RIDING THE ROCK

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.

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