The Great Game

STEPHEN BAXTER


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

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

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

And, leaving aside the vertigo, what deepened my own fear was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings, they were unmistakable. They were Xeelee nightfighters.

The Xeelee were the captain’s responsibility, not mine. But I couldn’t stop my over-active mind speculating on what had lured such a dense concentration of them so far out of the Galactic core that is their usual stamping ground.

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

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

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

I forced a grin. “I’ve seen worse, marine. Anyhow you’ve given the wetbacks something to do when we’ve gone.”

“Yes, sir….”

What you definitively don’t want at such moments is a visit from the brass. Which, of course, is what we got.

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

I stood up, brushing vomit off my suit. I could see how the troops were tensing up. But I couldn’t have stopped an admiral; this was his flag.

They reached my station just as the destination planet, at last, swam into view.

We grunts knew it only by a number. That eerie sun was too dim to cast much light, and despite low-orbiting sunsats much of the land and sea was dark velvet. But great orange rivers of fire coursed across the black ground. This was a suffering world.

Admiral Kard was watching me. “Lieutenant Neer. Correct?”

“Sir.”

“Welcome to Shade,” he said evenly. “You know the setup here. The Expansion reached this region five hundred years ago. We haven’t been much in contact since. But when our people down there called for help, the Navy responded.” He had cold artificial Eyes, and I sensed he was testing me.

“We’re ready to drop, sir.”

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

Admiral Kard eyed me. “You must forgive Commissary Xera. She does think of the universe as a textbook.”

He was rewarded for that with a glare.

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

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

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

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

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

I frowned. “What’s a frozen star? ”

The Commissary made to answer, but Kard cut across her. “Skip the science. Those Xeelee units are swarming like rats. We don’t know why the Xeelee are here. But we do know what they are doing to this human world.”

“That’s not proven,” Xera snapped.

Despite that caveat I could see my people stir. None of us had ever heard of a direct attack by the Xeelee on human positions.

Lian said boldly, “Admiral, sir—”

“Yes, rating?”

“Does that mean we are at war?”

Admiral Kard sniffed up a lungful of ozone-laden air. “After today, perhaps we will be. How does that make you feel, rating?”

Lian, and the others, looked to me for guidance.

I looked into my heart.

Across seven thousand years humans had spread out in a great swarm through the galaxy, even spreading out into the halo beyond the main disc, overwhelming and assimilating other life forms as we encountered them. We had faced no opponent capable of systematic resistance since the collapse of the Silver Ghosts five thousand years before—none but the Xeelee, the galaxy’s other great power, who sat in their great concentrations at the core, silent, aloof. For my whole life, and for centuries before, all of mankind had been united in a single purpose: to confront the Xeelee, and claim our rightful dominion.

And now—perhaps—here I was at the start of it all.

What I felt was awe. Fear, maybe. But that wasn’t what the moment required. “I’ll tell you what I feel, sir. Relief. Bring them on! ”

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

Then there was a flare of plasma around the blister, and the ride got a lot bumpier. I sat before I was thrown down, and the loadmaster hustled away the brass.

“Going in hard,” called the loadmaster. “Barf bags at the ready. Ten minutes.”

We were skimming under high, thin, icy clouds. The world had become a landscape of burning mountains and rivers of rock that fled beneath me.

All this in an eerie silence, broken only by the shallow breaths of the marines.

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

Somewhere down there, amid the bleating locals, there was an academician called Tilo, dropped by the Navy a couple of standard days earlier, part of a global network who had been gathering data on the causes of the volcanism. Tilo’s job, bluntly, had been to prove that it was all the Xeelee’s fault. The academician had somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear; I was to find and retrieve him. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I thought; the Commissaries were famously suspicious of the alliance between the Navy and the Academies—

Green lights marked out the hatch in the invisible wall.

The loadmaster came along the line. “Stand up! Stand up!” The marines complied clumsily.

“Thirty seconds,” the loadmaster told me. He was a burly, scarred veteran, attached to a rail by an umbilical as thick as my arm. “Winds look good.”

“Thank you.”

“You guys be careful down there. All clear aft. Ten seconds. Five.” The green lights began to blink. We pulled our flexible visors across our faces. “Three, two—”

The hatch dilated, and the sudden roar of the wind made all this real.

The loadmaster was standing by the hatch, screaming. “Go, go, go!” As the marines passed I checked each static line one last time with a sharp tug, before they jumped into blackness. The kid, Lian, was the second last to go—and I was the last of all.

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

The static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit’s Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock can be hurtful, but to me, after maybe fifty drops in anger, it came as a relief.

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

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

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

The Commission’s maps had shown a standard-issue Conurbation surrounded by broad, shining replicator fields, where the ground’s organic matter was processed seamlessly into food. But the view now was quite different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of a Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it.

You expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of everything.

Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. I could see the squat cone shape of a heavy-lift shuttle, dropped here on the Spline’s last pass through the atmosphere, ready to lift the population. My marines were heading for the Conurbation, just as they should.

But I had a problem, I saw now. There was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller, stranded half way up the flank of the mountain. Another village?

I’m not sentimental. You do what you can, what’s possible. I wouldn’t have gone after that isolated handful—if not for the fact that a pale pink light blinked steadily at me.

It was Tilo’s beacon. Kard had made it clear enough that unless I came home with the academician, or at least with his data, next time I made a drop it would be without a Yukawa suit.

I slowed my fall and barked out orders. It was a simple mission; I knew my people would be able to supervise the evacuation of the main township without me. Then I turned and continued my descent, down toward the smaller community.

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

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

Then the barely visible ground raced up to meet me. Feet together, knees bent, back straight, roll when you hit—and then a breath-stealing impact on hard rock.

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

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

Lian was standing there, her suit glowing softly. “Good landing, sir,” she said.

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

The sky was deep. Beyond clouds of ash, sunsats swam. Past them I glimpsed the red pinprick of the true sun, and the wraith-like galaxy disc beyond.

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

On this side of the valley, the village was just a huddle of huts—some of them made from wood—clustered on the lower slopes of the mountain. Bigger buildings might have been a school, a medical center. There were a couple of battered ground transports. Beyond, I glimpsed the rectangular shapes of fields—apparently plowed, not a glimmer of replicator technology in sight, mostly covered in ash.

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

Lian stood close to me. “Sir, I don’t understand.”

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

“Dark matter.” The new voice was harsh, damaged by smoke; I turned, startled.

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

I said, “You’re the academician.”

“Yes, I’m Tilo.”

“We’re here to get you out.”

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

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

“Are you in charge here?”

“I—” She smiled. “Yes, if you like. Will you help us get out of here?”

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

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

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

“Academician, why are you here?”

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

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

“I brought my pickup beacon,” he said smugly.

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

“But I don’t think there will be time—”

I ignored her. “Academician, can you walk?”

Tilo laughed. “No. And you can’t hear the mountain.”

That was when Mount Perfect exploded.

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

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

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

But that was only the start, for the removal of all that weight was like opening a pressurized can. The mountain erupted—not upward, but sideways, like the blast of an immense weapon, a volley of superheated gas and pulverized rock. It quickly overtook the landslide, and I saw it roll over trees—imports from distant Earth, great vegetable sentinels centuries old, flattened like straws.

I was stupefied by the scale of it all.

Now, from out of the ripped-open side of the mountain, a chthonic blood oozed, yellow-gray, viscous, steaming hot. It began to flow down the mountainside, spilling into rain-cut valleys.

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

“So it’s just mud,” said Lian uncertainly.

“You aren’t an earthworm, are you, marine?”

“Look at the logging camp,” Doel murmured, pointing.

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

For the first time I began to consider the contingency that we might not get out of here. In which case my primary mission was to preserve Tilo’s data.

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

“Tell me about dark matter,” I said. “Quickly.”

Tilo pointed up at the sky. “That star—the natural sun, the dwarf—shouldn’t exist.”

“What?”

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

Impatiently I snapped, “And the point—”

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

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

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

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

“The matter we’re made of—baryonic matter, protons and neutrons and the rest—is only about a tenth the universe’s total. The rest is dark matter: subject only to gravity and the weak nuclear force, impervious to electromagnetism. Dark matter came out of the Big Bang, just like the baryonic stuff. As our galaxy coalesced the dark matter was squeezed out of the disc…. But this is the domain of dark matter, Lieu tenant. Out here in the halo.”

“And this stuff can affect the ageing of stars.”

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

“You said an agent was ageing the stars.” I thought that over. “You make it sound intentional.”

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

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

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

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

He eyed me carefully. “The admiral is part of a—grouping—within the Navy that is keen to go to war, even to provoke conflict. Some call them extremists. Kard’s actions have to be seen in this light.”

Actually, I’d heard such rumors, but I stiffened. “He’s my commanding officer. That’s all that matters.”

Tilo sighed. “Mine too, in a sense. But—”

“Lethe,” Lian said suddenly. “Sorry, sir. But that mud is moving fast.”

So it was, I saw.

The flow was shaped by the morphology of the valley, but its front was tens of meters high, and it would soon reach the village. And I could see that the gush out of the mountain’s side showed no signs of abating. The mud was evidently powerfully corrosive; the land’s green coat was ripped away to reveal bare rock, and the mud was visibly eating away at the walls of the valley itself. I saw soil and rock collapse into the flow. Overlaying the crack of tree trunks and the clatter of rock, there was a noise like the feet of a vast running crowd, and a sour, sulphurous smell hit me.

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

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

“We can still get you out of here. With these suits we can get you over that bridge and to the transport—”

“What about the villagers?”

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

“We have mixed objectives,” I said weakly.

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

Lian said, “Sir?”

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

“Lethe, Lethe.” I ran down the ridge until I hit the mud.

Even with the suit’s augmentation the mud was difficult stuff to wade through—lukewarm, and with a consistency like wet cement. The stench was bad enough for me to pull my visor over my mouth. On the mud’s surface were dead fish that must have jumped out of the river to escape the heat. There was a lot of debris in the flow, from dust to pebbles to small boulders: no wonder it was so abrasive.

By the time I reached the little cottage I was already tiring badly.

The woman was bigger, obviously stronger than the man. I had her take her infant over her head, while I slung the man over my shoulder. With me leading, and the woman grabbing onto my belt, we waded back toward the higher ground.

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

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

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

I forced myself to my feet. I picked out a building—not the largest, not the highest, but a good compromise. “That one. We’ll get them onto the roof. I’ll call for another pickup.”

“Sir, but what if the mud keeps rising?”

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

She was crestfallen, but she ran to help as Doel improvised a ladder from a trellis fence.

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

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

I reached the woman in the trees and pulled her out. The other was gone.

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

I’d never met that woman. It was as if I had become part of this little community, all against my will, as we huddled together on that crudely built wooden roof. Not to mention the fact that I now wouldn’t be able to fulfill my orders completely.

The loss was visceral. I prepared to plunge back into the flow.

Tilo grabbed my arm. “No. You are exhausted. Anyhow you have a call to make, remember?”

Lian spoke up. “Sir. Let me go,” she said awkwardly, “I can manage that much.”

Redemption time for this marine. “Don’t kill yourself,” I told her.

With a grin she slid off the roof.

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

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

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

Kard glared at me. “What a mess, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

Kard closed his Eyes, and his image flickered; I imagined Tilo’s data and interpretations pouring into the processors that sustained this semiautonomous Virtual image, tightly locked into Kard’s original sensorium. Kard said, “Lousy prioritization. Too much about this dark matter crud, Academician.”

Xera said gently, “You were here on assignment from your masters in the Navy, with a specific purpose. But it’s hard to close your eyes to the clamoring truth, isn’t it, Academician?”

Tilo sighed, his face mud-covered.

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

I understood immediately what he meant. I felt a deep thrill. Even the locals stirred, apparently aware that something momentous was about to happen, even in the midst of their own misfortunes, stuck as we were on that battered wooden roof.

So it began.

At first Tilo wasn’t helpful.

“It isn’t clear that this is Xeelee action, deliberately directed against humans.” Despite Kard’s glare, he persisted, “I’m sorry, Admiral, but it isn’t clear. Look at the context.” He pulled up historical material—images, text that scrolled briefly in the murky air. “This is not a new story. There is evidence that human scientists were aware of dark-matter contamination of the stars before the beginning of the Third Expansion. It seems an engineered human being was sent into Sol itself…. An audacious project. But this was largely lost in the Qax Extirpation, and after that—well, we had a galaxy to conquer. There was a later incident, a project run by the Silver Ghosts, but—”

Kard snapped, “What do the Xeelee care about dark matter?”

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

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

“Admiral—”

“This isn’t a trial, Tilo,” Kard said. “We don’t need absolute proof. The imagery—human refugees, Xeelee night- fighters swooping overhead—will be all we need.”

Xera said dryly, “Yes. All we need to sell a war to the Coalition, the governing councils, and the people of the Expansion. This is wonderful for you, isn’t it, Admiral? It’s what the Navy has been waiting for, along with its Academy cronies. An excuse to attack.”

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

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

Kard glared. “We all have something to gain.”

And they began to talk, rapidly, about how the different agencies of the Coalition would position themselves in the event of a war.

The military arms, like the Pilots and the Communicators, would naturally ally with the Navy, and would benefit from an increase in military spending. Academic arms like the great Libraries on Earth would be refocused; there was thought to be a danger that with their monopoly on information they were becoming too powerful. Even the Guardians—the Expansion’s internal police force—would find a new role: the slowly rising tide of petty crime and illegal economic operations would surely reverse, and the Guardians could return to supporting the Commission in the policing of adherence to the Druz Doctrine—not to mention enforcing the draft.

A lot of this went over my head. I got the sense of the great agencies as shadowy independent empires, engaging in obscure and shifting alliances—like the current links between Navy and Academies, designed to counter the Commission’s intellectual weight. And now each agency would consider the possibility of a war as an opportunity to gain political capital.

It was queasy listening. But there’s a lot I didn’t want to know about how the Coalition is run. Still don’t, in fact.

“…And then there is the economic argument,” Kard was saying. “It is as if the Third Expansion itself is a war, an endless war against whoever stands in our way. Our economy is on a permanent war-time footing. Let there be no mistake—we could not coexist with the Xeelee, for they would forever represent a ceiling to our ambitions, a ceiling under which we would ultimately wither. We need continued growth—and so a confrontation with the Xeelee is ultimately inevitable.” He leaned forward. “And there is more. Xera, think how much the Commission itself stands to benefit.

“You Commissaries are responsible for maintaining the unity of mankind; the common principles, common purpose, the belief that has driven the Expansion so far. But isn’t it obvious that you are failing? Look at this place.” He waved a Virtual hand through Doel’s hair; the woman flinched, and the hand broke up into drifting pixels. “This woman is a mother, apparently some kind of matriarch to her extended family. It’s as if Hama Druz never existed.

“If the Druz Doctrine were to collapse, the Commission would have no purpose. Think of the good you do, for you know so much better than the mass of mankind how they should think, feel, live, and die. Your project is humanitarian! And it has to continue. We need a purification. An ideological cleansing. And that’s what the bright fire of war will give us.”

I could see that his arguments, aimed at the Commissary’s vanity and self-interest, were leaving a mark.

Tilo was still trying to speak. He showed me more bits of evidence he had assembled on his data desk. “I think I know now why the volcanism started here. This planet has an unusually high dark matter concentration in its core. Under such densities the dark matter annihilates with ordinary matter and creates heat—”

I listened absently. “Which creates the geological upheaval.”

He closed his eyes, thinking. “Here’s a scenario. The Xeelee have been driving dark matter creatures out of the frozen star—and, fleeing, they have lodged here—and that’s what set off the volcanism. It was all inadvertent. The Xeelee are trying to save stars, not harm humans….”

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

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

Those ragged-ass, dirt-scratching, orthodoxy-busting farmers hesitated for a heartbeat. You couldn’t have found a less likely bunch of soldiers for the Expansion.

But, would you believe, they started cheering the admiral: every one of them, even the kids. Lethe, it brought a tear to my eye.

Even Xera seemed coldly excited now.

Kard closed his Eyes; metal seams pushed his eyelids into ridges. “A handful of people in this desolate, remote place. And yet a new epoch is born. They are listening to us, you know—listening in the halls of history. And we will be remembered forever.”

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

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

When the sunsats returned to the sky, the valley was transformed. The channels had been gouged sharp and deep by the lahar, and the formerly agricultural plain had been smothered by lifeless gray mud, from which only occasional trees and buildings protruded.

But the lahar was flowing only sluggishly. Lian cautiously climbed to the edge of the roof and probed at the mud with her booted foot. “It’s very thick.”

Tilo said, “Probably the water has drained out of it.”

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

So it was, when I tried it myself.

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

As we lifted, Mount Perfect loosed another eruption.

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

“I guess.”

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

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

I went down to the sick bay, and watched Lian tending to the young from the village. She was patient, competent, calm. I had relieved her of her regular duties, as she was one of the few faces here that was familiar to the kids, who were pretty traumatized. I felt proud of that young marine. She had grown up a lot during our time on Shade.

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

To tell the truth I was bored with Tilo and his niggling. War! It was magnificent. It was inevitable.

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

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

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

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