Resplendent

AD 20,424

I

We’d had no warning of the wounded Spline ship’s return to Base 592, in the heart of the Galaxy.

Return: if you could call it that. But this was before I understood that every faster-than-light spaceship is also a time machine. That kind of puzzling would come later. For now, I just had my duty to perform.

As it happened we were off the Base at the time, putting the Admiral Kard through its paces after a refit and bedding in a new crew. Kard is a corvette: a small, mobile yacht intended for close-in sublight operations. I was twenty years old, still an ensign, assigned for that jaunt as an assistant to Exec Officer Baras. My first time on a bridge, it was quite an experience, and I was glad of the company of Tarco, an old cadre sibling, even if he was a male and a lard bucket. In cold Galaxy-centre light we had just run through a tough sequence of speed runs, emergency turns, full backdown, instrument checks, fire and damage control.

It was thanks to our fortuitous station on the bridge that Tarco and I were among the first to see the injured ship as it downfolded out of hyperspace. It was a Navy ship – a Spline, of course, a living ship, like a great meaty eyeball. It just appeared out of nowhere. We were close enough to see the green tetrahedral sigil etched into its flesh. But you couldn’t miss the smoking ruins of the weapons emplacements, and a great open rent in the hull, thick with coagulated blood. A swarm of lesser lights, huddling close, looked like escape pods.

The whole bridge crew fell silent.

‘Lethe,’ Tarco whispered. ‘Where did that come from?’ We didn’t know of any action underway at the time.

But we had no time to debate it.

Captain Iana’s voice sounded around the corvette. ‘That ship is the Assimilator’s Torch,’ he announced. ‘She’s requesting help. You can all see her situation. Stand by your stations.’ He began to snap out brisk orders to his heads of department.

Well, we scrambled immediately. But Tarco’s big moon-shaped face was creased by a look I didn’t recognise.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I heard that name before. Assimilator’s Torch. She’s due to arrive here at Base 592 next year.’

‘Then it’s a little early. So what?’

He stared at me. ‘You don’t get it, buttface. I saw the manifest. The Torch is a newborn Spline. It hasn’t even left Earth.’

But the injured Spline looked decades old, at least. ‘You made a mistake. Buttface yourself.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. Still, that was the first indication I had that there was something very wrong here.

The Kard lifted away from its operational position, and I had a grand view of Base 592, the planet on which we were stationed. From space it is a beautiful sight, a slow-spinning sphere of black volcanic rock peppered with the silver-grey of shipyards, so huge they are like great gleaming impact craters. There are even artificial oceans, glimmering blue, for the benefit of Spline vessels, who swim there between missions.

592 has a crucial strategic position, for it floats on the fringe of the 3-Kiloparsec Spiral Arm that surrounds the Galaxy’s Core, and the Xeelee concentrations there. Here, some ten thousand light years from Earth, was as deep as the Third Expansion of mankind had yet penetrated into the central regions of the main disc. 592 was a fun assignment. We were on the front line, and we knew it. It made for an atmosphere you might call frenetic. But now I could see ships lifting from all around the planet, rushing to the aid of the stricken vessel. It was a heart-warming, magnificent sight, humanity at its best.

As we approached the Spline, the Kard hummed like a well-tuned machine. Right now, all over the ship, I knew, the whole crew – officers and gunners, cooks and engineers and maintenance stiffs, experienced officers and half-trained rookies – everybody was getting ready to save human beings from the great void that had tried to kill them. It was what you did. I looked forward to playing my part.

Which was why I wasn’t too happy to hear the soft voice of Commissary Varcin behind me. ‘Ensign. Are you’ – he checked a list – ‘Dakk? I have a special assignment for you. Come with me.’ Varcin, gaunt and tall, served as the corvette’s political officer, as assigned to every ship of the line with a crew above a hundred. He had an expression I couldn’t read, a cold calculation.

Everybody is scared of the Commissaries, but this was not the time to be sucked into a time-wasting chore. ‘I take my orders from the exec. Sir.’ I looked to the Executive Officer.

Baras’s face was neutral. I knew about the ancient tension between Navy and Commission, but I also knew what Baras would say. ‘Do it, ensign. You’d better go too, Tarco.’

I had no choice, crisis or not. So we went hurrying after the Commissary.

Away from the spacious calm of the bridge, the corridors of the Kard were a clamour of motion and noise, people running every which way lugging equipment and stores, yelling orders and demanding help.

As we jogged I whispered to Tarco, ‘So where has this bucket come from? Where’s the action right now? SS 433?’

‘Not there,’ Tarco said. ‘Don’t you remember? At SS 433 we suffered no casualties.’

That was true. SS 433, a few hundred light years from 592, is a normal star in orbit around a massive neutron star; gravitationally squeezed, it emits high-energy jets of heavy elements – very useful. A month before, the Xeelee had shown up in an effort to wreck the human processing plants there. But thanks to smart intelligence by the Commission for Historical Truth they had been met by an overwhelming response. It had been a famous victory, the excuse for a lot of celebration.

If a little eerie. Sometimes the Commission’s knowledge of future events was so precise we used to wonder if they had spies among the Xeelee. Or a time machine, maybe. Scary, as I said. But there is a bigger picture here. After fifteen thousand years of the Third Expansion, and eight thousand years of all-out war with the Xeelee, humanity controls around a quarter of the disc of the Galaxy itself, a mighty empire centred on Sol, as well as some outlying territories in the halo clusters. But the Xeelee control the rest, including the Galaxy centre. And, gradually, the slow-burning war between man and Xeelee is intensifying.

So I was glad the Commissaries, with their apparent powers of prophecy, were on my side.

We descended a couple of decks and found ourselves in the corvette’s main loading bay. The big main doors had been opened to reveal a wall of burned and broken flesh. The stink was just overwhelming, and great lakes of yellow-green pus were gathering on the gleaming floor.

The wall was the hull of the injured Spline. The Kard had docked with the Assimilator’s Torch as best she could, and this was the result. The engineers were at work, cutting a usable opening in that wall. It was just a hole in the flesh, another wound. Beyond, a tunnel stretched, organic, less like a corridor than a throat.

I could see figures moving in the tunnel – Torch crew, presumably. Here came two of them labouring to support a third between them. Kard crew rushed forward to take the injured tar. I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she. That was how bad the burns were. Loops of flesh hung off limbs that were like twigs, and in places you could see down to bone, which itself had been blackened.

Tarco and I reacted somewhat badly to this sight. But already med cloaks were snuggling around the wounded tar, gentle as a lover’s caress.

I looked up at the Commissary, who was standing patiently. ‘Sir? Can you tell us why we are here?’

‘We received ident signals from the Torch when it downfolded. There’s somebody here who will want to meet you.’

‘Sir, who—’

‘It’s better if you see for yourself.’

One of the Torch crew approached us. She was a woman, I saw, about my height. There was no hiding the bloodstains and scorches and rips, or the way she limped; there was a wound in her upper thigh that actually smoked. But she had captain’s pips on her collar.

I felt I knew her face – that straight nose, the small chin – despite the dirt that covered her cheeks and neck, and the crust of blood that coated her forehead. She had her hair grown out long, with a ponytail at the back, quite unlike my regulation crew-cut. But – this was my first impression – her face seemed oddly reversed, as if she was a mirror image of what I was used to.

I immediately felt a deep, queasy unease.

I don’t know many captains, but she immediately recognised me. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

Tarco had become very tense. It turned out he had thought the situation through a little further than I had. ‘Commissary, what engagement has the Torch come from?’

‘The Fog.’

My mouth dropped. Every tar on Base 592 knew that the Fog is an interstellar cloud – and a major Xeelee concentration – situated inside 3-Kilo, a good hundred light years deeper towards the centre of the Galaxy. I said, ‘I didn’t know we were hitting the enemy so deep.’

‘We aren’t. Not yet.’

‘And,’ Tarco said tightly, ‘here we are greeting a battle-damaged ship that hasn’t even left Earth yet.’

‘Quite right,’ Varcin said approvingly. ‘Ensigns, you are privileged to witness this. This ship is a survivor of a battle that won’t happen for another twenty-four years.’

Tarco kind of spluttered.

As for me, I couldn’t take my eye off the Torch’s captain. Tense, she was running her thumb down the side of her cheek.

‘I do that,’ I said stupidly.

‘Oh, Lethe,’ she said, disgusted. ‘Yes, tar, I’m your older self. Get over it. I’ve got work to do.’ And with a glance at the Commissary she turned and stalked back towards her ship.

Varcin said gently, ‘Go with her.’

‘Sir—’

‘Do it, ensign.’

Tarco followed me. ‘So in twenty-four years you’re still going to be a buttface.’

I realised miserably he was right.

The three of us pushed through the narrow passageway into the Torch. The gravity was lumpy, and I suspected that it was being fed in from the Kard’s inertial generators.

I had had no previous exposure to the organic ‘technology’ of a Spline. We truly were inside a vast body. Every time I touched a surface my hands came away sticky, and I could feel salty liquids oozing over my uniform. The passage’s walls were raw flesh, much of it burned, twisted and broken, even far beneath the ship’s epidermis.

But that was just background to my churning thoughts. Captain Dakk, for Lethe’s sake.

The captain saw me staring again. ‘Ensign, back off. We can’t get away from each other, but over the next few days life is going to get complicated for the both of us. It always does in these situations. Just take it one step at a time.’

‘Sir—’

She glared at me. ‘Don’t question me. What interest have I got in giving you bad advice? I don’t like this situation any more than you do. Remember that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

We found lines of wounded, wrapped in cloaks. Crew were labouring to bring them out to the Kard. But the passageway was too narrow. It was a traffic jam, a real mess. It might have been comical if not for the groans and cries, the stink of fear and desperation in the air.

Dakk found an officer. He wore the uniform of a damage control worker. ‘Cady, what in Lethe is going on here?’

‘It’s the passageways, sir. They’re too ripped up to get the wounded out with the grapplers. So we’re having to do it by hand.’ He looked desperate, miserable. ‘Sir, I’m responsible.’

‘You did right,’ she said grimly. ‘But let’s see if we can’t tidy this up a little. You two,’ she snapped at Tarco and me. ‘Take a place in line.’

And that was the last we saw of her for a while, as she went stomping into the interior of her ship. She quickly organised the crew, from Torch and Kard alike, into a human chain. Soon we were passing cloaked wounded from hand to hand, along the corridor and out into the Kard’s loading bay in an orderly fashion.

‘I’m impressed,’ Tarco said. ‘Sometime in the next quarter-century you’ll be grafted a brain.’

‘Shove it.’

The line before us snarled up. Tarco and I found ourselves staring down at one of the wounded – conscious, looking around, waiting to be moved out. He was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen.

If this was all true, in my segment of time he hadn’t even been born yet.

He spoke to us. ‘You from the Kard?’

‘Yeah.’

He started to thank us, but I brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what happened to you.’

Tarco whispered to me, ‘Hey. Don’t ask him about the future. You never heard of time paradoxes? I bet the Commission has a few regulations about that.’

I shrugged. ‘I already met myself. How much worse can it get?’

Either the wounded man didn’t know we were from his past, or he didn’t care. He told us in terse sentences how the Torch had been involved in a major engagement deep in the Fog. He had been a gunner, with a good view of the action from his starbreaker pod.

‘We came at a Sugar Lump. You ever seen one of those? A big old Xeelee emplacement. But the nightfighters were everywhere. We were taking a beating. The order came to fall back. We could see that damn Sugar Lump, close enough to touch. Well, the captain disregarded the fallback order.’

Tarco said sceptically, ‘She disregarded an order?’

‘We crossed the chop line.’ A chop line is actually a surface, a military planner’s boundary between sectors in space – in this case, between the disputed territory inside the Fog and Xeelee-controlled space. The Xeelee had been suckered by the fallback, and the Torch broke through their lines. ‘We only lasted minutes. But we fired off a Sunrise.’

Tarco said, ‘A what?’ I kicked him, and he shut up.

Unexpectedly, the kid grabbed my arm. ‘We barely got home. But, Lethe, when that Sunrise hit, we nearly shook this old fish apart with our hollering, despite the pasting we were taking.’

Tarco asked maliciously, ‘How do you feel about Captain Dakk?’

‘She is a true leader. I’d follow her anywhere.’

All I felt was unease. No heroes: that’s one lesson of the Druz Doctrines, the creed that has held mankind together across fifteen thousand years, and drilled into every one of us by the Commissaries at their orientation sessions every day. If my future self had forgotten about that, something had gone wrong.

But now the gunner was looking at me intently. I became aware I was rubbing my thumb down my cheek. I dropped my hand and turned my face away.

Captain Dakk was standing before me. ‘Recognition. You’d better get used to that.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I groused. I was starting to resent the whole situation.

‘I don’t think what you, or I, want has much to do with it, ensign.’

I muttered to Tarco, ‘Lethe. Am I that pompous?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Dakk said, ‘I think we’re organised here for now. I’ll come back later when I can start thinking about damage control. In the meantime we’ve been ordered to your captain’s wardroom. Both of us.’

Tarco said hesitantly, ‘Sir – what’s a Sunrise?’

She looked surprised. ‘Right. You don’t have them yet. A Sunrise is a human-driven torpedo. A suicide weapon.’ She eyed me. ‘So you heard what happened in the Fog.’

‘A little of it.’

She cupped my cheek. It was the first time she had touched me. It was an oddly neutral sensation, like touching your own skin. ‘You’ll find out, in good time. It was glorious.’

Dakk led us back through Kard’s officer country. Commissary Varcin met us there.

Here, the partitions had hastily been taken down to open up a wide area of deck that was serving as a hospital and convalescent unit. There were crew in there in all stages of recovery. Some of them were lying on beds, weak and hollow-eyed. Many of them seemed to be pleading with the orderlies to be put back on the Torch despite their injuries – once you lose contact with your ship in a war zone it can be impossible to find it again. And many of them asked, touchingly, after the Torch itself. They really cared about their living ship, I saw; that battered old hulk was one of the crew.

An awful lot of them sported ponytails, men and women alike, apparently in imitation of their captain. Very non-Doctrinal.

When they saw Dakk they all shouted and cheered and whistled. The walking wounded crowded around Dakk and thumped her on the back. A couple just turned their heads on their pillows and cried softly. Dakk’s eyes were brimming, I saw; though she had a grin as wide as the room, she was on the point of breaking down.

I glanced at Tarco. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Among the medics I saw a figure with the shaven head and long robes of the Commission. She was moving from patient to patient, and using a needle on them. But she wasn’t treating them. She was actually extracting blood, small samples that she stored away in a satchel at her side.

This wasn’t the time or place to be collecting samples like that. I stepped forward to stop her. Well, it was a natural reaction. Luckily for me Tarco held me back.

Commissary Varcin said dryly, ‘I can see you have your future self’s impetuosity, ensign. The orderly is just doing her duty. It’s no doubt as uncomfortable for her as it is for you. Commissaries are human beings too, you know.’

‘Then what—’

‘Before they went into battle every one of these crew will have been injected with mnemonic fluid. That’s what we’re trying to retrieve. The more viewpoints we get of this action, the better we can anticipate it. We’re ransacking the ship’s databases and logs too.’

Call me unimaginative. I still didn’t know what unlikely chain of circumstances had delivered my older self into my life. But that was the first time it had occurred to me what a potent weapon had been placed in our hands. ‘Lethe,’ I said. ‘This is how we’ll win the war. If you know the course of future battles—’

‘You have a lot to absorb, ensign,’ Varcin said, not unkindly. ‘Take it one step at a time.’

Which, of course, had been my own advice to myself.

At last, somewhat to my relief, we got Dakk away from her crew. Varcin led us down more corridors to Captain Iana’s plush wardroom.

Tarco and I stood in the middle of the carpet, aware of how dinged-up we were, scared of spreading Spline snot all over Iana’s furniture. But Varcin waved us to chairs anyhow, and we sat down stiffly.

I watched Dakk. She sprawled in a huge chair, shaking a little, letting her exhaustion show now she was away from her crew. She was me. My face – reversed from the mirror image I’d grown up with. I was very confused. I hated the idea of growing so old, arrogant, unorthodox. But I’d seen plenty to admire in Dakk: strength, an ability to command, to win loyalty. Part of me wanted to help her. Another part wanted to push her away.

But mostly I was just aware of the bond that connected us. It didn’t matter whether I liked her or loathed her; whichever way, she was always going to be there, for the rest of my life. It wasn’t a comfortable notion.

Varcin was watching me. I got the idea he knew what I was feeling. But he turned to business, steepling his fingers.

‘Here’s how it is. We’re scrambling to download data, to put together some kind of coherent picture of what happened downstream.’ Downstream – not the last bit of time-hopping jargon I was going to have to get used to. ‘You have surprises ahead of you, Ensign Dakk.’

I laughed a bit shrilly, and waved a hand at the captain. ‘Surprising after this? Bring it on.’

Dakk looked disgusted. Tarco placed a calming hand on my back.

Varcin said, ‘First, you – rather, Captain Dakk – will be charged. There will be a court of inquiry.’

‘Charged? What with?’

Varcin shrugged. ‘Negligence, in recklessly endangering the ship.’ He eyed Dakk. ‘I imagine there will be other counts, relating to various violations of the Druz Doctrines.’

Dakk just smiled, a chilling expression. I wondered how I ever got so cynical.

Varcin went on, ‘Ensign, you’ll be involved.’

I nodded. ‘Of course. It’s my future.’

‘You don’t understand. Directly involved. We want you to serve as the prosecuting advocate.’

‘Me? Sir.’ I took a breath. ‘You want me to prosecute myself. For a crime, an alleged crime anyhow, I won’t commit for twenty-four years. Is there any part of that I misunderstood?’

‘No. You have the appropriate training, don’t you?’

Dakk laughed. ‘This is their way, kid. After all who knows me better?’

I stood up. ‘Commissary, I won’t do it.’

‘Sit down, ensign.’

‘I’ll go to Captain Iana.’

‘Sit. Down.’

I’d never heard such a tone of command. I sat, frightened.

‘Ensign, you are immature, and inexperienced, and impetuous. You will have much to learn to fulfil this assignment. But you are the necessary choice.

‘And there’s more.’ Again, I glimpsed humanity in that frosted-over Commissary. ‘In four months’ time you will report to the birthing complex on Base 592. There you will request impregnation by Ensign Hama Tarco, here.’

Tarco quickly took his hand off my back.

‘Permission will be granted,’ said Varcin. ‘I’ll see to that.’

I didn’t believe it. Then I got angry. I felt like I was in a trap. ‘How do you know I’ll want a kid by Tarco? No offence, butthead.’

‘None taken,’ said Tarco, sounding bemused.

Now the Commissary looked irritated. ‘How do you think I know? Haven’t you noticed the situation we’re in? Because it’s in the Torch’s record. Because the child you will bear—’

‘Will be on the Torch, with me,’ said Dakk. ‘His name was Hama.’

I swear Tarco blushed.

‘Was? The kid was called Hama?’ I felt a kind of panic. Perhaps it was the tug of a maternal bond that couldn’t yet exist, fear for the well-being of a child I’d only just learned about. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? He died, out there in the Fog.’

Varcin murmured, ‘One step at a time, remember, ensign.’

Dakk leaned forward. ‘Yes, he died. He rode the Sunrise. He was the one who took a monopole bomb into the Xeelee Sugar Lump. You see? Your child, Dakk. Our child. He was a hero.’

One step at a time. I kept repeating that to myself. But it was as if the wardroom was spinning around.

II

In Dakk’s yacht, I sailed around the huge flank of the Assimilator’s Torch. Medical tenders drifted alongside, hosing some kind of sealant into the living ship’s mighty wounds.

The injured Spline had been allowed to join a flotilla of its kind, regular ships of the line. Living starships the size of cities are never going to be graceful, but I saw that their movements were coordinated, a vast dance. They even snuggled against each other, like great fish jostling.

Dakk murmured, ‘Some of these battered beasts have been in human employ for a thousand years or more. We rip out their brains and their nervous systems – we amputate their minds – and yet something of the self still lingers, a need for others of their kind, for comfort. So we let the distressed swim together for a while.’

I listened absently.

The yacht docked, and the captain and I were piped aboard the Torch. I found myself in a kind of cave, buttressed by struts of some cartilaginous material. The lighting had been fixed, the on-board gravity restored.

We wandered through orifices and along round-walled passageways, pushing deeper into the body of the Spline. We saw none of Dakk’s crew, only repair workers from the Base.

Dakk said to me, ‘You haven’t served on a Spline yet, have you? The ship is alive, remember. It’s hot. At sleep periods you can walk around the ship, and you find the crew dozing all over the vessel, many of them naked, some sprawled on food sacks or weapons, or just on the warm surfaces, wherever they can. You can hear the pulsing of the Spline’s blood flow – even sometimes the beating of its heart, like a distant gong. That and the scrambling of the rats.’

It sounded cosy, but not much like the Navy I knew. ‘Rats?’

She laughed. ‘Little bastards get everywhere.’

On we went. It wasn’t as bad as that hour in the chaotic dark when the Spline first came limping in, and we had to haul a wounded crew out of a wounded ship. But even so it was like being in some vast womb. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get used to this environment, how I could serve on a ship like this. But Dakk seemed joyful to be back, so I was evidently wrong.

We came to a deep place Dakk called the ‘belly’. This was a hangar-like chamber separated into bays by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. Within the alcoves were suspended sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.

I prodded the surface of one of the sacs. It rippled sluggishly. I could see drifting plants, wriggling fish, snails, a few autonomous bots swimming among the crowd. ‘It’s like an aquarium,’ I said.

‘So it is. A miniature ocean. The green plants are hornweeds: rootless, almost entirely edible. And you have sea snails, swordtail fish and various microbes. There is a complete self-contained biosphere here. This is how we live; this little farm feeds us. These creatures are actually from Earth’s oceans. Don’t you think it’s kind of romantic to fly into battle against Xeelee super-science with a droplet of primordial waters at our core?’

‘How do you keep it from getting overgrown?’

‘The weed itself kills back overgrowth. The snails live off dead fish. And the fish keep their numbers down by eating their own young.’

I guess I pulled a face at that.

‘You’re squeamish,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t remember that.’

We walked on through the Spline’s visceral marvels. I didn’t take in much.

The truth is I was struggling to function. I’m sure I was going through some kind of shock. Human beings aren’t designed to be subject to temporal paradoxes about their future selves and unborn babies.

And my head was full of my work on the inquiry into Dakk’s actions.

The inquiry procedure was a peculiar mix of ancient Navy traditions and forensic Commission processes. Commissary Varcin had been appointed president of the court, and as prosecutor advocate I was a mix of prosecutor, law officer and court clerk. The rest of the court – a panel of brass who were a kind of mix of judge and jury combined – were Commissaries and Navy officers, with a couple of civilians and even an Academician for balance. It was all a political compromise between the Commission and the Navy, it seemed to me.

But the court of inquiry was only the first stage. If the charges were established Dakk would go on to face a full court martial, and possibly a trial before members of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave itself. So the stakes were high.

And the charges themselves – aimed at my own future self, after all – had been hurtful: Through Negligence Suffering a Vessel of the Navy to be Hazarded; Culpable Inefficiency in the Performance of Duty; Through Disregard of Standing and Specific Orders Endangering the War Aims of the Navy; Through Self-Regard Encouraging a Navy Crew to Deviate from Doctrinal Thought…

There was plenty of evidence. We had Virtual reconstructions based on the Torch’s logs and the mnemonic fluids extracted from the ship’s crew. And we had a stream of witnesses, most of them walking wounded from the Torch. None of them was told how her testimony fitted into the broader picture, a point which many of them got frustrated about. But all of them expressed their loyalty and admiration towards Captain Dakk – even though, in the eyes of Commissaries, such idolising would only get their captain deeper into trouble.

All this could only help so far. What I felt I was missing was motive. I didn’t understand why Dakk had done what she had done.

I felt I couldn’t get her into focus. I oscillated between despising her and longing to defend her – and all the time I felt oppressed by the paradoxical bond that locked us together. I sensed she felt the same. Sometimes she was as impatient with me as with the greenest recruit, and other times she seemed to try to take me under her wing. It can’t have been easy for her either, to be reminded that she had once been as insignificant as me. But if we were two slices of the same person, our situations weren’t symmetrical. She had been me, long ago; I was doomed to become her; it was as if she had paid dues that still faced me.

Anyhow, that was why I had requested a break from the deliberations, so I could spend some time with Dakk on her home territory. I had to get to know her – even though I felt increasingly reluctant to be drawn into her murky future.

She brought me to a new chamber, deep within the Spline ship. Criss-crossed by struts of cartilage, this place was dominated by a pillar made of translucent red-purple rope. There was a crackling stench of ozone.

I knew where I was. ‘This is the hyperdrive chamber.’

‘Yes.’ She reached up and stroked fibres. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it? I remember when I first saw a Spline hyperdrive muscle—’

‘Of course you remember.’

‘What?’

‘Because it’s now. This is my first time seeing this. And I’m you.’ Some day, I thought gloomily, I would inevitably find myself standing on the other side of this room, looking back at my own face. ‘Don’t you remember this? Being me, twenty years old, meeting – you?’

Her answer confused me. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’ She glared at me. ‘You do understand how come I’m stuck back in the past, staring at your zit-ridden face?’

‘No,’ I admitted reluctantly.

‘It was a Tolman manoeuvre.’ She searched my face. ‘Every faster-than-light starship is a time machine. Come on, ensign. That’s just special relativity! Even “Tolman” is the name of some long-dead pre-Extirpation scientist. They teach this stuff to four-year-olds.’

I shrugged. ‘You forget all that unless you want to become a navigator.’

‘With an attitude like that you have an ambition to be a captain?’

‘I don’t,’ I said slowly, ‘have an ambition to be a captain.’

That gave her pause. But she said, ‘The bottom line is that if you fight a war with FTL starships, time slips are always possible, and you have to anticipate them … Think of it this way. There is no universal now. Say it’s midnight here. We’re a light-minute from the Base. So what time is it in your fleapit barracks on 529? What if you could focus a telescope on a clock on the ground?’

I thought about it. It would take a minute for an image of the clock on the Base to reach me at lightspeed. So that would show a minute before midnight … ‘OK, but if you adjust for the time lag needed for signals to travel at lightspeed, you can construct a standard now – can’t you?’

‘If everybody was stationary, maybe. But suppose this creaky old Spline was moving at half lightspeed. Even you must have heard of time dilation. Our clocks would be slowed as seen from the base, and theirs would be slowed as seen from here. Think it through further. There could be a whole flotilla of ships out here, moving at different velocities, their timescales all different. They could never agree.

‘You get the point? Globally speaking there is no past and future. There are only events – like points on a huge graph, with axes marked space and time. That’s the way to think of it. The events swim around, like fish; and the further away they are the more they swim, from your point of view. So there is no one event on the Base, or on Earth, or anywhere else which can be mapped uniquely to your now. In fact there is a whole range of such events at distant places, moving at different speeds.

‘Because of that looseness, histories are ambiguous. A single location on Earth itself has a definite history, of course, and so does the Base. But Earth is maybe ten thousand light years from here. It’s pointless to map dates of specific events on Earth against Base dates; they can vary across a span of millennia. You can even have a history on Earth that runs backwards as seen from a moving ship.

‘Now do you see how faster-than-light screws things up? Causality is controlled by the speed of light. As long as light has time to travel from one event to another they can’t get out of order, from wherever they are viewed, and causality is preserved. But in a ship moving faster than light, you can hop around the spacetime graph at will. I took a FTL jaunt to the Fog. When I was there, from my point of view the history of the Base here was ambiguous over a scale of decades … When I came home I simply hopped back to an event before my departure.’

I nodded. ‘But it was just an accident. Right? This doesn’t always happen.’

‘It depends on the geometry. Fleeing the Xeelee, we happened to be travelling at a large fraction of lightspeed towards the Base when we initiated the hyperdrive. So, yes, it was an accident. But you can make Tolman manoeuvres deliberately. And during every operation we always drop Tolman probes: records, log copies, heading for the past.’

I did a double-take. ‘You’re telling me it’s a deliberate tactic of this war to send information to the past?’

‘Of course. If such a possibility’s there you have to take the opportunity. What better intelligence can there be? The Navy has always cooperated with this fully. In war you seek every advantage.’

‘But don’t the Xeelee do the same?’

‘Sure. But the trick is to try to stop them. The intermingling of past and future depends on relative velocities. We try to choreograph engagements so that we, not they, get the benefit. And of course they reciprocate.’ Dakk grinned wolfishly. ‘It’s a contest in clairvoyance. But we punch our weight.’

I tried to focus on what was important. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Then give me a message from the future. Tell me how you crossed the chop line.’

She paced around the chamber, while the Spline’s weird hyperdrive muscles pulsed. ‘Before the fallback order came, we’d just taken a major hit. Do you know what that’s like? Your first reaction is sheer surprise that it has happened to you. Surprise, and disbelief, and resentment. And anger. The ship is alive; it’s part of your crew. And you live in it; it’s as if your home has been violated. So there was shock. But most of the crew went to defence posture and began to fulfil their duties, as per their training. There was no panic. Pandemonium, yes, but no panic.’

‘And in all this you decided to disobey the fallback order.’

She looked me in the eye. ‘I had to make an immediate decision. We had an opportunity; we were close enough to strike, I believed, and we were in a situation where my orders weren’t valid. So I believed. I decided to go ahead.

‘We went straight through the chop line and headed for the centre of the Xeelee concentration, bleeding from a dozen hits, starbreakers blazing. That’s how we fight the Xeelee, you see. They are smarter than us, and stronger. But we just come boiling out at them. They think we are vermin, so we fight like vermin.’

‘You launched the Sunrise.’

‘Hama was the pilot.’ My unborn, unconceived child. ‘He rode a monopole torpedo: the latest stuff. A Xeelee Sugar Lump is a fortress shaped like a cube, thousands of kilometres on a side, a world with edges and corners. We punched a hole in its wall like it was paper.

‘But we were taking a beating. Hit after hit.

‘We had to evacuate the outer decks. You should have seen the hull, human beings swarming like flies on a piece of garbage, scrambling this way and that, fleeing the detonations. They hung onto weapons mounts, stanchions, lifelines, anything. We fear the falling, you see. I think some of the crew feared that more than the Xeelee. The life pods got some of them. We lost hundreds … Her face worked, and she seemed to reach for happier memories. ‘You know why the name “Sunrise”? Because it’s a planet thing. The Xeelee are space dwellers. They don’t know day and night. Every dawn is ours, not theirs – one thing they can’t take away from us. Appropriate, don’t you think? And you should see what it’s like when a Sunrise pilot comes on board.’

‘Like Hama.’

‘As the yacht conies out of port, you get a flotilla riding along with it, civilian ships as well as Navy, just to see the pilot go. When the pilot comes aboard the whole crew lines the passageways, chanting his or her name.’ She smiled. ‘Your heart will burst when you see Hama.’

I struggled to focus. ‘So the pilots are idolised. We aren’t supposed to have heroes.’

‘Lethe, I never knew I was such a prig! Kid, there is more to war than doctrinal observance. Anyhow what are the Sunrise pilots but the highest exemplars of the ideals of the Expansion? A brief life burns brightly, remember – Druz said it himself – and a Sunrise pilot puts that into practice in the brightest, bravest way possible.’

‘And,’ I said carefully, ‘are you a hero to your crew?’

She scowled at me. Her face was a mask of lines, grooves carved by years into my own flesh. She had never looked less like me. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m too old, I should be ashamed even to be alive. Listen to me. Ten years after this meeting, you will take part in a battle around a neutron star called Kepler’s. Look it up. That’s why your crew will respect you, for what you will achieve that day – even though you won’t be lucky enough to die. And as for the chop line, I don’t have a single regret. We struck a blow, damn it. I’m talking about hope. That’s what those fucking Commissaries never understand. Hope, and the needs of the human heart. That’s what I was trying to deliver…’ Something seemed to go out of her. ‘But none of that matters now. I’ve come through another chop line, haven’t I? Through a chop line in time, into the past, where I face judgement.’

‘I’m not assigned to judge you.’

‘No. You do that for fun, don’t you?’

I didn’t know what to say. I felt pinned. I loved her, and I hated her, all at the same time. She must have felt the same way about me. But we knew we couldn’t get away from each other. Perhaps it is never possible for copies of the same person from two time slices ever to get along. After all it’s not something we’ve evolved for.

In silence we made our way back to Dakk’s wardroom. There, Tarco was waiting for us.

‘Buttface,’ he said formally.

‘Lard bucket,’ I replied.

On that ship from the future, in my own future wardroom, we stared at each other, each of us baffled, maybe frightened. We hadn’t been alone together, not once, since the news that we were to have a child together. And even now Captain Dakk was sitting there like the embodiment of destiny.

Under the Druz Doctrines, love isn’t forbidden. But it’s not the point. But then, I was learning, out here on the frontier, where people died far from home, things were a little more complex than my training and conditioning had indicated.

I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You sent for me. Your future, smarter, better-looking self.’

Captain Dakk said dryly, ‘Obviously you two have – issues – to discuss. But I’m afraid I can’t give you the time. Events are pressing.’

Tarco turned to face her. ‘Then let’s get on with it, sir. Why did you ask for me?’

Dakk said, ‘Navy intelligence have been analysing the records from the Torch. They have begun the process of contacting those who will serve on the ship – or their cadres, if they are infants or not yet born – to inform them of their future assignments. It’s the policy.’

Tarco looked apprehensive. ‘And that applies to me?’

Dakk didn’t answer directly. ‘There are protocols. When a ship returns from action, it’s customary for the captain or senior surviving officer to send letters of condolence to cadres who have lost loved ones, or visit them.’

Tarco nodded. ‘I once accompanied Captain Iana on a series of visits like that.’

I said carefully, ‘But in this case the action hasn’t happened yet. Those who will die haven’t yet been assigned to the ship. Some haven’t even been born.’

‘Yes,’ Dakk said gently. ‘But I have to write my letters even so.’

That was incomprehensible to me. ‘Why? Nobody’s dead yet.’

‘Because everybody wants to know, as much as we can tell them. Would it be better to lie to them, or keep secrets?’

‘How do they react?’

‘How do you think? Ensign Tarco, what happened when you did the rounds with Iana?’

Tarco shrugged. ‘Some took it as closure, I think. Some wept. Some were angry, even threw us out. Others denied it was real … They all wanted more information. How it happened, what it was for. Everyone seemed to have a need to be told that those who had died had given their lives for something worthwhile.’

Dakk nodded. ‘After a time hop you see all those reactions too. Some won’t open the messages. They put them in time capsules, as if putting history back in order. Others take a look, find other ways to cope with the news. We don’t tell people how to react. But we don’t keep anything from them; that’s the policy,’ She studied me. ‘This is a time-travellers’ war, ensign. A war like none we’ve fought before. We are stretching our procedures, even our humanity, to cope with the consequences. But you get used to it.’

Tarco said apprehensively, ‘Sir, please – what about me?’

Gravely, Dakk handed him a data desk.

‘Hey, buttface,’ he said, reading. ‘You make me your exec. How about that. Maybe it was a bad year in the draft.’

I didn’t feel like laughing. ‘Read it all.’

‘I know what it says.’ His broad face was relaxed.

‘You don’t make it home. That’s what it says, doesn’t it? You’re going to die out there, in the Fog.’

He actually smiled. ‘I’ve been anticipating this since the Torch came into port. Haven’t you?’

My mouth opened and closed, as if I was a swordtail fish in the belly of a Spline. ‘Call me unimaginative,’ I said. ‘How can you accept this assignment, knowing it’s going to kill you?’

He seemed puzzled. ‘What else would I do?’

‘Yes,’ the captain said. ‘It is your duty. Can’t you see how noble this is, Dakk? Isn’t it right that he should know – that he should live his life with full foreknowledge of the circumstances of his death, and do his duty even so, right up to the final foretold instant?’

Tarco grabbed my hand. ‘Hey. It’s years off. We’ll see our baby grow.’

I said dismally, ‘Some love story this is turning out to be.’

‘Yes.’

Commissary Varcin’s Virtual head coalesced in the air. Without preamble he said, ‘Change of plan. Ensign, it’s becoming clear that the evidence to hand will not be sufficient to establish the charges. Specifically it’s impossible to say whether Dakk’s actions hindered the overall war aims. To establish that we’ll have to go to the Libraries, at the Commission’s central headquarters.’

I did a double-take. ‘Sir, that’s on Earth.’

The disembodied head snapped, ‘I’m aware of that.’

I had no idea how bookworm Commissaries on Earth, ten thousand light years away, could possibly have evidence to bear on this front-line incident. But the Commissary explained, and I learned there was more to this messages-from-the-future industry than I had yet imagined. On Earth, the Commission for Historical Truth had been mapping the future. For fifteen thousand years.

I said, ‘Things weren’t weird enough already.’

My future self murmured, ‘You get used to it.’

Varcin’s expression softened a little. ‘Think of it as an opportunity. Every Expansion citizen should see the home world before she dies.’

‘Come with me,’ I said impulsively to Tarco. ‘Come with me to Earth.’

‘All right.’

Dakk put her hands on our shoulders. ‘Lethe, but this is a magnificent enterprise.’

I hated her; I loved her; I wanted her out of my life.

III

It was all very well for Varcin to order us to Earth. The Navy wasn’t about to release one of its own to the Commission for Historical Truth without a fight, and there was lengthy wrangling over the propriety and even the legality of transferring the court of inquiry to Earth. In the end a team of Navy lawyers was assigned to the case.

We were a strange crew, I guess: two star-crossed lovers, court members, Navy lawyers, serving officers, Commissaries and all. Not to mention another version of me. The atmosphere was tense all the way from Base 592.

But at journey’s end all our differences and politics and emotional tangles were put aside, as we crowded to the hull to sightsee our destination.

Earth!

At first it seemed nondescript: just another rocky ball circling an unspectacular star, in a corner of a fragmented spiral arm. But Snowflake surveillance stations orbited in great shells around the planet, all the way out as far as the planet’s single battered Moon, and schools of Spline gambolled hugely in the waves of a mighty ocean that covered half the planet’s surface. It was an eerie thought that down there somewhere in that sea was another Assimilator’s Torch, a junior version of the battered old ship we had seen come limping into port.

This little world had become the capital of the Third Expansion, an empire that stretched across all the stars I could see, and far beyond. And it was the true home of every human who would ever live. I was thrilled. As our flitter cut into the atmosphere and was wrapped in pink-white plasma, I felt Tarco’s hand slip into mine.

At least during the journey in we had had time to spend together. We had talked. We had even made love, in a perfunctory way.

But it hadn’t done us much good. Other people knew far too much about our future, and we didn’t seem to have any choice about it anyhow. There could be no finer intelligence than a knowledge of the future – an ability to see the outcome of a battle not yet waged, or map the turning points of a war not yet declared – and yet what use was that intelligence if the future was fixed, if we were all forced to live out pre-programmed lives? I felt like a rat going through a maze. What room was there for joy?

I hoped I was going to learn this wasn’t true in the Commission’s future libraries. Of course I wasn’t worrying about the war and the destiny of mankind. I just wanted to know if I really was doomed to become Captain Dakk, battered, bitter, arrogant, far from orthodox – or whether I was still free, free to be me.

The flitter swept over a continent. I glimpsed a crowded land, and many vast weapons emplacements, intended for the eventuality of a last-ditch defence of the home world. Then we began to descend towards a Conurbation. It was a broad, glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock, and linked by canals. But the scars of the Qax Occupation, fifteen thousand years old, were still visible. Much of the land glistened silver-grey where starbreaker beams and nano-replicators had once worked, turning plains and mountains into a featureless silicate dust.

The Commissary said, ‘This Conurbation itself was Qax-built. It is still known by its ancient Qax registration of 11729. It was more like a forced labour camp or breeding pen than a human city. It was here that Hama Druz himself developed the Doctrine that has shaped human destiny ever since. It is the headquarters of the Commission. A decision was made to leave the work of the Qax untouched. It shows what will become of us again, if we should falter or fail…’

And so on. His long face was solemn, his eyes gleaming with a righteous zeal. He was a little scary.

We were taken to a complex right at the heart of the old Conurbation. It was based on the crude Qax architecture, but internally the bubble dwellings had been knocked together and extended underground, making a vast complex whose boundaries I never glimpsed.

Varcin introduced it as the Library of Futures. Once the Libraries had been an independent agency, Varcin told us, but the Commission had taken them over three thousand years ago. Apparently there had been an epic war among the bureaucrats.

Tarco and I were each given our own quarters. My room seemed huge, itself extending over several levels, and very well equipped, with a galley and even a bar. I could tell from Captain Dakk’s expression exactly what she thought of this opulence and expense. That bar made a neat Poole’s Blood, though.

It was very strange to be in a place where a ‘day’ lasted a standard day, a ‘year’ a year. Across the Expansion the standards are set by Earth’s calendar – of course; what else would you use? A ‘day’ on Base 592, for instance, lasted over two hundred standard days, which was actually longer than its ‘year’, which was around half a standard. But on Earth, everything fit together.

On the second day, the court of inquiry was to resume. But Varcin said that he wanted to run through the Commission’s findings with us – me, Captain Dakk, Tarco – before it all unravelled in front of the court itself.

So, early on that crucial day, the three of us were summoned to a place Varcin called the Map Room.

It was like a vast hive, a place of alcoves and bays extending off a gigantic central atrium. On several levels, shaven-headed, long-robed figures walked earnestly, alone or in muttering groups, accompanied by gleaming clouds of Virtuals.

I think all three of us lowly Navy types, Tarco and I, even the older Dakk, felt scruffy and overwhelmed.

Varcin stood at the centre of the open atrium. In his element, he just smiled. And he waved his hand, a bit theatrically.

A series of Virtual dioramas swept over us like the pages of an immense book.

In those first few moments I saw huge fleets washing into battle, or limping home decimated; I saw worlds gleaming like jewels, beacons of human wealth and power – or left desolated and scarred, lifeless as Earth’s Moon. And, most wistful of all, there were voices. I heard roars of triumph, cries for help.

I knew what I was seeing. I was thrilled. These were the catalogued destinies of mankind.

Varcin said, ‘Half a million people work here. Much of the interpretation is automated – but nothing has yet replaced the human eye, human scrutiny, human judgement. You understand that the further away you are from a place, the more uncertainty there is over its timeline compared to yours. So we actually see furthest into the future concerning the most remote events…’

‘And you see war,’ said Tarco.

‘Oh, yes. As far downstream as we can see, whichever direction we choose to look, we see war.’

I picked up on that. Whichever direction … ‘Commissary, you don’t just map the future here, do you? I mean a single future.’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘I knew it,’ I said gleefully, and they all looked at me oddly. ‘You can change the future.’ And I wasn’t stuck with becoming Captain Dakk. ‘So if you see a battle will be lost, you can choose not to commit the fleet. You can save thousands of lives with a simple decision.’

‘Or you could see a Xeelee advance coming,’ Tarco said excitedly. ‘Like SS 433. So you got the ships in position – it was a perfect ambush.’

Dakk said, ‘Remember the Xeelee have exactly the same power.’

I hadn’t thought of that. ‘So if they had foreseen SS 433, they could have chosen not to send their ships there in the first place.’

‘Yes,’ Varcin said. ‘In fact if intelligence were perfect on both sides, there would never be any defeat, any victory. It is only because future intelligence is not perfect – the Xeelee didn’t foresee the ambush at SS 433 – that any advances are possible.’

Tarco said, ‘Sir, what happened the first time? What was the outcome of SS 433 before either side started to meddle with the future?’

‘Well, we don’t know, ensign. Perhaps there was no engagement at all, and one side or the other saw a strategic hole that could be filled. It isn’t very useful to think that way. You have to think of the future as a rough draft, that we – and the Xeelee – are continually reworking, shaping and polishing. It’s as if we are working out a story of the future we can both agree on.’

I was still trying to figure out the basics. ‘Sir, what about time paradoxes?’

Dakk growled, ‘Oh, Lethe, here we go. Somebody always has to ask about time paradoxes. And it has to be you, doesn’t it, ensign?’

I persisted. ‘I mean’ – I waved a hand at the dioramas – ‘suppose you pick up a beacon with data on a battle. But you decide to change the future; the battle never happens … What about the beacon? Does it pop out of existence? And now you have a record of a battle that will never happen. Where did the information come from?’

Tarco said eagerly, ‘Maybe parallel universes are created. In one the battle goes ahead, in the other it doesn’t. The beacon just leaks from one universe to another.’

Dakk looked bored.

Varcin was dismissive. ‘We don’t go in for metaphysics much around here. The cosmos, it turns out, has a certain common sense about these matters. If you cause a time paradox there is no magic. Just an anomalous piece of data that nobody created, a piece of technology with no origin. It’s troubling, perhaps, but only subtly, at least compared to the existence of parallel universes, or objects popping in and out of existence. What concerns us more, day to day, are the consequences of this knowledge.’

‘Consequences?’

‘For example, the leakage of information from future into past is having an effect on the evolution of human society. Innovations are transmitted backward. We are becoming – static. Rigid, over very long timescales. Of course that helps control the conduct of a war on such immense reaches of space and time. And regarding the war, many engagements are stalemated by foresight on both sides. It’s probable that we are actually extending the war.’

My blood was high. ‘We’re talking about a knowledge of the future. And all we’re doing with it is set up stalemate after stalemate?’

For sure Varcin didn’t welcome being questioned like that by an ignorant ensign. He snapped, ‘Look, nobody has run a war this way before. We’re making this up as we go along. But, believe me, we’re doing our best.

‘And remember this. Knowledge of the future does not change certain fundamentals about the war. The Xeelee are older than us. They are more powerful, more advanced in every which way we can measure. Logically, given their resources, they should defeat us, whatever we do. We cannot ensure victory by any action we make here, that much is clear. But we suspect that if we get it wrong we could make defeat certain.’ His face closed in. ‘If you work here you become – cautious. Conservative. The further downstream we look the more extensive our decisions’ consequences become. With a wave of a hand in this room I can banish trillions of souls to the oblivion of non-existence – or rather, of never-to-exist.’

‘So you don’t wave your hand,’ said Tarco pragmatically.

‘Quite. All we can hope for is to preserve at least the possibility of victory, in some of the futures. And we believe that if not for the Mapping, humanity would have lost this war by now.’

I wasn’t convinced. ‘You can change history. But you will still send Tarco out, knowing he will die. Why?’

Varcin’s face worked as he tried to control his irritation. ‘You must understand the decision-making process here. We are trying to win a war, not just a battle. We have to try to see beyond individual events to the chains of consequences that follow. That is why we will sometimes commit ships to a battle we know will be lost – why we will send warriors to certain deaths, knowing their deaths will not gain the slightest immediate advantage – why sometimes we will even allow a victory to turn to a defeat, if the long-term consequences of victory are too costly. And that is at the heart of the charges against you, Captain.’

Dakk snapped, ‘Get to the point, Commissary.’

Varcin gestured again.

Before the array of futures, a glimmering Virtual diagram appeared. It was a translucent sphere, with many layers, something like an onion. Its outer layers were green, shading to yellow further in, with a pinpoint star of intense white at the centre. Misty shapes swam through its interior. It cast a green glow on all our faces.

‘Pretty,’ I said.

‘It’s a monopole,’ said Dakk. ‘A schematic representation.’

‘The warhead of the Sunrise torpedo.’

‘Yes.’ Varcin walked into the diagram, and began pointing out features. ‘The whole structure is about the size of an atomic nucleus. There are W and Z bosons in this outer shell here. Further in there is a region in which the weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces are unified, but strong nuclear interactions are distinct. In this central region’ – he cupped the little star in his hand – ‘grand unification is achieved.’

I spoke up. ‘Sir, so how does this hurt the Xeelee?’

Dakk glared at me. ‘Ensign, the monopole is the basis of a weapon which shares the Xeelee’s own physical characteristics. You understand that the vacuum has a structure. That structure contains flaws. The Xeelee actually use two-dimensional flaws – sheets – to power their nightfighters. But in three-dimensional space you can also have one-dimensional flaws – strings – and zero-dimensional flaws.’

‘Monopoles,’ I guessed.

‘You got it.’

‘And since the Xeelee use spacetime defects to drive their ships—’

‘The best way to hit them is with another spacetime defect.’ Dakk rammed her fist into her hand. ‘And that’s how we punched a hole in that Sugar Lump.’

‘But at a terrible cost.’ Varcin made the monopole go away. Now we were shown a kind of tactical display. We saw a plan view of the Galaxy’s central regions – the compact swirl that was 3-Kilo, wrapped tightly around the Core. Prickles of blue light showed the position of human forward bases, like Base 592, surrounding the Xeelee concentration in the Core.

And we saw battles raging all around 3-Kilo, wave after wave of blue human lights pushing towards the core, but breaking against stolid red Xeelee defence perimeters.

‘This is the next phase of the war,’ Varcin said. ‘In most futures these assaults begin a century from now. We get through the Xeelee perimeters in the end, through to the Core – or rather, we can see many futures in which that outcome is still possible. But the cost in most scenarios is enormous.’

Dakk said, ‘All because of my one damn torpedo.’

‘Because of the intelligence you will give away, yes. You made one of the first uses of the monopole weapon. So after your engagement the Xeelee knew we had it. The fallback order you disregarded was based on a decision at higher levels not to deploy the monopole weapon at the Fog engagement, to reserve it for later. By proceeding through the chop line you undermined the decision of your superiors.’

‘I couldn’t have known that such a decision had been made.’

‘We argue that, reasonably, you should have been able to judge that. Your error will cause great suffering, unnecessary death. The Tolman data proves it. Your judgement was wrong.’

So there it was. The Galaxy diagram collapsed into pixels. Tarco stiffened beside me, and Dakk fell silent.

Varcin said to me, ‘Ensign, I know this is hard for you. But perhaps you can see now why you were appointed prosecutor advocate.’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘And will you endorse my recommendations?’

I thought it through. What would I do in the heat of battle, in Dakk’s position? Why, just the same – and that was what must be stopped, to avert this huge future disaster. Of course I would endorse the Commission’s conclusion. What else could I do? It was my duty.

We still had to go through the formalities of the court of inquiry, and no doubt the court martial to follow. But the verdicts seemed inevitable.

You’d think I was beyond surprise by now, but what came next took me aback.

Varcin stood between us, my present and future selves. ‘We will be pressing for heavy sanctions.’

‘I’m sure Captain Dakk will accept whatever—’

‘There will be sanctions against you too, ensign. Sorry.’

I would not be busted out of the Navy, I learned. But a Letter of Reprimand would go into my file, which would ensure that I would never rise to the rank of captain – in fact, I would likely not be given postings in space at all.

It was a lot to absorb, all at once. But even as Varcin outlined it, I started to see the logic. To change the future you can only act in the present. There was nothing to be done about Dakk’s personal history; she would carry around what she had done for the rest of her life, a heavy burden. But, for the sake of the course of the war, my life would be trashed, so that I could never become her, and never do what she had done.

Not only that, any application I made to have a child with Tarco would not be granted after all. Hama would never be born. The Commissaries wanted to make doubly sure nobody ever climbed on board that Sunrise torpedo.

I looked at Tarco. His face was blank. We had never had a relationship, not really – never actually had that child – and yet it was all being taken away from us, becoming no more real than one of Varcin’s catalogued futures.

‘Some love story,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Shame, buttface.’

‘Yes.’ I think we both knew right there that we would drift apart. We’d probably never even talk about it properly.

Tarco turned to Varcin. ‘Sir, I have to ask—’

‘Nothing significant changes for you, ensign,’ said Varcin softly. ‘You still rise to exec on the Torch – you will be a capable officer—’

‘I still don’t come home from the Fog.’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, sir.’ He actually sounded relieved. I don’t know if I admired that or not.

Dakk looked straight ahead. ‘Sir. Don’t do this. Don’t erase the glory.’

‘I have no choice.’

Dakk’s mouth worked. Then she spoke shrilly. ‘You fucking Commissaries sit in your gilded nests. Handing out destinies like petty gods. Do you ever even doubt what you are doing?’

‘All the time, Captain,’ Varcin said sadly. He put a hand on Dakk’s shoulder. ‘We will take care of you. You aren’t alone. We have many other relics of lost futures. Some of them are from much further downstream than you. Many have stories which are – interesting.’

‘But,’ said Dakk stiffly, ‘my career is finished.’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

There was a heartbeat of tension. Then something seemed to go out of Dakk. ‘Well, I guess I crashed through another chop line. My whole life is never going to happen. And I don’t even have the comfort of popping out of existence.’

I faced Dakk. ‘Why did you do it?’

Her smile was twisted. ‘Why would you do it? Because it was worth it, ensign. Because we struck at the Xeelee. Because Hama – our son – gave his life in the best possible way.’

At last I thought I understood her.

We were, after all, the same person. As I had grown up it had been drummed into me that there was no honour in growing old – and something in Dakk, even now, despite all she had gone through, still felt the same way. After surviving her earlier engagements she was not content to be a living hero. On some deep level she was ashamed to be alive. So she had let Hama, our lost child, live out her own dream – a dream of certain youthful death. Even though in the process she violated orders. Even though it damaged humanity’s cause. And now she envied Hama his moment of glorious youthful suicide, even though it was an incident lost in a vanished future.

I think Dakk wanted to say more, but I turned away. I was aware I was out of my depth; counselling your elder self over the erasure of her whole career, not to mention her child, isn’t exactly a situation you come across every day.

Anyhow I was feeling elated. Despite disgrace for a crime I’d never committed, despite my own screwed-up career, despite the loss of a baby I would never know, despite the wrecking of any relationship I might have had with Tarco, I was relieved. Frankly, I was glad I wouldn’t turn into the beat-up egomaniac I saw before me. And I would never have to live through this scene again, standing on the other side of the room, looking back at my own face.

Is that cruel? I couldn’t help it. I was free.

Tarco had a question to ask. ‘Sir – do we win?’

Varcin kept his face expressionless. He clapped his hands, and the images over our heads changed.

It was as if the scale expanded.

I saw fleets with ships more numerous than the stars. I saw planets burn, stars flare and die. I saw the Galaxy reduced to a wraith of crimson stars that guttered like dying candles. I saw people – but people like none I’d ever heard of: people living on lonely outposts suspended in empty intergalactic spaces, people swimming through the interior of stars, people trapped in abstract environments I couldn’t even recognise. I saw shining people who flew through space, naked as gods.

And I saw people dying, in great waves, unnumbered hordes of them.

Varcin said, ‘We think there is a major crux in the next few millennia. A vital engagement at the centre of the Galaxy. Many of the history sheaves seem to converge at that point. Beyond that everything is uncertain. The farther downstream, the more misty are the visions, the more strange the protagonists, even the humans … There are paths to a glorious future, an awesome future of mankind victorious. And there are paths that lead to defeat – even extinction, all human possibilities extinguished. Your question isn’t a simple one, ensign.’

Dakk, Tarco and I shared glances. Our intertwined destinies were complex. But I bet the three of us had only one thought in our minds at that moment: that we were glad we were mere Navy tars, that we did not have to deal with this.

That was almost the end of it. The formal court was due to convene; the meeting was over.

But there was still something that troubled me. ‘Commissary?’

‘Yes, ensign?’

‘Do we have free will?’

Captain Dakk grimaced. ‘Oh, no, ensign. Not us. We have duty.’

We walked out of the Map Room, where unrealised futures flickered like moth wings.

As the two sides worked over their successive drafts of history, as timescales stretched to fit the vast spatial arena of a Galactic war, the Coalition laboured to keep mankind united. It succeeded, to an astonishing degree.

But there was always plenty of room, plenty of time, for things to drift.

One such dark corner was an Observation Post, flung far out of the Galaxy itself.

AD 23,479

I

When Luca arrived in the Library conference room, the meeting between Commissary Dolo and Captain Teel was already underway. They sat in hard-backed armchairs, talking quietly, while trays of drinks hovered at their elbows.

Over their heads Virtual dioramas swept by like dreams, translucent, transient. These were the possible destinies of mankind, assembled from the debris of interstellar war by toiling bureaucrats here in Earth’s Library of Futures, and displayed for the amusement of the Library’s guests. But neither Dolo nor Teel were paying any attention to the spectacle.

Luca waited by the door. He was neither patient nor impatient. He was just a Novice, at twenty years old barely halfway through his formal novitiate into the Commission, and Novices expected to wait.

But he knew who this Captain Teel was. An officer in the Green Navy, she had come from her posting on the Front – the informal name for the great ring of human fortification that surrounded the Core of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee lurked, mankind’s implacable foe. The Navy and the Commission for Historical Truth were also, of course, ancient and unrelenting enemies. There was no way Teel, therefore, would adopt the ascetic dress code of the Commission, even here in its headquarters. But her uniform was a subdued charcoal grey shot through with green flashes, and her hair, if not shaved, was cut short; this fighting officer had shown respect, then, for the hive of bureaucrats she had come to visit.

At last Dolo noticed Luca.

Luca said, ‘You sent for me, Commissary.’

Captain Teel turned her head towards him. She looked tired, but Luca saw how the complex, shifting light of multiple futures softened her expression.

Dolo was watching Luca, the corner of his mouth pulled slightly, as if by a private joke. Dolo had no eyebrows, and his skull was shaved, as was Luca’s. ‘Yes, Novice, I called you. I think I’m going to need an assistant on this project, and Lethe knows you need some field experience.’

‘A project, Commissary?’

‘Sit down, shut up, listen and learn.’ Dolo waved a hand, and a third chair drifted in from a corner of the room.

Luca sat, and absently followed their continuing talk.

From scuttlebutt in the dormitories he already had an idea why Captain Teel had been called here to Earth. In a unit of troopers at some desolate corner of the Front, there had been an outbreak of anti-Doctrinal thinking which, it sounded to Luca’s ill-informed ears, might even be religious in character. If so, of course, it was perilous to the greater efficiency of the Third Expansion. An important issue, then. But not very interesting.

Surreptitiously, as they talked, he studied Teel.

He supposed he had expected some battle-scarred veteran of raids on Xeelee emplacements. But this Navy officer was young, surely about the same age as he was himself, at twenty years. Her face was long, the nose narrow and well-carved, her nostrils flaring slightly; her mouth was relaxed but full. Her skin was unblemished – though it was pale, almost bloodless; he reminded himself that of all the countless worlds now inhabited by mankind, on only a handful could a human walk in the open air without a skinsuit. But that paleness gave her skin a translucent quality. But it was not Teel’s features that drew him – she was scarcely conventionally beautiful – but something more subtle, a quality of stillness about her that seemed to pull him towards her like a gravitational field. She was solid, he thought, as if she was the only real person in this place of buzzing bureaucrats. Even before she spoke to him, he knew that Teel was like no one he had ever met before.

‘Novice.’ The Commissary’s gaze neatly skewered Luca.

To his mortification, Luca felt his face flush like a child’s in a new cadre. Captain Teel was looking a little past him, expressionless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Dolo brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’

Luca looked at Teel. ‘That, with respect, the Captain is young.’

Dolo nodded, his voice forensic. ‘How could one so young – actually younger than you, Novice – have achieved so much?’

Luca said, ‘“A brief life burns brightly.”’

Teel’s lips parted, and Luca thought she sighed. The ancient slogan hung in the air, trite and embarrassing.

Dolo’s smile was cruel. ‘I have come to a decision. I will visit the site of this Doctrinal infringement. And you, Novice, will come with me.’

‘Commissary – you want me to go to the Core?’ It was all but unheard of for a novice to travel so far.

‘I have no doubt it will help you fulfil your fitful promise, Luca. Make the arrangements.’

Suddenly he was dismissed. Luca stood, bowed to the Commissary and Captain, and turned to leave.

Emotions swirled in Luca: embarrassment, surprise, fear – and a strange, unexpected grain of hope. Of course this was all just some game to the Commissary; Dolo had spotted Luca’s reaction to Teel and had impulsively decided to toy with him. Dolo was hugely arrogant. You could hardly expect to become one of the most powerful members of a bureaucracy that ruled the disc of a Galaxy without learning a little arrogance along the way. But for Luca it was a good opportunity, perhaps an invaluable building block for his future career.

And none of that mattered, he knew in his heart, for whatever the wider context Luca was now going to be in the company of this intriguing young Navy officer for weeks, even months to come, and who could say where that would lead?

At the door he glanced back. Teel and Dolo continued to talk of this uninteresting Doctrinal problem at the Galaxy’s Core; still she didn’t look at him.

They were to climb to orbit in a small flitter, and there join the Navy yacht that had brought Teel to Earth.

Luca had only been off Earth a couple of times during his general education, and then on mere hops out of the atmosphere. As the flitter lifted off the ground its hull was made transparent, so that it was as if the three of them were rising inside a drifting bubble. As the land fell away Luca tried to ignore the hot blood that prickled at his neck, and the deeply embarrassingly primeval clenching of his sphincter.

He tried to draw strength from Teel’s stillness. Her eyes were blue, Luca noticed now. He hadn’t been able to make that out before, in the shifting light of the Library.

As they rose the Conurbation was revealed. It was a glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock. The landscape beyond was flat, a plain of glistening silver-grey devoid of hills, and there were no rivers, only the rectilinear gashes of canals. The only living things to be seen, aside from humans, were birds. It was like this over much of the planet. The alien Qax had begun the transformation of the land during their Occupation of Earth, their starbreaker beams and nanoreplicators turning the ground into a featureless silicate dust.

They spoke of this. Teel murmured, ‘But the Qax were here only a few centuries.’

Dolo nodded. The silvery light reflected from the planes of his face; he was about fifty years old. ‘Much of this is human work, Coalition work. The Qax tried to destroy our past, to cut us adrift from history. Their motivation was wrong – but their methods were valid. Remember, we have been in direct conflict with the Xeelee for eleven thousand years. We have done well. We have swept them out of the plane of the Galactic disc. But they remain huddled in their fortress in the Core, and beyond our little island of stars they swarm in uncounted numbers. We must put the past aside, for it is a distraction. If the Xeelee defeat us, we will have no future – and in that case, what will the past matter?’

‘Your ideology is powerful.’

Dolo nodded. ‘A single idea powerful enough to keep mankind united across a hundred thousand light years, and through tens of millennia.’

Teel said, ‘But the mountains and rivers of Earth were far older than mankind. How strange that we have outlived them.’

Luca was startled by this anti-Doctrinal sentiment. Dolo merely looked interested, and said nothing.

The yacht soared upwards, out through the great ranks of Snowflake surveillance stations that stretched as far as Earth’s Moon, and the planet itself turned into a glistening pebble that fell away into the dark.

It would take them a day to reach Saturn. Luca, on this first trip out of Earth’s gravitational well, had expected to glimpse Earth’s sister worlds – perhaps even mighty Jupiter itself, transformed millennia ago into a gleaming black hole in a futile gesture of rebellion. But he saw nothing but darkness beyond the hull, not so much as a grain of dust, and even as they plunged through the outer system the stars did not shift across the sky, dwarfing the journey he was making.

Saturn itself was a bloated ball of yellow-brown that came swimming out of the dark. It was visibly flattened at the poles, and rendered misty in the diminished light of the already remote sun. Rings like ceramic sheets surrounded it, gaudy. The world itself was an exotic place, for, it was said, mighty machines of war had been suspended in its clouds, there to defend Sol system should the unthinkable happen and the alien foe strike at the home of mankind. But if the machines existed there was no sign of them, and Luca was disappointed when the yacht stopped its approach when the planet was still no larger than he could cover with his hand.

But Saturn wasn’t their destination.

Dolo murmured, ‘Look.’

Luca saw an artefact – a tetrahedron, glowing sky-blue – sailing past the planet’s limb. Kilometres across, it was a framework of glowing rods, and brown-gold membranes of light stretched across the open faces. Those membranes held tantalising images of star fields, of suns that had never shone over Saturn, or Earth.

‘A wormhole Interface,’ Luca breathed. It was like a dream of a forbidden past.

Wormholes were flaws in space and time which connected points separated by light years – or by centuries – with passages of curved space. On the scale of the invisibly small, where the mysterious effects of quantum gravity operated, spacetime was foam-like, riddled with tiny wormholes. It had taken the genius of the legendary engineer Michael Poole, more than twenty thousand years ago, to pull such a wormhole out of the foam and manipulate it to the size and shape he wanted: that is, big enough to take a spacecraft.

‘Once it must have been magnificent,’ Teel said now. ‘Poole and his followers built a wormhole network that spanned Sol system, from Earth to the outermost ice moon. At Earth itself wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the planet like sculptures.’ This evocation was surprisingly poetic. But then Teel had been brought up within the Core itself – you couldn’t get much further from Earth than that – and Luca wondered how much this trip to the home system meant to her.

But Dolo said sternly, ‘That was before the Occupation, of course. The Qax broke it all up, destroyed the Poole wormholes. But now we are building a mighty new network, a great system of arteries that runs, not just across Sol system, but all the way to the Core of the Galaxy itself. There are a thousand wormhole termini orbiting in these rings. And if we have that in the present, we don’t need dreams of the past, do we?’

Teel did not respond.

The yacht swept on, tracking the great ring system into the shadow of the planet.

Ships swarmed everywhere, pinpricks in the dark. Saturn, largest planet in the system now that Jupiter had been imploded, was used merely as a convenient gravitational mooring point for the mouths of the wormholes, tunnels through space and time. And its rings were being mined, ice and rock fragments hurled into the wormhole mouth to feed humans at remote destinations. Luca had heard mutterings in the seminaries at the steady destruction of this unique glory. In another couple of centuries, it was predicted, the ravenous wormholes would have gobbled up so much the rings would be barely visible, mere wraiths of their former selves. But, as Dolo would have remarked had Luca raised the point, if the victorious Xeelee caused the extinction of mankind, all the beauty in the universe would have no point, for there would be no human eyes to see it.

Now they were approaching a wormhole Interface. One great triangular face opened before Luca, wider and wider, until it was like a mouth that would swallow the yacht. A spark of light slid over the grey-gold translucent sheet that spanned the face, the reflected light of the yacht’s own drive.

Suddenly Luca realised that he was only moments from being plunged into a wormhole mouth himself, and his heart hammered.

Blue-violet fire flared, and the yacht shuddered. Fragments of the Interface’s exotic matter framework were already hitting the yacht’s hull. That grey-gold sheet dissolved into fragments of light that fled from a vanishing point directly before him. This was radiation generated by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, deep in the throat of the flaw. For the first time since they had left Earth there was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity, and the yacht seemed a fragile, vulnerable thing around him, a flower petal in a thunderstorm.

Luca gripped a rail. Aware of Teel at his side he tried not to cower, to hide his head from the stretched sky which poured down over him.

After a few days of hyperdrive hops and falls through branching wormholes, they reached the Orion Line. This was the innermost section of the Galactic spiral arm which contained Earth’s sun. They emerged at a new clustering of wormhole Interfaces, a huge interchange that dwarfed the port at Saturn, carrying the commerce of mankind across thousands of light years.

Here they transferred to a Spline, a living thing transformed into a Navy warship. In the increasingly dangerous regions into which they would now venture, such protection was necessary.

Before they resumed their journey to the centre they took dinner, just the three of them, in a transparent blister set on the Spline’s outer hull. At their small table they were served, not by automata but by humans, Navy ratings who hovered with cutlery, plates, dishes, even a kind of wine. It was a surreal experience for Luca, for all around the table, outside the blister’s glimmering walls, the Spline’s epidermis stretched away like the surface of a fleshy moon, and beyond its close horizon wormhole mouths glimmered like raindrops.

Commissary Dolo seemed slightly drunk. He was holding forth about the history of the Orion Line. ‘Do you know the geography of the Galaxy, Novice? Look over there.’ He pointed with his fork. ‘That’s the Sagittarius Arm, the next spiral arm in from ours. The Silver Ghosts strove for centuries to keep us out of those lanes of stars.’ He talked on about the epochal defeat of the Ghosts and the thunderous Expansion since, and how the great agencies of the Coalition, the Navy, the Commission, the Guards, the Academies and the rest, had worked together to achieve those victories – and how officials like the Surveyor of Revenues and the Auditor-General laboured to maintain the mighty economic machine that fuelled the endless war – and, of course, how his own department within the Commission, the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, oversaw the rest. He made it sound as if the conquest of the Galaxy was an exercise in paperwork.

As the Commissary talked, when he thought Dolo wasn’t watching him, Luca studied Teel.

There was something animal in her deft actions with her cutlery, the powerful muscles that worked in her cheeks. It was as if she could not be sure when her next meal would come. Everything she did was so much more solid and vivid than anything else in his life – and far more fascinating than the great star clouds that illuminated the human empire. He was thrilled that they shared this transient bubble of isolation.

When Dolo fell silent, Luca took his chance. He leaned subtly closer to Teel. ‘I suppose the food we eat is the same from one end of the Galaxy to the other.’

She didn’t look directly at him, but she turned her head. ‘Since this food comes from the belly of this Spline ship, and since the Spline are used all over the Galaxy – yes, I imagine you are right, Novice.’

‘But not everything is the same,’ he found himself babbling. ‘We are about the same age, but our two lives could hardly have been more different. There is much about you that I envy.’

‘You know very little about my life.’

‘Yes, but even so—’

‘What do you envy most?’

‘Comradeship. I was born in a birthing centre and placed in a cadre. That’s how it was for everybody. The cadres are broken up in cycles; you aren’t allowed to get too close to your cadre siblings. Even at the seminaries I am in competition with the other novices. Intimacy is seen as inevitable, but is regarded as a weakness.’

‘Intimacy?’

‘I have had lovers,’ he said, ‘but I have no comrades.’ He regretted the foolish words as soon as they were uttered. ‘At the Front, everybody knows—’

‘What everybody knows is always to be questioned, Novice,’ said Dolo. Suddenly he no longer seemed drunk, and Luca wondered if he had fallen into some subtle trap. Dolo turned in his chair, waving his empty glass at the attendant ratings.

When Luca looked back, Teel had turned away. She was peering at the Sagittarius Arm’s wash of light, as if with her deep eyes she could see it more clearly.

The Galaxy was a hundred thousand light years across, and over most of its span the stars were scattered more sparsely than grains of sand spread kilometres apart. On such a scale even the greatest human enterprise was dwarfed. And yet, as they neared the centre, the sense of activity, of industry, accelerated.

They moved within the 3-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost of the spiral arms proper, wrapped tightly around the Core region. Here, no more than a few thousand light years from the Core itself, the Spline was replenished in orbit around a world that glistened, entirely covered in metal. This was a factory world, devoted to the production of armaments. Great clusters of wormhole mouths hovered over its gleaming surface, amid a cloud of Snowflake surveillance posts.

On a data desk, Dolo sketched concentric circles. ‘The Core itself is surrounded by our fortresses, our warrior worlds and cities. As you’ll see, Novice. Behind that, out here we are in the hinterland. Around a belt hundreds of light years thick, factory worlds churn out the material needed to wage the war. And behind that there is an immense and unending inward resource flow from across the Galaxy’s disc, a flow through wormhole links and freighters of raw materials for the weapons factories, the lifeblood of a Galaxy all pouring into the centre to fuel the war.’

‘It is magnificent,’ Luca breathed. ‘An organisation Galaxy-wide, built and directed by humans.’

‘But,’ Teel said dryly, ‘do you think the Galaxy even notices we are here?’

Again Luca was disturbed by her flirting with non-Doctrine.

Dolo laughed softly. He said to Luca, ‘Tell me what you have learned about our mission. Why are we here? Why was Captain Teel required to travel all the way out to Earth? What is there in this outbreak of faith so far from Earth that concerns us?’

What concerns me, Luca thought, is my relationship with Teel. But beyond that was his duty, of course; he aspired to become a Commissary, for the Commission for Historical Truth was the mind and conscience of the Third Expansion, and he did take his mission very seriously. ‘It is only the Druz Doctrines that unite us, that enable the efficient working of the Expansion. If even our front-line troops are allowed to waste energy on foolish non-Doctrinal maundering—’

‘Captain? What do you think?’

Teel pulled her lip, and Luca saw tiny hairs there, shining in the starlight. ‘I think there is more at stake here than mere efficiency.’

‘Of course there is. Perhaps I am training the wrong novice,’ Dolo said ruefully. ‘Luca, human history is not a simple narrative, a story told to children. It is more like a pile of sand.’

‘Sand?’

‘Heaped up,’ Dolo said, miming just that. ‘And as you add more grains – one at a time, random events added to the story – the heap organises itself. But the heap, the angle of the slope, is always at a state at which it is liable to collapse with the addition of just one more grain – but you can never know which grain. This is called “self-organised criticality”. And so it is with history.’

Luca frowned. ‘But the Coalition controls history.’

Dolo laughed. ‘None of us is arrogant enough to believe that we control anything – and certainly not the historical arc of a society spanning a Galaxy, even one as unified as ours. Even the foreknowledge of the future compiled by the Libraries is of no help. All we can do is watch the grains of sand as they fall.’

Luca found this terrifying, the notion that the great structure of the Expansion was so fragile. Equally terrifying was the realisation of how much knowledge he still had to acquire. ‘And you think the religious outbreak at the Core is one such destabilising grain?’

‘I’m hoping it won’t be,’ Dolo said. ‘But the only way to know is to go there and see.’

‘And stop the grain falling.’

‘And make the right decision,’ Dolo murmured, correcting him.

They left the factory world and passed ever inwards towards the Core, through more veils of stars.

At last they faced a vast wall of light. These were star-birthing clouds. Against the complex, turbulent background Luca could pick out globular clusters, tight knots of stars. Ships sailed silently everywhere, as deep as the eye could see. But from behind the curtain of stars and ships a cherry-red light burned, as if the centre of the Galaxy itself was ablaze.

Teel said, ‘We are already within the Core itself, strictly speaking. Surrounding the Galaxy’s centre is a great reservoir of gas some fifteen hundred light years across – enough to bake a hundred billion stars, crammed into a region smaller than that spanned by the few thousand stars visible to human eyes from Earth. That wall you see is part of the Molecular Ring, a huge belt of gas and dust clouds and star-forming regions and small clusters. The Ring surrounds the centre itself, and the Xeelee concentrations there.’

Dolo said evenly, ‘The Ring is expanding. It is thought that it was thrown off by an explosion in the Core a million years ago. We have no idea what caused it.’

‘How remarkable,’ Luca said. ‘In this dense place, this is the debris of an explosion: a great rolling wave of star birth. And what is that pink light that glows through the clouds?’

For the first time in the days since he had met her Teel looked directly at him. Her blue eyes seemed as wide as Earth’s oceans, and he felt his breath catch. ‘That,’ she said simply, ‘is the Front. By that light people are dying.’

Luca felt a complex frisson of fear and anticipation. All his life he had lived in a human space thousands of light years deep. He could look up into the sky and pick out any star he chose, and know that either humans were there, or they had been there and moved on, leaving the system lifeless and mined out. But now it was different. This slab of sky with its teeming clouds and young stars was not human. Up to now, he had been too concerned with his relationships with Teel and Dolo, and beyond that his duty, to have thought ahead. He realised he had no idea what he might find here at the Core, none at all.

He said reflexively, ‘“A brief life burns brightly.”’

‘Here we have a different slogan,’ murmured Teel. ‘“Death is life.”’

The Spline ship moved on, cautiously approaching the vast clouds of light.

II

The asteroid had an official number, even an uplifting name, provided by a Commissary on distant Earth. But the troopers who rode it just called it the Rock.

‘But then,’ Teel quietly told Luca, ‘they call every asteroid the Rock.’

And from this Rock’s surface, everything was dwarfed by the magnificent sky. They were very close to the Galaxy’s heart now, and the heavens were littered with bright hot beacons which, further out, merged into the clouds of light where they had been born. Beyond that was the curtain of shining molecular clouds that walled off the Galaxy’s true centre – a curtain through which cherry-red light poured unceasingly, a battle glow that had already persisted for centuries.

The three of them, with a Navy guard, were walking on the Rock’s surface in lightweight skinsuits. The asteroid was just a ball of stone some fifty kilometres across, one of a swarm that surrounded a hot blue-white star. The young sun’s low light cast stark shadows from every crater, of which there were many, and from every dimple and dust grain at Luca’s feet. He found himself fascinated by small details – the way the dust you kicked up rose and fell through neat parabolas, and clung to your legs so that it looked as if you had been dipped in black paint, and how some craters were flooded with a much finer blue-white powder that, somehow bound electrostatically, would flow almost like water around your glove.

But it was a difficult environment. His inertial-control boots glued his feet to the dusty rock, but in the asteroid’s microgravity his body had no perceptible weight, and he felt as if he was floating in some invisible fluid, stuck by his feet to this rocky floor – or, if he wasn’t careful about his sense of perspective, he might feel he was walking up a wall, or even hanging from a ceiling. He knew the others, especially Teel, had noticed his lack of orientation, and he was mortified with every clumsy glue-sticky step he took.

Meanwhile, all across the surface of this Rock, by the light of the endless war, soldiers toiled.

The troopers wore military-issue skinsuits, complex outfits replete with nipples and sockets and grimy with rubbed-in asteroid dirt. Some of the suits had been repaired; they had discoloured patches and crude seams welded into their surfaces. These patched-up figures moved through great kicked-up clouds of black dust, while machines clanked and hovered and crawled around them.

Most of the troopers’ heads were crudely shaved, a practicality if you were doomed to wear your skinsuit without a break for days at a time. With grime etched deep into their pores it was impossible to tell how old they were. They looked tired, and yet kept on with their work even so, long past the normal limits of humanity. They were nothing like the steel-eyed warriors Luca had imagined. They looked like experts in nothing but endurance.

It seemed to Luca that what they were basically doing was digging. Many of them used simple shovels, or even their bare hands. They dug trenches and pits and holes, and excavated underground chambers, each trooper, empowered by microgravity, hauling out huge masses of crumpled rock. Luca imagined this scene repeated on a tremendous swarm of these drifting rocky worldlets, soldiers digging endlessly into the dirt, as if they were constructing a single vast trench that enclosed the Galaxy Core itself.

Dolo made a remark about the patched-up suits.

Teel shrugged. ‘Suits are expensive here. Troopers themselves are cheaper.’

Luca said, ‘I don’t understand why they are digging holes in the ground.’

‘To save their lives,’ Teel said.

‘It’s called “riding the Rock”, Novice,’ Dolo said.

When it was prepared, Luca learned, this asteroid would be thrown out of its parent system, and in through the Molecular Ring towards the Xeelee concentrations. The first phase of the journey would be powered, but after that the Rock would fall freely. The troopers, cowering in their holes in the ground, would ‘run silent’, as they called it, operating only the feeblest power sources, making as little noise and vibration as possible. The point was to fool the Xeelee into thinking that this was a harmless piece of debris, and for cover many unoccupied rocks would be hurled in along similar trajectories. At closest approach to a Xeelee emplacement – a ‘Sugar Lump’ – the troopers would burst out of their hides and begin their assault.

‘It sounds a crude tactic, but it works,’ said Dolo.

‘But the Xeelee hit back,’ said Luca.

‘Oh, yes,’ Teel said, ‘the Xeelee hit back. The rocks themselves generally survive. Each time a rock returns we have to dig out the rubble, and build the trenches and shelters again. And bury the dead.’

Luca frowned. ‘But why dig by hand? Surely it would be much more efficient to leave it to the machines.’

Dolo said carefully, ‘The soldiers seem to believe that a shelter constructed by a machine will never be as safe as one you have dug out yourself.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Luca said. ‘All that matters is a shelter’s depth, its structural qualities—’

‘We aren’t talking about sense,’ Dolo said. ‘We are touching here on the problem we have come to study. Come, Novice; recall your studies on compensatory belief systems.’

Luca had to dredge up the word from memory. ‘Oh. Superstition. The troopers are superstitious.’

Dolo said, ‘It’s a common enough reaction. The troopers have little control of their lives, even of their deaths. So they seek to control what they can – like the ground they dig, the walls that shelter them – and they come to believe that such actions in turn might placate greater forces. All utterly non-Doctrinal, of course.’

Luca snorted. ‘It is a sign of weakness.’

Teel said without emotion, ‘Imagine this Rock cracking like an egg. Sometimes that happens, in combat. Imagine humans expelled, sent wriggling defenceless into space. Imagine huddling in the dark, waiting for that to happen at any moment. Now tell me how weak we are.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Luca said, flustered.

Dolo was irritated. ‘You’re sorry, you’re sorry. Child, open your eyes and close your mouth. That way we’ll all get along a lot better.’

They walked on.

The horizon was close and new land ahead hove constantly into view, revealing more pits, more toiling soldiers. Luca had the disconcerting sensation that he was indeed walking around the equator of a giant hall of rock, and his vertigo threatened to return.

It was because he was so busy trying to master his queasiness that he didn’t notice the arch until they had almost walked under it. It was a neat parabola, perhaps twenty metres tall. A single trooper was standing beneath it, hands behind her back, stiffening to attention as Teel approached.

‘Ah,’ said Dolo, breathing a little heavily with the exertion of the suited walk. ‘So this is what we have come so far to see.’

Luca stood under the arch. Its fine span narrowed above him, making a black stripe across the complex sky. The arch was so smoothly executed that he thought at first it must have been erected by machine, perhaps from blown rock. But when he bent closer he saw that the arch was constructed from small blocks, each no larger than his fist, stone that had been cut and polished. On each block writing was etched: names, he saw, two or three on each stone.

Teel stood at one side of the arch, picked up a pebble of conglomerate, and with care lobbed it upwards. It followed a smooth airless arc that almost matched the arch’s span. ‘Geometrically the arch is almost perfect,’ she said.

Dolo bent to inspect the masonry. ‘Remarkable,’ he murmured. ‘There is no mortar here, no pinning.’

‘It was built by hand,’ Teel said. ‘The troopers started with the keystone and built it up side by side, lifting what was already completed over the new sections. Easy in microgravity.’

‘And the stone?’

‘Taken from deep within the asteroid – kilometres deep. The material further up has been gardened by impacts, shattered and conglomerated. They had to dig special mines to get to it.’

‘And all done covertly, all kept from the eyes of their commanders.’

‘Yes.’

Dolo turned to Luca. ‘What do you make of it, boy?’

Luca would have had to dredge for the word if he hadn’t been studying this specific area of deviancy. ‘It is a chapel,’ he said. A chapel of the dead, he thought, whose names are inscribed here. He glanced up at the arch’s span. There was writing up to the limits of his vision. Hundreds of names, then.

‘Yes, a chapel.’ Dolo walked up to the single trooper standing under the arch. She held her place, but returned the Commissary’s scrutiny apprehensively.

Teel said, ‘This is Bayla.’

‘The one on the charge.’

‘She faces a specimen charge of anti-Doctrinal behaviour. Similar charges will be applied to others of the unit here depending on the outcome of the hearing – on your decision, gentlemen.’

Dolo looked the trooper up and down, as if he could read her mind by studying her suited body. ‘Trooper. You understand the charge against you. Are you guilty?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me about Michael Poole.’

Bayla was silent for a moment, visibly frightened; the visor of her skinsuit was misted. She glanced at Teel, who nodded.

And so Bayla stammered a tale of how the great engineer of ancient times, Michael Poole, had ridden one last wormhole to Timelike Infinity, the end of time itself. There he waited, watching all the events of the universe unfolding – and there he was ready to welcome those who remembered his name, and honour those who had fallen – and from there his great strength would reach out to save those who followed his example.

Dolo listened to this dispassionately. ‘How many times have you ridden the Rock?’

‘Twice, sir.’

‘And what are you most afraid of, trooper?’

Again Bayla glanced at Teel. ‘That you won’t let me back.’

‘Back where?’

‘To ride the Rock again.’

‘Why does that frighten you?’

Because she does not want to abandon her comrades, Luca thought, watching her. Because she is guilty to be alive where others have fallen around her. Because she fears they will die, leaving her to live on alone.

But Bayla said only, ‘It is my duty, Commissary. A brief life burns brightly.’

Teel said, ‘Simply say what you believe, trooper; it won’t help you to mouth slogans.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Luca walked back to the arch, for now Teel was standing under it, running her gloved hand over its surface. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he essayed.

She shrugged. ‘It’s a tribute, not a work of art. But yes, it is beautiful.’

After his foolish remark about weakness he wanted to rebuild his connection with her. ‘The names.’ He glanced up at the arrayed letters over his head. He said boldly, ‘To record the fallen may be non-Doctrinal, but here it seems – appropriate. If I had time I would climb this arch and count all the names.’

‘It might take you longer than you think.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She pointed to a name, inscribed in the surface before his face. ‘What do you see?’

‘“Etta Maris”,’ he read. ‘A name.’

‘Now look at the first letter. Your suit visor has a magnification option; just tell it what you want to do.’

It took a couple of tries before he got it right. A Virtual flickered into existence before his face, the magnified letter. Even on this scale the carving was all but flawless – a labour of devotion, he saw, moved. But now he looked more closely, and he saw there were more names, inscribed within the carved-out grooves of the letter.

He stepped back, shocked. ‘Why, there must be as many names here, in this single letter, as are inscribed on the whole of the arch.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Teel said coolly. ‘Pick a name and look again.’

Again he magnified a single letter from one inscribed name – and again he found more names, thousands of them, crowded in far beneath the level of human visibility.

‘The names in the top layer were carved by hand,’ Teel said. ‘Then they used waldoes, and lasers, and ultimately replicator nanotech…’

He increased the magnification again and again, finding more layers of names nested one within the other. There were more layers than he could count, more names than could ever read if he stood here for the rest of his life. Just on this one Rock. And perhaps there were similar memorials on all the other bits of battered debris at every human emplacement, all the way around the core of the Galaxy, a great band of death stretching three thousand light years across space and two thousand years deep in time. He stepped back, shocked.

Teel studied his face. ‘Are you all right?’

His eyes were wet, he found. He tried to blink away the moisture, but to his chagrin he felt a hot tear roll down his cheek. It was a dark epiphany, this shock of the names.

‘I shouldn’t have to teach you the Doctrines,’ Teel said, comparatively gently. ‘We each have one life. We each die. The question is how you spend that life.’ She reached up with a gloved finger to touch his moist cheek – but her finger touched his visor, of course, and she dropped her hand and looked away, almost shyly.

He was astonished. In this brief moment of his own weakness, when he had been overwhelmed by something so much greater than he was, he had at last acquired some stature in her eyes; he had at last made the kind of contact with her that he had dreamed about since they had met.

After several hours on the surface they were escorted to what Teel called a bio facility, a pressurised dome where the soldiers could tend their bodies and their skinsuits, eat, drink, void their wastes, sleep, fornicate, play.

Around the perimeter of a central atrium there were small private cubicles, including dormitories, toilets and showers. Dolo and Luca were going to have to share one small, grimy compartment, at which Dolo scowled. Luca found a toilet and used it with relief. He had been unable to use the facilities in his skinsuit, in which you were just supposed to let go and allow the suit to soak it all up; it hadn’t helped that the suits were semi-transparent.

He wandered uncertainly through the large central area. Under its fabric roof the facility was too hot. There was a stink of overheated food from the replicator banks, and the floor was grimy with sweat and ground-in asteroid dirt. The troopers, dressed in dirty coveralls, walked and laughed, argued and wrestled. While Luca had kept his inertial-control boots on, the soldiers mostly went barefoot; they jumped, crawled, even somersaulted, at ease in the low gravity environment. Many of them were sitting in solemn circles singing songs, sometimes accompanied by flutes and drums that had been improvised from bits of kit. They played sentimental melodies, but Luca could not make out the words; the troopers’ vocabulary was strange and specialised, littered with acronyms.

There was graffiti on the walls. One crude sketch showed the unmistakable flared shape of a Xeelee nightfighter conflated with the ancient symbol of a fanged demon, and there were references by one sliver of a sub-unit to the incompetence and sexual inadequacy of the troopers in another, startlingly obscene. A couple of slogans caught his eye: ‘Love unto the utmost generation is higher than love of one’s neighbour. What should be loved of man is that he is in transition.’ And: ‘I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ Another hand had added: ‘I am become Boredom, the Destroyer of Motivation.’

He joined Dolo on a small stage that had been set up before rows of seats. The daily briefing was soon to begin here. Luca reported on the graffiti he had seen. ‘I don’t recognise the sources.’

‘Probably pre-Occupation. Oh, don’t look so shocked. There is plenty of the stuff out there; we can’t control everything. In fact I think I recognise the first. Frederick Nietzsche.’ His pronunciation was strangulated.

‘It sounded a good summary of the Druz Doctrines to me.’

‘Perhaps. But I wonder how much harm those words have done, down across the millennia. Tell me what you think of our proto-religion here.’

‘The elements are familiar enough,’ Luca said. ‘The old legend of Michael Poole has been conflated with the beliefs of the Friends of Wigner.’ During the Qax Occupation the rebel group called the Friends had concocted a belief, based on ancient quantum-philosophical principles, that no event was made real until it was observed by a conscious intelligence – and hence that the universe itself would not be made real until all of its history was observed by an Ultimate Observer at Timelike Infinity, the very end of time. If such a being existed, then perhaps it could be appealed to – which was what the Friends had intended to achieve during their ultimately futile rebellion against the Qax. ‘It’s just that in this instance Poole himself has become that Observer.’

Dolo nodded. ‘Oddly, Michael Poole was lost in time – in a sense – his last act, so it is said, was to fly his ship deliberately into an unending network of branching wormholes, in order to save mankind from an invasion from the future. Perhaps he is still out there somewhere, wherever there is. You can certainly see the resonance of his story for these rock jockeys. Poole sacrificed his life for the sake of his people – and yet, transcendent, he lives on. What a role model!’ He actually winked at Luca. ‘I sometimes think that even if we could achieve a state of total purity, of totally blank minds cocooned from the history of mankind, even then such beliefs would start sprouting spontaneously. But you have to admit that it’s a good story.’ He sounded surprisingly mellow.

Luca was shocked. ‘But – sir – surely we must act to stop this drift from Doctrinal adherence. This new faith is insidious. You aren’t supposed to pray for personal salvation; it is the species that counts. If this kind of thing is happening all over the Front, perhaps we should consider more drastic steps.’

Dolo’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re talking about excision.’

In the seminaries there had been chatter for millennia about the origin of the religious impulses which endlessly plagued the swarming masses under the Commission’s care. Some argued that these impulses came from specific features of the human brain. Thus perhaps the characteristic sense of oneness with a greater entity came from a temporary disconnection within the parietal lobe, detaching the usual sense of one’s self – controlled by the left side of this region – from the sense of space and time, controlled by the right. And perhaps a sense of awe and significance came from a malfunction of the limbic system, a deep and ancient system keyed to the emotions. And so on. If a mystical experience was simply a symptom of a malfunctioning brain – like, say, an epileptic fit – then that malfunction could be fixed, the symptoms abolished. And with a little judicious tinkering with the genome, such flaws could be banished from all subsequent generations.

‘A future without gods,’ said Luca. ‘How marvellous that would be.’

Dolo nodded. ‘But if you had had such an excision – and you had stood under the arch of names – could you have appreciated its significance? Could you have understood, have felt it as you did? Oh, yes, I watched you. Perhaps those aspects of our brains, our minds, have evolved for a purpose. Why would they exist otherwise?’

Luca had no answer. Again he was shocked.

‘Anyhow,’ said Dolo, reverting to orthodoxy, ‘tampering with human evolution – or even passively allow it to happen – is itself against the Druz Doctrines. We win this war as humans or not at all – and we bend that rule at our peril. We have stayed united, across tens of thousands of light years and unthinkably huge populations, because we are all the same. Although that’s not to say that evolution isn’t itself taking mankind away from the norm that Hama Druz himself might have recognised.’

‘Commissary?’

‘Well, look around you. Most of these soldiers are the children of soldiers – obviously, how could it be otherwise? And the relentless selection of war is working to shape a new kind of human, better equipped for the fight. Combat survivors are the ones who get to breed, after all. Already their descendants are wiry, lithe, confident in the three-dimensional arena of low or zero gravity. Some studies even suggest that their eyes are adapting to the pressure of three-dimensional combat – that some of them can see velocity, for example, by perceiving subtle Doppler shifts in the colours of approaching or receding objects. Think what an advantage that would be in the battlefield! Another few thousand years of this and perhaps we will not recognise the soldiers who fight for the rest of us.’

‘I think I’m losing my bearings,’ said Luca truthfully.

Dolo patted his shoulder. ‘No. You’re just learning, is all.’

‘And what have you learned about my troopers?’ Teel had joined them on the small stage, and the troopers began to line up in rows before them.

Luca had learned to be honest with her. ‘I find them – strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘They have all ridden the Rock, yes?’

‘Most of them.’

‘Then they have seen comrades fall. They know they will be sent out again to a place where they must face the same horror. And yet, here and now, they laugh.’

Teel thought about that and answered carefully. ‘Away from the Front you don’t talk about what happens out there. It’s like – a secret. You’ve seen something beyond normal human experience. If you show your fear, or even admit it to yourself, then you’re allowing a leak between this, normal human life, and what lies out there. You’re letting it in. And if that happens there will be nowhere safe. Do you understand?’

He watched her face; there was sweat on her brow, traces of asteroid grime. ‘Is that how you feel?’

‘I try not to feel anything,’ she said.

Luca looked around the dome. ‘And this place is so shabby.’ He felt a kind of self-righteous anger, and he encouraged it in himself, hoping to impress Teel. ‘If these people are willing to die for the Expansion, they should have some comfort.’

Dolo shook his head. ‘Again you don’t understand, Novice. Think about the life of a soldier. It is a limited existence: moments of birth and growth, comradeship, determination, isolation – and finally, after the briefness of the light, an almost inevitable conclusion in pain and death. They have to know they are fighting for something better. And so they have to see that the present is imperfect. The soldiers must live in an eternal now of shabbiness and toil, so that they can be made to believe that we will progress from such places until a glorious victory is won, and everything will be made perfect – even if no such progress is ever actually made.’

‘Then everything here is designed for a purpose,’ Luca said, wondering. ‘Even the shabbiness.’

‘This is a machine built for war, Novice.’

A junior officer called the troops to order. On their crude seats, just blocks of asteroid rock, they fell silent.

Teel stood up. She said clearly, ‘Eighteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-one years ago an alien force conquered humanity’s home planet. We are here to ensure that never happens again.’ She held up a data desk and read a single short obituary, a summary of one ordinary soldier’s life and death. Here was another memorial, Luca supposed, for those who had fallen – and again, not strictly Doctrinal. Then Teel went on to a kind of situation report, summarising incidents from right around the Molecular Ring that circled the Galaxy’s centre.

The troops listened carefully. Luca watched their faces. Their gazes were fixed on Teel as she spoke, their mouths open like rapt children’s, some of them even quietly echoing the words she used. When she finished – ‘Let’s hurl the Xeelee starbreakers down their own Lethe-spawned throats!’ – there was cheering, and even some tears.

Teel invited Dolo to get to his feet. As an emissary of the Coalition, he was to make a short address to these far-from-home troopers. He was greeted with whistles and foot-stamping. Luca thought he looked small and out of place in his pristine Commissary’s robe.

Dolo talked in general terms about the war. He said that the ‘Ring theatre’ was a testing ground for future operations, including the eventual assault on the Xeelee concentrations in the Core itself – which, he hinted, might be closer than anybody expected. ‘This a momentous time,’ he said, ‘and you have a momentous mission. You have been commissioned by history. This is total war. Our enemy is implacable and powerful. But if we let our vision of the universe and ourselves go forth, and we embrace it entirely, those who remember us will sing songs about us years from now…’

Luca let the words slide through his awareness. When the troops dispersed he found a way to get close to Teel.

She said, ‘So do you think you have seen the comradeship you envied so much?’

‘They love you.’

She shook her head. ‘They think I’m a lucky commander. I’ve ridden this Rock four times already, and I’m still in one piece. They hope I’ll give them some of my good fortune. And anyhow they have to love me; it’s part of my job description. They won’t let their brains be blown out for a stuffed shirt—’

‘No, it’s more than that. They will follow you anywhere.’ His blood surging, longing to be part of her life, he said recklessly,

‘As would I.’

That seemed to take her aback. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

He leaned closer. ‘You’ve known there is something between us, a connection deeper than words, since the moment we met—’

But here was Dolo, and the moment was already over. The Commissary held up a small data desk, ‘Novice, tomorrow we have a chance to advance your education. We will accompany a press gang.’

‘Sir?’

‘Be ready early.’

Teel had taken advantage of the interruption to slip away to join her troops. Luca saw how her face lit up when she spoke to those with whom she had fought. He was hopelessly jealous.

Dolo murmured, ‘Don’t lose yourself in her, Novice. After tomorrow, we will see if you still envy these troopers.’

III

The blue planet came swimming out of the dark.

Dolo said, ‘You know that planets are rare here. This close to the Core, with so many stars crowding, stable planetary orbits are uncommon. All the unformed debris, which elsewhere might have been moulded into worlds, here makes up huge asteroid belts – which is why the rocks are used as they are; they are plentiful enough.

‘This pretty world, though, was discovered by colonists of the Second Expansion – oh, more than twenty thousand years ago. Almost inevitably, they call it New Earth: names of colonised planets are rarely original. They brought with them a very strange belief system and primitive technology, but they made a good fist of terraforming this place. It lies a little close to its sun, though…’

Luca didn’t feel able to reply. The world was like a watery Earth, he thought, with a world-ocean marked by tiny ice caps at the poles and a scatter of dark brown islands. He felt unexpectedly nostalgic.

Dolo was watching his face. ‘Remember, though you are a Novice, you represent the Commission. We are the ultimate source of strength for these people. Keep your fear for the privacy of your quarters.’

‘I understand my duty, sir.’

‘Good.’

The yacht slid neatly into the world’s thick air. Under a cloud-littered blue sky the ocean opened out into a blue-grey sheet that receded to a misty horizon.

The yacht hovered over the largest archipelago, a jumble of islands formed from ancient and overlapping volcanic caldera, and settled to the ground. It landed in a Navy compound, a large complex marked out in bright Navy green and surrounded by a tall fence. Beyond the fence, the rocky land rolled away, unmodified save for snaking roads and scattered farms and small villages.

Luca and Dolo joined a handful of troopers in an open-top skimmer. Hovering a couple of metres above the ground the skimmer shot across the Navy compound – Luca glimpsed bubble domes, unpressurised huts, neat piles of equipment – and then slid through a dilating entrance in the outer wall and hurtled over the countryside.

They had to wear face masks. Even after twenty thousand years of terraforming of this world, there was still not enough oxygen in the air; it had taken half that time just to exterminate most of the native life. But they could leave their skinsuits behind, and Luca welcomed the feeling of sunlight on his exposed skin.

Dolo said, over the wind noise, ‘What you’re going to see is where many of those troopers you envy come from.’

Luca said, ‘I imagined birthing centres.’ Like the one into which he had been born, on Earth.

‘Yes. The children of soldiers are incubated in such places. But you’ve seen yourself that there is a – drift – in such populations, under the relentless selection pressure of combat. It’s a good idea to freshen up the gene pool with infusions of wild stock.’

‘Wild? Commissary, what is a “press gang”?’

‘You’ll see.’

The skimmer arrived at a village by the coast.

Luca stepped out of the hovering vehicle. The volcanic rock felt lumpy through the thin soles of his boots. A harbour, a rough crescent shape, had been blasted into the rock, and small boats bobbed languidly on oily water. Even through the filters in his mask Luca could smell the intense salt of the sea air, and the electric tang of ozone. But the volcanic rock was predominantly black, as were the pebbles and sand, and the water looked eerily dark.

He looked back along the coast. Dwellings built of volcanic rock were scattered along a road that led back to a denser knot of buildings. Here and there green flashed amidst the black – grass, trees, Earth life struggling to prosper in this alien soil. It was clear these people fed themselves through agriculture: crops grown on the transformed land, fish harvested from the seeded seas. The Second Expansion had occurred before the Qax had brought effective replicator technology to Earth, an unintended legacy which still fed the mass of the human population today. And so these people farmed, a behavioural relic.

From the doorway of the nearest house a child peered out at him, a girl aged about ten, finger thrust into one nostril, wide-eyed and curious. She wore no mask; the locals were implanted with respiratory equipment at birth.

He said, wondering, ‘This is not a Coalition world.’

‘No, it is not,’ said Dolo. ‘Ideally all human beings, across the Galaxy, would think exactly the same thought at every moment; that is what we must ultimately strive for. But out here on the fringe of the Expansion, where resources are limited, things are – looser. The three million inhabitants here have been left to their own devices – such as their own peculiar form of government, which lapsed into a kind of monarchy. The war against the Xeelee is a priority over cleansing the minds of a few fisher-folk on a dirt ball like this.’

‘As long as they pay their taxes.’

Dolo grinned at him. ‘An unexpectedly cynical remark from my idealistic young Novice! But yes, exactly so.’

They walked with the troopers towards the house. The little girl disappeared indoors. Luca could smell cooking, a baking smell like bread, and a sharper tang that might have been some kind of bleach. Simple domestic smells. Flowers adorned the top of the doorway, a colourful stripe, and two small bells dangled from the door itself, too small to be useful as a signal to the occupants, a cultural symbol Luca couldn’t decode. The troopers in their bright green uniforms looked strikingly out of place, the shapes and colours all wrong, as if they had been cut out of some other reality and inserted into this sunlit scene.

There is a whole world here, Luca thought, a society which has followed its own path for twenty thousand years, with all the subtlety and individuality that that implies. I know nothing about it, had never even heard of it before coming here into the Core. And the Galaxy, which I as a Commissary will presume to govern, must be full of such places, such worlds, shards of humanity scattered over the stars.

A woman came to the door – the little girl’s mother? – strong-faced, about forty, with hands grimy from work in a field, or garden. She looked resigned, Luca thought on first impression. Her gaze ran indifferently over the Commissaries, and she turned to the lead trooper.

She spoke a language he didn’t recognise. The artificial voice of the trooper’s translating desk was small and tinny.

Luca said, ‘They must have brought their language with them. This woman speaks a relic of a pre-Extirpation tongue.’ He felt excited, intellectually. ‘Perhaps that aboriginal tongue could be reconstructed. Populations are scattered on this island world, isolated. Their languages must have diverged. By comparing the dialects of different groups—’

‘Of course that would be possible,’ said Dolo, sounded vaguely irritated. ‘But why would you want to do such a thing?’

Now the woman pressed her hand against the trooper’s data desk, a simple signature, and she called a name. The little girl came back to the door. She was a thin child with an open, pretty face; she looked bewildered, not scared, Luca thought. The mother reached down and gave the girl a small valise. She placed her hand on the girl’s back, as if to push her to the troopers.

Luca understood what was happening a moment before the girl herself. ‘We are here to take her away, aren’t we?’

Dolo held up a finger, silencing him.

The girl looked at the tall armour-clad figures. Her face twisted with fear. She threw down the valise and turned to bury her face in her mother’s belly, yelling and jabbering. The mother was weeping herself, but she tried to pull the child away from her legs.

‘She’s just a child,’ Luca said. ‘She doesn’t want to leave her mother.’

Dolo shrugged. ‘Child or not, she should know her duty.’

At first the troopers seemed tolerant. They stood in the sun, watching impassively as the mother gently cajoled the child. But after a couple of minutes the lead trooper stepped forward and put his gloved hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl squirmed away. The trooper seemed to have misjudged the mother’s mood, for she jabbered angrily at him, pulled the child inside the house and slammed the door. The troopers glanced at each other, shrugged wearily, and fingered the weapons at their belts.

Dolo tugged Luca’s sleeve. ‘We don’t need to see the resolution of this little unpleasantness. Come. Let me show you what will happen to that child.’

The lead trooper agreed that Dolo could take the skimmer if a replacement was sent out. So Luca climbed back into the skimmer alongside Dolo, leaving the harbour village behind them. It did not take long before they were back within the enclosing wall of the Navy compound, with the complex disorderly local world of sea and rock and light shut out. Luca felt a huge relief, as if he had come home.

Dolo directed the skimmer to a cluster of buildings huddled within the wall. These blocky huts had been set around a rectangle of cleared ground, and fenced off from the rest of the Navy base. Once inside this compound within a compound, Dolo and Luca got out of the skimmer and walked across obsessively swept dirt.

Everywhere Luca could see children. They were of varying ages from ten or so through to perhaps sixteen. One group marched in formation, another was lined up in rows, a third was undergoing some kind of physical training over a crude obstacle course, a fourth was standing in a rough square, watching something at the centre. Luca imagined this place must be big enough to hold a thousand children, perhaps more.

‘What is this place?’

‘Call it a school,’ Dolo said. ‘Keep your eyes open; listen and learn. And remember—’

‘I know. I am the Commission. I mustn’t show what I feel.’

‘Better yet that you should feel nothing inappropriate in the first place. But not showing it is a start. First impressions?’

‘Regularity,’ Luca said. ‘Straight lines everywhere. Everything planned, everything ordered. Nothing spontaneous.’

‘And the children?’

Luca said nothing. There was silence save for barked commands; none of the children seemed to be saying anything.

Dolo said, ‘You must understand that children brought in from the wild are more difficult to manage than those raised in birthing centres from soldier stock, for whom the war is a way of life; they know nothing else. These wild ones must be taught there is nothing else. So they will spend six or more years of their lives in places like this. Of course past the age of thirteen – or younger in some cases – they are used in combat.’

‘Thirteen?’

‘At that age their usefulness is limited. Those who survive are brought back for further training, and to shape the others. It helps them become accustomed to death, you see, if they are returned from the killing fields to a place like this, which keeps filling up with more people, people, people, so that mortality becomes trivial, a commonplace of statistics … Here now; this is where that pretty little girl from the coast will be brought, when the troopers extract her from her clinging mother.’

It was a nondescript building, before which children had been drawn up in rows. Male and female, no older than ten or eleven, they were dressed in simple orange coveralls, and were all barefoot. A woman stood before them. She had a short club in her hand. The children’s posture was erect, their heads held still, but Luca could see how their eyes flickered towards the club.

One child was called forward. She was a slim girl, perhaps a little younger than the rest. The woman spoke to her almost gently, but Luca could hear she was describing, clinically, some small crime to do with not completing laundry promptly. The girl was wide-eyed and trembling, and Luca, astonished, saw urine trickle down her leg.

Then, without warning, the woman drew her club and slammed it against the side of the child’s head. The child fell in the dust and lay still. Luca would have stepped forward, but Dolo had anticipated his reaction and grabbed his arm. Immediately the woman switched her attention to the others. She stepped over the prone form and walked up and down their rows, staring into their faces; she seemed to be smelling their fear.

Luca had to look away. He glanced up. The Galaxy’s centre glowed beyond a milky blue sky.

Dolo murmured, ‘Oh, don’t worry. They know how to do such things properly here. The child is not badly hurt. Of course the other children don’t know that. The girl’s crime was trivial, her punishment meaningless – save as an example to the others. They are being exposed to violence; they have to get used to it, not to fear it. They must be trained not to question the authority over them. And—ah, yes.’

The woman had pulled a boy out of the ranks of silent children. Luca thought she could see tears glistening in his round eyes. Again the woman’s club flashed; again the child fell to the ground.

Luca asked, aghast, ‘And what was his crime?’

‘He showed feelings for the other, the girl. That too must be programmed out. What use would such emotions be under a sky full of Xeelee nightfighters?’ Dolo studied him. ‘Luca, I know it is hard. But it is the way of the Doctrines. One day such training may save that boy’s life.’

They walked on, as the children were made to pick up their fallen comrades.

They came to a more ragged group of children. Some of these were older, Luca saw, perhaps twelve or thirteen. It disturbed him to think that there might actually be combat veterans among this group of barefoot kids. At the centre of the group, two younger children – ten-year-olds – were fighting. The others watched silently, but their eyes were alive.

Dolo murmured, ‘Here is a further stage. Now the children have to learn to use violence against others. The older ones have been put in charge of the younger. Beaten regularly themselves, now they enjoy meting out the same treatment to others. You see, they are forcing these two to fight, perhaps just for entertainment.’

At last one of the fighters battered her opponent to the ground. The fallen child was dragged away. The victor was a stocky girl; blood trickled from her mouth and knuckles. One of the older children walked into the crude ring, grinning, to face the stocky girl.

Dolo nodded with a connoisseur’s approving glance. ‘That fighter is strong,’ he said. ‘But now she will learn afresh that there are many stronger than she is.’

‘These barefoot cadets must long to escape.’

‘But their prison is not just a question of walls. In some places the regime is – harsher. When they are taken from their homes, the children are sometimes made to commit atrocities there.’

‘Atrocities?’

Dolo waved a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter what. There are always criminals of one class or another who require corrective treatment. But after committing such an act the child is instantly transformed, in her own heart, and in the hearts of her family. The family may not even want the child back. So she knows that even if she escapes this place, she can never go back home.’ He smiled. ‘Ideally, of course, it would be a family member who is struck down; that would be the purest blow of all.’

‘How efficient.’

‘Even in the face of violence a child’s social and moral concepts are surprisingly resilient; it takes a year or more before such things as family bonds are finally broken. After that the child crosses an inner threshold. Her sense of loyalty – why, her sense of self – becomes entwined not with her family but with the regime. And, of course, the first experience of combat itself is the final threshold. After that, with all she has seen and done, she cannot go home. She has been reborn. She doesn’t even want to be anywhere else.’

They walked on to the edge of the compound. Beyond the rows of buildings there was a break in the fence. On the rocky plain beyond, a group of children, with adult overseers, were lying on their bellies in crude pits dug into the ground. They were working with weapons, loading, dismantling, cleaning them, and firing them at distant targets. The weapons seemed heavy, dirty and noisy; every firing gave off a crack that made Luca jump.

Dolo asked, ‘Now. Do you see what is happening here?’

‘More indoctrination. The children must be trained to handle weapons, to deploy destructive forces – and to kill?’

‘There are native animals – flying, bird-like creatures – which they hunt. These days the animals are raised for that purpose, of course; it has ironically saved them from extinction. Yes, they must learn to kill.’

‘And people?’

‘The Xeelee are not like us – but they are sentient. Therefore it helps to be exposed to the moral conflict of killing a sentient creature, before it is necessary to do it to save one’s life. So, yes, people too, when appropriate.’

‘Commissary, must we commit such barbarism to wage our war?’

Dolo looked surprised. ‘But there is no barbarism here. Novice, what did you expect? This regime, this crude empire of mud and clubs and blood, is actually a sophisticated processing system. It turns human beings, children, into machines.’

‘Then why use human beings at all? Why not fight the war with machines?’ It shocked him to find himself even mouthing such ideas.

Dolo seemed patient. ‘This is a question everybody must ask at least once, Luca. We fight as we do because of the nature of our foe, and ourselves. The Xeelee are not like humans, not even like species such as the Silver Ghosts, our starfaring rivals in the early days of the Expansion. Read your history, Novice. With the Xeelee there has never been a possibility of negotiation, diplomacy, compromise. None. In fact there has been no contact at all – other than the brutal collision of conflict. The Xeelee ignore us until we do something that disturbs them – and then they stomp on us hard, striking with devastating force until we are subdued. To them we are vermin. Well, the vermin are fighting back.’

‘And we are doing so,’ Luca said, ‘by consuming our children.’

‘Yes, our children – our human flesh and blood. Because that is all we have.’ Dolo held up his hands and flexed his fingers in Galaxy light. ‘We weren’t designed for waging a Galactic war – as the Xeelee seem to have been. We carry our past in our bodies, a past of cowering in trees, of huddling on plains, without weapons, without even fire to protect us, as the predators closed. But we fought our way out of that pit, just as we’re fighting our way out of this one – not by denying our nature but by exploiting it, by breeding, breeding, breeding, filling up every empty space with great swarms of us. We are nothing but flesh and blood – but in overwhelming numbers even soft flesh can win the day. Our humanity is our only, our final weapon, and that is how we will win.’ As he talked his broad face was alive with a kind of pleasure.

Around Luca the squads of children went through their routine of training, punishment, reward and abuse, their young minds shaped like bits of heated metal. He conjured up the face of Teel, her soft humanity above the stiff collar of the military uniform.

Dolo was watching him again. ‘You’re thinking of the lovely Captain. This is where she came from.’ He waved a hand. ‘An inductee into this dismal boot camp, here on New Earth, she was a tough fighter. Saw her first action at twelve, survived, went back for more. Why do you think I brought you here?’

Luca, bewildered, looked down at the dirt.

Dolo, at random, beckoned a small boy standing in a row of others. With a glance at his overseer the boy came running and stood at attention before them. His eyes were bright, lively. Dolo bent down and smiled. ‘Do you know who we are?’

‘No, sir,’ snapped the boy.

‘Then who are you?’

‘Who I am does not matter. Sir,’ he appended hastily.

‘Good. Then what are you?’

‘I am a little boy now, and I must study. But when I am big enough to operate a weapon I will join the unending war, and avenge those who have fallen, and fight for the future of mankind.’

Dolo straightened up. Luca would have sworn he could see a tear in his eye. ‘Novice, it has taken us twenty thousand years – perhaps even longer – to get to this point. But, step by step, we are reaching our goal. I give you the child soldier: the logical future of mankind.’

When Dolo nodded dismissal the boy turned away and walked back to his section. Luca could see he was struggling to contain his youthful energy, trying not to skip or run.

When they got back to the Rock, an evacuation and hasty re-equipping was underway. Non-combatants were removed from the Rock, equipment, stores and people hurried underground, weapons, sensor and drive emplacements rapidly completed and tested. Meanwhile the troopers were checking their skinsuits and other kit, and injecting themselves with mnemonic fluid, a record which might help the military analysts reconstruct whatever happened to them.

It turned out that orders had been changed. The Rock was to be hurled on its new mission to the Front in just a few more days, weeks ahead of the old schedule. Perhaps, Luca thought with a shiver, the prognosticating librarians on distant Earth had discerned some shifting in their misty maps of the future, and the Rock was to be sent to secure some famous preordained victory – or to avert some predetermined disaster.

But for him the most important consequence of this chain of events was that he was to be taken off the Rock and flown out to another station, while Teel was to ride the Rock once more to the Front itself.

He hurried to her quarters.

Aside from a small bathroom area there were just two pieces of furniture, a simple bed and table. She was sitting on the bed studying a data desk. The top button of her uniform was undone; he found his eyes drawn to the tiny triangle of flesh that showed there.

She put down the desk. ‘I knew you would come.’

‘You did?’

‘You have learned about the new orders. Your emotions are confused.’

Tentatively he sat beside her on the bed. ‘I’m not confused. I don’t want to be parted from you.’

‘Do you think I should defy my duty? Or you yours?’

‘No. I just don’t want to lose you.’

Her blue eyes were wide, deep as oceans. ‘It’s not that. You’ve been to New Earth. Now you know where I come from – what I am. You want to save me, don’t you?’

He was hot, miserable, perplexed. ‘I can’t tell if you are mocking me.’

She took his hand and enclosed it in hers. ‘Go home.’

‘Take me with you,’ he said.

‘What?’

It was as if he was framing the thoughts even as the words emerged from his mouth. ‘To the Front. Give me a posting on the Rock.’

‘That’s absurd. You’re a Commissary – a Novice at that. You don’t have the training.’

He let his voice harden. ‘I could surely be as useful as the twelve-year-old conscripts who will be riding with you.’

‘Do you know what you will face?’

‘I know you will be there.’ He moved his face closer to hers, just a little, until he could feel her breath on his mouth. It was his last voluntary act.

Her passion was primal, like the way she ate, as if after this moment there would be no more to savour. And all through the love-making, and the hours later they spent asleep together, he could sense the strength in her – a strength she held back, as if afraid of damaging him.

IV

Luca huddled at the bottom of the trench. It was just a gouge scraped roughly in the surface of the Rock.

He stared up at a great stripe of sky that was full of cherry-red light, a sky where immense rocks sailed like clouds. Sometimes they came so close to his own Rock he could actually see people moving on their inverted surfaces. It seemed impossible that such vast objects could be crowded so close. The slightest touch of one of these great jostling rocks against another could crush him and these shallow trenches and chambers, utterly erasing him and any trace to show he had ever existed, scraping clean his life from the universe. He was in a heavily armoured skinsuit, but he felt utterly defenceless. He was just a mote of soft blood and flesh, trapped in this nightmare machinery of churning rock and deadly light.

All of this in utter, inhuman silence, save for the shallow scratch of his own breathing, the constant incomprehensible chatter over his comms.

The Rock itself was a swarm of continual, baffling activity. Troopers crowded constantly past him, great files of them labouring from place to place carrying equipment and supplies. They were blank-faced, dogged, their suits carefully dusted with asteroid dirt in the probably vain hope that such camouflage would help them survive. Sometimes they stepped on Luca’s feet or legs, and he cowered against the dirt in his trench, trying to make himself small and invisible.

Bayla, the trooper on the charge of religious sedition, was with him, though. She had been assigned by Teel to ‘supervise’ him. Luca hadn’t seen anything of Teel herself since they had broken through the last cordon of Navy Spline ships and into the full battle light, and the final preparations had begun. Whatever fantasies he had had of working alongside Teel, of somehow participating in this effort, had long evaporated. The only human comfort he drew was from the warm pressure of Bayla’s leg against his own.

Bayla kept checking a chronometer and consulting lists that scrolled over the surface of her skinsuit sleeve. But every few minutes she took the time to check on Luca. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Again he had to push back to let a file of troopers past. ‘I don’t understand how they can do their jobs.’

‘What else is there to do?’

‘They must be afraid.’

He could see her frown. ‘You learn to live with the fear. Like living with an illness.’

‘A fear of death, or injury?’

‘No, not that.’ She spoke slowly. She seemed serene. ‘It’s more that it might not make sense. You feel you’re in the wrong world, the wrong time. That it shouldn’t be like this. If you let that in, that’s the true fear.’

He didn’t understand, of course.

A patch of Bayla’s sleeve flashed orange. ‘Excuse me.’ Bayla barked a command.

A file of troopers came scurrying through the dirt and took their position. They were carrying tools, he saw. The troopers all seemed small, light. Young, he realised. Bayla held up her hand, checked the time again – then brought her arm down in a chop. The troopers swarmed up over the side of the trench, using rungs and cables or just footholds gouged into the harder rock.

In response, light stormed.

Some of the troops fell back immediately, limp, like dolls. The rest of the troopers flattened themselves on their bellies in the dirt, under the light, and began to crawl away, face down, out of Luca’s sight. Other troopers came scurrying along the trench with med cloaks. They wrapped up the fallen and took them away, limp bundles that were awkward to handle in the low gravity.

There was a swirl of cubical pixels before Luca. It coalesced into the compact form of Dolo. He wasn’t wearing a skinsuit, and his robe was clean. In this place of dirt and rock and fire he was like a vision of an unattainable paradise. He smiled. ‘How are we bearing up, Novice?’

Luca found it difficult to speak. ‘Those troopers who went out of the trench in the first wave. They were children.’ Perhaps some of them had come from the induction camp on New Earth.

‘Think of it in terms of efficiency. They are agile, easy to command. But they are poor soldiers. They suffer higher casualty rates than their adult counterparts, in part because their lack of maturity and experience leads them to take unnecessary risks. And their young bodies are more susceptible to complications if injured. But little has yet been invested in their training.’

‘So they are expendable.’

‘We are all expendable,’ Dolo said. ‘But some are more expendable than others. They will not suffer, Luca: if it comes, death here is usually rapid. And if they see their fellows fall they will not grieve; their childish empathy has been beaten out of them.’ The Virtual floated closer to Luca, studying his face, close enough for Luca to see the graininess of the pixels. ‘You are still thinking this is inhuman, aren’t you? The evolution of your conscience is proving a fascinating study, Novice. Of course it is inhuman. All that matters are the numbers, the rates of mortality, the probabilities and cost of success. This is a statistical war – as wars have always been.’

There was a piercing whistle-like blast over the comms unit. Virtual Dolo popped out of existence, grinning.

A few of the child soldiers scrambled back over the trench’s lip – a very few, and several of them were nursing injuries. More troops came scurrying like files of rats along the trench. Soon there was a double line of them, most carrying hand weapons or tools, peering up at the sky.

For a few heartbeats everybody was still, waiting.

Bayla was beside Luca, as intent as the rest. Luca whispered to her, ‘What was the last thing you did before we left the bio facility?’

‘I sent my daughter a Virtual.’

A daughter. Sons and daughters, like family life in general, were strictly anti-Doctrinal. ‘Where is she?’

‘On New Earth. I told her how as a baby she laughed when she looked at my face. How she slept in my arms, how we bathed together. I told her that when she grows up and wants to know about me she should ask her father or her aunt. Whatever becomes of me, she must never think of herself as a child without a mother. I will always be watching her.’

‘From your place at Timelike Infinity,’ he hazarded.

‘I want her to be good, and to be the kind of person others would like. But I told her I was sorry that I had been a poor mother, an absent mother. When she was very small she had a doll, a soldier. I carry it with me as a good-luck charm.’ She patted her dust-covered tunic. Luca saw a slight bulge there. ‘This way she is always with me. The last time I saw her was during my last leave on New Earth. She was with the other children. They lined up to wave flags and sing for us. It’s burned in my mind, her face that day. I told her that when she hears of my death she should be happy for me, for I will have achieved my ambition.’

‘You embrace death, but you dream of your family.’

Bayla glanced at him. ‘What else is there to do?’

Another piercing shriek in Luca’s comms unit. No, it was a word, he realised, a word yelled so loud it overwhelmed the system itself. In response there was a muffled roar – more voices, thousands of voices, shouting together, maybe every trooper on the Rock.

Bayla raised her hand again, watching lights flash on her sleeve. ‘Wait, wait.’ The cherry-red light in the sky was growing brighter, shading to pink. It was like a silent, gathering sunrise, as if the Rock was turning to face some vast source of heat, and the noise rose in response.

Bayla brought her arm chopping down.

The first row of troopers swarmed forward, struggling to get out of the trench. Red light flared. Most of them fell back immediately, broken, limp, gases venting from ruined suits, and the yelling was broken now by screams of pain. Without hesitation the second line pushed after the first. They trampled on the fallen bodies of their comrades, even those who still moved, pushing their way over flesh and dirt to get to the lip of the trench. But they fell back in their turn, as if their bodies were exploding. Yet another line of troopers gathered and began to rush over the lip of the trench.

Suddenly Luca felt swept up, as if a great tide of blood was lifting these yelling troopers into battle. Without conscious thought he tore at the dirt with clumsy hands and hoisted his body out of the trench.

He was standing in a flood of light. Hardly anyone was standing with him, of the hundreds who had gone before him. There was a huddled heap of skinsuit every few paces, and bodies drifted helplessly above like moons of this asteroid, out of contact with the surface, to be pierced by relentless flickering beams of crimson light. When he looked back he saw that still another wave of troops was coming out of the trench. They were twitching like dolls as the darting light threaded through them. Soon the next wave were struggling to advance through a space that was clogged with corpses.

Space was sewn with cherry-red beams, a great flat sheet of them that flickered, vanished, came again. When he looked up he could see more of the beams, layer on layer, absolutely straight, that climbed up like a geometrical demonstration. The light crowded space until it seemed there wasn’t room for it all, that the beams must start to cut and destroy each other.

And still people fell, all around him. He had never imagined such things were possible. It was as if he had been transported into some new and unwelcome reality, where the old physical laws didn’t apply—

Somebody punched him in the back.

With agonising slowness, he fell to the dirt. Something landed on top of him. It wasn’t heavy, but he could feel how massive it was; its inertia knocked the wind out of him. For an instant he was pressed face down, staring at the fine-grained asteroid soil and the reflection of his own hollow-eyed face. But still the cherry-red light dazzled him; even when he closed his eyes he could see it.

He twisted and thrashed, pushing the mass off his back. It was a trooper, he saw. She was struggling, convulsing. A crater had been torn in her chest. Blood was gushing out, immediately freezing into glittering crystals, as if she was just pouring herself out into space. Her eyes locked on Luca’s; they were blue like Teel’s, but this was not Teel. Luca, panicking and revolted, thrashed until he had pushed her away.

But without the trooper on his back he was uncovered. Some instinct made him try to dig himself into the dirt. Perhaps he could hide there. But deeper than a hand’s breadth or so the dirt was compact, hardened by aeons, resistant to his scrabbling fingers.

A shadow moved across the light. Luca flinched and looked up. It was a ship, a vast graceful ship silhouetted against the light of battle.

The Xeelee nightfighter was a sycamore seed wrought in black a hundred metres across. The wings swept back from the central pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they were so fine Luca could see starbreaker fire through them. The Xeelee was swooping low over the asteroid’s surface – impossibly low, impossibly graceful, utterly inhuman. Threads of starbreaker light connected it to the ground, pulses of death dealt at the speed of light. Luca couldn’t tell if their source was the ship or the ground. Where the ship’s shadow passed explosions erupted from the asteroid’s surface, and bodies and bits of equipment were hurled up to go flying into space on neat straight-line trajectories.

Beneath the gaze of that dark bird, Luca felt utterly exposed.

There was a fresh crater not metres away, a scrap of shelter. He closed his eyes. ‘One, two, three.’ He pushed himself to hands and knees and tried a kind of low-gravity crawl, pulling at the surface with his hands and digging his toes into the dust, squirming over the ground like an insect.

He reached the crater and threw himself into it. But again the low gravity had fooled him, and he took an age to complete his fall.

The massive wing of the nightfighter passed over him. It was only metres above him; if he had jumped up he could have touched it. He felt a tugging, like a tide, passing along his body, and light flared all around him. He clamped his hands over his head and closed his eyes.

The cherry-red light faded, and that odd sensation of tugging passed. He risked looking up. The Xeelee had moved beyond him. It was tracking over the asteroid’s close horizon, setting like a great dark sun, and it dragged a webbing of red light beneath it as it passed.

There was a brief lull. The light of more distant engagements bathed the ground in a paler, more diffuse glow.

Something moved on the ground. It was a trooper, crawling out of a hole a little deeper than Luca’s. He, she, moved hunched over, looking only half human. One leg was dragging. Luca saw now that the trooper had lost a foot, cleanly scythed, and that the lower leg of the skinsuit was tied off by a crude tourniquet. More troopers came clambering out of holes and trenches, or even out of the cover of the bodies of their comrades. They crawled, walked, flopped back towards their trenches.

But the red light erupted again, raking flat across the curved landscape. The beams lanced through the bodies of the wounded as they tried to crawl, and they staggered and fell, cut open and sliced – or they simply exploded, the internal pressure of their bodies destroying them in silent, bloody bursts.

Still Luca was unharmed, as if this withering fire was programmed to avoid him. But, turned around and battered, he didn’t know where his trench was, where he should go. And dust was thrown up around him by silent detonations, obscuring his vision. He saw a brighter light ahead, a cool whiteness, as if seen through a fog of dust and frozen blood. He pulled himself out of the crater and crawled that way.

Again the fire briefly faded. There was no air to suspend the dust, and as soon as the firing ceased it fell quickly back to the ground, or dispersed into space. As the dust cleared the white light was revealed.

It was no human shelter but the Sugar Lump itself, looming towards the Rock.

The Xeelee emplacement, a huge projection of power, was a cube, shining white, that spun slowly about shifting axes: it was an artefact the size of a small planet, a box that could have contained Earth’s Moon. And it was beautiful, Luca thought, fascinated, like a toy, its faces glowing sheets of white, its edges and corners a geometrical ideal. But its faces were scarred and splashed with rock.

He saw this through a stream of rocks that soared through their complex orbits towards the Sugar Lump. They looked like gravel thrown against a glowing window. But these were asteroids, each like his own Rock, kilometres across or more.

Red light punched through his shoulder. He stared, uncomprehending, as blood founted in a pencil-thin spray, before his suit sealed itself over and the flow stopped. He was able to raise his arm, even flex his fingers, but he couldn’t feel the limb, as if he had been sleeping on it. He could sense the pain, though, working its way through his shocked nervous system.

An explosion erupted not metres away.

A wave of dirt and debris washed him onto his back. At last pain pulsed in his arm, needle-sharp. But the dust cleared quickly, the grains settling out on their millions of parabolas to the surface from which they had been hurled, and the open sky was revealed again.

A face of the Sugar Lump was over him, sliding by like a translucent lid across the world, the edges too remote to see. Asteroids slid past its surface, sparking with weapons’ fire. The plane face itself rippled, holes dilating open like stretching mouths, and more Xeelee ships poured out, nightfighters like darting birds whose wings opened tentatively.

But a new fire opened up from the Rock, a blistering hail of blue-white sparks that hosed into the surface of the Sugar Lump itself. This was fire from a monopole cannon, Luca knew, and those blue-white sparks were point defects in spacetime. The Xeelee craft emerging from the Sugar Lump tried to open their wings. But the blue sparks ripped into them. One nightfighter went spinning out of control, to plummet back into the face of the Sugar Lump.

These few seconds of closest approach were the crux of the engagement, its whole purpose. Monopoles, point defects, would rip a hole in a nightfighter wing, or a Sugar Lump face. But you had to get close enough to deliver them. And you had to hit the Xeelee craft when they were vulnerable, which meant the few seconds or minutes after the nightfighters had emerged from the Sugar Lump emplacements, when they were slow, sluggish, like baby birds emerging from a nest. That was why you had to get in so close to the Sugar Lump, despite the ferocious fire, and you had to use the precious seconds of closest approach as best you could – and then try to get out before the Xeelee assembled their overwhelmingly superior weaponry. That was why Luca was here; that was why so many were screaming and dying around him.

Luca felt hate well up inside him, hate for the Xeelee and what they had done to mankind, the deaths and pain they had inflicted, the massive distortion of human destiny. And as the human weapons ripped holes in the Xeelee emplacement he roared a visceral cry of loathing and triumph.

But now somebody stood over him, shadowed against the Sugar Lump face.

‘Bayla? Teel?’

A heavy hand reached down, grabbed a handful of his tunic, and hauled Luca up. He was carried across the surface, floppy-limbed, with remarkable speed and efficiency. The sky, still crowded with conflict, rocked above him.

He was hurled into a hole in the ground. He fell through low gravity and landed in darkness on a heap of bodies, a tangle of limbs. Med cloaks were wrapped around the injured, but many of the cloaks glowed bright blue, the colour of death, so that this chamber in the rock was filled with eerie electric-blue shadows.

More bodies poured in after Luca, tumbling on top of him. The mouth of the tunnel closed over, blocking out the light of battle. There was a second of stillness. Luca squirmed, trying to get out from under the heap of bodies.

Then the stomping began. It was exactly as if some immense boot was slamming down on the asteroid. The people in the chamber were thrown up, dropped back, shaken. Splinters of bright white light leaked into the tunnel through its layers of sealing dirt. Luca found himself rolling, kicked and punched. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder he fought with his fists and feet until he found himself huddled in a corner of wall and floor. He hugged his knees to his chest, making himself a small, hard boulder.

Still the slamming went on. He could feel it in his bones, his very flesh. He closed his eyes. He tried to think of the Conurbation where he had been born, and joined his first cadres. It had been an open place of parks and ruined Qax domes. In the mornings he would run and run, his cloak flapping around his legs, the dewy grass sharp under his bare feet. He had never been more alive – certainly more than now, sealed up in this suit in a hole in the shuddering ground.

He huddled over, dreaming of Earth. Perhaps if he dug deep down inside himself he would find a safe place to live, inside his memory, safe from this war. But still the great stamping went on and on, as he remembered the dew on the grass.

Luca. Novice Luca.

He had never understood.

Oh, logically he knew of the endless warfare at the heart of the Galaxy, the relentless deaths, the children thrown into the fire. But he had never understood it, on a deep, human level. So many human dead, he thought, buried in meaningless rocks like this or scattered across space, as if the disc of the Galaxy itself is rotten with our corpses. There they wait until the latest generation joins them, falling down like sparks into the dark.

Luca.

He tried to remember his ambitions, how he used to feel, when the war had been a fascinating exercise in logistics and ideology, a source of endless career opportunities for bright young Commissaries. How could he have been so dazzled by such fantasies?

It was as if a great crime was being committed, out of sight. Whether humans won this war or not, nothing would ever be the same – nothing ever could compensate for the relentless evil being committed here. We’re like those wretched children on New Earth forced to commit atrocities against those they love, he thought. We can’t go back. Not after what we have done here.

Luca. Luca. ‘…Luca. You are alive, like it or not. Look at me, Novice.’

Reluctantly, shedding the last of his cocoon of grass-green memory, he opened his eyes. He was still in the chamber of dirt. There was no light but the dimming glow of med cloaks. Nothing moved; everybody was still. But the stomping had stopped, he realised.

And here was Dolo’s Virtual head, a fuzzy ball of pixels, floating before him, glowing in the dark.

‘I’m in my grave,’ Luca said.

‘Less melodrama, please, Novice. The Navy knows you’re here. They’re on the way to dig you out.’

‘Teel—’

‘Is dead. So is Bayla, our anti-Doctrinal religionist.’ Dolo reeled off more names, everybody Luca could think of in the units he had met. ‘Everybody is dead, except you.’

Teel was dead. He tried to remember his feelings for Teel, that peculiar wistful love reciprocated by her on some level he had never understood. It had been everything in the world to him, he thought, just hours ago, and even after what he had seen of the child soldiers on New Earth and the rest, his head had been full of dreams of fighting alongside her – and, yes, of saving her from this place, just as she had understood. Now it all seemed remote, a memory of a memory, or the memory of a story told by somebody else.

As if they were back in the seminary, Dolo said, ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’

‘I have no sense of the true scale of this, the moral scale. I don’t even know what my own life is worth. I’m too small. I’ve nothing to measure it against.’

‘But it was that very scale that saved you. What defence do we have, we feeble humans, against the Xeelee?’

‘None.’

‘Wrong. Listen to me. We are fighting a war on an interstellar scale. The Xeelee push out of the Core; we push them back, endlessly. The Front is a vast belt of friction, right around the Galaxy’s centre, friction between huge wheels spun by the Xeelee and ourselves, rubbing away lives and material as fast as we can pour them in. It’s been this way, virtually static, for two thousand years.

‘But if you are caught in the middle of it, your defence is numbers. Your defence is statistical. If there are enough of you, even if others are taken, you might survive. We have probably been using such strategies all the way back to the days without fire or tools, on some treeless plain on Earth. When the predators come, let them take her – the slowest, the youngest or oldest, the weakest, the unlucky – but I will survive. Death is life, remember; that was what Teel said: the death of others is my life.’

Luca looked into Dolo’s eyes; the low-quality image had only empty, staring sockets. ‘It is a vermin’s strategy.’

‘We are vermin.’

‘Does the arch still stand?’

‘It is sited on the far side of the asteroid, away from the main weapons sites. Yes, it stands.’

‘Let it be,’ Luca said. ‘The religion. The worship of Poole at Timelike Infinity.’

Dolo’s head pushed closer. ‘Why?’

‘Because it gives the troopers a meaning the dry Doctrines can’t supply. A belief in a simple soldiers’ heaven makes no difference.’

‘But it does make a difference,’ Dolo said quietly. ‘Remember that we need to manage the historical stability of the Expansion. Far from being damaging, I now believe this proto-religion might actually be useful in ensuring that.’ He laughed. ‘We will probably support it, discreetly. Perhaps we will even write some scripture for it. We have before. In the end we don’t care what they think they are fighting for, as long as they fight.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why do you do this? And—’

‘And why do I so obviously enjoy it? Ha!’ Dolo tipped back his Virtual face. ‘Because it is a kind of exploration, Novice. There will always be another battlefield – another star, even, one day, another Galaxy – and each is much like the last. But here we are exploring the depths of humanity itself. How far can a human being be degraded and brutalised before something folds up inside? I can tell you, we haven’t reached the bottom of that yet, and we’re still digging.

‘And then there is the war itself, the magnificence of the enterprise. Think about it: we are trying to build a perfect killing machine from soft human components, from swarming animals who evolved in a very different place, very far from here. It is a marvellous intellectual exercise – don’t you think?’

Luca dropped his face. He said, ‘How can we win this war?’

Dolo looked puzzled. ‘But we have no interest in mere winning, but in the perfecting of humanity. And to achieve that we need eternity, an eternal war. Victory is trivial compared to that.’

‘No,’ Luca said.

‘Novice—’

Dirt showered over him. Fragments rained through Dolo’s Virtual, making it flicker. Luca looked up. A machine had broken through the roof of the cavern, revealing the light of the Galaxy Core.

Skinsuited troopers clustered around the hole. One leapt down and just picked up Luca under his shoulders. Luca cried out at the pain of his wound, but he was hoisted up towards the sky and released.

For a second, two, he floated up through the vacuum, as if dreaming.

Then more strong hands caught him. He was wrapped in a med cloak. It snuggled around him and he immediately felt its warmth.

Everywhere he looked he saw more teams digging, and bodies floating out of the dirt. It was as if the whole Rock were a cemetery fifty kilometres across, disgorging its dead. And over his comms system he could hear a great murmuring groan. It was the merging of thousands of voices, he realised, the thousands of wounded that still littered this battered Rock, who themselves were far outnumbered by the dead.

‘No,’ he muttered.

A visored face loomed over him. ‘No what?’

‘We have to find a way to win this war,’ Luca whispered.

‘Sure we do. Save your strength, buddy.’ The med cloak probed at his shoulder. He felt a sharp pain.

And then sleep engulfed him, shutting out the light of the war.

The seed inadvertently planted by Dolo and others, in allowing the soldiers’ new religion to survive, took a long time to bear fruit.

In the meantime Luca was right. Humanity had to find a way to win its war before it lost through sheer exhaustion. It was through the slow sedition of Luca and others like him that the victory came about.

But it would take two more bloody millennia before the heroics of what became known as the ‘Exultant generation’ broke the logjam of the Front, and mankind’s forces swept on into the Core itself.

I had a small part to play in that victory. We undying, hidden away, have sometimes seen fit to steer human history. With patience you can make a difference. But mayflies, blind to the long term, are impossible to herd. You never get everything you want.

Still, a victory.

Suddenly the Galaxy was human.

Victorious child soldiers peered around at what they had won, uncomprehending, and wondered what to do next.

Mankind sought new purposes.

For the first time in many millennia voyages of discovery, not conquest, were launched. Some even sailed beyond the Galaxy itself.

And even there they found relics of mankind’s complicated history.

Some were almost as old as I am.