Resplendent

LAKES OF LIGHT

AD 10,102

The Navy ferry stood by. From the ship’s position, several stellar diameters away, the cloaked star was a black disc, like a hole cut out of the sky.

Pala was to descend to the star alone in a flitter – alone save for her Virtual tutor, Commissary Dano.

The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inwards, silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had about the mass of Earth’s sun and, though it was dark, Pala imagined she could feel that immense mass tugging at her.

Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow cloaked, made perfectly black save for pale, pixel-small specks, flaws in the dark mask, specks that were lakes of light. She’d seen the Navy scouts’ reports, even studied the Virtuals, but until this moment she hadn’t been able to believe in the extraordinary reality.

But she had a job to do, and had no time to be overawed. The Navy scouts said there were humans down there – humans living with, or somehow on the star itself. Relics of an ancient colonising push, they now had to be reabsorbed into the greater mass of mankind, their energies engaged in the project of the Expansion. But the Galaxy was wide, and Pala, just twenty-five years old, was the only Missionary who could be spared for this adventure.

Dano was a brooding presence beside her, peering out with metallic Eyes. His chest did not rise and fall, no breath whispered from his mouth. He was projected from an implant in her own head, so that she could never be free of him, and she had become resentful of him. But Pala had grown up on Earth, under a sky so drenched with artificial light you could barely see the stars, and right now, suspended in this three-dimensional arena, she was so disoriented she was grateful for the company even of a Commissary’s avatar.

And meanwhile that hole in the sky, the cloaked star, swelled until its edges passed out of her field of view.

The flitter dipped and swivelled, and swept along the line of the star’s equator. Now she was flying low over a darkened plain, with a starry night sky above her. The star was so vast, its diameter more than a hundred times Earth’s, that she could see no hint of curvature in its laser-straight horizon.

‘Astonishing,’ she said. ‘It’s like a geometrical exercise.’

Dano murmured, ‘And yet, to the best of our knowledge, the photosphere of a star roils not a thousand kilometres beneath us, and if not for this – sphere, whatever it is – we would be destroyed in an instant, a snowflake in the mouth of a furnace. What’s your first conclusion, Missionary?’

Pala hesitated before answering. It was so recently that she had completed her assessments in the Academies on Earth, so recently that the real Dano had, grudgingly, welcomed her to the great and ancient enterprise that was the Commission for Historical Truth, that she felt little confidence in her own abilities. And yet the Commission must have faith in her, or else they wouldn’t have committed her to this mission.

‘It is artificial,’ she said. ‘The sphere. It must be.’

‘Yes. Surely no natural process could wrap up a star so neatly. And if it is artificial, who do you imagine might be responsible?’

‘The Xeelee,’ she said immediately. Involuntarily she glanced up at the crowded stars, bright and vivid here, five thousand light years from Earth. In the hidden heart of the Galaxy mankind’s ultimate foe lurked; and surely it was only the Xeelee who could wield such power as this.

There was a change in the darkness ahead. She saw it first as a faint splash of light near the horizon, but as the flitter flew on that splash opened out into a rough disc that glowed pale blue-green. Though a speck against the face of the masked star, it was sizeable in itself – perhaps as much as a hundred kilometres across.

The flitter came to rest over the centre of the feature. It was like a shard of Earth, stranded in the night: she looked down at the deep blue of open water, the mistiness of air, the pale green of cultivated land and forest, even a greyish bubbling that must be a town. All of this was contained under a dome, shallow and flat and all but transparent. Outside the dome what looked like roads, ribbons of silver, stretched away into the dark. And at the very centre of this strange scrap of landscape was a shining sheet of light.

‘People,’ Dano said. ‘Huddling around that flaw in the sphere, that lake of light.’ He pointed. ‘I think there’s some kind of port at the edge of the dome. You’d better take the flitter down by hand.’

Pala touched the small control panel in front of her, and the flitter began its final descent.

They cycled through a kind of airlock, and emerged into fresh air, bright light.

It wasn’t quite daylight. The light was diffuse, like a misty day on Earth, and it came not from the sky but from the ground, to be reflected back by mirrors on spindly poles. The atmosphere was too shallow for the ‘sky’ to be blue, and through the dome’s distortion Pala saw smeared-out star fields. But the ‘sky’ contained pale, streaky clouds.

A dirt road led away from the airlock into the domed ecology. Looking along the road Pala glimpsed clusters of low buildings, the green of forest clumps and cultivated fields. She could even smell wood smoke.

Dano sniffed. ‘Lethe. Agriculture. Typical Second Expansion.’

This pastoral scene wasn’t a landscape Pala was familiar with. Under Coalition ideology Earth was dominated by sprawling Conurbations, and fields in which nanotechnologies efficiently delivered food for the world’s billions. Even so this was a human scene, and she felt oddly at home here.

But she wasn’t at home. The Navy scouts had determined that the stellar sphere was rotating as a solid, and that this equatorial site was moving at only a little less than orbital speed. This arrangement was why they experienced such an equable gravity; if not for the compensating effects of centrifugal force, they would have been crushed by nearly thirty times Earth standard. She could feel none of this, but nevertheless, standing here, gazing at grass and trees and clouds, she was really soaring through space, actually circling a star in less than a standard day.

‘It takes a genuine effort of will,’ she said, ‘to remember where we are.’

‘That it does. And here comes the welcoming party,’ Dano said dryly.

Two people walked steadily up the road, a man and a woman. They were both rather squat, stocky, dark. They wore simple shifts and knee-length trousers, practical clothes, clean but heavily repaired. The man might have been sixty. His hair was white, his face a moon of wrinkles. The woman was younger, perhaps not much older than Pala. She wore her black hair long and tied into a queue that nestled over her spine, quite unlike the short and severe style of the Commission. Her shift had a sunburst pattern stitched into it, a welling up of light from below.

The man spoke. ‘My name is Sool. This is Bicansa. We have been delegated to welcome you.’ Sool’s words, in his own archaic tongue, were seamlessly translated in Pala’s ears. But underneath the tinny murmuring in her ear she could hear Sool’s own gravelly voice. ‘I represent this community, which we call Home…’

‘Inevitably,’ Dano said.

‘Bicansa comes from a community to the north of here.’ Pala supposed he meant another inhabited light lake. She wondered how far away that was; she had seen nothing from the flitter.

The woman Bicansa simply watched the newcomers. Her expression seemed closed, almost sullen. She could not have been called beautiful, Pala thought; her face was too round, her chin too weak. But there was a strength in her dark eyes that intrigued Pala.

Pala made her own formal introductions. ‘Thank you for inviting us to your community.’ Not that these locals had had any choice. ‘We are emissaries of the Commission for Historical Truth, acting on behalf of the Interim Coalition of Governance, which in turn directs and secures the Third Expansion of mankind…’

The man Sool listened to this with a pale smile, oddly weary. Bicansa glared.

Dano murmured, ‘Shake their hands. Just as well it isn’t an assessment exercise, Missionary!’

Pala cursed herself for forgetting such an elementary part of contact protocol. She stepped forward, smiling, her right hand outstretched.

Sool actually recoiled. The custom of shaking hands was rare throughout the worlds of the Second Expansion; evidently it hadn’t been prevalent on Earth when that great wave of colonisation had begun. But Sool quickly recovered. His grip was firm, his hands so huge they enclosed hers. Sool grinned. ‘A farmer’s hands,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

Bicansa offered her own hand readily enough. But Pala’s hand passed through the woman’s, making it break up into a cloud of blocky pixels.

It was this simple test that mandated the handshake protocol. Even so, Pala was startled. ‘You’re a Virtual.’

‘As is your own companion,’ said Bicansa levelly. ‘I’m close by actually – just outside the dome. But don’t worry. I’m a projection, not an avatar. You have my full attention.’

Pala felt unaccountably disappointed that Bicansa wasn’t really here.

Sool indicated a small car, waiting some distance away, and he offered them the hospitality of his home. They walked to the car.

Dano murmured to Pala, ‘I wonder why this Bicansa hasn’t shown up in person. I think we need to watch that one.’ He turned to her, his cold Eyes glinting. ‘Ah, but you already are – aren’t you, Missionary?’

Pala felt herself blush.

Sool’s village was small, just a couple of dozen buildings huddled around a scrap of grass-covered common land. There were shops and manufactories, including a carpentry and pottery works, and an inn. At the centre of the common was a lake, its edges regular – a reservoir, Pala thought. The people’s water must be recycled, filtered by hidden machinery, like their air. By the shore of the lake, children played and lovers walked.

All the raw material of this human settlement had come from cometary impacts, packets of dirty ice from this star’s outer system that had splashed onto the sphere since its formation. It was remarkable that this peaceful scene could have originated in such violence.

This was a farming community. In the fields beyond the village, crops grew towards the reflected glare of spindly mirror towers, waving in breezes wafted by immense pumps mounted at the dome’s periphery. And animals grazed, descendants of cattle and sheep brought by the first colonists. Pala, who had never seen an animal larger than a rat, stared, astonished.

The buildings were all made of wood, neat but low, conical. Sool told the visitors the buildings were modelled after the tents the first colonists here had used for shelter. ‘A kind of memorial to the First,’ he said. But Sool’s home, with big windows cut into the sloping roof, was surprisingly roomy and well lit. There were traces of art. On one wall hung a kind of schematic portrait, a few lines to depict a human face, lit from below by a warm yellow light.

Sool had them sit on cushions of what turned out to be stuffed animal hide, to Pala’s horror. In fact everything seemed to be made of wood or animal skin. But these people could generate Virtuals, Pala reminded herself; they weren’t as low tech as they seemed.

Sool confirmed that. ‘When the First found this masked star they created the machinery that still sustains us – the dome, the mirror towers, the hidden machines that filter our air and water. We must maintain the machines, and we go out to bring in more water ice or frozen air.’ He eyed his visitors. ‘You must not think we are fallen. We are surely as technologically capable as our ancestors. But every day we acknowledge our debt to the wisdom and heroic engineering of the First.’ As he said this, he touched his palms together and nodded his head reverently, and Bicansa did the same.

Pala and Dano exchanged a glance. Ancestor worship?

A slim, pretty teenage girl brought them drinks of pulped fruit. The girl was Sool’s ‘daughter’; it turned out his ‘wife’ had died some years previously. Thanks to her training Pala was familiar with such terms. The drinks were served in pottery cups, elegantly shaped and painted deep blue, with more inverted-sunburst designs. Pala wondered what dye they used to create such a rich blue.

Dano watched the daughter as she politely set a cup before himself and Bicansa; these colonists knew Virtual etiquette. Dano said, ‘You obviously live in nuclear families.’

‘And you don’t?’ Bicansa asked curiously.

‘Nuclear families are a classic feature of Second Expansion cultures. You are typical of your era.’ Pala smiled brightly, trying to be reassuring, but Bicansa’s face was cold.

Dano asked Sool, ‘And you are the leader of this community?’

Sool shook his head. ‘We are few, Missionary. I’m leader of nothing but my own family, and even that only by my daughter’s grace! After your scouts’ first visit the Assembly asked me to speak for them. I believe I’m held in high regard; I believe I’m trusted. But I’m a delegate, not a leader. Bicansa represents her own people in the same way. We have to work together to survive; I’m sure that’s obvious. In a sense we’re all a single extended family here…’

Pala murmured to Dano, ‘Eusocial, you think? The lack of a hierarchy, an elite?’ Eusociality – hive living – had been found to be a common if unwelcome social outcome in crowded, resource-starved colonies.

Dano shook his head. ‘No. The population density’s nowhere near high enough.’

Bicansa was watching them. ‘You are talking about us. Assessing us.’

‘That’s our job,’ Dano said levelly.

‘Yes, I’ve learned about your job,’ Bicansa snapped. ‘Your mighty Third Expansion that sweeps across the stars. You’re here to assimilate us, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ Pala said earnestly. It was true. The Assimilation was a separate programme, designed to process the alien species encountered by the Third Expansion wavefront. Pala worked for a parallel agency, the Office of Cultural Rehabilitation which, though controlled by the same wing of the Commission for Historical Truth as the Assimilation, was intended to handle relic human societies implanted by earlier colonisation waves, similarly encountered by the Expansion. ‘My mission is to welcome you back to a unified mankind. To introduce you to the Druz Doctrines which shape all our actions.’

Bicansa wasn’t impressed. Her anger flared, obviously pent up. ‘Your arrogance is dismaying,’ she said. ‘You’ve only just landed here, only just come swooping down from the sky. You’re confronted by a distinct culture five thousand years old. We have our own tradition, literature, art – even our own language, after all this time. And yet you think you can make a judgement on us immediately.’

‘Our judgement on your culture, or your lack of it, doesn’t matter,’ said Dano. ‘Our mission is specific.’

‘Yes. You’re here to enslave us.’

Sool said tiredly, ‘Now, Bicansa—’

‘You only have to glance at the propaganda they’ve been broadcasting since their ships started to orbit over us. They’ll break up our farms and use our land to feed their Expansion. And we’ll be taken to work in their factories, our children sent to worlds a thousand light years away.’

‘We’re all in this together,’ Dano said. ‘The Third Expansion is a shared enterprise of all humanity. You can’t hide, madam, not even here.’

Pala said, ‘Anyhow it may not be like that. We’re Missionaries, not the draft. We’re here to find out about you. And if your culture has something distinctive to offer the Third Expansion, why then—’

‘You’ll spare us?’ Bicansa snapped.

‘Perhaps,’ said Dano. He reached for his cup, but his gloved fingers passed through its substance. ‘Though it will take more than a few bits of pottery.’

Sool listened to this, a deep tiredness in his sunken eyes. Pala perceived that he saw the situation just as clearly as Bicansa did, but while she was grandstanding, Sool was absorbing the pain, seeking to find a way to save his way of life.

Pala, despite all her training, couldn’t help but feel a deep empathy for him. ‘We’re here to save you,’ she insisted, longing to be reassuring. It didn’t seem to work.

They were all relieved when Sool stood. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You should see the heart of our community, the Lake of Light.’

The Lake was another car journey away. The vehicle was small and crowded, and Dano, uncomplaining, sat with one Virtual arm embedded in the substance of the wall.

They travelled perhaps thirty kilometres inwards from the port area to the centre of the lens-shaped colony. Pala peered out at villages and farms. Mirror-masts towered over the buildings. It was as if they were driving through a forest of skeletal trees, impossibly tall, crowned by light.

‘You see we are comfortable,’ Sool said anxiously. ‘Stable. We are at peace here, growing what we need, raising our children. This is how humans are meant to live. And there is room here, room for billions more.’ That was true; Pala knew that the sphere’s surface would have accommodated ten thousand Earths, more. Sool smiled at them. ‘Isn’t that a reason for studying us, visiting us, understanding us – for letting us be?’

‘But you are static,’ Dano said coolly. ‘You have achieved nothing. You’ve sat here in the dome built by your forefathers five thousand years ago. And so have your neighbours, in the other colonies strung out along this star’s equator.’

‘We haven’t needed any more than this,’ Sool said. ‘Must one expand?’ But his smile was weak.

Bicansa, sitting before Pala, said nothing throughout the journey. Her neck was narrow, elegant, her hair finely brushed. Pala wished she could talk to this woman alone, but that was of course impossible.

As they approached the Lake there was a brighter glow directly ahead, like a sun rising through trees. They broke through the last line of mirror towers.

The car stopped, and they walked. Under their feet, as they neared the Lake itself, the compacted comet dirt thinned and scattered. At last Pala found herself standing on a cool, steel-grey surface – the substance of the sphere itself, the shell that enclosed a sun. It was utterly lifeless, disturbingly blank.

Dano, more practical, kneeled down and thrust his Virtual hand through the surface. Images flickered before his face, sensor readings rapidly interpreted.

‘Come,’ Sool said to Pala, smiling. ‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

Pala walked forward to the Lake of Light itself.

The universal floor was a thin skin here, and a white glow poured out of the ground to drench the dusty air. Scattered clouds shone in the light from the ground, bright against a dark sky.

As far ahead as she could see the Lake stretched away, shining. It was an extraordinary, unsettling sight, a flood of light rising up from the ground, baffling for a human sensorium evolved for landscape and sun, as if the world had been inverted. But the light was being harvested, scattered from one great mirrored dish to another, so that its life-giving glow was spread across the colony.

Sool walked forward, onto the glowing surface. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Pala. ‘It’s hot, but not so bad here at the edge; the real heat is towards the Lake’s centre. But even that is only a fraction of the star’s output, of course. The sphere keeps the rest.’ He held out his arms and smiled. It was as if he was floating in the light, and he cast a shadow upwards into the misty air. ‘Look down.’

She saw a vast roiling ocean, almost too bright to look at directly, where huge vacuoles surfaced and burst. It was the photosphere of a star, just a thousand kilometres below her.

‘Stars give all humans life,’ Sool said. ‘We are their children. Perhaps this is the purest way to live, to huddle close to the star-mother, to use all her energy…’

‘Quite a pitch,’ Dano murmured in her ear. ‘But he’s targeting you. Don’t let him take you in.’

Pala felt extraordinarily excited. ‘But Dano – here are people living, breathing, even growing crops, a thousand kilometres above the surface of a sun! Is it possible this is the true purpose of the sphere – to terraform a star?’

Dano snorted his contempt. ‘You always were a romantic, Missionary. What nonsense. Stick to your duties. For instance, have you noticed that the girl has gone?’

When she looked around, she realised that it was true; Bicansa had disappeared.

Dano said, ‘I’ve run some tests. You know what this stuff is? Xeelee construction material. Your first intuition was right. This cute old man and his farm animals and grandchildren are living on a Xeelee artefact. And it’s just ten centimetres thick.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she admitted.

‘All this is a smokescreen. We have to go after her,’ Dano said. ‘Bicansa. Go to her “community in the north”, wherever it is. I have a feeling that’s where we’ll learn the truth of this place.’

While Dano murmured this sinister stuff in her ear, Sool was still trying to get her attention. His face was underlit by sunlight, she saw, reminding her of the portrait in his home. ‘You see how wonderful this is? We live on a platform, suspended over an ocean of light, and all our art, our poetry is shaped by our experience of this bounteous light. How can you even think of removing this from the spectrum of human experience?’

Pala felt hopelessly confused. ‘Your culture will be preserved,’ she said hopefully, still wanting to reassure him. ‘In a museum.’

Sool laughed tiredly, and he walked around in the welling light.

Pala accepted they should pursue the mysterious girl, Bicansa. But she impulsively decided she had had enough of being remote from the world she had come to assess.

‘Bicansa is right. We can’t just swoop down out of the sky. We don’t know what we’re throwing away if we don’t take the time to look.’

‘But there is no time,’ Dano said wearily. ‘The Expansion front is encountering thousands of new star systems every day. Why do you think you’re here alone?’

‘Alone save for you, my Virtual conscience.’

‘Don’t get cocky.’

‘Well, whether you like it or not, I am here, on the ground, and I’m the one making the decisions.’

And so, she decided, she wasn’t going to use her flitter. She would pursue Bicansa as the native girl had travelled herself – by car, over the vacuum road laid out over the star sphere.

‘You’re a fool,’ snapped Dano. ‘We don’t even know how far north her community is.’

He was right, of course. Pala was shocked to find out how sparse the scouts’ information on this star-world was. There were light lakes scattered across the sphere from pole to pole, but away from the equator the compensating effects of centrifugal force would diminish. In their haste the scouts had assumed that no human communities would have established themselves away from the standard-gravity equatorial belt, and hadn’t mapped the sphere that far out.

She would be heading into the unknown, then. She felt a shiver of excitement at the prospect. But Dano admonished her for being distracted from her purpose.

He insisted that she shouldn’t use one of the locals’ cars, as she had planned, but a Coalition design shipped down from the Navy ferry. And, he said, she would have to wear a cumbersome hard-carapace skinsuit the whole way. She gave in to these conditions with bad grace. It took a couple of days for the preparations to be completed, days she spent alone in the flitter at Dano’s order, lest she be seduced by the bucolic comfort of Home.

At last everything was ready, and Pala took her place in the car.

She set off. The road ahead was a track of comet-core metal, laid down by human engineering across the immense face of the star sphere. To either side were scattered hillocks of ice, purple-streaked in the starlight. They were the wrecks of comets that had splashed against the unflinching floor of the sphere.

The road surface was smooth, the traction easy. The blue-green splash of the domed colony receded behind her. The star sphere was so immense it was effectively an infinite plain, and she would not see the colony pass beyond the horizon. But it diminished to a line, a scrap of light, before becoming lost in the greater blackness.

When she gave the car its head it accelerated smoothly to astounding speeds, to more than a thousand kilometres an hour. The car, a squat bug with big, tough, all-purpose tyres, was state-of-the-art Coalition engineering, and could keep up this pace indefinitely. But there were no landmarks save the meaningless hillocks of ice, the arrow-straight road laid over blackness, and despite the immense speed, it was as if she wasn’t moving at all.

And, somewhere in the vast encompassing darkness ahead, another car fled.

‘Xeelee construction material,’ Dano whispered. ‘It’s like no other material we’ve encountered. You can’t cut it, bend it, break it. Even if we could build a sphere around a star and set it spinning in the first place, it would bulge at the equator and tear itself apart. But this shell is perfectly spherical, despite those huge stresses, to the limits of our measurements. Some believe the construction material doesn’t even belong to this universe. But it can be shaped by the Xeelee’s own technology, controlled by gadgets we call “flowers”.’

‘It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere.’

‘Of course not. Even the Xeelee have to obey the laws of physics. Construction material seems to be manufactured by the direct conversion of radiant energy into matter, one hundred per cent efficient. Stars burn by fusion fire; a star like this, like Earth’s sun, probably converts some six hundred million tonnes of its substance to energy every second…’

‘So if the sphere is ten centimetres thick, and if it was created entirely by the conversion of the star’s radiation—’ She called up a Virtual display before her face, ran some fast calculations.

‘It’s maybe ten thousand years old,’ Dano said. ‘Of course that’s based on a lot of assumptions. And given the amount of comet debris the sphere has collected, that age seems too low – unless the comets have been aimed to infall here…’

She slept, ate, performed all her biological functions in the suit. The suit was designed for long-duration occupancy, but it was scarcely comfortable: no spacesuit yet designed allowed you to scratch an itch properly. However she endured.

After ten days, as the competition between the star’s gravity and the sphere’s spin was adjusted, she could feel the effective gravity building up. The local vertical tipped forward, so that it was as if the car was climbing an immense, unending slope. Dano insisted she take even more care moving around the cabin, and spend more time lying flat to avoid stress on her bones.

Dano himself, of course, a complacent Virtual, sat comfortably in an everyday chair.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would the Xeelee create this great punctured sphere? What’s the point?’

‘It may have been nothing more than a simple industrial accident,’ he said languidly. ‘There’s a story from before the Qax Extirpation, predating even the Second Expansion. It’s said that a human traveller once saved himself from a nova flare by huddling behind a scrap of construction material. The material soaked up the light, you see, and expanded dramatically … The rogue scrap would have grown and grown, easily encompassing a star like this, if the traveller hadn’t found the “Xeelee flower”, the off-switch. It’s probably just a romantic myth. Or this may alternatively be some kind of technology demonstrator.’

‘I suppose we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘And why the light lakes? Why not make the sphere perfectly efficient, closed, totally black?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps it’s a honey trap.’ She had never seen a bee, or tasted honey, and she didn’t understand the reference. ‘Sool was right that this immense sphere-world could host billions of humans – trillions. Perhaps the Xeelee hope that we’ll flock here, to this place with room to breed almost without limit, and die and grow old without achieving anything, just like Sool, and not bother them any more. But I think that’s unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the effective gravity rises away from the equator. So the sphere isn’t much of a honey trap, because we can’t inhabit most of it. Humans here are clearly incidental to the sphere’s true purpose.’ His Virtual voice was without inflection, and she couldn’t read his mood.

They passed the five-gravity latitude before they even glimpsed Bicansa’s car. It was just a speck in the high-magnification sensor displays, not visible to the naked eye, thousands of kilometres ahead on this tabletop landscape. It was clear that they weren’t going to catch Bicansa without going much deeper into the sphere’s effective gravity well.

‘Her technology is almost as good as ours,’ Pala gasped. ‘But not quite.’

‘Try not to talk,’ Dano murmured. ‘You know, there are soldiers, Navy tars, who could stand multiple gravity for days on end. You aren’t one of them.’

Pala was lying down, cushioned by her suit, kept horizontal by her couch despite the cabin’s apparent tilt upwards. But even so the pressure on her chest was immense. ‘I won’t turn back,’ she groaned.

‘I’m not suggesting you do. But you will have to accept that the suit knows best.’

When they passed six gravities, the suit flooded with a dense, crimson fluid that forced its way into her ears and eyes and mouth. The fluid, by filling her up, would enable her to endure the immense, unending pressure of the gravity. It was like drowning.

Dano offered no sympathy. ‘Still glad you didn’t take the flitter? Still think this is a romantic adventure? Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Romance. I saw the way you looked at Bicansa. Did she remind you of gentle comforts, of thrilling under-the-blanket nights in the Academy dormitories?’

‘Shut up,’ she gasped.

‘Didn’t it occur to you that as she was only a Virtual image, that image might have been edited? You don’t even know what she looks like.’

The fluid tasted of milk. Even when the feeling of drowning had passed, she never learned to ignore its presence in her belly and lungs and throat; she felt as if she was on the point of throwing up, all the time. She slept as much as she could, trying to shut out the pain, the pressure in her head, the mocking laugh of Dano.

But, trapped in her body, she had plenty of time to think over the central puzzle of this star-world – and what to do about it. And still the journey continued across the elemental landscape, and the astounding, desolating scale of this artificial world worked its way into her soul.

They drove steadily for no less than forty days, and traversed a great arc of the star sphere stretching from the equator towards the pole, across nearly a million kilometres. As gravity dominated the diminishing centrifugal forces, the local vertical tipped back up and the plain seemed to level out.

Eventually the effective gravity force reached more than twenty standard.

The car drew to a halt.

Pala insisted on seeing for herself. Despite Dano’s objections she had the suit lift her up to the vertical, amid a protesting whine of exoskeletal motors. As the monstrous gravity dragged at the fluid in which she was embedded, waves of pain plucked at her body.

Ahead of the car was another light lake, another pale glow, another splash of dimly lit green. But there were no trees or mirror towers, she saw; nothing climbed high above the sphere’s surface here.

Bicansa appeared in the air.

She stood in the car’s cabin, unsuited, as relaxed as Dano. Pala felt there was some sympathy in her Virtual eyes. But she knew now without doubt that this wasn’t Bicansa’s true aspect.

‘You came after me,’ Bicansa said.

‘I wanted to know,’ Pala said. Propped up in her suit, her voice was a husk, muffled by the fluid in her throat. ‘Why did you come to the equator – why meet us? You could have hidden here.’

‘Yes,’ Dano said grimly. ‘The Navy’s careless scouting missed you.’

‘We had to know what kind of threat you are to us. I had to see you face to face, take a chance that I would expose’ – she waved a hand – ‘this.’

‘You know we can’t ignore you,’ Dano said. ‘This great sphere is a Xeelee artefact. We have to learn what it’s for.’

‘That’s simple,’ Pala said. She had worked it out, she believed, during her long cocooning. ‘We were thinking too hard, Dano. The sphere is a weapon.’

‘Ah,’ Dano said grimly. ‘Of course. And I always believed your thinking wasn’t bleak enough for this job, Pala. I was wrong.’

Bicansa looked bewildered. ‘What are you talking about? Since the First landed, we have thought of this sphere as a place that gives life, not death.’

Dano said, ‘You wouldn’t think it was so wonderful if you inhabited a planet of this star as the sphere slowly coalesced – if your ocean froze out, your air began to snow … Pala is right. The sphere is a machine that kills a star – or rather, its planets, while preserving the star itself for future use. I doubt if there’s anything special about this system, this star.’ He glanced at the sky, metal Eyes gleaming. ‘It is probably just a trial run of a new technology, a weapon for a war of the future. One thing we know about the Xeelee is that they think long term.’

Bicansa said, ‘What a monstrous thought. My whole culture has developed on the hull of a weapon! But even so, it is my culture. And you’re going to destroy it, aren’t you? Or will you put us in a museum, as you promised Sool?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Pala whispered.

They both turned to look at her. Dano murmured threateningly, ‘What are you thinking, Missionary?’

She closed her eyes. Did she really want to take this step? It could be the end of her career if it went wrong, if Dano failed to back her. But she had sensed the gentleness of Sool’s equatorial culture, and had now experienced for herself the vast spatial scale of the sphere – and here, still more strange, was this remote polar colony. This was an immense place, she thought, immense both in space and time – and yet humans had learned to survive here. It was almost as if humans and Xeelee were learning to live together. It would surely be wrong to allow this unique world to be destroyed, for the sake of short-term gains.

And she thought she had a way to keep that from happening.

‘If this is a weapon, it may one day be used against us. And if so we have to find a way to neutralise it.’ The suit whirred as she turned to Bicansa, ‘Your people can stay here. You can live your lives the way you want. I’ll find ways to make the Commission accept that. But there’s a payback.’

Bicansa nodded grimly. ‘I understand. You want us to find the Xeelee flower.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Pala. ‘Find the off-switch.’

Dano faced her, furious. ‘You don’t have the authority to make a decision like that. Granted this is an unusual situation. But these are still human colonists, and you are still a Missionary. Such a deal would be unprecedented.’

‘But,’ Pala whispered, ‘Bicansa’s people are no longer human. Are you, Bicansa?’

Bicansa averted her eyes. ‘The First were powerful. Just as they made this star-world fit for us, so they made us fit for it.’

Dano, astonished, glared at them both. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, I see. A loophole! If the colonists aren’t fully human under the law you can pass the case to the Assimilation, who won’t want to deal with it either … You’re an ingenious one, Pala! Well, well. All right, I’ll support your proposal at the Commission. No guarantees, though.’

‘Thank you,’ Bicansa said to Pala. She held out her Virtual hand, and it passed through Pala’s suit, breaking into pixels.

Dano had been right, Pala thought, infuriatingly right, as usual. He had seen something in her, an attraction to this woman from another world she hadn’t even recognised in herself. But Bicansa didn’t even exist in the form Pala had perceived, not if she endured this gravity. Was she, Pala, really so lonely? Well, if so, when she got out of here she would do something about her personal life.

And she would have to think again about her career choice. Dano had always warned her about an excess of empathy. It seemed she wasn’t cut out for the duties of a Missionary – and next time she might not be able to find a legal loophole to spare the victims of the Commission’s heavy charity.

With a last regretful glance, Bicansa’s Virtual sublimated into dusty light.

Dano said briskly, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ll call down the flitter to get you out of here before you choke to death.’ He turned away, and his pixels flickered as he worked.

Pala looked out through the car’s window at the colony, the sprawling, high-gravity plants, the dusty, flattened lens of shining air. She wondered how many more colonies had spread over the varying gravity latitudes of the star shell, how many more adaptations from the standard human form had been tried – how many people actually lived on this immense artificial world. There was so much here to explore.

The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed out cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face – thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way towards the colony, and its lake of light.

Pala was right that the Xeelee star-cloak was a weapon. One day this strange apparition would return, to haunt human history.

What a pity Bicansa’s people never did find an off-switch.

This was an age when every resource in the Galaxy had to be harnessed to feed the Expansion. So the Missionaries and Assimilators drove on.

But, at the very edge of the human front, they were never very safe vocations.

BREEDING GROUND

AD 10,537

The starbreaker pod exploded in her face.

Mari was hurled backwards, landing with a jarring impact against the weapons emplacement’s rear bulkhead. Something gushed over her eyes – something sticky – blood? With sudden terror she scraped at her face.

The emplacement’s calm order had been destroyed in an instant. Alarms howled, insistent. There was screaming all around her, people flailing. The transparent forward bulkhead had buckled inwards, and the row of starbreaker pods behind it, including her own, had been crushed and broken open. Charred shadows still clung to some of the stations, and there was a stink of smoke, of burned meat. She had been lucky to have been thrown back, she realised dully.

But beyond the forward bulkhead the battle was continuing. She saw black extragalactic space laced by cherry-red starbreaker beams, a calm enfilade caging in the bogey, the Snowflake, the misty alien artefact at the centre of this assault. The rest of the flotilla hovered like clouds around the action: Spline ships, fleshy scarred spheres, sisters of the living ship in which she rode, each wielding a huge shield of perfectly reflective Ghost hide.

Then the gravity failed. She drifted away from the wall, stomach lurching. In the misty dark, something collided with her, soft and wet; she flinched.

There was a face in front of her, a bloody mouth screaming through the clamour of the alarm. ‘Gunner!’

That snapped her back into focus. ‘Yes, sir.’

This was Jarn, a sub-lieutenant. She was bloodied, scorched, one arm dangling; she was struggling to pull herself into a pressure cloak. ‘Get yourself a cloak, then help the others. We have to get out of here.’

Mari felt fear coil beneath her shock. She had spent the entire trip inside this emplacement, a station stuck to the outer flesh of a Spline ship; here she had bunked, messed, lived; here was her primary function, the operation of a starbreaker beam. Get out? Where to?

‘…Academician Kapur first, then Officer Mace. Then anybody else who’s still moving…’

‘Sir, the action—’

‘Is over.’ For a heartbeat Jarn’s shrill voice softened. ‘Over for us, gunner. Now our duty is to keep ourselves alive. Ourselves, and the Academician, and the wetback. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Move it.’ Jarn spun away, hauling pressure cloaks out of lockers.

Mari grabbed a cloak out of the smoke-filled air. Jarn was right; the first thing you had to do in a situation like this was to make sure you could keep functioning yourself. The semi-sentient material closed up around her, adjusting itself as best it could. There was a sharp tingle at her forehead as the cloak started to work on her wound. The cloak was too small; it hurt as it tried to enfold her stocky shoulders, her muscular legs. Too late to change it now.

Jarn had already opened a hatch at the back of the emplacement. She was pushing bodies through as fast as she could cram them in. Seeing Mari, she jabbed a finger, directing Mari towards Kapur.

The Academician – here because he was the nearest thing to an expert on the action’s target – was drifting, limbs stiff, hands clutched in front of his face. Mari had to pull his hands away. His eye sockets were pits of ruin; the implanted Eyes there had burned out.

No time for that. She forced herself to close the cloak over his face. Then she pushed him by main force towards Jarn’s open hatchway.

Next she came to Mace, the wetback, the Navy officer. He was bent forward over a sensor post. When she pulled him back she saw that both legs had been crudely severed, somewhere below the knee. Blood pumped out of broken vessels in sticky zero-G globules. His mouth gaped, strands of bloody drool floating around his face.

Her cloak had a medical kit. She ripped this open now and dug out a handful of gel. Shuddering at the touch of splintered bone and ragged flesh, she plastered the gel hastily over the raw wounds. The gel settled into place, turning pale blue as it sealed vessels, sterilised, dissolved its substance into a blood replacement, and started the process of promoting whatever healing was possible. Then she dragged a cloak around Mace and hurled him bodily towards Jarn and the hatch.

Under the alarm, she realised now, the noise had subsided. No more screaming. Nobody left in the emplacement was moving, nobody but her.

Beyond the forward bulkhead the Snowflake, the target, was beginning to glow internally, pink-white, and subtle structures crumbled. Fleshy Spline hulls drifted across the artefact’s immense, complex expanse, purposeful, determined.

But the bulkhead was blistering, about to give way.

She dived through the hatch. Jarn slammed it closed. Mari felt a soundless explosion as the bulkhead failed. The alarm was cut off at last.

She was in a kind of cave, roughly spherical, criss-crossed by struts of some cartilaginous material. It was dark here, a crimson obscurity relieved only by the glow of the cloaks. She could see portals in the walls of the cave – not hatchways like decent human engineering, but orifices, like nostrils or throats, leading to a network of darker chambers beyond. There was some kind of air here, surely unbreathable. Little motes moved in it, like dust.

When she touched a wall, it was warm, soft, moist. She recoiled.

She was stuck inside the body of a Spline.

Mari had never forgotten her first view of a Spline ship.

Its kilometres-wide bulk had dwarfed her flitter. It was a rough sphere, adorned by the tetrahedral sigil of free humanity. The hull, actually a wrinkled, leathery hide, was punctured by vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered. In one pit an eye had rolled, fixing Mari disconcertingly; Mari had found herself turning away from its huge stare.

The Spline – so went below-decks scuttlebutt – had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. Then, unknown years ago, they rebuilt themselves. They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs – and rose from their ocean like vast, studded balloons.

What it boiled down to was that Spline ships were alive: living starships.

On the whole, it was best not to think about it. Cocooned in the metal and ceramic of a gun or sensor emplacement, you mostly didn’t have to. Now, however, Mari found herself immersed in deep red biological wetness, and her flesh crawled.

Jarn, strapping her own damaged arm tightly to her side, watched her with disgust. ‘You’re going to have to get used to it.’

‘I never wanted to be a wetback. Sir.’ The wetbacks were the officers and ratings who interfaced between the Spline vessel and its human cargo. Mace, the Navy officer who had been assigned to escort Academician Kapur during the action, was a wetback.

‘We’re all wetbacks now, gunner.’ Jarn glanced around. ‘I’m senior here,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m in charge. Gunner, help me with these people.’

Mari saw that Jarn was trying to organise the survivors into a rough line. She moved to help. But there was just a handful here, she saw – eight of them, including Mari and Jarn, just eight left out of the thirty who had been working in the emplacement at the time of the assault.

Here was Kapur, the spindly Academician with the ruined Eyes, sunk in sullen misery. Beside him Mace drifted in the air, his cloak almost comically truncated over those missing legs. Next to Mace were two squat forms, wrapped in misted cloaks, clutching at each other. Round faces peered up at Mari fearfully.

She reached for their names. ‘Tsedi. Kueht. Right?’

They nodded. They were supply ratings, both male, plump, soft-skinned. They spoke together. ‘Sir, what happened?’ ‘When will we get out of here?’

Academician Kapur turned his sightless face. ‘We made a bonfire. A bonfire of wisdom almost as old as the universe. And we got our fingers burned.’

The ratings quailed, clutching tighter.

Useless, Mari thought analytically. Dead weight. Rumour had it they were cadre siblings, hatched in some vast inner-Expansion Conurbation; further rumour had it they were also lovers.

She moved on down the line of cloaked bodies. Two more survivors, roughly wrapped in their cloaks. She recognised Vael, a gunner ranked below herself, and Retto, a sub-lieutenant who had been officer of the watch at the time of the attack. Good sailors both. Even the officer.

Except they weren’t survivors at all. She could see that even through the layers of their imperfectly fitting cloaks, which had turned a subtle blue colour, the colour of death. Mari’s heart sank; it would have been good to have these two at her side.

Jarn had extracted a kit of what looked like hypodermic needles from a pack at Mace’s waist. ‘Take their cloaks. Retto’s and Vael’s.’

Jarn was one rank below the CO and his First Officer, with nominal responsibilities for communications. Mari knew her as a prissy idiot who routinely dumped any responsibility downwards. And now, in this grim situation, she had issued a stupid order like that. ‘Sir, they’re dead.’

Kapur turned blindly. A thin, intense, withdrawn man, he wore his head shaven after the ancient fashion of the Commission for Historical Truth, and he had a clutch of bright red vials strapped to his waist: mnemonic fluid, every droplet a backup record of everything that had happened during the action. He said, ‘I can read your tone of voice, gunner. I can tell what you’re thinking. Why did such good comrades have to die, when such a rabble as this has survived?’

‘Academician, shut up,’ Jarn snapped. ‘Sir. Just do it, gunner. There’s nothing to be done for them now. And we’re going to need those cloaks.’ Fumbling one-handed, she began to jab needles into the fleshy wall of the little cavern, squirting in thick blue gunk.

Of course Kapur was right. Mari surveyed her surviving companions with disgust: Jarn the pompous ass-muncher of a junior officer, Mace the half-dead wetback, Kapur the dried-up domehead, the two soft-bodied store-stackers. But there was nothing to be done about it.

Keeping her face stony, Mari peeled the cloaks off the inert bodies of Vael and Retto. Vael’s chest had been laid open, as if by an immense punch; blood and bits of burned meat floated out of the cavity.

Jarn abandoned her needle-jabbing. ‘The Spline isn’t responding.’ She held up the emptied hypodermics. ‘This is the way you communicate with a Spline – in an emergency, anyhow. Chemicals injected into its bloodstream. Lieutenant Mace could tell you better than I can, if he were conscious. I think this Spline must be too badly wounded. It has withdrawn from us, from human contact.’

Mari gaped. ‘We can’t control the ship?’

Kapur sighed. ‘The Spline do not belong to us, to humanity. They are living ships, independent, sentient creatures, with whom we negotiate.’

The siblings huddled fearfully. The fatter one – Tsedi – stared with wide eyes at Jarn. ‘They’ll come to get us. Won’t they, sir?’

Jarn’s face flickered; Mari saw she was out of her depth herself, but she was working to keep control, to keep functioning. Maybe this screen-tapper was stronger than Mari had suspected. ‘I’m a communications officer, remember.’ That meant she had a Squeem implant, an alien fish swimming in her belly, her link to the rest of the crew. She closed her eyes, as if tapping into the Squeem’s crude group mind. ‘There is no they, rating.’

Tsedi’s eyes were wide. ‘They’re dead? The crew? All of them?’

‘We’re on our own. Just focus on that.’

Alone. Kapur laughed softly. Mari tried to hide her own inner chill.

As if on cue, they all felt a subtle, gut-wrenching displacement.

‘Hyperdrive,’ Mari said.

The siblings clutched each other. ‘Hyperdrive? The Spline is moving? Where is it taking us?’

Kapur said, ‘Wherever it wants. We have no influence. Probably the Spline doesn’t even know we are here. This is what you get when your warship has a mind of its own.’

Impatiently, Jarn snapped, ‘Nothing we can do about that. All right, we have work to do. We should pool what we have. Med kit, supplies, weapons, tools, anything.’

There was precious little. They had the cloaks, plus the two spares scavenged from the bodies of Vael and Retto. The cloaks came with med-kits, half depleted already. There was some basic planet-fall survival gear, carried routinely by the crew: knives, water purification tablets.

Jarn rubbed her wounded arm, gazing at the kit. ‘No food. No water.’ She glared at Kapur. ‘You. Academician. You know anything about Spline?’

‘More than the rest of you, I suspect,’ Kapur said dryly. ‘For all you use them to fly around the Expansion from one battle to another. But little enough.’

‘The cloaks will keep us alive for twenty-four hours. We might use the spares to stretch that a little longer. But we need to replenish them. How? Where do we go?’

I wouldn’t have thought so far ahead, Mari considered. Again she was reluctantly impressed by Jarn.

Kapur pressed his fists to his burned-out Eyes. ‘Inwards. The Spline has storage chambers in a layer beneath its hull. I think.’

Tsedi said, ‘If only Lieutenant Mace was conscious. He’s the expert. He would know—’

‘But he isn’t,’ Jarn snapped, irritated. There’s just us.’

They were silent.

‘All right.’ Jarn looked around, and selected an orifice directly opposite the one they had entered through. ‘This way,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll lead. Academician, you follow me, then you two, Tsedi and Kueht. Gunner, bring up the rear. Here.’ She thrust one of the knives into Mari’s hand. ‘Keep together.’

Kapur asked, ‘What about Mace?’

Jarn said carefully, ‘We can’t take him. He’s lost a massive amount of blood, and I think he may be in anaphylactic shock.’

‘We take him.’

‘Sir, you’re our priority.’ That was true, Mari knew. You were always supposed to preserve the Academicians and Commissaries first, for the sake of the knowledge they might bring forward to the next engagement. And if that couldn’t be managed, then you retrieved the mnemonic vials the domeheads kept with themselves at all times. Everything else was expendable. Everything and everyone. Jarn said, ‘We don’t have energy to spare for—’

‘We take him.’ Kapur reached for Mace. Grunting, he pulled the Navy man to him and arranged him on his back, arms around his neck, head lolling, half-legs dangling.

Jarn exchanged a glance with Mari. She shrugged. ‘All right. You others, get ready.’

‘I don’t like this situation, sir,’ Mari said, as she gathered up her kit.

‘Me neither,’ Jarn muttered. ‘The day the Expansion takes full control of these Lethe-spawned Spline the better. In the meantime, just do your job, sailor. Form up. Keep together. Let’s go.’

One by one they filed through the orifice, into the crimson-black tunnel beyond. Mari, as ordered, took the rear of the little column, and she watched the dim yellow glow of the others’ cloaks glistening from the organic walls.

She couldn’t believe this was happening. But she breathed, she moved, she followed orders; and she seemed to feel no fear. You’re in shock, she told herself. It will come.

In the meantime, do your job.

Without gravity there was no up, no down. Their only orientation came from the tunnel around them. Its clammy walls were close enough to touch in every direction, the space so cramped they had to proceed in single file.

The tunnel twisted this way and that, taking them sideways as much as inwards. But with every metre Mari was descending deeper into the carcase of this wounded Spline; she was very aware that she was crawling like some parasitic larva under the skin of a living creature.

What made it worse was the slow going.

Jarn and Mari moved OK, but Kapur blundered blindly, and Tsedi and Kueht seemed unaccustomed to the lack of gravity. The siblings stayed as close to each other as they could get in the confined space, touching and twittering like birds. Mari growled to herself, imagining what the master-at-arms would have said about that.

They couldn’t have gone more than a few hundred metres before Mace’s cloak turned blue. But Kapur, bathed in a cerulean glow he couldn’t see, refused to leave Mace behind. He toiled doggedly on, his inert burden on his back.

Jarn snapped, ‘I don’t have time for this. Gunner, sort it out.’

‘Sir. How?’

‘With the tact and sensitivity you starbreaker grunts are famous for. Just do it. You two, move on.’ She took the lead again, hustling Tsedi and Kueht behind her.

Mari took her place behind Kapur, at a loss. ‘…I guess you knew each other a long time, sir.’

Kapur turned. ‘Mace and I? How old are you, gunner?’

‘Eighteen standard, sir.’

‘Eighteen.’ He shook his head. ‘I first met Mace before you were born, then. I was seconded here by the Commission, on the failed first contact with the Snowflake.’

‘Seconded?’

‘I was a Guardian, a policeman. As the Expansion grows, the rate of Assimilation itself accelerates, and specialists are rare … My own brand of forensic intelligence proved adequate for the role. My job was to understand the Snowflake. Mace’s was to destroy it.’

Mari understood the tension. Resources were always short. The Assimilation, the processing of newly contacted alien species on an industrial scale, followed an accelerating Expansion that now spanned a quarter of the Galaxy’s disc and had reached the great globular clusters beyond.

And, in one of those clusters, they had found the Snowflake. It surrounded a dwarf star, a tetrahedron fourteen million kilometres on a side: a stupendous artefact, a vast setting for an ancient, faded jewel of a star.

So far as anybody knew, the Snowflake had been constructed to observe: simply that, to gather data, as the universe slowly cooled. Since the building of the Snowflake, thirteen billion years had shivered across the swirling face of the Galaxy.

Assimilation was a matter of processing: contact, conquest, absorption – and, if necessary, destruction. If Kapur had been able to determine the goals of the Snowflake and its builders, then perhaps those objectives could be subverted to serve human purposes. If not, then the Snowflake had no value.

Mari guessed, ‘Lieutenant Mace gave you a hard time.’

Kapur shook his head. ‘Mace was a good officer. Hard, intelligent, ambitious, brutal. He knew his job and he carried it out as best he could. I was in his way; that was uncomfortable for me. But I always admired him for what he was. In the end the Snowflake resisted Mace’s crude assaults.’

‘How?’

‘We were – brushed aside.’

He tried to explain what had happened. Their ship had been hit by a beam of lased gravity waves, that had come from outside the Galaxy. It seemed that the Snowmen, the builders of the ’Flake, had been able to manipulate something humans called Mach’s principle. Mach, or Mar-que, it was a name all but lost in the Qax Extirpation.

Kapur said, ‘You are embedded in a universe of matter. That matter tugs at you with gravity fields – but the fields surround you uniformly; they are equal in all directions, isotropic and timeless. The Snowmen had a way of making the field … unequal.’

‘How?’

Kapur laughed uneasily. ‘We still don’t know. I guess you learn a lot in thirteen billion years.

‘It has taken twenty-two years for the Academies to figure out how to deal with the Snowflake. For deal with it we must, of course. Its stubborn, defiant existence is not a direct threat to us, but it is a challenge to the logic of our ideology.’ Now he smiled, remembering. ‘After our failed mission we corresponded, Mace and I. I followed Mace’s career with a certain pride. Do you think it’s getting hot?’

‘Sir—’

‘When I was assigned to this second assault on the Snowflake, Mace was seconded to accompany me. He had risen to lieutenant. It galled him to have to become a wetback.’

‘Sir. Lieutenant Mace is dead.’

Kapur drifted to a halt, and sighed. ‘Ah. Then knowing me did him little good in the end. What a pity it ends like this.’

Gently Mari pulled the broken body from Kapur’s back. Kapur didn’t resist; he drifted to the wall, running his fingers over its moist surface. Mari pulled the cloak off Mace’s inert body, but it had been used up by its efforts to keep Mace alive.

She was surprised to learn of a friendship between a straight-and-true Navy man and a domehead. And then Kapur had attempted to haul his friend along with him, even though it must have been obvious that Mace couldn’t survive – even though Kapur, as their passenger Academician, would have been in his rights to demand that the rest of them carry him along.

People always surprised you. Especially those without military training and the proper orientation. But then, she had never gotten to know any domeheads before, not before this disaster, today.

She shoved the body back the way they had come, up into the darkness. When she was done she was sweating. Maybe it was getting hotter in here, as they penetrated deeper into the core of the Spline. ‘It’s done, sir. Now we have to—’

There was a flash of light from deeper inside the tunnel. And now came a high-pitched, animal scream.

Mari shoved Kapur out of the way and hurled herself down the tunnel.

It was Tsedi, the fat rating. He looked as if he had been shot in the stomach. The cloak over his fat belly was scorched and blackened, flaking away. Kueht bounced around the cramped tunnel, screaming, eyes bugging wide, flapping uselessly.

Jarn was struggling with one of the spare cloaks. ‘Help me.’ Together Jarn and Mari wrapped the cloak around Tsedi’s shivering form.

And when she got closer Mari saw that whatever had burned through the rating’s cloak had gone on, digging a hole right into Tsedi’s body, exposing layers of flesh and fat. Inside the hole something glistened, wet and pulsing.

She retched.

‘Hold it in,’ Jarn said, her own voice tremulous. ‘Your cloak would handle the mess, but you’d smell it for ever.’

Mari swallowed hard, and got herself under control. But her hand went to the knife tucked into her belt. ‘Did someone fire on us?’

Jarn said, ‘Nothing like that. It was the Spline.’

‘The Spline?’

Kapur was hovering above them, anchored to the wall by a fingertip touch. ‘Haven’t you noticed how hot it has become?’

Jarn said evenly, ‘I remember hearing rumours about this. It’s part of their – um, lifecycle. The Spline will dive into the surface layers of a star. Normally, of course, they drop off any human passengers first.’

Mari said, ‘We’re inside a star? Why?’

Jarn shrugged. ‘To gather energy. To feed – to refuel. Whatever. How should I know?’

‘And to cleanse,’ Kapur murmured. ‘They bathe in starstuff. Probably our Spline’s damaged outer layers have already been sloughed away, taking what was left of our emplacements with it.’

‘What about Tsedi?’

‘There was a sunbeam,’ Jarn said. ‘Focused somehow.’

‘An energy trap,’ Kapur said. ‘A way for the Spline to use the star’s heat to rid itself of internal parasites. Like us,’ he added with cold humour.

Jarn said, ‘Whatever it was, it caught this poor kid in the gut. And – oh, Lethe.’

Tsedi convulsed, blood-flecked foam showing at his mouth, limbs flapping, belly pulsing wetly. Jarn and Mari tried to pin him down, but his flailing body was filled with unreasonable strength.

It finished as quickly as it had started. With a final spasm, he went limp.

Kueht began to scream, high-pitched.

Jarn sat back, breathing hard. ‘All right. All right. Take the cloak off him, gunner.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ Kapur said gently. ‘Not while the Spline bathes in its star.’

‘No,’ Jarn said. ‘Deeper, then. Come on.’

But Kueht clung to Tsedi’s corpse. Jarn tried to be patient; in the gathering heat she drifted beside the rating, letting him jabber. ‘We grew up together,’ he was saying. ‘We looked after each other in the Conurbation, in the cadres. I was stronger than he was and I’d help him in fights. But he was clever. He helped me study. He made me laugh. I remember once…’

Mari listened to this distantly.

Kapur murmured, ‘You don’t approve of family, gunner?’

‘There is no such thing as family.’

‘You grew up in a Conurbation?’

‘Navy run,’ she growled. ‘Our cadres were broken up and reformed every few years, as per Commission rules. The way it should be. Not like this.’

Kapur nodded. ‘But further from the centre, the rules don’t always hold so well. It is a big Expansion, gunner, and its edges grow diffuse … Humanity will assert itself. What’s the harm in family?’

‘What good is “family” doing that rating now? It’s only hurting him. Tsedi is dead.’

‘You despise such weakness.’

‘They lived while good human beings died.’

‘Good human beings? Your comrades in arms. Your family.’

‘No—’

‘Do you miss them, gunner?’

‘I miss my weapon.’ Her starbreaker. It was true. It was what she was trained for, not this sticky paddling in the dark. Without her starbreaker she felt lost, bereft.

In the end Jarn physically dragged Kueht away from the stiffening corpse of his cadre sibling. At last, to Mari’s intense relief, they moved on.

They seemed to travel through the twisting tunnel-tube for hours. As the semi-sentient cloaks sought to concentrate their dwindling energies on keeping their inhabitants alive, their glow began to dim, and the closing darkness made the tunnel seem even more confining.

At last they came to a place where the tunnel opened out. Beyond was a chamber whose mottled walls rose out of sight, into darkness beyond the reach of their cloaks’ dim glow. Jarn connected a line to a hook which she dug into the Spline’s fleshy wall, and she and Mari drifted into the open space.

Huge fleshy shapes ranged around them. Some of them pulsed. Fat veins, or perhaps nerve trunks, ran from one rounded form to another. Even the walls were veined: they were sheets of living tissue and muscle, nourished by the Spline’s analogue of blood.

Mari found herself whispering. ‘Is it the brain?’

Jarn snorted. ‘Spline don’t have brains as we do, tar. Even I know that much. Spline systems are – distributed. It makes them more robust, I guess.’

‘Then what is this place?’

Jarn sighed. ‘There’s a lot about the Spline we don’t understand.’ She waved a hand. ‘This may be a, a factory. An organic factory.’

‘Making what?’

‘Who knows?’ Kapur murmured. He lingered by the wall, sightless gaze shifting. ‘We are not the only clients of the Spline. They provide services for other species, perhaps from far beyond the Expansion, creatures of whom we may have no knowledge at all. But not everybody uses the Spline as warships. That much is clear.’

‘It is hardly satisfactory,’ Jarn said through clenched teeth, ‘that we have so little control over a key element of the Expansion’s strategy.’

‘You’re right, lieutenant,’ Kapur said. ‘The logic of the Third Expansion is based on the ultimate supremacy of mankind. How then can we share our key resources, like these Spline? But how could we control them – any more than we can control this rogue in whose chest cavity we ride helplessly?’

Mari said, ‘Lieutenant.’

Jarn turned to her.

Mari glanced back at Kueht. The rating huddled alone at the mouth of the tunnel from which they had emerged. She made herself say it. ‘We could make faster progress.’

Before Jarn could respond, Kapur nodded. ‘If we dump the weak. But we are not strangers any more; we have already been through a great deal together. Mari, will you be the one to abandon Kueht? And where will you do it? Here? A little further along?’

Mari, confused, couldn’t meet Kapur’s sightless glare.

Jarn clutched her wounded arm. ‘You’re being unfair, Academician. She’s trained to think this way. She’s doing her job. Trying to save your life.’

‘Oh, I understand that, lieutenant. She is the product of millennia of methodical warmaking, an art at which we humans have become rather good. She is polished precision machinery, an adjunct to the weapon she wielded so well. But in this situation, we are all stranded outside our normal parameters. Aren’t we, gunner?’

‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ Jarn snapped. She picked out a patch of deeper darkness on the far side of the chamber. ‘That way. The way we were heading. There must be an exit. We’ll have to work our way around the walls. Mari, you help Kapur. Kueht, you’re with me…’

More long hours.

As its energy faded, Mari’s cloak grew still more uncomfortable – tighter on her muscular body, chafing at armpits and groin and neck. It was tiring for her to struggle against its elasticity. And, though she had been able to resist throwing up, the cloak was eventually full of her own sour stink.

Meanwhile, her back ached where she had been rammed against the emplacement bulkhead. That gash on her head, half-treated by the cloak, was a permanent, nagging pain. Mysterious aches spread through her limbs and neck. Not only that, she was hungry, and as thirsty as she had ever been; she hadn’t had so much as a mouthful of water since the assault itself. She tried not to think about how much Kueht was slowing them down, what had transpired in the ‘factory’. But there wasn’t much else to think about.

She knew the syndrome. She was being given too much time in her own head. And thinking was always a bad thing.

They came at last to another chamber.

As far as they could see in their cloaks’ failing light, this was a hangar-like place of alcoves and nooks. The bays were separated by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. And within the alcoves were suspended great pregnant sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.

Jarn made straight for one of the sacs, pulled out her knife and slit it open. The liquid pulsed out in a zero-G straight-line jet, bubbling slightly. Jarn thrust a finger into the flow, and read a sensor embedded in her cloaked wrist. She grinned. ‘Sea water. Earth-like, salty sea water. And this green glop is blue-green algae, I think. We found what we came for.’ She lengthened the slit. ‘Each of you pick a sac. Just climb in and immerse yourself; the cloaks will take what they need.’ She showed them how to work nipples in their cloaks that would provide them with desalinated water, even a mushy food based on the algae.

Mari helped Kapur, then clambered inside a sac of her own. She didn’t lose much water when she slit the sac; surface tension kept it contained in big floating globules that she was able to gather up in her hands. She folded the sac like a blanket, holding it closed over her chest. The water was warm, and her cloak, drinking in nutrients, began to glow more brightly.

‘Blue-green algae,’ she murmured. ‘From a human world.’

‘Obviously,’ Kapur said.

‘Maybe this is one of the ways you pay a Spline,’ Jarn said. ‘I always wondered about that.’ She moved around the chamber, handing out vials of an amber fluid that she passed through the sac walls. ‘I think we deserve this. Pass it through your cloak.’

Kapur asked, ‘What is it?’

Mari grinned. ‘Poole’s Blood.’ For Michael Poole, the legendary pre-Extirpation explorer of Earth.

‘Call it a stimulant,’ Jarn said dryly. ‘An old Navy tradition, Academician.’

Mari sucked down her tot. ‘How long should we stay here?’

‘As long as the cloaks need,’ Jarn said. ‘Try to sleep.’

That seemed impossible. But the rocking motion of the water and its swaddling warmth seemed to soothe the tension out of her sore muscles. She thought about her starbreaker station: the smooth feel of the machinery as she disassembled it for servicing, the sense of its clean power when she worked it.

Mari closed her eyes, just for a moment.

When she opened her eyes, three hours had passed. And Kueht had gone.

‘He must have gone back,’ Jarn said. ‘Back to where we left his sibling.’

‘That was hours ago,’ Mari said. She looked from one to the other. ‘We can’t leave him.’ Without waiting for Jarn’s reaction she plunged back into the tunnel they had come from.

Jarn hurried after Mari, calling her back. But Mari wasn’t about to listen. After a time, Jarn seemed to give up trying to stop her, and just followed.

Through the factory-like chamber they went, then back along the twisting length of muscle-walled tunnel.

…Why am I doing this?

Kueht was fat, useless and weak; before the disaster Mari wouldn’t have made room for him in the corridor. All her training and drill, and the Expansion’s Druz Doctrines that underpinned them, taught that people were not of equal worth. It was an individual’s value to the species as a whole that counted: nothing more, nothing less. And it was the duty of the weak to lay down their lives for the strong, the worthless for the valuable.

But it wasn’t working out like that. When it came down to it Mari just couldn’t abandon even a helpless, useless creature like Kueht; she couldn’t be the one to leave him behind, just as Kapur had said. Humanity will assert itself.

She was thinking too much again.

At last they reached the place where Mari had jammed Tsedi’s burned body. Kueht was here, sprawled over his sibling. They pulled at Kueht’s shoulders, turning him on his back. His cloak flapped open. His face was swollen, his tongue protruding and blackened.

Mari said, ‘Kapur talked about opening our cloaks. Maybe that gave him the idea.’

‘It must have been hard,’ Jarn said. ‘The cloak would have resisted being opened; it is smart enough to know that it would kill its occupant if it did. And asphyxiation is a bad way to die.’ She shrugged. ‘He told us he didn’t want to go on without Tsedi. I guess we just didn’t believe it.’

Mari shook her head, unfamiliar emotions churning inside her. Here were two comical little fat men, products of some flawed cadre somewhere, helpless and friendless save for each other. And yet Kueht had been prepared to die rather than live without the other. ‘Why?’

Jarn put her hand on Mari’s arm; it was small over Mari’s bunched bicep. ‘Don’t think about it.’

They paused to strip Kueht of his cloak. Even now, Mari realised, Jarn was thinking ahead, planning the onward journey.

They made good speed back the way they had come, to where Kapur was waiting. That was because they had after all lost the weak and slow, Mari reflected. It wasn’t a thought that gave her any pleasure.

‘We could just stay here,’ Jarn said. ‘There is food. We could last a long while.’

Jarn seemed to have withdrawn into herself since the loss of Kueht. Maybe exhaustion was weakening her resolve. She was, after all, just a screen-tapper.

‘You’ve done well,’ Mari said impulsively.

Jarn looked at her, startled.

Kapur said, ‘There’s no point staying here. We have to assume we will be rescued, plan for it. Anything else is futile, simply waiting to die.’

Jarn said, ‘We’re stuck inside a Spline warship, remember. Epidermis like armour.’

Kapur nodded. ‘Then we must go to a place where the epidermis can be penetrated.’

‘Where?’

‘The eyes,’ Kapur said. ‘That’s the only possibility I can think of.’

Jarn frowned. ‘How will we find our way to an eye?’

‘A nerve trunk,’ said Mari. Jarn looked at her. Mari said defensively, ‘Why not? Sir. Every eye must have an optic nerve connecting it to the rest of the nervous system. Or something like it.’

Jarn shook her head. ‘You keep springing surprises on me, Mari.’

Kapur laughed out loud. ‘That’s human beings for you.’

They filled up the spare cloaks with sea water. Then, each of them trailing a massive, sluggish balloon by a length of rope, they formed up, Jarn leading, Kapur central, Mari bringing up the rear.

As they left the chamber, mouth-like nozzles puckered from the walls and began to spew sprays of colourless liquid. Mari’s cloak flashed a warning. Stomach acid, she thought. She turned away.

Once they were in motion the inertia of her water bag gave Mari a little trouble, and when the tunnel curved she had some work to do hauling the bag around corners and giving it fresh momentum. But she worked with a will. Physical activity: better than thinking.

In some places the tunnels were scarred: once damaged, now healed. Mari remembered more scuttlebutt. Some of the great Spline vessels were very old, perhaps more than a million years, according to the domeheads. And they were veterans of ancient wars, fought, won and lost long before humans had even existed.

They had been moving barely half an hour when they came to another chamber.

This one was something like the organic ‘factory’. A broad open chamber criss-crossed by struts of cartilage was dominated by a single pillar, maybe a metre wide, that spanned the room. It was made of something like translucent red-purple skin, and Mari made out fluid moving within it: blood, perhaps, or water. And there were sparks, sparks that flew like birds.

Kapur sniffed loudly. ‘Can you smell that?’ Their cloaks transmitted selective scents. ‘Ozone. An electric smell.’

Jarn’s water bag, clumsily sealed, was leaking; Mari had been running into droplets all the way up the tunnel. But now she saw that the droplets were falling – drifting away from Jarn, following slowly curving orbits, falling in towards the pillar that dominated the centre of the room.

Jarn, fascinated, followed the droplets towards the pillar.

Something passed through Mari’s body, a kind of clench. She grunted and folded over.

‘0h,’ said Kapur. ‘That was a tide. Lethe—’

Without warning he hurled himself forward. He collided clumsily with Jarn, scrabbled to grab her, and spun her around. His momentum was carrying the two of them towards the pillar. But he tried to shove her away.

‘No, you don’t, sir,’ Jarn grunted. With a simple one-armed throw she flipped him back towards Mari. But that left her drifting still faster towards the pillar.

Kapur scrabbled in the air. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Hold him, gunner.’ Behind Jarn, Mari saw, those water droplets had entered tight, whirling orbits, miniature planets around a cylindrical sun. Jarn said, ‘We haven’t brought him all this way to—’

And then she folded.

As simple as that, as if crumpled by an invisible fist. Her limbs were thrust forward, her spine and neck bent over until they cracked. Blood and other fluids, deep purple, flooded her cloak, until that broke in turn, and a gout of blood and shit sprayed out.

Mari grabbed Kapur’s bent form and threw her body across his, sheltering him from the flood of bodily fluids.

Kapur was weeping, inside his cloak. ‘I heard it. I heard what happened to her.’

‘What?’

‘This is the hyperdrive chamber. Don’t you see? Inside a Spline, even a star drive grows organically. Oh, you are seeing miracles today, gunner. Miracles of the possibilities of life.’

‘We have to get you out of here.’

He straightened, seeming to get himself under control. ‘No. The lieutenant—’

Mari shrieked into his face, ‘She’s dead!’ He recoiled as if struck. She forced herself to speak calmly. ‘She’s dead, and we have to leave her, as we left the rest. I’m in charge now. Sir.’

‘The Squeem,’ he said evenly.

‘What?’

‘Jarn’s implant. If we’re to have any chance of rescue, we need it … Once the Squeem conquered the Earth itself. Did you know that? Now they survive only as unwilling symbiotes of mankind.’

Mari glanced back at Jarn’s body, which was drifting away from the pillar. She seemed to have been compressed around a point somewhere above her stomach. Her centre of gravity, perhaps. ‘I can’t.’

‘You have to. I’ll help.’ Kapur’s voice was hard. ‘Take your knife.’

They travelled on for perhaps a day.

Mari’s cloak began to fail, growing cloudy, stiff, confining. Kapur moved increasingly slowly and feebly, and, though he didn’t complain or even ask, he needed a lot of help. It seemed he had been wounded somehow, maybe internally, by the shock that had killed Jarn. But there wasn’t anything Mari could do about that.

Once the tunnel they were using suddenly flooded with a thick gloopy liquid, crimson flecked with black. Blood maybe. Mari had to anchor them both to the wall; she wrapped her arms around Kapur and just held him there, immersed in a roaring, blood-dark river, until it passed. Then they kept on.

At last they found an eye.

It turned out to be just that: an eye, a fleshy sphere some metres across. It swivelled this way and that, rolling massively. At the back was a kind of curtain of narrow, overlapping sheets – perhaps components of a retina – from which narrower vine-like fibres led to the nerve bundle they had followed.

Mari parted the fibres easily. A clear fluid leaked out into the general murk.

She pulled Kapur into the interior of the eye. It was a neat spherical chamber. Unlike the tunnels and chambers they had passed through there were no shadows here, no lurking organic shapes; it was almost cosy.

She lodged Kapur against the wall. She found places to anchor their bundles of water, and the scrap of cloak within which swam the Squeem, the tiny alien not-fish which had inhabited Jarn’s stomach.

She pushed at the forward wall. Her hand sank into a soft, giving, translucent surface. A lens, maybe. But beyond there was only veined flesh. ‘If this is an eye, why can’t I see out?’

‘Perhaps the Spline has closed its eyelids.’

The floor under Mari seemed to shudder; the clear fluid pulsed, slow waves crossing the chamber, as the eye swivelled. ‘But the eye is moving.’

Kapur grinned weakly. ‘Surely Spline dream.’

Then the Spline eyelid opened, like a curtain raising. And, through a dense, distorting lens, Mari saw comet light.

They were deep within a solar system, she saw. She could tell because the comet had been made bright by sunlight. Its dark head was obscured by a glowing cloud, and two shining tails streaked across the black sky, tails of gas and dust.

To Mari it was a strange, beautiful sight. In most Expansion systems such a comet wouldn’t be allowed to come sailing so close to a sun, because of the danger to the inhabitants of the system, and of the comet itself – all that outgassing would make the nucleus a dangerous place to live.

But she saw no signs of habitation. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any lights. Where are the people? … Oh.’

Kapur turned when he heard her gasp.

Spline came sailing out of the glare of the comet’s diffuse coma: great fleshy bodies, a dozen of them, more. She peered, seeking the green sigil of humanity, the telltale glitter of emplacements of weapons and sensors; but she saw nothing but walls of hardened flesh, the watery glint of eyes. This flotilla was moving like none she had seen before – coordinated, yes, but with an eerie, fluid grace, like a vast dance. Some of the Spline were smaller than the rest, darting little moons that orbited the great planets of the others.

And now they were gathering around the comet core.

‘They are grazing,’ she said. ‘The Spline are grazing on the comet.’

Kapur smiled, but his face was grey. ‘This is not a flotilla. It is a – what is the word? – it is a school.’

‘They are wild Spline.’

‘No. They are simply Spline.’

The school broke and came clustering around Mari’s ship. Huge forms sailed across her vision like clouds. She saw that the smaller ones – infants? – were nudging almost playfully against her Spline’s battered epidermis. It was a collision of giants – even the smallest of these immature creatures must have been a hundred metres across.

And now the Spline rolled. Mart’s view was swivelled away from the comet, across a sky littered with stars, and towards a planet.

It was blue: the blue of ocean, of water, the colour of Earth. But this was not a human world. It was swathed in ocean, a sea broken only by a scattered litter of gleaming ice floes at the poles, and a few worn, rusty islands. She could see features on the shallow ocean floor: great craters, even one glowing pit, the marks of volcanism. An out-of-view sun cast glittering highlights from that ocean’s silvery, wrinkled hide, and a set of vast waves, huge to be visible from this altitude, marched endlessly around the water-world.

And now she saw a fleet of grey-white forms that cut through the ocean’s towering waves, leaving wakes like an armada of mighty ships, visible even from space.

‘Of course,’ Kapur said, his voice a dry rustle as she described this to him. ‘It must be like this.’

‘What?’

‘The home world of the Spline. The breeding ground. We knew they came from an ocean. Now they swim through the lethal currents of space. But biology must not be denied; they must return here, to their original birthing place, to spawn, to continue the species. Like sea turtles who crawl back to the land to lay their eggs.’ Kapur folded on himself, tucking his arms into his chest. ‘If only I had my Eyes! … I often wondered how the Spline made that transition from ocean to vacuum. As giant ocean-going swimmers, they surely lacked limbs, tools; there would be no need for the sort of manipulative intelligence that would enable them to redesign themselves. There must have been others involved – don’t you think? Hunters, or farmers. For their own reasons they rebuilt the Spline – and gave them the opportunity to rebel, to take control of their destiny.’

‘Academician,’ Mari said hesitantly. ‘I don’t recognise the stars. I don’t see any sign of people. I never heard of a world like this. What part of the Expansion are we in?’

He sighed. ‘Nobody has seen the home world of the Spline before. Therefore we can’t be in the Expansion. I’m afraid I have no idea where we are.’ He coughed, feebly, and she saw he was sweating.

It was getting hot.

She glanced out of the window-lens. That blue world had expanded so that it filled up her window, a wall of ocean. But the image was becoming misty, blurred by a pinkish glow. Plasma.

‘I think we’re entering the atmosphere.’

‘The Spline is coming home.’

Now the glow became a glaring white, flooding the chamber. The temperature was rising savagely, and the chamber walls began to shudder. She found herself pulled to the floor and pressed deep into yielding tissue.

I’m not going to live through this, she thought. They were simply too far from home, too far from rescue, the situation too far out of control. It was the first time she had understood that, deep in her gut. And yet she felt no fear: only concern for Kapur. She cradled him in her arms, trying to shield him from the deceleration. His body felt stick-thin. He gasped, his face working from pain from which she couldn’t save him. Nevertheless she tried to support his head. ‘There, there,’ she murmured.

‘Do you have any more of that Poole blood?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Pity…’ He whimpered, and tried to raise his hands to his ruined Eyes. He had never once complained of that injury, she realised now, even though the agony must have been continual and intense.

She had always thought of herself as strong, but there were different sorts of strength, she thought now. She felt as if her head was full of boulders: huge thoughts, vast impressions that rattled within her skull, refusing her peace. ‘Lieutenant Jarn turned out to be a good officer. Didn’t she, sir?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘I never liked her, before. But she sacrificed her life for you.’

‘That was her duty. You would have done the same.’

‘Yes,’ said Mari doggedly, ‘but you tried to save her. Even though you didn’t have to. Even though you would have been killed yourself in the process.’

He tried to turn his head. ‘Gunner, I sense you believe you have failed, because you aren’t dead yet. Listen to me now. You haven’t failed. In the end, what brought us so far was not your specialist training but deeper human qualities of courage, initiative, endurance. Empathy. In the end it will be those qualities that will win this war, not a better class of weapon. You should be proud of yourself.’

She wasn’t sure about that. ‘If I ever did get out of this I’d have to submit myself for reorientation.’

‘The Commission would have its work cut out, I think – Ah.’ His face worked. ‘Child.’ She had to bend to hear him. He whispered, ‘Even now my wretched mind won’t stop throwing out unwelcome ideas. You still have a duty to perform. Remember.’

‘Remember?’

‘You saw the stars. Given that, one could reconstruct the position of this world, this Spline home. And how valuable that piece of information would be. It is the end of the free Spline,’ he said. ‘What a pity. But I am afraid we have a duty. You must remember. Tell the Commissaries what you saw.’

‘Sir—’

He tried to grasp her arm, his ruined face swivelling. ‘Tell them.’ His back arched, and he gasped. ‘Oh.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking him. ‘No!’

‘I am sorry, gunner Mari. So sorry.’ And he exhaled a great gurgling belch, and went limp.

She continued to cradle Academician Kapur, rocking him like a child, as the homecoming Spline plunged deeper into its world’s thick atmosphere.

But as she held him she took the vials of mnemonic fluid from his waist, and drank them one by one. And she took the Squeem from its cloak bag – it wriggled in her fingers, cold and very alien – and, overcoming her disgust, swallowed it down.

In the last moments, the Spline’s great eyelid closed.

Accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Erdac, Commissary Drith stepped gingerly through the transfer tunnel and into the damaged Spline eye.

Drith’s brow furrowed, sending a wave of delicate creases over her shaved scalp. It was bad enough to be immersed inside the body of a living creature like this, without being confronted by the gruesome sight the salvage teams had found here. Still, it had been a prize worth retrieving.

Erdac said, ‘You can see how the Squeem fish consumed this young gunner, from inside out. It kept alive that way, long enough anyhow for it to serve as a beacon to alert us when this Spline returned to service in human space. And there was enough of the mnemonic fluid left in the gunner’s body to—’

‘A drop is sufficient,’ Drith murmured. ‘I do understand the principle, Commander.’

Erdac nodded stiffly, his face impassive.

‘Quite a victory, Commander,’ Drith said. ‘If the breeding ground of the Spline can be blockaded, then the Spline can effectively be controlled.’

‘These two fulfilled their duty in the end.’

‘Yes, but we will profit personally from this discovery.’ The Commander didn’t respond to that; maybe he thought the remark was a personal test, a trap.

Drith looked down at the twisted bodies and poked at them with a polished toecap. ‘Look how they’re wrapped around each other. Strange. You wouldn’t expect a dry-as-a-stick Academician and a boneheaded Navy grunt to get so close.’

‘The human heart contains mysteries we have yet to fathom, Commander.’

‘Yes. Even with the mnemonic, I guess we’ll never really know what happened here.’

‘But we know enough. What else matters?’ Drith turned. ‘Come, Commander. We both have reports to file, and then a mission to plan, far beyond the Expansion’s current limits … quite an adventure!’

They left, talking, planning. The forensic teams moved in to remove the bodies. It wasn’t easy. Even in death they were closely intertwined, as if one had been cradling the other.

The Assimilated ‘Snowflake’ technology would turn out to be very valuable, much later, when I, Luru Parz, rediscovered it in decaying archives.

In the meantime Kapur’s intuition was right. This was a turning point. With the Spline harnessed the Third Expansion accelerated. Mankind burned across the Galaxy.

The vanguard soldiers and Assimilators were reckless.

Destructive.

Magnificent.

THE DREAMING MOULD

AD 12,478

Tomm found a new patch of dreaming mould. Snuggled into the shade of a damp tree root, it had settled down into a grey circle the size of a dinner plate. Where it had crossed the crimson soil it had left a slimy trail. You often found moulds in shady places like this. They didn’t like the brightness of the growth lights. The muddled starlight cast diffuse colours over the mould, but it was always going to look ugly.

Tomm pressed his hands into the mould. It felt cold, slimy, not bad when you got used to it.

And the mould started to talk to him.

As always, it was like waking up. Suddenly he could smell the ozone tang of the growth lights, and hear the bleating of the goat at the Gavil place over the horizon, and he seemed to be able to see every one of the one hundred and twenty thousand stars in the crowded sky.

And then he spread out sideways, that was the way he thought of it, he reached out, left and right. The crowded stars froze over his head – or maybe they wheeled around and around, blurring into invisibility. He was with the mould now. And he could see its long, simple, featureless life all of a piece, from beginning to end, pulled out of time like a great grey slab of rock hauled out of the ground.

Even his heart stopped its relentless pumping.

But there was a flitter, a spark against the orange stars.

He dropped back into time. He stood and wiped his slimy hands on his trousers, watching the spaceship approach.

He was eight years old.

Kard’s metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. ‘Lethe, I love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light shining through the rubble of a planet?’

This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy’s main disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.

The flitter’s hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.

Xera said carefully, ‘I compliment you on the efficiency of your process.’

He waved that aside. ‘Forget efficiency. Forget process. Commissary, this cluster contains a million stars, crowded into a ball a hundred light years across. It’s only four decades since we first arrived here. And we will have processed them all, all those pretty lights in the sky, within another fifty to sixty years. What do you think of that?’

‘Admiral—’

‘This is the reality of Assimilation,’ he snapped. ‘Ten thousand ships, ten million human beings, in this fleet alone. And it’s the same all over the Expansion, across a great spherical front forty thousand light years across. I doubt you even dream of sights like this, back in the centre. Commissary, watch and learn ...’

Without warning, planets cannonballed out of the sky. She cowered.

Kard laughed at her shock. ‘Oh. And here is our destination.’ Stub, the rodent-faced young pilot, turned to face them, grinning. ‘Sir, wake me up when it gets interesting.’

Stub called Xera a domehead when he thought she wasn’t listening. She tried not to despise them both for the way they bullied her.

There were three worlds in this sunless system, locked into a complex gravitational dance. Xera could see them all, sweeping in vertiginously, pale starlit discs against a crowded sky. Only one of them was inhabited: she saw the blue of water and the grey-green of living things splashed against its rust-red hide. It was called, inevitably, ‘Home’, in the language of the first human colonists to have reached this place, millennia before.

Xera was a xenoculturalist. She was here because the inhabitants of Home had reported an indigenous sentient species on their world. If this was true the planet might be spared from the wrecking crews, spared from demolition for the sake of its inner iron, its natives put to a more subtle use: mind was valuable. The fate of whole cultures, alien and human, the fate of a world, could depend on her assessment of the inhabitants’ claim.

But her time was cruelly brief. Rear Admiral Kard’s own impatient presence here – he hadn’t wanted to spare any of his line officers to check out what he called ‘earthworm grunting’ – told her all she needed to know about the Navy’s attitude to her mission.

Belatedly she remembered to deploy her data desk; she needed to record the triple worlds’ orbital dynamics. Here in this crowded cluster, stellar close approaches were frequent, and worlds were commonly ripped free of the stars that had borne them. Most planets floated alone, but this world, Home, was unusual in having its two gravitationally locked companion worlds. The nature of their mutual orbit was apparently puzzling to the Academicians, and they had asked her to check it out. Orbital dynamics were hardly her priority, but nobody else was going to get a chance to study this unique jewel-box of worlds. She held up her desk, letting it record.

But already the flitter had begun its brisk closing descent, and the opportunity was over.

She flew through a spectacular orbital picket of Snowflakes, the giant tetrahedral artefacts the Navy employed as surveillance and communications stations. Then Home opened out into a landscape that fled beneath her, a land of lakes and forests and farms and scattered townships, of green growing things illuminated by floodlights mounted on unlikely stalks.

It was all so complex, so fascinating, but she had so little time. This was the reality of Assimilation: the processing of alien worlds and species on an industrial scale. Out here, you just did what you could before the starbreaker teams moved in. It was rescue work, really. The only consolation was that you would never know what you had missed—

She was plunged into blackness. Impact foam encased her.

Xera had no idea what had happened. But she felt a guilty stab of satisfaction that Kard and his magnificent Navy had screwed up after all.

To Tomm the flitter had been an all but invisible bubble, sweeping down through the air, with its three passengers suspended inside. But then it stopped dead, as if it had run into a wall, and its hull appeared out of nowhere. Opaqued, the flitter was an ugly, lumpy thing. It hung for a heartbeat. Then the flitter tipped up until it pointed at the ground, and fell without ceremony.

On impact the hull broke up into compartments that dropped into the dirt. Hatches popped open, and a gooey white liquid ran into the rust-red ground.

Two people tumbled out. They were wearing bright orange skin-tight suits, to which the sticky liquid clung. They staggered a few paces from the wreck and collapsed to their knees. They were a woman and a man, Tomm saw.

The man had silvery fake eyes. He didn’t see Tomm, or if he did he didn’t care. He immediately got up and stalked back into the wreckage of the flitter, ripping debris out of the way.

The woman was younger. Her head was shaved. She got to her feet more slowly. She looked around, as if she had never seen stars, dirt, growth lights before. She looked right at Tomm.

Then, coming to herself, she ran to the flitter’s wrecked forward section. Tomm made out splashes of blood in there. The woman stepped back, a look of horror on her face. She glanced around, but there was nobody in sight, nobody but Tomm.

She walked back and spoke to him. He waited as she tapped at a panel on her chest, and a box floated up into the air by her shoulder. ‘Can you understand me?’ the box asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I need help.’

Together they prised open the ripped hull. There wasn’t much to see. Opaqued, the hull looked like scuffed metal, and all the pod’s control surfaces were blank, dead. But there was a man – Tomm guessed he was the pilot – crumpled up into the nose of the pod, the way you’d wad a tissue into your pocket.

The woman bent over the pilot, feeling at his neck. ‘He’s still alive. Fluttery pulse … Lethe, I’m not trained for this. What’s your name?’

‘Tomm.’

‘All right, Tomm. I’m Xera. I need you to pass me a med cloak. In the compartment behind you.’

The door was stiff, but Tomm was strong. The cloak was brilliant orange, so bright it seemed to dazzle. Xera just threw the cloak at the pilot. It immediately began to work its way around the body, then it filled up with more white goo.

When the cloak had set hard Xera took the pilot’s shoulders, Tomm his legs. The pilot felt lighter than he looked. They got him out through the ripped hull, and set him on the ground. He lay there in the dirt, wrapped up like a bug in a cocoon, only his bruised face showing.

‘He looks young,’ Tomm said.

‘He’s only fifteen.’ She glanced at him. ‘How old are you?’

‘Eight. How old are you?’

She forced a smile. ‘Twenty-five standard. I think you’re very brave.’ She waved a trembling hand. ‘To cope with all this. A crashing spaceship. An injured man.’

Tomm shrugged. He had grown up on a farm. He knew about life, injury, death.

He waited to see what happened next.

The air was warm, and smelled of rust. The land was like a tabletop, worn flat.

Kard had dumped heaps of equipment out of the flitter onto the ground, and was pawing through it.

Xera said, ‘Admiral – what happened?’

‘The Squeem,’ Kard said bluntly. ‘Dead, every last one of them. All the systems are down. We didn’t even get a mayday out.’ He glanced at the complex sky. ‘The controllers don’t know we are here. It’s happened before. Nobody knows how the little bastards manage it.’

‘You’re saying the Squeem killed themselves to sabotage us?’

‘Oh, you think it’s a coincidence it happened just as we came into our final descent?’

The Squeem were group-mind aquatic creatures, a little like fish. Once, it was said, they had conquered Earth itself. Now, long Assimilated, they were used as communications links, as a piece of technology. Some humans had even taken Squeem implants. But it seemed that the Squeem were still capable of defiance. Maybe, she thought, the Assimilation wasn’t as complete as it was presented by Commission propagandists.

Kard’s hard gaze slid over the bundled pilot, as if reluctant to look at him too closely.

Xera said, ‘Stub is hurt. The cloak will keep him alive for a while, but—’

‘We need to get to the base camp. It’s north of here, maybe half a day’s walk.’

She looked about dubiously. There was no sun, no moon. Even Home’s sibling worlds were invisible. There were only stars, a great uniform wash of them, the same wherever you looked. ‘Which way’s north?’

Kard glared, impatient. He seemed to see Tomm for the first time. ‘You. Aboriginal. Which way?’

Tomm pointed, without hesitation. His feet were bare, Xera noticed now.

‘Then that’s the way we’ll go. We’ll need a stretcher. Xera, rig something.’

Tomm said, ‘My home’s closer.’ He pointed again. ‘It’s just over that way. My parents could help you.’

Xera looked at Kard. ‘Admiral, it would make sense.’

He glared at her. ‘You do not take an injured Navy tar to an aboriginal camp.’

Xera tried to control her irritation. ‘The people here are not animals. They are farmers. Stub might die before—’

‘End of discussion. You. Earthworm. You want to come show us the way?’

Tomm shrugged.

Xera frowned. ‘You don’t need to tell your parents where you are?’

‘You’re the Navy,’ Tomm said. ‘We’re all citizens of the Third Expansion. You have come here to protect us. That’s what you told us. What harm can I come to with you?’

Kard laughed.

The ground was densely packed crimson dirt, hard under her feet. Soon she was puffing with exertion, her hips and knees dryly aching. After half a year in the murky gut of a Spline ship Xera wasn’t used to physical exercise.

Kard, a bundle on his back, walked stiffly, with obvious distaste for the very dust under his feet.

At least the ground was level, more or less. And Stub, on his improvised stretcher, wasn’t as heavy as he should have been. Evidently the smart med-care cloak contained some anti-gravitational trickery. Stub wasn’t improving, though, despite the cloak’s best efforts. Around his increasingly pale face, the cloak’s hem glowed warning blue.

The boy, Tomm, just seemed interested in the whole adventure.

Away from the cultivated areas the ground looked nutrient-leached, and the only hills were eroded stumps, as dust-strewn as the rest. This was an old place, she thought. The population was evidently sparse, no more than this worn-out land could support.

And the sky was baffling.

Xera had grown up on a small planet of 70 Opiuchi, less than seventeen light years from Earth itself. There, in the Galaxy’s main disc, three thousand stars had been visible in the night sky. In this globular cluster there were forty times as many. Shoals of stars swam continually above the horizon, casting a diffuse light laced with pale, complex, shifting shadows. There were too many of them to count, to identify, to track. This world had no sun and too many stars; it knew no day, no night, only this unchanging, muddy starlight. Here, time washed by unmarked, and in every direction the sky looked the same.

They had to cross a cultivated field. A floodlight bank loomed over the green growing things, presumably intended to supplement the starlight.

Kard hauled a semi-transparent suit out of the scavenged bundle he carried, and tied off the arms and legs. ‘You,’ he said to Tomm. ‘Take this. We need supplies.’

Xera made to protest at this casual theft of somebody’s crop. But Tomm was already running alongside Kard’s long strides. They began pulling handfuls of green pods into the tied-off suit. Xera waited by Stub.

Kard snapped, ‘Tell me what you eat here.’

‘Peas,’ said Tomm brightly. ‘Beans. Rice. Wheat.’

‘No replicators?’

Xera said, ‘Admiral, Tomm’s ancestors are here because they fled the Qax Occupation of Earth, seven thousand years ago. Nano replicators are Qax technology. To the colonists here, such things are hated.’

Kard glanced around. ‘So how did they terraform this place?’

‘The hard way. Apparently it took them centuries.’

‘And now they grow wheat.’

‘Yes.’

Kard laughed. ‘Well, our suits will filter out the toxins.’

‘We have goats too,’ said the boy.

‘Oh, imagine that.’

They came to an ancient, tangled tree, and Kard bent to inspect its roots. He pulled out a handful of what looked like fungus. ‘What’s this?’

‘Dreaming mould,’ said Tomm.

‘Say what?’

Xera hurried over. ‘That is why we’re here. It’s a relic of the native ecology, spared in the terraforming.’

Kard hefted the greyish stuff. ‘This is supposed to be sentient?’

‘So the locals claim.’

‘It can’t even move.’

‘It can,’ insisted Tomm. ‘It moves like slimy bugs.’

Xera held up her data desk, showing Kard images. ‘On the move it absorbs nutrients from organic detritus, local analogues of leaves and grass. Then the protoplasm hardens into a definite shape as the mould prepares to fruit. In some species you get little parasols and rods.’

This organism was actually like the slime moulds of Earth: a very ancient form from a time when categories of life were blurred, when the higher plants had yet to split off from the fungi, and all animal life had streamed in protoplasmic shapelessness. What was more controversial was whether these moulds were sentient, or not. Already she was wondering how she could complete her assessment – how could she possibly tell?

Kard saw her doubts. He turned to the kid. ‘How can this mould of yours be so smart if it can’t use tools?’

‘They used to,’ said Tomm.

‘What?’

‘Once they built starships. They came from over there.’ He pointed into the murky roof of stars – but the way he was pointing, Xera realised, was towards the Galaxy’s main disc.

She asked, ‘How do you know such things?’

‘When you touch them.’ The boy shrugged. ‘You just know.’

‘And why,’ Kard asked, ‘would they come to a shithole like this? It hasn’t even got a sun.’

‘They didn’t want a sun. They wanted a sky like that,’ pointing up again.

‘Why?’

‘Because you can’t tell the time by it.’

Kard was glaring at Xera, hefting the mould. ‘Is this all there is? What in Lethe are we doing here, Commissary?’

‘Let’s just try on the idea before we dismiss it,’ Xera said quickly. ‘Suppose there was an ancient race, done with’ – she raised a hand at the sky, where worlds burned – ‘with all this. Colonising, building—’

Kard snapped, ‘So they came to this worn-out dump. They dismantled their starships, and dissolved into slime. Right? But it isn’t even safe, here in this cluster. Have you any idea what it would be like to live through a Galaxy plane-crossing?’ He shook his head. He threw the native life form into the hopper, along with the pea pods and runner beans.

‘Admiral—’

‘End of discussion.’

On they walked.

The stars were sombre. Most were orange or even red, floating silently in their watchful crowds. All this cluster’s stars were about the same age, and all were old. Even the planets were so old the radioactivity trapped in their interiors had dwindled away. Which explained the exhausted landscape: no tectonics, no geology, no mountain-building.

This was what you got in a globular cluster. Like a diffuse planet, this whole cluster orbited the centre of the Galaxy. Every hundred million years it plunged through the Galaxy’s disc, and in those catastrophic interludes all the dust was stripped out of the spaces between the stars. Thus there was no unburnt gas to make new stars out of, no rock dust to make new planets. That was why the fleet needed to demolish planets for their iron. Rock, metals were scarce between the worlds.

Of course Kard was right about the hazards of a main disc crossing. This planet would be bombarded with spiral-arm hydrogen and dust. A single dust grain would deliver the energy of a fission bomb. The place would be flooded with X-rays, if the atmosphere wasn’t stripped off completely.

Maybe, maybe. But – Xera learned, checking her data desk, which she’d hung around her neck – the last plane crossing was only a couple of million years ago. There were nearly a hundred megayears yet before that calamity had to be faced again. Time enough for anybody.

This wasn’t an academic debate. If she could prove the planet harboured intelligence, it might be spared demolition, its human colonists allowed to continue their way of life. If not…

Kard stopped again, breathing hard. ‘Take a break.’ He dumped the stretcher and squatted down, took a handful of pea pods from his improvised backpack, and crammed them into his mouth, pods and all.

The spare suit had extracted some water from the vegetable matter. Xera took one of its sleeves and dribbled water into the mouth of Stub. His breathing was irregular, his face pasty. She opened the cloak a little at his neck, trying to make him easier.

Kard recoiled from the stink that came out of the cloak, an earthy melange of blood and shit, the smell of a wounded human. ‘Lethe, I hate this.’ He turned away. ‘You think the base is far?’

‘I don’t know. Not far, surely.’

He nodded, wordless, not looking at her.

Tomm sat quietly and watched them, bare feet tucked under his legs. He didn’t ask for food or drink. Of the three of them he was by far the freshest.

Xera glanced again at her data desk. It had been working on the observations she’d been able to make before the landing. Now the desk showed that Home and its two siblings were locked into a figure-of-eight orbital motion. It was an exotic but stable solution to the ancient problem of how three bodies would swarm together under gravity. More common solutions resembled planets conventionally orbiting a sun, or three worlds at the corners of a rotating equilateral triangle.

She tried to discuss this with Kard. He knew a lot more about orbital dynamics than she did. But he was definitively not interested.

Xera pulled the dreaming mould out of the tied-up suit. A little dehydrated, it was cold to the touch but not unpleasant. She could tell nothing by just looking at it.

Uncertainly she handed it to Tomm.

The boy pressed his hands against the mould. He looked vaguely disappointed. ‘This one’s too dry.’

‘Tomm, what happens when you touch the mould?’

‘Like if you’re sick.’ Tomm shrugged. ‘The mould helps you.’

‘How?’

He said some things the floating translator unit couldn’t handle. Then he said, ‘Time stops.’

Kard sat up. ‘Time stops?’

‘Like that. The mould doesn’t see time—’ Tomm made chopping motions. ‘One bit after another. Step, step, step. It sees time all as a piece. All at once.’

Kard raised hairless eyebrows.

Xera felt like defying him. ‘We need to keep open minds, Admiral. We’re here to seek out the strange, the unfamiliar. That’s the whole point. We know that time is quantised. Instants are like grains of sand. We experience them linearly, like a bug hopping from one grain to another. But other perceptions of time are possible. Perhaps—’

Kard looked disgusted. ‘These dirt-diggers would call my ass sentient if it would hold back the starbreakers one more day.’ He leaned towards the boy, who looked scared. ‘Do you understand what we’re doing here? Planets like yours are rare, in a globular cluster. That’s why we need to blow up your world. So we can use what’s inside it to make more ships and weapons.’

‘So you can blow up more worlds.’

‘Exactly. Slime mould and all.’

‘Isn’t that what the Qax did to humans?’

Xera choked a laugh.

Kard glared. ‘Listen to me. You’re just a snot-nosed earthworm kid and I’m a rear admiral. And any time I want to I could—’

Stub’s med cloak abruptly turned bright blue.

Xera hurried to the dying pilot. Kard swore, stood up and walked away.

Tomm stared.

Xera felt for a pulse – it was desperately feathery – and bent her ear to Stub’s mouth, trying to detect a breath. I’m here to stand in judgement on another race, perhaps much more ancient than my own, she thought. But I can’t even save this wretched boy, lying in the dirt.

Kard stalked around. The crimson dust had stained his gleaming boots. ‘We walked all this way for nothing.’

‘It was your call,’ she snapped. ‘If we had gone to the farmers for help, maybe we could have saved him.’

Kard wasn’t about to accept that. He turned on her. ‘Listen to me, Commissary—’

Tomm was pressing bits of the dreaming mould into Stub’s mouth.

Kard grabbed Tomm’s arm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The mould wants to help him. This is what we do.’

Xera asked quickly, ‘When you hurt, when you die, you do this?’

‘You take him out of time.’

Kard said, ‘You’ll choke him, you little grub.’ He was still holding the boy’s arm.

‘Admiral, let the kid go.’

He said dangerously, ‘This is a Navy man.’

‘But we failed him, Kard. The cloak can’t help. He’s dying. Let the boy do what he wants. If it makes him feel better…’

Kard’s face worked. But he broke away.

Bleakly, helplessly, Xera watched the boy patiently feed bits of the mould into the pilot’s mouth.

You take him out of time.

Could it be true? How would it be to loosen the grasp of time – to have a mind filled with green thoughts, like a vegetable’s perhaps – to be empty of everything but self? Kard had said the mould had no goals. But what higher goal could there be? Who needed starships and cities and wars and empires, when you could free yourself at last of the fear of death? And what greater empathy could there be than to share such a gift with others?

Or maybe the mould was just some hallucinogen, chewed by bored farmers.

Stub’s breathing, though shallow, seemed a little easier.

She said, ‘I think it’s working.’

Kard wouldn’t even look down. ‘No.’

‘Admiral—’

He turned on her. ‘I know the sentience laws. What defines intelligence? You need to have goals, and pursue them. What goals has a slime mould got? Second, you need to have empathy: some kind of awareness of intelligence in others. And, most fundamentally, you need a sense of time. Life can only exist in a universe complex enough to be out of equilibrium – there could be no life in a mushy heat bath, with no flows of energy or mass. So tracking time is fundamental to intelligence, for a sense of time derives from the universal disequilibrium that drives life itself. There. If these creatures really don’t have a time sense they can’t be intelligent. How do you answer that? There’s nothing here, Commissary. Nothing for you to save.’

She pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Admiral – the history of human understanding is about discarding prejudices, about ourselves, about others, about the nature of life, mind. We have come a long way, but we’re still learning. Perhaps even an insistence on a time sense itself is just another barrier in our thinking…’

Kard, she could see, wasn’t listening.

But, she thought, it isn’t just about the sentience laws, is it, Admiral? You can’t accept that you made the wrong call today. Just as you can’t accept that the humble creatures here, the farmers and this boy and even the mould, might know something you don’t. You’d rather destroy it all than accept that.

Data scrolled across her desk. She glanced down. The desk had continued patiently to work on the orbital data. The figure-of-eight configuration was rare, the desk reported now, vanishingly unlikely. Surely too improbable to be natural. She felt wonder stir. Had they been vain, at the last? Before they dissolved down into this humble form, even gave up their shape, had they left a grandiose dynamic signature scrawled across the sky?…

But it’s too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and we’ll never know what happened here.

Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground. ‘Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether you’re right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over. We’ve cleaned out this Galaxy. There’s nothing left to oppose us now – nothing but one more opponent.’

‘I have my assessment to finish—’

‘Nothing happened here, Commissary. Nothing.’

Tomm sat back, smiling.

It seemed to Xera that the young pilot’s face relaxed, that he breathed a little easier, before he was still.

Personally I have more sympathy for Xera and her complex ethical dilemmas than with Kard.

But it was Kard’s arrogant impatience that caught the flavour of the times.

Mayfly generations tick by terribly quickly. And almost all mayflies, embedded in history, believe that their epoch is eternal, that things will be this way until the end of time. Almost all. It takes a special mayfly to understand that he is living through a time of flux, a time when great forces are shifting – and even more special to be able to influence those forces.

Kard turned out to be one such.

Just as he had said, the Galaxy was cleaned out. Only one more opponent remained. Only one war remained to be completed.

But it had to be started first.

THE GREAT GAME

AD 12,659

We were in our blister, waiting for the drop. My marines, fifty of them in their bright orange Yukawa suits, were sitting in untidy rows. They were trying to hide it, but I could see the tenseness in the way they clutched their static lines, and their unusual reluctance to rib the wetbacks.

Well, when I looked through the blister’s transparent walls and out into the dangerous sky, I felt it myself.

We had been flung far out of the main disc, and the sparse orange-red stars of the halo were a foreground to the Galaxy itself, a pool of curdled light that stretched to right and left as far as you could see. But as our Spline ship threw itself gamely through its complicated evasive manoeuvres, that great sheet of light flapped around us like a bird’s broken wing. I could see our destination’s home sun – it was a dwarf, a pinprick glowing dim red – but even the target star jiggled around the sky as the Spline bucked and rolled.

And, leaving aside the vertigo, what twisted my own stress muscles was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings – unmistakable, they were Xeelee nightfighters. The Xeelee were the Spline Captain’s responsibility, not mine. But I couldn’t stop my over-active mind speculating on what had lured such a dense concentration of them so far out of the Galactic Core, their usual stamping ground.

Given the tension, it was almost a relief when Lian threw up.

Those Yukawa suits are heavy and stiff, meant for protection rather than flexibility, but she managed to lean far enough forward that her bright yellow puke mostly hit the floor. Her buddies reacted as you’d imagine.

‘Sorry, Lieutenant.’ She was the youngest of the troop, at seventeen ten years younger than me.

I handed her a wipe. ‘I’ve seen worse, marine. Anyhow you’ve left the wetbacks something to clean up. Keep them busy when we’ve gone.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The mood was fragile, but I was managing it. What you definitively don’t want at such moments is a visit from the brass. Which, of course, is what we got.

Admiral Kard came stalking through the drop blister, muttering to the loadmaster, nodding at marines. At Kard’s side was a Commissary – you could tell that was her role at a glance – a woman, tall, ageless, in the classic costume of the Commission for Historical Truth, a floor-sweeping gown and shaved-bald head. She looked as cold and lifeless as every Commissary I ever met.

Admiral Kard picked me out. ‘Lieutenant Neer, correct?’

I stood up, brushing vomit off my suit. ‘Sir.’

‘Welcome to Shade,’ he said evenly.

I could see how the troops were tensing up. We didn’t need this. But I couldn’t have thrown out an admiral, not on his flagship.

‘We’re ready to drop, sir.’

‘Good.’

Just then the destination planet, at last, swam into view. We grunts knew it only by a number. That eerie sun was too dim to cast much light, and despite low-orbiting sunsats much of the land and sea was dark velvet. But great orange rivers of fire coursed across the black ground. This was a suffering world; you could see that from space.

The Commissary peered out at the tilted landscape, hands folded behind her back. ‘Remarkable. It’s like a geology demonstrator. Look at the lines of volcanoes and ravines. Every one of this world’s tectonic faults has given way, all at once.’

Admiral Kard eyed me. ‘You must forgive Commissary Xera. She does think of the universe as a textbook, set out before us for our education.’

He was rewarded for that with a glare.

I kept silent, uncomfortable. Everybody knows about the strained relations between Navy, the fighting arm of mankind’s Third Expansion, and Commission, implementer of political will. Maybe that structural rivalry was the reason for this impromptu walk-through, as the Commissary jostled for influence over events, and the Admiral tried to score points with a display of his fighting troops.

Except that right now they were my troops, not his.

To her credit, Xera seemed to perceive something of my resentment. ‘Don’t worry, Lieutenant. It’s just that Kard and I have something of a history. Two centuries of it, in fact, since our first encounter on a world called Home, thousands of light years from here.’

I could see Lian look up at that. Two centuries? According to the book, nobody was supposed to live so long. I guess at seventeen you still think everybody follows the rules.

Kard nodded. ‘And you’ve always had a way of drawing subordinates into our personal conflicts, Xera. Well, we may be making history today. Neer, look at the home sun, the frozen star.’

I frowned. ‘What’s a frozen star?’

The Commissary made to answer, but Kard cut across her. ‘Skip the science. You know the setup here. The Expansion reached this region five hundred years ago. When our people down there called for help, the Navy responded. That’s our job.’ He had cold artificial Eyes, and I sensed he was testing me. ‘And those Xeelee units are swarming like flies. We don’t know why the Xeelee are here. But we do know what they are doing to this human world.’

‘That’s not proven,’ Xera snapped.

Of course she was right. One of our objectives, in fact, was to pick up proof that the Xeelee were responsible for the calamities befalling the colonists on this battered world, Shade. But even so I could see my people stir at the Admiral’s words. There had been tension between humanity and Xeelee for centuries, but none of us had ever heard of a direct attack by the Xeelee on human positions.

Lian said boldly, ‘Admiral, sir.’

‘Yes, rating?’

‘Does that mean we are at war?’

Admiral Kard sniffed up a lungful of ozone-laden air. ‘After today, perhaps we will be, at long last. How does that make you feel, rating?’

Lian, and the others, looked to me for guidance. I looked into my heart.

Across seven thousand years of the Third Expansion humans had spread out in a great swarm through the Galaxy, even reaching the halo beyond the main disc, overwhelming other life forms as we encountered them. We had faced no opponent capable of systematic resistance since the collapse of the Silver Ghosts – none but the Xeelee, the Galaxy’s other great power, who sat in their great concentrations at the Core, silent, aloof.

This had been the situation for five thousand years. In my officer training I’d been taught the meaning of such numbers – for instance, that was an interval as long as that between the invention of writing and the launch of the first spaceships from Earth. It was a long time. But the Coalition was older yet, and its collective memory and clarity of purpose, all held together by the Druz Doctrines, even across such inhuman spans of time, was flawless. Marvellous when you thought about it.

And now – perhaps – here I was at the start of the final war, the war for the Galaxy. What I felt was awe. Also fear, maybe. But that wasn’t what the moment required.

‘I’ll tell you what I feel, sir. Relief. Bring it on!’

That won me a predictable hollering, and a slap on the back from Kard. Xera studied me blankly, her face unreadable.

Then there was a flare of plasma around the blister, and the ride got a lot bumpier. The Spline was entering the planet’s atmosphere. I sat before I was thrown down, and the loadmaster at last hustled away the brass.

‘Going in hard,’ called the loadmaster. ‘Barf bags at the ready. Ten minutes.’

We were skimming under high, thin, icy clouds. The world had become a landscape of burning mountains and rivers of rock that fled beneath me. All this in an eerie silence, broken only by the shallow breaths of the marines.

The ship lurched up and to the right. To our left now was a mountain; we had come so low already that its peak was above us. According to the centuries-old survey maps the locals had called it Mount Perfect, and, yes, once it must have been a classic cone shape, I thought, a nice landmark for an earthworm’s horizon. But now its profile was spoiled by bulges and gouges, ash had splashed around it, and deeper mud-filled channels had been cut into the landscape, splayed like the fingers of a hand.

Somewhere down there, amid the bleating locals, there was an Academician called Tilo, dropped by the Navy a couple of standard months earlier, part of a global network who had been gathering data on the causes of the volcanism. Tilo’s job, bluntly, had been to prove that this was all the Xeelee’s fault. The Academician had somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear. Our mission, along with helping with the evacuation of the locals, was to find and retrieve Tilo and his data. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I thought; the Commissaries, paranoid about their own power, were famously suspicious of the alliances between the Navy and the Academies.

Green lights marked out the hatch in the transparent wall. Show time.

The loadmaster came along the line. ‘Stand up! Stand up!’ The marines complied clumsily. ‘Thirty seconds,’ the loadmaster told me. He was a burly, scarred veteran, attached to a rail by an umbilical as thick as my arm. ‘Winds look good.’

‘Thank you.’

‘All clear aft. Ten seconds. Five.’

The green lights began to blink. We pulled our flexible visors across our faces.

‘Three, two—’

The hatch dilated, and the sudden roar of the wind made all this real. The loadmaster stood by the hatch, screaming, ‘Go, go, go!’

As the marines passed I checked each static line one last time with a sharp tug, before they jumped into blackness. The kid, Lian, was the second last to go – and I was the last of all.

So there I was, falling into the air of a new world.

My static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit’s Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock of no-gravity can be a jolt to the stomach, but to me, after maybe fifty drops in anger, it came as a relief.

I looked up and to my right. I saw a neat line of marines falling starfished through the air. One was a lot closer to me than the rest – Lian, I guessed. Past them I made out our Spline vessel, its hull charred from its hurried entry into the atmosphere. Our open drop blister was a glistening scar on its flank. The Spline looked immense, its pocked hull like an inverted landscape above me. It was a magnificent sight, an awe-inspiring display of human power and capability.

But beyond it I saw the hulking majesty of that mountain, dwarfing even the Spline. A dense cloud of smoke and ash lingered near its truncated summit, underlit by a fiery glow.

I looked down, searching for the valley I was aiming for.

I was able to pick out the target. The Commission’s maps, two centuries old, had shown a standard-issue Conurbation surrounded by broad, shining replicator fields, where the ground’s organic matter was processed seamlessly into food. But the view from the air was different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of the domed Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it, as if the colonists had moved out of the buildings provided for them. Well, you expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of everything.

Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. Amid the domes I could see the squat cone shape of a heavy-lift shuttle, dropped here on the Spline’s last pass through the atmosphere, ready to lift the population.

But I had a problem, I saw now. My marines were heading straight for the nominal target, the Conurbation, just as they should. But there was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller, stranded halfway up the flank of the mountain. There was no sign of domed Conurbation architecture, but there seemed no doubt this was human. Another village? And then I saw a pale pink light blinking at me from the middle of that cluster of shacks.

I’m not sentimental, and I don’t go for heroic gestures. In a given situation, with given resources, you do what you can, what’s possible. Given a free hand I’d have concentrated my energies on evacuating the Conurbation which undoubtedly held the bulk of the population. I wouldn’t have gone after that isolated handful of people, wouldn’t have approached that village at all – if not for that pink light. It was Tilo’s beacon. Kard had made it clear enough that unless I came home with the Academician, or at least with his data, next time I made a drop it would be without a Yukawa suit.

I slowed my fall and barked out orders. I knew my people would be able to supervise the evacuation of the main township without me; it was a simple mission. Then I redirected my own descent, down towards the smaller community. I’d go get Tilo out of there myself.

It was only after I had committed myself that I saw one of my troop had followed me: the kid, Lian.

No time to think about that now. A Yukawa suit is good for one drop, one way. You can’t go back and change your mind. Anyhow I was already close. I glimpsed a few ramshackle buildings, upturned faces shining like coins.

Then the ground raced up to meet me. Feet together, knees bent, back straight, roll when you hit – and then a lung-emptying impact on hard rock.

I allowed myself three full breaths, lying there on the cold ground, as I checked I was still in one piece.

Then I stood and pulled off my visor. The air was breathable, but thick with the smell of burning, and of sulphur. But the ground quivered under my feet, over and over. I wasn’t too troubled by that – until I reminded myself that I wasn’t on a ship any more, that planets were supposed to be stable.

Lian was standing there, her suit glowing softly. ‘Good landing, sir,’ she said.

I nodded, glad she was safe, but irritated; if she’d followed orders she wouldn’t have been here at all. I turned away from her, a deliberate snub that was enough admonishment for now.

I tried to get my bearings. The sky was deep. Beyond clouds of ash, sunsats swam. And past them I glimpsed the red pinprick of the true sun, and the wraith-like Galaxy disc.

I was just outside that mountainside village. Below me the valley skirted the base of Mount Perfect, neatly separating it from more broken ground beyond. The landscape was dark green, its contours coated by forest, and clear streams bubbled into a river that ran down the valley’s centre. A single, elegant bridge spanned the valley, reaching towards the old Conurbation on the far side. Further upstream I saw what looked like a logging plant, giant pieces of yellow-coloured equipment standing idle amid huge piles of sawn trees. Idyllic, if you liked that kind of thing, which I didn’t.

On this side of the valley, the village was just a huddle of huts – some of them made from wood – clustered on the lower slopes of the mountain. Bigger buildings might have been a school, a medical centre maybe, and there were a couple of battered ground transports. Beyond, I glimpsed the rectangular shapes of fields – apparently ploughed, not a glimmer of replicator technology in sight. It was like a living-history exhibit. But today it was all covered in ash.

People were standing, watching me, grey as the ground under their feet. Men, women, children, infants in arms, old folk, people in little clusters. There were maybe thirty of them.

Lian stood close to me. ‘Sir, I don’t understand. The way they are standing together—’

‘These are families,’ I murmured. ‘You’ll pick it up.’

‘Dark matter.’ The new voice was harsh, damaged by smoke.

A man was limping towards me. About my height and age but a lot leaner, he wore a tattered Navy coverall, and was he using an improvised crutch to hobble over the rocky ground, favouring what looked like a broken leg. His face and hair were grey with the ash.

I said, ‘You’re the Academician.’

‘Yes, I’m Tilo.’

‘We’re here to get you out.’

He barked a laugh. ‘Sure you are. Listen to me. Dark matter. That’s why the Xeelee are here, meddling in this system. It may have nothing to do with us at all. Things are going to happen fast. If I don’t get out of here … whatever happens, just remember that one thing – dark matter.’

A woman hurried towards me. One of the locals, she was wearing a simple shift of woven cloth, and leather sandals on her feet; she looked maybe forty, strong, tired. An antique translator box hovered at her shoulder. ‘My name is Doel,’ she said. ‘We saw you fall.’

‘Are you in charge here?’

‘I—’ She smiled wearily. ‘Yes, if you like. Will you help us get out of here?’

She didn’t look, or talk, or act, like any Expansion citizen I had ever met. Things truly had drifted here. ‘You are in the wrong place.’ I was annoyed how prissy I sounded. I pointed to the Conurbation, on the other side of the valley. ‘That’s where you’re supposed to be. The evacuation point.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, bemused. ‘We’ve lived here in the village since my grandfather’s time. We didn’t like it, over in Blessed. We came here to live a different way. No replicators. Crops we grow ourselves. Clothes we make—’

‘Mothers and fathers and grandfathers,’ Tilo cackled. ‘What do you think of that, Lieutenant?’

‘Academician, why are you here, in this village?’

He shrugged. ‘I came to study the mountain, as an exemplar of the planet’s geology. I accepted the hospitality of these people. That’s all. I got to like them, despite their – alien culture.’

‘But you left your equipment behind,’ I snapped. ‘You don’t have comms implants. You didn’t even take your mnemonic fluid, did you?’

‘I brought my pickup beacon,’ he said smugly.

‘Lethe, I don’t have time for this.’ I turned to Doel. ‘Look, if you can get your people across the valley, to where that transport is, you’ll be taken out with the rest.’

‘But I don’t think there will be time—’

I ignored her. ‘Academician, can you walk?’

Tilo laughed. ‘No. And you can’t hear the mountain, can you?’

That was when Mount Perfect exploded.

Tilo told me later that, if I’d known where and how to look, I could have seen the north side of the mountain bulging out. The immense chthonic defect had been growing visibly, at a metre a day. Well, I didn’t notice that. Thanks to some trick of acoustics I didn’t even hear the eruption – though it was heard by other Navy teams working hundreds of kilometres away.

But the aftermath was clear enough. With Lian and Doel, and with Academician Tilo limping after us, I ran to the crest of a ridge to see down the length of the valley.

As we watched, a billion tonnes of rock slid into the valley in a monstrous landslide. Already a huge grey thunderhead of smoke and ash was rearing up to the murky sky. A sharp earthquake had caused the mountain’s swollen flank to shear and fall away.

But that was only the start of the sequence of geological events, for the removal of all that weight was like opening a pressurised can. The mountain erupted – not upwards, but sideways, like the blast of an immense weapon, a volley of superheated gas and pulverised rock. The eruption quickly overtook the landslide, and I saw it demolish trees, imports from distant Earth, sentinels centuries old flattened like straws. I was stupefied by the scale of it all.

And there was more to come. From out of the ripped-open side of the mountain, a chthonic blood oozed, yellow-grey, viscous, steaming hot. It began to flow down the mountainside, spilling into rain-cut valleys.

‘That’s a lahar,’ Tilo murmured. ‘Mud. The heat is melting the permafrost – the mountain was snow-covered two weeks ago; did you know that? – making up a thick mixture of volcanic debris and meltwater. I’ve learned a lot of esoteric geology here, Lieutenant.’

‘So it’s just mud,’ said Lian uncertainly.

‘Just mud. You aren’t an earthworm, are you, marine?’

‘Look at the logging camp,’ Doel said.

Already the mud had overwhelmed the heavy equipment, big yellow tractors and huge cables and chains used for hauling logs, crumpling it all like paper. Piles of sawn logs were spilled, immense wooden beams shoved downstream effortlessly. The mud, grey and yellow, was steaming, oddly like curdled milk.

Just mud. For the first time I began to consider the contingency that we might not get out of here.

In which case my primary mission was to preserve Tilo’s data. I quickly used my suit to establish an uplink. We were able to access Tilo’s records, stored in cranial implants, and fire them up to the Spline. But in case it didn’t work—

‘Tell me about dark matter,’ I said. ‘Quickly.’

Tilo pointed up at the sky. ‘That star – the natural sun, the dwarf – shouldn’t exist.’

‘What?’

‘It’s too small. It has only around a twentieth of Earth’s sun’s mass. It should be a planet: a brown dwarf, like a big, fat Jovian. It shouldn’t burn – not yet. You understand that stars form from the interstellar medium – gas and dust. Originally the medium was just Big-Bang hydrogen and helium. But stars bake heavy elements, like metals, in their interiors, and eject them back into the medium when the stars die. So as time goes on, the medium is increasingly polluted.’

Impatiently I snapped, ‘And the point?’

‘The point is that an increase in impurities in the interstellar medium lowers the critical mass needed for a star to be big enough to burn hydrogen. So as time goes by and the medium gets murkier, smaller stars start lighting up. Lieutenant, that star shouldn’t be shining. Not in this era, not for trillions of years yet; the interstellar medium is too clean … You know, it’s so small that its surface temperature isn’t thousands of degrees, like Earth’s sun, but the freezing point of water. It is a star with ice clouds in its atmosphere. There may even be liquid water on its surface.’

I looked up, wishing I could see the frozen star better. Despite the urgency of the moment I shivered, confronted by strangeness, a vision from trillions of years downstream.

Tilo said bookishly, ‘What does all this mean? It means that out here in the halo, something, some agent, is making the interstellar medium dirtier than it ought to be. The only way to do that is by making the stars grow old.’ He waved a hand at the cluttered sky. ‘And if you look, you can see it all over this part of the halo; the stellar evolution diagrams are impossibly skewed.’

I shook my head; I was far out of my depth. What could make a star grow old too fast? … Oh. ‘Dark matter?’

‘The matter we’re made of – baryonic matter, protons and neutrons and the rest – is only about a tenth of the universe’s total. The rest is dark matter: subject only to gravity and the weak nuclear force, impervious to electromagnetism. Dark matter came out of the Big Bang, just like the baryonic stuff. As our Galaxy coalesced the dark matter was squeezed out of the main disc … But it lingered here. This is the domain of dark matter, Lieutenant. Out here in the halo.’

‘And this stuff can affect the ageing of stars.’

‘Yes. A dark matter concentration in the core of a star can change temperatures, and so affect fusion rates.

‘You said an “agent” was ageing the stars. You make it sound intentional.’

He was cautious now, an Academician who didn’t want to commit himself. ‘The stellar disruption appears non-random.’

Through the jargon, I tried to figure out what this meant. ‘Something is using the dark matter? … Or are there life forms in the dark matter? And what does that have to do with the Xeelee, and the problems here on Shade?’

His face twisted. ‘I haven’t figured out the links yet. There’s a lot of history. I need my data desk,’ he said plaintively.

I pulled my chin, thinking of the bigger picture. ‘Academician, you’re on an assignment for the Admiral. Do you think you’re finding what he wants to hear?’

He eyed me carefully. ‘The Admiral is part of a faction within the Navy that is keen to go to war with the Xeelee – if necessary, even to provoke conflict. Some call them extremists. Kard’s actions have to be seen in this light.’

Actually I’d heard such rumours, but I stiffened. ‘He’s my commanding officer. That’s all that matters.’

Tilo sighed. ‘I understand. But—’

‘Lethe,’ Lian said suddenly. ‘Sorry, sir. But that mud is moving fast.’

So it was, I saw.

The mud was filling up the valley, rising rapidly, even as it flowed towards us. It was piling up behind a front that was held back by its own viscosity. As it surged forward the mud ripped away the land’s green coat to reveal bare rock, and was visibly eating away at the walls of the valley itself. Overlaying the crack of tree trunks and the clatter of rock there was a noise like the feet of a vast running crowd, and a sour, sulphurous smell hit me.

The gush out of the mountain’s side showed no signs of abating. That front was already tens of metres high, and would soon reach the village.

‘I can’t believe how fast this stuff is rising,’ I said to Tilo. ‘The volume you’d need to fill up a valley like this—’

‘You and I are used to spacecraft, Lieutenant,’ Tilo said. ‘The dimensions of human engineering. Planets are big. And when they turn against you—’

‘We can still get you out of here. With our suits we can get you over that bridge and to the transport.’

‘What about the villagers?’

I was aware of the woman, Doel, standing beside me silently, just waiting. Which, of course, made me feel worse than if she’d yelled and begged.

There was a scream. We looked down the ridge and saw that the mud had already reached the village’s lower buildings. A young couple with a kid were standing on the roof of a low hut, about to get cut off.

Lian said, ‘Sir? Your orders?’

I waited one more heartbeat, as the mud began to wash over that hut’s porch.

‘Lethe, Lethe.’ I ran down the ridge until I hit the mud.

On the mud’s surface were dead fish that must have jumped out of the river to escape the heat. There was a lot of debris in the flow, from dust to pebbles to small boulders: no wonder it was so abrasive.

Even with the suit’s strength augmentation the mud was difficult stuff to wade through – lukewarm, and with a consistency like wet cement. The stench was bad enough for me to pull my visor over my mouth. By the time I reached the cottage I was already tiring badly.

I found the little ‘family’, parents and child, terrified, glad to see me. The woman was bigger, obviously stronger than the man. I had her hold her infant over her head, while I slung the man over my shoulder. With me leading, and the woman grabbing onto my belt, we waded back towards the higher ground.

All this time the mud rose relentlessly, filling up the valley as if it had been dammed, and every step sapped my energy.

Lian and Doel helped us out of the dirt. I threw myself to the ground, breathing hard. The young woman’s legs had been scoured by rocks in the flow; she had lost one sandal, and her trouser legs had been stripped away.

‘We’re already cut off from the bridge,’ Lian said softly.

I forced myself to my feet. I picked out a building – not the largest, not the highest, but a good compromise. It turned out to be the hospital. ‘That one. We’ll get them onto the roof. I’ll call for another pickup.’

‘Sir, but what if the mud keeps rising?’

‘Then we’ll think of something else,’ I snapped. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

She ran to help as Doel improvised a ladder from a trellis fence.

My first priority was to get Tilo safely lodged on the roof. Then I began to shepherd the locals up there. But we couldn’t reach all of them before the relentless rise of the mud left us all ankle-deep. People began to clamber up to whatever high ground they could find – verandas, piles of boxes, the ground transports, even rocks. Soon maybe a dozen were stranded, scattered on rooftop islands around a landscape turning grey and slick.

I waded in once more, heading towards two young women who crouched on the roof of a small building, like a storage hut. But before I got there the hut, undermined, suddenly collapsed, pitching the women into the flow. One of them bobbed up and was pushed against a stand of trees, where she got stuck, apparently unharmed. But the other tipped over and slipped out of sight. I reached the woman in the trees and pulled her out. The other was gone.

I hauled myself back onto the hospital roof for a break. All around us the mud flowed, a foul-smelling grey river, littered with bits of wood and rock.

My emotions were deep and unwelcome. I’d never met that woman, but her loss was visceral. It was as if, against my will, I had become part of this little community, as we huddled together on the roof of that crudely built hospital. Not to mention the fact that I now wouldn’t be able to fulfil my orders completely.

I prepared to plunge back into the flow.

Tilo grabbed my arm. ‘No. Not yet. You are exhausted. Anyhow you have a call to make, remember? If you can get me a data desk—’

Lian spoke up. ‘Sir. Let me bring in the stranded locals.’ She said awkwardly, ‘I can manage that much.’

Redemption time for this young marine. ‘Don’t kill yourself,’ I told her.

With a grin she slid off the roof.

Briskly, I used my suit’s comms system to set up a fresh link to the Spline. I requested another pickup – was told it was impossible – and asked for Kard.

Tilo requested a Virtual data desk. He fell on it as soon as it appeared. His relief couldn’t have been greater, as if the mud didn’t exist.

When they grasped the situation I had gotten us all into, Admiral Kard and Commissary Xera both sent down Virtual avatars. The two of them hovered over our wooden roof, clean of the mud, gleaming like gods among people made of clay.

Kard glared at me. ‘This is a mess, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You should have gotten Tilo over that damn bridge while you could. We’re heavily constrained by the Xeelee operations. You realise we probably won’t be able to get you out of here alive.’

It struck me as somewhat ironic that in the middle of a Galaxy-spanning military crisis I was to be killed by mud. But I had made my choice. ‘So I understand.’

‘But, Kard,’ Xera said, her thin face fringed by blocky pixels, ‘he has completed his primary mission, which is to deliver Tilo’s data back to us.’

Kard closed his Eyes, and his image flickered; I imagined Tilo’s data and interpretations pouring into the processors which sustained this semi-autonomous Virtual image, tightly integrated with Kard’s original sensorium. Kard said, ‘Your report needs redrafting, Tilo. Sharpening up. There’s too much about this dark matter crud, Academician.’

Xera said gently, ‘You were here on assignment from your masters in the Navy, with a specific purpose. They wanted to know what the Xeelee are up to. But it’s hard to close your eyes to the clamouring truth, isn’t it, Academician?’

Tilo sighed, his face mud-covered.

‘We must discuss this,’ Kard snapped. ‘All of us, right now. We have a decision to make, a recommendation to pass up the line – and we need to assess what Tilo has to tell us, in case we can’t retrieve him.’

I understood immediately what he meant. We were about to put the Xeelee in the dock – us, right here on this beaten-up planet, while the mud rose up around us. And the recommendation we made today might reach all the way back to the great decision-making councils on Earth itself. I felt a deep thrill. Even the locals stirred, apparently aware that something historically momentous was about to happen, even in the midst of their own misfortunes, stuck as we were on that battered wooden roof.

So it began.

At first Tilo wasn’t helpful.

‘It simply isn’t proven that this volcanism is the result of Xeelee action – and certainly not that it’s deliberately directed against humans,’ Despite Kard’s glare, he persisted, ‘I’m sorry, Admiral, but it isn’t clear.

‘Look at the context.’ He pulled up historical material – images, text that scrolled briefly in the murky air. ‘This is not a new story. There is evidence that human scientists were aware of dark-matter contamination in the stars before the beginning of the Third Expansion. They called the dark-matter life forms they found “photino birds”. It seems an engineered human being was once sent into Sol itself to study them … An audacious project. But this learning was largely lost in the Qax Extirpation, and after that – well, we had a Galaxy to conquer. There was a later incident, a project run by the Silver Ghosts concerning a “soliton star”, but—’

Kard snapped, ‘What do the Xeelee care about dark matter?’

Tilo rubbed tired eyes with grubby fists. ‘However exotic they are, the Xeelee are baryonic life forms, like us. It isn’t in their interests for the suns to die young, any more than for us.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps they are trying to stop it. Perhaps that’s why they have come here, to the halo. Nothing to do with us.’

Kard waved a Virtual hand at Mount Perfect’s oozing wounds. ‘Then why all this, just as the Xeelee show up? Coincidence?’

Xera protested, ‘Admiral—’

‘This isn’t a Commission trial, Tilo,’ Kard said. ‘We don’t need absolute proof. The imagery – human refugees, Xeelee nightfighters swooping overhead – will be all we need to implicate the Xeelee in this destruction.’

Xera said dryly, ‘Yes. All we need to sell a war to the Coalition, the governing councils, and the people of the Expansion.’ They seemed to forget the rest of us as they engaged in an argument they had clearly been pursuing before. ‘This is wonderful for you, isn’t it, Admiral? It’s what the Navy has been waiting for, along with its Academy cronies. An excuse to attack.’

Kard’s face was stony. ‘The cold arrogance of you cosseted intellectuals is sometimes insufferable. It’s true that the Navy is ready to fight, Commissary. That’s our job. And we are ready. We have the plans in place—’

‘But does the existence of the plans require their fulfilment? And let’s remember how hugely the Navy itself will benefit. As the lead agency, a war would clearly support the Navy’s long-term political goals.’

Kard glared. ‘We all have something to gain. Xera, you Commissaries are responsible for maintaining the unity of mankind; the common principles, common purpose, the belief that has driven the Expansion so far. But isn’t it obvious that you are failing? Look at this place.’ He waved a Virtual hand through Doel’s hair; the woman flinched, and the hand broke up into drifting pixels. ‘This woman is a mother, apparently some kind of matriarch to her extended family.’ He pronounced those words with loathing. ‘They don’t even live in their Coalition-provided Conurbation domes. It’s as if Hama Druz never existed!

‘And if the Druz Doctrines were to collapse, the Commission would have no purpose. Think of the good you do, for you know so much better than the mass of mankind how they should think, feel, live and die. Your project is actually humanitarian! It has to continue. But if it is to prevail mankind needs purification. An ideological cleansing. And that’s what the bright fire of war will give us.’

I could see that his arguments, aimed at the Commissary’s vanity and self-interest, were leaving a mark. I got a sense of the great agencies of the Coalition as shadowy independent empires, engaging in obscure and shifting alliances. And now each agency would contemplate the possibility of a war as an opportunity to gain political capital. It was queasy listening. But there’s a lot I didn’t want to know about how the Coalition is run. Still don’t, in fact.

They had forgotten the Academician. But Tilo was still trying to speak. He showed me more bits of evidence he had assembled on his data desk – me, because I was the only one still listening. ‘But I think I know now why the volcanism started here, Lieutenant. Forget the star: this planet has an unusually high dark-matter concentration in its core. Under such densities the dark matter annihilates with ordinary matter and creates heat.’

I listened absently. ‘Which creates the geological upheaval.’

He closed his eyes, thinking. ‘Here’s a scenario. The Xeelee have been driving dark-matter creatures out of the frozen star – and, fleeing, they have lodged here – and that’s what set off the volcanism. It was all inadvertent. The Xeelee are trying to save stars, not harm planets. They probably don’t even know humans are here … The damage to the planet is entirely coincidental.’

But nobody paid any attention to that. For, I realised, we had already reached a point where evidence didn’t matter.

Kard ignored the Academician; he had what he wanted. He turned to the people of the village, muddy, exhausted, huddled together on their rooftop. ‘What of you? You are the citizens of the Expansion. There are reformers who say you have had enough of colonisation and conflict, that there are enough people in the sky, we should seek stability and peace. Well, you have heard what we have had to say, and you have seen our mighty ships. Will you live out your lives on this drifting rock, helpless before a river of mud – or will you transcend your birth and die for an epic cause? War makes everything new. War is the wildest poetry. Will you join me?’

Those ragged-ass, dirt-scratching, orthodoxy-busting farmers hesitated for a heartbeat. You couldn’t have found a less likely bunch of soldiers for the Expansion. But, would you believe, they started cheering the Admiral: every one of them, even the kids. Lethe, it brought a tear to my eye.

Even Xera seemed coldly excited.

Kard closed his Eyes; metals seams pushed his eyelids into ridges. ‘We are just a handful of people in this desolate, remote place. And yet here a new epoch is born. They are listening to us, you know – listening in the halls of history. And we will be remembered for ever.’

Tilo’s expression was complex. He clapped his hands, and the data desk disappeared in a cloud of pixels, leaving his work unfinished.

We mere fleshy types had to stay on that rooftop through the night. We could do nothing but cling to each other as the muddy tide rose slowly around us, and the kids cried from hunger.

When the sunsats returned to the sky, the valley was transformed. The channels had been gouged sharp and deep by the lahar, and the farms had been smothered by lifeless grey mud, from which only occasional trees and buildings protruded. But the lahar was flowing only sluggishly now.

Lian cautiously climbed to the edge of the roof and probed at the mud with her booted foot. ‘It’s very dense.’

Tilo said, ‘Probably the water has drained out of it.’

Lian couldn’t stand on the mud, but if she lay on it she didn’t sink. She flapped her arms and kicked, and she skidded over the surface. Her face grey with the dirt, she laughed like a child. ‘Sir, look at me! It’s a lot easier than trying to swim or wade…’

So it was, when I tried it myself.

And that was how we got the villagers across the flooded valley, one by one, to the larger Conurbation – not that much was left of that by now – where the big transport waited to take us off. In the end we lost only one of the villagers, the young woman who had been overwhelmed by the surge. I tried to accept that I’d done my best to fulfil my contradictory mission objectives – and that, in the end, was the most important outcome for me.

As we lifted, Mount Perfect loosed another eruption.

Tilo, cocooned in a med cloak, stood beside me in an observation blister, watching the planet’s mindless fury. He said, ‘You know, you can’t stop a lahar. It just goes the way it wants to go. Like this war, it seems.’

‘I guess.’

‘We humans understand so little. We see so little. But when you add us together we combine into huge historical forces that none of us can deflect, any more than you can dam or divert a mighty lahar ...’

And so on. I made an excuse and left him there.

I went down to the sick bay, and watched Lian tending to the young from the village. I had relieved her of her regular duties, as she was one of the few faces on board that was familiar to the traumatised kids, so she was useful here. With the children now she was patient, competent, calm. I felt proud of that young marine; she had grown up a lot during our time on Shade.

And as I watched her simple humanity, I imagined a trillion such acts, linking past and future, history and destiny, a great tapestry of hard work and goodwill that united mankind into a mighty host that would some day rule a Galaxy.

To tell the truth I was bored with Tilo and his niggling. War! It was magnificent. It was inevitable. I didn’t understand what had happened down on Shade, and I didn’t care. What did it matter how the war had started, in truth or lies? We would soon forget about dark matter and the Xeelee’s obscure, immense projects, just as we had before; we humans didn’t think in such terms. All that mattered was that the war was here, at last.

The oddest thing was that none of it had anything to do with the Xeelee themselves. We needed a war. Any enemy would have served our purposes just as well.

I began to wonder what it would mean for me. I felt my heart beat faster, like a drumbeat.

We flew into a rising cloud of ash, and bits of rock clattered against our hull, frightening the children.

Yes, war was inevitable. Too many wanted it too badly. But it did strike me as ironic that the triggering incident was a Xeelee action concerned with a different war entirely, a war in which we were always bystanders – a war which would one day overwhelm all of us.

With the final conflict begun at last, the Galaxy-spanning civilisation of mankind underwent a drastic reconfiguration. For millennia, under the Coalition, it had been a machine for expansion and conquest. Now it became a machine of war.

Humanity resplendent. We undying hid away, waiting for the storm to pass.

>And human hearts, evolved for a long-forgotten savannah, had to adapt to the dilemmas of interstellar battlefields.