something about results concerning the nature of Chandra. Nilis looked shocked, and immediately followed her off the walkway and out of the ops room.

Enduring Hope was simply baffled. What in the universe could be more important than to be here, in these next few crucial minutes? But he felt relieved Nilis and his emotional turmoil were gone.

Luru Parz watched suspiciously.

The Marshal himself tapped Hope on the shoulder. “Engineer. Look. Your friend is going back in — Pirius.”

Hope was a bit overwhelmed to be prompted by a Marshal. But he asked: “Which one? Sir.”

“Both of them.”

“This time we send two ships in,” Pirius Red said. “Not just one at a time. I’ll go first.”

Torec said, “You’ve used up your weapon.”

“I know. I’ll go in to guide. Bilson, you’ve been there. We know we’ve breached that netting; maybe Jees managed to make the hole bigger. What if we could pass the starbreakers through that breach? We’d have a short time of free flight, not blocked by the net. We might see enough to hit the event horizon. What do you think?”

Bilson was very subdued. “It’s possible. It would be a very short time. Less than a second—”

“All right. Which is why whoever is going in will need a spotter.”

Torec said, “So who makes the bomb run?”

Pirius took a breath. He wondered how long he could keep making these decisions; he felt as if he was sentencing another crew to death. But he had to make a choice. “Burden — are you ready?”

There was no reply. And as the seconds ticked by, Pirius suddenly understood that there would be none. He brought up a Virtual image of Burden’s face. Behind his skinsuit visor Burden’s face was ghost pale, as if drained of blood.

Burden’s navigator whispered, “He’s been like this since we passed SO-2. I didn’t want to sav—”

Pirius Blue said, “Burden. Burden. Quero!”

Burden’s eyes flickered. He licked his lips, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry.” His voice was a hoarse croak, his throat evidently closed up.

Red said, “He’s frozen. Lethe. Blue, did you know about this?”

Blue sighed. “No. But I wondered… It happened before, didn’t it, Burden?”

Burden seemed to be loosening a little. “Yes. It happened before.”

“And that’s why you got busted down to the penal divisions on Quin. Cohl was right to be suspicious of you.”

“I never lied to you—”

“But you never told me the full truth, did you? It was nothing to do with your unorthodoxy.”

“That didn’t help. But, yes. I froze up. Just like this. People died, you know. Because of me, because I froze. I don’t understand it. I can fight on a Rock. I can fight my way out of those blood-soaked trenches. I can save lives. But up here, in a greenship—”

“And that’s why you kept busting your balls in combat missions? You were punishing yourself.”

“Lethe,” Torec snarled. “And that garbage about timelike infinity — did you mean any of it?”

“I gave hope,” he said quietly. “And it gave me hope. That some day it will all be put right. People died because of me.”

Blue said, “Down on the Rocks, you saved far more.”

“The arithmetic of death doesn’t work like that,” Burden said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Torec said.

“I let you down, Squadron Leader.”

“Yes,” Red said with feeling. “Yes, you did.”

“When you asked me to join you, and then to be a flight commander, I couldn’t refuse. It was such a noble thing to attempt, such a right thing. I wanted to be part of it. I just hoped I’d be able to get through it.”

“Well, you haven’t,” Torec said bitterly.

Red said, “Guys, we don’t have time for this.”

“I’ll make the run,” said Blue immediately.

Red said, “Why? To save face for your buddy?”

“No. Because I’m the better choice for a two-ship run anyhow. Think about it, Red. We’re the same person. If we go in together, communication’s going to be essential. If we can’t understand each other, who can?”

Red said, “But—”

“I know what you intend to do,” Pirius Blue said. “While I drop my bombs, you’ll draw the flak. That’s what you’re really planning, isn’t it, Red? You see, I told you I understood you.”

Pirius sighed. “All right. Cabel. Bilson. Yes, I intend to draw the flak away from Blue. Maybe that way we’ll give him a chance of succeeding with the mission. But you’ve been down there already. If you don’t think you can do this again—”

“Count me in,” Cabel said immediately.

Bilson was clearly having a lot more difficulty. But the navigator sighed raggedly. “You did say that if we screwed up today we’d be back tomorrow. Let’s get it over.”

“Good man,” Pirius said warmly.

“Let’s do it,” Blue said. His ship broke immediately out of the formation.

Pirius grasped his controls, and the two ships settled side by side.

Burden said, “I just want to say—”

“Later,” Red snapped.

Torec whispered, “Godspeed.”

Blue asked, “What does that mean?”

“Something I learned on Earth. Very old, I think.”

“No good-byes,” Pirius Red said. “Ten minutes, we’ll be back.”

Torec forced a laugh. “Knowing my luck, both of you. Or neither…”

In formation, the two ships swept down through the great hollow toward the shining puddle of the accretion disc.

Once again Red found himself flying low over the accretion disc; once again the event horizon itself rose like a malevolent sun before him. But this time Blue’s ship was a green spark off his port bow.

Blue opened a private loop to Red. “Of course,” he said, “if we both get killed down here, then nothing will be left of me — of you.”

“That would be simpler,” Red said.

“That it would. Take care of Torec if—”

“And you,” Red called. “Good luck, brother.”

“Yes — Lethe! I’m in flak!”

Pirius Red glanced across. Two, three, four starbreaker beams were raking the sky, trying to triangulate on Blue’s ship. Red yanked his ship sideways, cutting between. To his satisfaction, two or three of the beams started to track him, while the others lost Blue, who ducked below his nominal course. But if one of those beams touched him, however briefly, he would be done.

Red began to weave back and forth, the CTC pulling the ship through a rapid evasion pattern faster than any human pilot could — faster than a Xeelee, Pirius thought. But the starbreakers tracked after him.

Cabel growled, “I think I’m going to lose my breakfast.”

Pirius shouted, “But it’s working. Bilson! Keep tracking — it’s your job to guide Blue in.”

“Understood, Pilot.”

“Coming up on that netting,” Pirius Blue reported. “Wow — I don’t think I believed it — a contiguous structure light-minutes across! The Xeelee have been busy… Red, I’m in flak again.”

Pirius, following his evasive course, had drifted too far from his temporal twin. No time to get back under sublight.

He punched his controls. The ship jumped, a big FTL jump of a light-second or so. He heard the blister hull creak, and his displays lit up with red flags; you weren’t supposed to make such jumps in spacetime this turbulent. But it had worked, and he had lodged himself just in front of Pirius Blue.

And once again the flak beams were focused on him. He laughed out loud. “Bring it on!”

Bilson said, “I lost the lock.”

“Then get it back,” Pirius shouted. “Come on, navigator, we’re almost there.”

“I have it. I have it!” A starbreaker speared out from the greenship’s weapons pod, and hit a stretch of netting some distance before the two fleeing ships.

“I’ve got it,” Blue called. “Good work, Bilson. But we need to have a word about your flying, Red.”

“Have you got the event horizon?”

Blue said quietly, “We have a fix.”

Pirius’s cabin flared with cherry-red light. The starbreakers were close. He ignored the glow, overrode the automatics, and held the ship to its line. “Only a few seconds more, crew—”

The blister shuddered around him, and a telltale blared. He had lost one nacelle, one crew blister: it was Cabel, probably the best engineer in the squadron, gone, burned away, a scrap of flesh in this tremendous tumult of energy. Regret stabbed, but he had no time now, no time. Still he stuck to his line. “Blue, drop the damn bombs—”

“Gone!” Blue called.

Pirius hurled the ship sideways. But the starbreakers tracked him, and still the ship shuddered.

Blue reported, “Gone and — Lethe!”

“What? Blue, I can’t see.”

“The black holes converged — we picked up the gravity wave pulse, right on the event horizon. And the Xeelee — Lethe, it’s working!… Oh.” He sounded oddly disappointed.

Pirius wrenched his ship around once more. “Blue! Report.”

“The flak has got me. I can’t maneuver — I’m wallowing like a hog—”

“Blue!”

“I always did want to be remembered,” Blue said.

“So did I.”

“Maybe we will be after all. Good-bye, brother. Tell Nilis…” But his voice winked out, and Pirius heard no more, nothing but Bilson’s quiet sobbing.

In the ops room the cheering was loud.

That netting around the event horizon looked as if it had been punched open by a vast fist. The surface beneath, a mist of sheets and threads of plasma falling into the event horizon, was awash with waves of density that flared brightly — some were so dense, the monitors said, that hydrogen fusion was briefly sparking. These waves were caused by oscillations of the event horizon itself, where it had been struck a mighty punch by the coalescing black holes of Blue’s cannon. All around this part of Chandra, intense pulses of gravitational waves were washing out, and it was those waves that were wreaking such damage on the netting structure, far overwhelming the feeble human efforts.

It was Nilis’s moment of triumph. When Enduring Hope looked for the Commissary, he was nowhere to be seen.

Luru Parz watched, her eyes cold.

“Lethe, Nilis was right,” Marshal Kimmer said. “It worked! Where is that oaf? Commissary!”

At last Nilis came running onto the walkway. He was carrying a data desk which he waved in the air. He hurried up to Kimmer. “Marshal! I have it at last. Those final images of the web structure were the key — I knew there was more to this black hole than we suspected!”

Kimmer evidently didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care. He wrapped one arm around Nilis’s shoulders. “Commissary, you old fool! Unlike you, I have no imagination. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it. But you’ve done it! You’ve ripped a hole in that peculiar Xeelee nest — and we still have four armed ships left to finish the job. By the time we’re done that black hole will be as naked as the day it was formed, and the Xeelee will have nowhere to hide. I tell you, if you told me you had found a way to beat the Xeelee in a bare-knuckle fight I’d believe you now!”

Nilis pulled away forcibly. When he spoke, it was practically a shriek. “Marshal — listen to me. We have to call off the attack?

Kimmer, shocked, was silenced.

Luru Parz said, “And the remaining ships—”

“Call them home. Let no more lives be lost today.”

Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”

Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”

“You have what?”

“The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone…”

Chapter 57

The monads cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they liked their universes to have story; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.

And so in the time before time, when they picked out their seedling universes from the reef of possibilities, the monads, midwives of reality, exerted a subtle selection pressure. They chose for enrichment only the brightest bubbles in the cosmic spindrift: bubbles with a special, precious quality. A tendency to complexify.

Thoughtful beings, human and otherwise, would wonder at the endless fecundity of their universe, a universe that spawned life at every stage of its existence — and wonder why it had to be so.

Some of them came to understand that it was the universe’s own innate tendency to complexify that had created the richness of structure within it.

Simple laws of molecular combination governed the growth of such intricate, inanimate forms as snowflakes and DNA molecules. But autocatalysis and homeostasis enabled simple structures to interact and spin off more complex structures still, until living things emerged, which combined into ever more complicated entities.

The same pattern showed in other aspects of reality. The hive structures of ant colonies and Coalescent communities emerged without conscious design from the small decisions of their drones. Even in the world of human ideas, the structures of religions, economies, and empires fed back on themselves and became ever richer. Even mathematical toys, like games of artificial life run in computer memories, seemed to demonstrate an unwavering tendency to grow more complicated. But then, human mathematics was a mirror of the universe humans found themselves in; that was why mathematics worked.

Complexifying seemed inevitable. But it was not. A universe could be imagined without this tendency.

If the ability to complexify had suddenly been turned off, the universe would have seemed very different. Snowflakes would not form, birds would not flock, ants and Coalescents would have tumbled out of their disintegrating hives, baffled. On larger scales, economic and historical cycles would break up. Ecosystems would fail; there would be no coral reefs, no forests. The great cycles of matter and energy, mediated by life, on a living world like Earth would collapse.

But of course there would be no observers of such catastrophes, for without complexity’s search for feedback loops and stable processes, hearts could not beat, and embryos could not form.

Humans had the good fortune to exist in a universe in which there was no law of conservation of complexity, no limit to its supply.

But it didn’t have to be that way. That the universe could complexify, that richness of existence was possible at all, was thanks to the monads, and their subtle pan-cosmic selection. The monads had selected, designed, nurtured a universe that would be fruitful forever, in which there was no limit to the possibilities for life and energy, for life and mind, as far ahead as it was possible to look.

While empires rose and fell, while the universe continued its endless unraveling of possibility after possibility, the monads slumbered. They had done their work, made their contribution. Now they waited for the precious moments of the furthest future when this universe, in turn grown old, spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

But in their epochal sleep, even the monads could be drawn into history. And even they could be harmed.

Chapter 58

Luru Parz watched the Commissary with blank hostility, Enduring Hope with bafflement.

Nilis tried to tell his complex story too quickly, too briefly. For months he had been trying to assemble all the data on Chandra that he could find: on the Xeelee and quagmites and other denizens, on cosmological data like the relic Big Bang radiation, on the astrophysics of the black hole itself and the knotted-up singularity at its heart — and now even on the extraordinary artifact the Xeelee had wrapped around the event horizon. And he had come to a new conclusion.

Nilis said triumphantly, “Do you see? Do you see now?”

“No,” snapped Kimmer.

There was a story in this information, said Nilis. And that story was the secret history of the universe.

Nilis said he had looked deep into the structure of Chandra, and had found life infesting even the singularity at its heart. “These deep ones — the ones I call monads; it is a very antique word — they are older than all of us. Older than the Xeelee, older than the universe itself! It will take a lot of study to figure it all out. But it’s clear that the monads are responsible for life in this universe. Or rather for the tendency of this universe to complexify, to produce life. It is a level of deep design about the universe nobody ever suspected. And in their nests of folded spacetime, huddled inside the event horizons of black holes, they slumber — waiting for our petty ages to pass away — until the time comes for a new universe to be born from the wreckage of the old.”

“And the Xeelee—”

“They live off Chandra, the black hole. Their net structure is the great machine which allows them to achieve their goals: to birth nightfighters, to use the black hole as a computing engine, all of it. But that’s trivial. It’s what’s inside the black hole that counts. The Xeelee are just parasites. Secondary. They don’t matter!”

Kimmer said dangerously, “They matter rather a lot to me.”

Enduring Hope thought he understood. “And if we attack the black hole,” he said doggedly, “we could destroy the monads. Is that what you fear?”

“Yes,” Nilis said gratefully, sweat beading his brow. “Oh, my boy — yes! That is precisely what I fear.”

Kimmer said, “But even if you are right, there are other galaxies. Other nests of monads.”

Nilis insisted, “We can’t make any simple assumptions about this situation, Marshal.” He spoke rapidly about levels of reality, of interconnectivity in higher dimensions. “By striking a blow in this one place we may wreak damage everywhere, and for all time…”

Luru Parz said slowly, “The Commissary fears that if we destroy the monads we will break the thread — don’t you, Nilis? — the shining thread of life, of creativity, that connects this universe to those that preceded it, and to those that will follow. To kill them would be patricide — or deicide, perhaps.” She smiled. “Ah, but I forgot. In this enlightened age you don’t have gods — or fathers, do you? It’s entirely appropriate of humanity that when we do find God, we try to turn Him into a weapon, and then kill Him.”

“Shut up, you old monster,” Kimmer said.

Luru Parz said coldly, “But this is why I’ve been trying to stop you, Nilis. To stop this pointless research.”

His jaw dropped. “You — it was you? You obstructed me, you blocked me from the data, the processing resources I needed? I thought you were my ally, Luru Parz. It was you who said we must study the black hole in the first place!”

“Study it sufficiently to destroy it — that’s all we needed. Not this! Knowledge is a weapon, Nilis. That’s all it is. I always feared that if you rooted around for long enough you’d find some reason not to complete the project. Academic fools like you always do.”

Maybe she was right to block him, Enduring Hope thought. He recalled his conversation with Blue, who had foreseen exactly this outcome: that sooner or later Nilis would find a reason to fall in love with Chandra, and would try to stop the attack.

Nilis said darkly, “Listen to me. My analysis is hasty. And it contains more questions than answers. Regardless of any pan-cosmic responsibility, if we were to destabilize this monad complex, we don’t know what the result would be. The damage could be huge. I can’t begin to estimate it—” He shook his head. “Damage on a galactic scale, perhaps.”

Luru Parz pushed past Nilis to face Kimmer. Her face was alive, intense, but Hope thought it had the intensity of a sharpened blade, not a human expression. “Then let it be so. Marshal — we must do it regardless of the consequences. This is our one chance, don’t you see?”

Kimmer said, “But if we cause such devastation — if the Galaxy center detonates—”

Luru shouted, “What of it? Let the Galaxy be cleansed! Marshal, I have seen the human race populate a Galaxy once; we can do it again. And this time it would be a Galaxy free of Xeelee. We must do this!”

Nilis laughed, a brittle sound. “Marshal, you aren’t listening to her? Why, you fool—”

Kimmer’s reaction was immediate. He swung around and swatted the Commissary aside with one gloved fist. Nilis fell backward, clattering clumsily against a bulkhead, blood seeping from his mouth.

Enduring Hope ran to him and cradled his head. “Commissary, Commissary,” he whispered. “You can’t go around calling a marshal a fool!”

Luru Parz seemed to have recovered her detachment. Breathing hard, she said, “Our debate here is irrelevant anyway.”

Kimmer, confounded by the rapid turning of events, glowered at her. “What do you mean?”

“The decision to go on doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Pirius Red. Who has heard every word we have said. Haven’t you, Pilot?”

The voice from the center of the Galaxy was sepulchral. “I have, Luru Parz.”

Pirius Red pressed his gloved hands to his temples.

He and Bilson, his surviving crewmate, had made it back to the rump of his squadron. But he was grateful that he was alone in his blister. He was still trying to absorb the shocks of the last few minutes — the death of his engineer and the sudden loss of his own older self. He had no idea how he was supposed to feel about that. And now this, a questioning of the whole basis of the mission by the man who had instigated it all.

He found it difficult even to speak. He knew he was close to burnout.

This Burden Must Pass said, “It’s your decision, Squadron Leader.”

Pirius’s laugh was bitter. “Now you have something to say.”

Torec, her voice strained by grief, snapped at Burden, “Yes. And for you it doesn’t matter, because, right or wrong, everything will be put right at the end of time, won’t it?”

“Perhaps not this,” Burden said softly.

“We should wait,” Bilson said hesitantly. “We need time. If Nilis is right… We need time to check.”

Torec said, “But we won’t get as good a chance to strike again. We know that. The Xeelee will be waiting for us next time.”

“We will find another way,” Bilson said. “People are smart like that.”

“Yes, we are,” said Burden.

Pirius was anguished. If Nilis was even half-right, they could be committing a terrible crime, a crime that might transcend the universe itself. How could he possibly know the right thing to do? Who was he to have such a decision thrust upon him?

And yet the choice seemed clear.

Pirius said, “Enough of us have died today.” Including half of myself, he thought. He tried to rehearse the words. We pull back…

“Pilot.” Bilson’s voice was full of wonder.

Pirius looked down at the accretion disc. A kind of cloud was rising above that puddle of light, a black cloud. When he increased the magnification of his images, he saw they were ships, a horde of them, rising like insects.

“It’s the Xeelee,” Torec said. “They’re streaming out of the Cavity. I don’t believe it. They are abandoning Chandra.”

Burden said, “It looks as if they agree with Nilis. There are some things just not worth destroying, whatever the cost.”

“Let’s go home,” Pirius said.

The five battered ships swiveled as one and turned away from the heart of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee ships were still rising, countless numbers of them.

When Pirius Blue came to, he was embedded in darkness, unable to move. Impact foam, he realized.

To his own surprise, he was still alive. He had survived the flak assault, and the destruction of his ship. He wasn’t even injured, as far as he could tell.

With voice commands he brought up sensor data, which flickered before his eyes inside his visor. Drifting at the center of the accretion disc, he learned, he was rather a long way away from any possible pickup. And nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Suspended in darkness, locked into the foam, he came to a quick decision. He uttered a command.

His foam shell burst and flew apart, leaving him in his skinsuit. He was falling in a cloud of fragments, and a bath of brilliant Galaxy-center light. His visor turned jet black, and its inner surface immediately lit up with red warning flags.

He checked his suit’s systems. All overloaded, all on the brink of failure. A skinsuit wasn’t designed to withstand the ferocious conditions of the center of the Galaxy, and it knew it. But it didn’t matter. This would be over soon, one way or another.

With more commands he coaxed his visor to leak through a little of the hard light that battered it. Soon he could see again, if sketchily.

He was floating through a forest of shining threads, silvery lines as straight as laser beams — but some of the threads were broken, twisted.

With a jolt, he understood. He was falling through the net structure around the black hole. There was no sign of those vessels they had spotted crawling over the net, however. And there was no sign of his ship, or his crewmates, who, if they had not died immediately, must be drifting as helplessly as he was.

To his surprise, one comm loop was still working. He couldn’t talk to the squadron, but there was a line to the ops room on Arches. With brisk commands, he set it to transmit only, and patched in a visual feed from his visor. He was happy for them to watch what he watched. There might be much for them to learn, however the operation worked out. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody. No good- byes. Not when there was another version of himself who could do all that for him.

Still falling helplessly, he swiveled in space, and looked down at the event horizon.

Though infalling plasma crawled across its surface, reddening as it fell out of existence, it was dark, a dark plane beneath him. The ferocious light that bathed this place was either absorbed by the event horizon or else was deflected by the black hole’s immense gravity field; he was in the shadow of the black hole, a strange relativistic shadow left by bent and distorted light.

He lifted his head. The event horizon was like a monstrous planet, so vast it was a plain beneath him that cut the universe in two. Everywhere redshifted plasma writhed and crawled, raining into the hole, and immense auroras flapped. But at its straight-line horizon he saw bands of light; one, two, perhaps three stripes, running parallel with the edge. The rings were another product of the hole’s huge gravity field, as light was not simply deflected but pulled through one orbit, two, before being flung away.

But now he was falling ever more rapidly toward that fatal surface. Telltales warned him that his signal lock to Arches was being lost: the increasing redshift he must be suffering was affecting the frequency control. It was a secondary effect of the distortion of time itself by the black hole’s gravity. He tried to divert some of his processing power to adjusting the signal, to keep the lock as long as possible.

Time, time: from the point of view of his own younger self in the outside universe, time would pass more and more slowly for Blue as he approached the event horizon, until at last duration ceased altogether, and he was pinned against the horizon like a fly embedded in glass. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before relativity played a final trick on his tangled lifeline, and Pirius Red became the older twin after all.

Blue would know nothing of that. He probably wouldn’t feel anything when he passed through the event horizon itself. This far out from such a massive object, tidal forces had not yet begun to pluck at a body as small as his. Once inside the horizon, though, his fate would be determined.

Inside a black hole space and time pivoted about the constancy of lightspeed, and exchanged roles. Outside, time proceeded inexorably forward, but you could move back and forth in space. But inside a hole it was space that was one-directional. No matter how hard he struggled, his progress would be one way, toward the singularity at the geometric center of the hole — the singularity was now his only future. And there, long after the tides had torn his body apart, the strings and membranes that underlay the very particles of his body would be stretched and torn, before being crushed out of existence altogether.

The telltale acknowledgment signal from Arches turned to a high-frequency chirp that disappeared into inaudibility. He turned the comm system off; it was no use now.

He glanced back the way he had come. Though the crowded sky directly above him seemed unaffected, toward the hole’s horizon his view was blueshifted and muddled. It was as if he was looking out through a shallow, mirrored cone: even light was being pulled into the hole’s gravity field, and was starting to rain down on him. As he fell further the light would fold up behind him, and eventually all the light in the universe would be pulled tight into a pencil-thin cone, spearing down after him as he fell into darkness.

Of course the most likely cause of his death would be his suit’s failure. But perhaps he could juggle its systems, force the hole itself to kill him. He grinned fiercely. It would be a challenge.

Chapter 59

On the long journey back to Arches they saw no sign of Xeelee.

Ops told them that when the black hole web was abandoned, the Xeelee appeared to have ceased their operations, right across the face of the Galaxy, from Core to rim. Pirius found it hard to believe that this one action had made such a difference. But he was glad that they weren’t harassed; they would have been easy targets.

He was only bringing back four ships, though. This Burden Must Pass had volunteered to stay at Chandra for an additional day. He would record what he could of the field of action, and search for any survivors of the lost ships. Pirius agreed to this reluctantly. It was standard operating procedure, and as the sole surviving flight commander Burden was the right man for the job. But Pirius knew that this offer had more to do with the contents of Burden’s own head.

Besides, he didn’t like the idea of leaving anybody behind. He made sure Burden’s crew were happy with the idea before he agreed, but they seemed loyal to Burden.

Four ships left, then — and then another was lost. It was another systems failure — catastrophic, as the containment of the point black-hole bombs failed, and the ship was immediately torn apart. After that, Pirius ordered the crews to dump their remaining bombs. He knew he would regret for the rest of his life not having thought of this precaution earlier.

So in the end only three ships returned to Arches Base. They were directed to a hangar with enough cradles to hold the ten that had flown out from Orion Rock fifteen hours before.

Pirius was the first down. He made a shaky landing, dropping his ship too hard into its cradle. There were dozens of ground crew on standby, and they came swarming around immediately. But of course there was only Pirius and Bilson to help out of their blisters; the stump of Cabel’s nacelle was a mute testament to the loss.

Enduring Hope and Cohl were both here. Pirius was unreasonably pleased to see their familiar faces. They embraced, stiffly, in their skinsuits. But he could see their distress at the loss of Blue, “their” Pirius.

Marshal Kimmer, in a bright skinsuit adorned with badges of command, came striding forward. “Well done, pilot, well done!”

Pirius allowed his hand to be shaken. But when Kimmer demanded to know how the operation had gone, Pirius just said, “Wait for the debrief,” and turned back to his crew. You didn’t speak to a senior officer like that, but he was too tired to care.

Pirius sent Bilson to the sick bay, but he fought off the medics who tried to lead him away. He wasn’t about to leave the hangar until the other surviving ships made it home.

In they came, one at a time. Neither made a landing much better than he had, but both got down safely. The crews in their skinsuits clustered on the floor of the hangar, while medics and reserve flight crew crowded around them, and Hope’s technicians moved in on the ships.

Everybody talked at once. Relief was the first emotion, relief to be alive. The release of nervous energy was almost like elation. But those empty cradles told a harrowing story. People would wander off alone and glance at the sky, as if expecting one of the lost ships to come limping home even now.

Pirius’s most difficult meeting was with Torec. She hugged him, but her small face, inside her visor, was closed with grief. “I’ve got you back,” she said, “but I’ve lost you as well. How am I supposed to cope with that?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured.

Once inside the base, the crew were taken through standard post-operation processing.

First the medics checked them over. All but one, a navigator with a broken arm, were released. Then they were taken to a refectory, where food and drink were heaped up. They suddenly discovered how hungry they were. But there was enough food for thirty, and it was uncomfortable to be surrounded by empty chairs.

After that, though Pirius felt so exhausted he thought he would sleep for a week, they were taken away for preliminary debriefs, individually, in crews, and then as a whole. That went on for six wearying hours, until at last a consensus Virtual record of the operation was put together, combining all their viewpoints and the logs of the surviving ships. The crews accepted this as necessary. Details about the mission could be argued over for years, but these first moments, when memories were fresh and unclouded by sentiment or denial, were essential for an accurate record. It was grueling work, though.

Marshal Kimmer sat silently throughout these sessions. The only emotion he showed came when Pirius described how he had taken his ship back for a second run on Chandra, to guide Blue and to deflect the flak.

When the debrief was over, Kimmer approached Pirius. “You were right,” he said gruffly. “I should have waited for the debrief. But I’ll say it again. Well done, Pilot.” He seemed to want to say more, but his small, mean-looking mouth appeared incapable of expression. He bowed and walked away, his entourage of aides at his heels.

By now Pirius was so tired he felt numb, detached, as if he were still wearing a skinsuit. But he knew he had one more duty.

Commissary Nilis was in his room, deep in Officer Country. Pila sat with him. They were sorting through data desks, and Virtual images of Chandra and its surrounds floated in the air. Nilis actually shied away from Pirius when he came in, a kind of shame showing in his broad, rumpled face.

Pila, though, gazed at Pirius. “Well done,” she said softly.

He wondered what she was feeling. This strange, cold woman from Earth had been on her own journey, he supposed. He said, “I couldn’t have done it without you, Pila. I won’t forget that.” He turned to Nilis and said formally, “Commissary — I was glad to have taken part in the final experiment that proved your theories.”

That took Nilis by surprise. “Oh, my boy, my boy. Thank you! And you validated my faith in you, in spades. You have come a long way from that mixed-up child on Port Sol and Venus, my boy, a long, long way. You are a man — you poor wretch!

“And of course it has been a great technical achievement.” He smiled, his rheumy eyes wet. “Who would have thought, when we were limping around in Sol system, that we could have brought it off? Well, I always had faith in you, Pirius; I knew you could do it, if anybody could.”

“And we made history today.”

“Oh, yes, there’s that too. How remarkable to think that of all the galaxies we see in the sky, only ours is clear of the Xeelee — and all thanks to human endeavor! And it is a historic moment in other ways. It’s a fallacy, you know, that communication is always possible between alien cultures. The dismal records of the Assimilation prove that. Sometimes perceptions of our common universe simply diverge too much. In an awful lot of first contacts, ’communication’ is primal: only to be ignored, eaten, or attacked. And there is no record of the Xeelee attempting any form of communication with any lesser species, save extreme violence. But in this incident they did respond. We threatened Chandra, they withdrew, we did not attack; information, of a sort, passed between us, and a kind of agreement was reached.” He sighed. “If only it were possible to build on this breakthrough! Perhaps the perpetual war could be ended. But I fear that may be Utopian.”

Pirius knew how important this sort of philosophical stuff was to the Commissary. “A triumph in many ways, then.”

“Yes.” But Nilis’s face crumpled. “But too many people were lost — too many young lives rubbed out because of me and my dreams. Those moments when the first two runs failed, and I thought that despite the sacrifices I had demanded, I had failed, were almost more than I could bear.”

Pirius tried to find words about the proportionality of the losses compared to what had been gained. But Nilis, he saw, was inconsolable for now. After a time he left him to his work.

In their barracks, Torec was already asleep. She hadn’t even taken off the coverall given her by the medics after they peeled her out of her skinsuit. Pirius crawled in with her. She stirred, mumbled, and turned into his arms, a bundle of soft warm humanity.

He had thought he would be too agitated to sleep. Besides, he felt guilty about lying down to sleep when others had died, or were still out there. If he slept, this long day would finally end, and he would somehow lose it, lose them.

But sleep rose up like a black tide, regardless.

The next day, his first priority was his crews.

He toured the base. They were in their barracks, or the refectories, or the sick bays, or the gyms and training rooms where they had gone to work out the tension from their systems. A couple of them had gone back to the ships to help the ground crews with their own investigations and debriefing.

Some just accepted what had happened. It was a gamble worth taking, they said; you win some, you lose some. Others were bitter at the stupidity of the commanders, including Pirius himself, who had sent them into the Cavity with such poor intelligence. He absorbed their anger. And some just talked. They went over and over what they had done, telling and retelling their own small war stories as part of the whole. That was all right. It was part of the healing, and Pirius’s job now was to listen. And it wasn’t going to stop here, he knew. The shock of what they had gone through, and the guilt at having survived where others hadn’t, would never leave them.

Pirius had lost a temporal twin, a part of himself, and he wondered which way his own damage would work out — and how Torec, who had lost her lover and welcomed him home at the same time, would sort out her own complicated, guilt-ridden grief.

More than twenty-four hours after Pirius’s return, This Burden Must Pass brought his own battered ship home.

Pirius hurried to meet him, and walked with his crew to the sick bay. With his visor cracked open, Burden’s face was drawn, dried sweat was crusted under his shadowed eyes, and his hair was plastered to his head. Burden said that they had encountered no Xeelee harassment on the way back. “It looks as if it really is true,” he said. “They have abandoned the Galaxy to mankind. And because of us.”

“Quite a story to add to that end-of-time confluence of yours,” Pirius said.

“Yes, quite a story.” Burden said more slowly, “Pirius. About what happened out there—”

“Forget it,” Pirius snapped.

“I can’t do that,” Burden said. “If I’d gone into Chandra as you ordered, as was my duty, maybe Blue would have survived.”

“We’ll never know. We’ve all come home with regrets, Burden. Now we move on.”

Burden nodded, his eyes downcast. “We move on.”

Burden said he had found no traces of Jees’s lost ship. “It was smashed up. Two of the crew nacelles, more or less intact. But the systems had failed before the safety cut-ins could work.”

“They didn’t survive.”

“We sent the crew blisters into the black hole.” Burden smiled thinly, exhausted. “It seemed fitting.”

“That it does.” Pirius was thinking over what Burden had said. His thoughts were muddy; already the events of the flight seemed remote, as if they had happened a decade ago, or in another life. But there was something missing from Burden’s report. “You didn’t mention the third nacelle. Jees rode with the Silver Ghost.”

Burden grinned. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. I’ll have to report it, I suppose. Of the Ghost’s nacelle I found not a trace. Not only that, it looked to me as if it had been sheared off — I mean, deliberately.”

“The Ambassador escaped,” Pirius said, marveling. Once more there was a Silver Ghost loose in the Galaxy. “But what different can one Ghost make?”

“The Ghosts are remarkable creatures, and very resourceful. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Sink Ambassador. And you have to wonder if, from the Ghost’s point of view, this whole operation was set up — if we were set up — just to give the Ghost a chance to get free.”

“That’s impossible.”

Burden glanced around. “I’m not going to repeat this in the debrief. But I want to go back out there again.” He spread his gloved hands. “After all, the war is over, it seems. They don’t need me to fight any more. Not that I was much use at that in the first place. I want to go back to the center again, to look for the Ambassador.”

“Why?”

“Because we never finished our philosophical discussions. Things are different now. Perhaps we can learn from the Ghosts about how we’re going to live our lives from now on. Oh, Pirius — one more thing.” He dug out a data desk and showed him some complicated schematics. “Something the sensors picked up.”

Burden had observed structures of dark matter drifting through the center of the Galaxy. Invisible to human senses, passing through even the crowded matter around Chandra as if it was no more substantial than a Virtual, the shadowy forms had settled around the central black hole.

Burden said, “I remember what you said about Nilis, and Luru Parz, and their interpretation of history. The Xeelee cleaned these dark matter creatures, the ’photino birds,’ out of the Core. Now the Xeelee are gone — and in less than a day the birds are back.” He put away the data desk. “Silver Ghosts loose, dark matter creatures swarming through the Core — we have planted many seeds, as Nilis would say. Something tells me the future suddenly got a lot more complicated.”

A week after the crews returned from the core, Arches Base received visitors from Earth. The scuttlebutt in the dorms was that one was a member of the Grand Conclave itself, the highest body of governance in the Coalition: one of just twelve people who governed a Galaxy, and she was here. Not only that, the scuttlebutt went, she had come to give them all medals.

The day after that, the crews of Exultant Squadron and everybody connected with Operation Prime Radiant were called to the hangar. The hangar was covered by a translucent dome that gave a view of the sky, and the hot white light of the Core beat down into the interior of the pit. All ten of the ships’ cradles were empty now; the surviving ships would perform a flyby, piloted by reserve crews.

Everybody was here, brought together for the first time since they had dispersed after their debriefing. With Pirius were Torec, Burden, and the rest of the surviving crews. Cohl was here, and Enduring Hope brought a gaggle of grinning ground crew techs. The more senior officers, including Captains Marta, Seath, and Boote, kept apart, resplendent in new dress uniforms.

Others came out for their share of the limelight. Aside from civilians like Commissary Nilis and Pila, there were much more lowly types: workers, techs, administrators. Many of them were older than the flight crews, and their ranks gleamed with metallic implants, for this was the Navy’s way of using its surviving veterans. But they performed the various unglamorous but essential jobs that kept the base running and the ships flying, and with Pila’s help, Pirius had made sure that they would be here.

A piping sounded, a tradition, it was said, dating from a time when man’s ships sailed only the seas of Earth. The officers muttered quiet orders. The military staff and civilians alike drew their ranks up a little tighter and stood rigidly to attention.

A party swept from the shadows into full Galaxy light. Marshal Kimmer and Minister Gramm accompanied a much more imposing figure. Philia Doon, Plenipotentiary for Total War, tall, slender, was dressed in a long golden cloak that swept around her feet. Her gait was graceful — and yet it was not quite natural, as if she used prosthetics, and her footsteps were loud and heavy, abnormally weighty. Kimmer was speaking to her, but she was looking into the sky, and Pirius had the impression that even as she took in Kimmer’s words, she was listening to some other voice only she could hear.

The skin of her slender face shone a subtle silver-gray. There wasn’t a hair on her head.

Doon took her place on a low platform. One by one the staff of the base were presented to her. Marshal Kimmer himself went up first, followed by Nilis, who bowed as he was handed some kind of elaborate data desk. Then Doon began to work her way through the officers, down the ladder of superiority.

When it was his turn, Pirius found his heart thumping as he approached this strange creature. She towered over him.

“Congratulations, Pilot,” the Plenipotentiary murmured. Her voice was rich, but too precise — artificial, he thought. She said, “Your squadron — Exultant — was well named.” But even as she talked there was no expression in that silvered face, and she didn’t even seem to be looking at him. She beckoned him closer, and he smelled a faint scent of burning. She pressed her hand to his chest, and when she lifted it away a bright green tetrahedral sigil glowed there, his new battle honor.

Pirius was very glad when the ceremony was over and they were allowed to break ranks.

Nilis approached Pirius. “Well, Pilot, now you have seen right to the very heart of our marvelous Third Expansion — and that is the type of creature that festers there.”

“You mean Plenipotentiary Doon?”

“She is what is called a raoul,” Nilis said. “Do you not recognize the texture of her skin?”

“I don’t know the technology.”

“Not technology. Not even biology — or at any rate, not human biology. That stuff is the hide of a Silver Ghost. The Plenipotentiary is a symbiote; she has the internal organs of a human, but the flesh of a Ghost. Oh, and she has implants tucked into her belly, I believe: more symbiotes, another conquered alien species living on within the bodies of our rulers, a group-mind entity that once, it is said, conquered the Earth, and is now used to provide instantaneous links between the Plenipotentiaries and their circle of chosen ones.

“There is plenty of justification for all this surgery and genetic tinkering: the Plenipotentiaries have such responsibility that they need such powers, such dispensations from the Doctrines that are supposed to govern us all. But I hardly think Hama Druz would approve, do you? He would say she is a monstrosity, perhaps. But that monstrosity is what you have been fighting for.”

A monstrosity? Watching the Plenipotentiary, Pirius remembered Nilis’s talk of an eleventh step in human evolution. Were those prostheses no more than cosmetic — or would Doon somehow breed true? Perhaps this extraordinary woman really did represent the future, whether she made him comfortable or not.

They joined Pirius’s friends. Nilis told them high-level gossip he had heard about the impact of the operation on Earth. “Do you know, on Earth, for the first time in millennia the Library of Futures is blank. The future is unknown.” For a moment he sounded almost gleeful. “I hear that a lot of people are very scared. We really have shaken everything up, haven’t we, Pilot? All the way back to the corridors of Earth itself! Who can say what is to come? Oh, we face a great dislocation, of course. I suspect our greatest challenge will be to keep mankind from tearing itself apart, now that it has no one else on whom to vent its anger and frustration. We don’t need warriors anymore, but we do need peacekeepers, I fear!

“But isn’t it refreshing?” he said, and he bounced absurdly on his toes. “Think of it! Can we not now place Hama Druz in the grave which he so richly deserves? Druz in his neurotic terror longed to keep mankind static, unchanging. But that denies the basic creativity of the universe in which we are embedded — a creativity, indeed, which flows from the creatures inside that spectacular artifact you attacked, Pirius. Now we need no longer deny our essential nature: now we can swim with the flow of the universe rather than against it — and perhaps, at last, uncover our true destiny as children of the cosmos.”

All that sounded a bit vague to Pirius.

Enduring Hope said, “But, Commissary, when we get up tomorrow morning — what shall we do?”

Nilis laughed, avuncular, and spread his hands to the sky. “Why, there is a whole universe out there waiting for you — now that you don’t have to die before you grow up.” He pointed to the senior officers, to Kimmer and Seath and Marta. “They are too old to change. No doubt they hoped to die before the war ended — well, bad luck! For young people like you, the future is suddenly opened up. Perhaps some of you will come with me back to Chandra, to study that remarkable nest of transcosmic life. And perhaps some of you will go sailing beyond the bounds of the Galaxy itself. Why not? We’ve always been so busy battling to survive in this Galaxy, for twenty thousand years we haven’t so much as sent a probe out there.”

Cohl said seriously, “But the Xeelee are still out there — they are everywhere but here.”

“The Xeelee will keep for another day,” Nilis said gently. “And in the meantime you have families to build.”

Pirius was shocked. “Families?”

“Well, why not? The old machinery has always been there, even if we don’t use it anymore. And now all the rules have changed. It will do you good to have a real family, you know, to put down roots. You really don’t know how it feels.” He winked. “And I always did want to be a grandfather — honorary, at least!”

Pirius stared at Torec. Her face was flushed, but he could see generations of conditioning warring with even more ancient impulses. He hadn’t yet got over the loss of Pirius Blue, but a part of him had been glad, guiltily, that his temporal twin had gone, that his life had simplified a little. Now it looked as if it was going to get a lot more complicated again. He felt a sudden warm rush of joy.

From out of the crowd, Luru Parz approached. She was wearing a simple white robe. To Pirius, Luru Parz was a nightmare from his difficult time in Sol system. He felt unaccountably afraid. He wondered what possible justification she could have used to crash this event — but if she wasn’t shy even of a Plenipotentiary, she was powerful indeed.

“Congratulations, Pilot. Quite a feat of arms.”

Nilis said warningly, “Luru Parz, this is hardly the time for more of your antique strangeness. Let these young people enjoy their moment.”

“Their moment?” Luru Parz smiled coldly. “Their moment, yes, the moment of vivid brightness that makes a mayfly life worthwhile.” She glared up at the sky. “And we have won the Galaxy! When I was born — when mankind was restricted to a single planet, and was under the heel of an alien conqueror — nobody would have believed this day would come. For now we are briefly the biggest fish in this puddle of stars. But what is one galaxy? Out there, on scales beyond our very perception, is an ocean of wonders and dangers we can’t even imagine.”

Nilis snapped, “What do you want, Luru Parz?”

She turned on Pirius. “I want to make sure you understand what you have done, Pilot. For better or worse, you have broken open the strange madness that gripped humans for so long. Now the iron law of the Druz Doctrines will weaken, and mankind, scattered over a billion worlds, will begin to explore the limits of the possible. You have brought on us a new age, Pirius, an age of bifurcation.

Perhaps you think that’s a good thing — I know this fool Nilis does.

“But at least we were united in our madness. You see, we will never again be strong enough, never united, never determined enough, to strike as you could have struck.” She pointed her finger at Pirius. “You could have destroyed it — destroyed that monstrous thing at the center of the Galaxy — but you turned back.”

Pirius frowned. “Do you believe the Xeelee will return?”

“Of course they will. It’s only a matter of time. And we will not be able to push them out again. They will be back — just as the photino birds have returned, and another ancient conflict resumes. And you turned back.”

Torec asked, “Where will you go now, Luru Parz?”

“To Earth, of course.”

“Why?”

“To prepare its defenses.” With that she walked away, small, closed in, unimaginably ancient.

Hope gasped, and pointed up. “The flyby!”

Pirius looked up. Far above the surface of the asteroid, the surviving ships of Exultant Squadron sailed across the sky, their graceful human engineering silhouetted against the glare of the Galaxy’s heart.