When the sunsats returned to the sky, the valley was transformed. The channels had been gouged sharp and deep by the lahar, and the farms had been smothered by lifeless grey mud, from which only occasional trees and buildings protruded. But the lahar was flowing only sluggishly now.
Lian cautiously climbed to the edge of the roof and probed at the mud with her booted foot. ‘It’s very dense.’
Tilo said, ‘Probably the water has drained out of it.’
Lian couldn’t stand on the mud, but if she lay on it she didn’t sink. She flapped her arms and kicked, and she skidded over the surface. Her face grey with the dirt, she laughed like a child. ‘Sir, look at me! It’s a lot easier than trying to swim or wade …’
So it was, when I tried it myself.
And that was how we got the villagers across the flooded valley, one by one, to the larger Conurbation - not that much was left of that by now - where the big transport waited to take us off. In the end we lost only one of the villagers, the young woman who had been overwhelmed by the surge. I tried to accept that I’d done my best to fulfil my contradictory mission objectives - and that, in the end, was the most important outcome for me.
As we lifted, Mount Perfect loosed another eruption.
Tilo, cocooned in a med cloak, stood beside me in an observation blister, watching the planet’s mindless fury. He said, ‘You know, you can’t stop a lahar. It just goes the way it wants to go. Like this war, it seems.’
‘I guess.’
‘We humans understand so little. We see so little. But when you add us together we combine into huge historical forces that none of us can deflect, any more than you can dam or divert a mighty lahar …’
And so on. I made an excuse and left him there.
I went down to the sick bay, and watched Lian tending to the young from the village. I had relieved her of her regular duties, as she was one of the few faces on board that was familiar to the traumatised kids, so she was useful here. With the children now she was patient, competent, calm. I felt proud of that young marine; she had grown up a lot during our time on Shade.
And as I watched her simple humanity, I imagined a trillion such acts, linking past and future, history and destiny, a great tapestry of hard work and goodwill that united mankind into a mighty host that would some day rule a Galaxy.
To tell the truth I was bored with Tilo and his niggling. War! It was magnificent. It was inevitable. I didn’t understand what had happened down on Shade, and I didn’t care. What did it matter how the war had started, in truth or lies? We would soon forget about dark matter and the Xeelee’s obscure, immense projects, just as we had before; we humans didn’t think in such terms. All that mattered was that the war was here, at last.
The oddest thing was that none of it had anything to do with the Xeelee themselves. We needed a war. Any enemy would have served our purposes just as well.
I began to wonder what it would mean for me. I felt my heart beat faster, like a drumbeat.
We flew into a rising cloud of ash, and bits of rock clattered against our hull, frightening the children.
Yes, war was inevitable. Too many wanted it too badly. But it did strike me as ironic that the triggering incident was a Xeelee action concerned with a different war entirely, a war in which we were always bystanders - a war which would one day overwhelm all of us.
With the final conflict begun at last, the Galaxy-spanning civilisation of mankind underwent a drastic reconfiguration. For millennia, under the Coalition, it had been a machine for expansion and conquest. Now it became a machine of war.
Humanity resplendent. We undying hid away, waiting for the storm to pass.
And human hearts, evolved for a long-forgotten savannah, had to adapt to the dilemmas of interstellar battlefields.
PART FOUR
RESPLENDENT
THE CHOP LINE
AD 20,424
I
We’d had no warning of the wounded Spline ship’s return to Base 592, in the heart of the Galaxy.
Return: if you could call it that. But this was before I understood that every faster-than-light spaceship is also a time machine. That kind of puzzling would come later. For now, I just had my duty to perform.
As it happened we were off the Base at the time, putting the Admiral Kard through its paces after a refit and bedding in a new crew. Kard is a corvette: a small, mobile yacht intended for close-in sublight operations. I was twenty years old, still an ensign, assigned for that jaunt as an assistant to Exec Officer Baras. My first time on a bridge, it was quite an experience, and I was glad of the company of Tarco, an old cadre sibling, even if he was a male and a lard bucket. In cold Galaxy-centre light we had just run through a tough sequence of speed runs, emergency turns, full backdown, instrument checks, fire and damage control.
It was thanks to our fortuitous station on the bridge that Tarco and I were among the first to see the injured ship as it downfolded out of hyperspace. It was a Navy ship - a Spline, of course, a living ship, like a great meaty eyeball. It just appeared out of nowhere. We were close enough to see the green tetrahedral sigil etched into its flesh. But you couldn’t miss the smoking ruins of the weapons emplacements, and a great open rent in the hull, thick with coagulated blood. A swarm of lesser lights, huddling close, looked like escape pods.
The whole bridge crew fell silent.
‘Lethe,’ Tarco whispered. ‘Where did that come from?’ We didn’t know of any action underway at the time.
But we had no time to debate it.
Captain Iana’s voice sounded around the corvette. ‘That ship is the Assimilator’s Torch,’ he announced. ‘She’s requesting help. You can all see her situation. Stand by your stations.’ He began to snap out brisk orders to his heads of department.
Well, we scrambled immediately. But Tarco’s big moon-shaped face was creased by a look I didn’t recognise.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I heard that name before. Assimilator’s Torch. She’s due to arrive here at Base 592 next year.’
‘Then it’s a little early. So what?’
He stared at me. ‘You don’t get it, buttface. I saw the manifest. The Torch is a newborn Spline. It hasn’t even left Earth.’
But the injured Spline looked decades old, at least. ‘You made a mistake. Buttface yourself.’
He didn’t rise to the bait. Still, that was the first indication I had that there was something very wrong here.
The Kard lifted away from its operational position, and I had a grand view of Base 592, the planet on which we were stationed. From space it is a beautiful sight, a slow-spinning sphere of black volcanic rock peppered with the silver-grey of shipyards, so huge they are like great gleaming impact craters. There are even artificial oceans, glimmering blue, for the benefit of Spline vessels, who swim there between missions.
592 has a crucial strategic position, for it floats on the fringe of the 3-Kiloparsec Spiral Arm that surrounds the Galaxy’s Core, and the Xeelee concentrations there. Here, some ten thousand light years from Earth, was as deep as the Third Expansion of mankind had yet penetrated into the central regions of the main disc. 592 was a fun assignment. We were on the front line, and we knew it. It made for an atmosphere you might call frenetic. But now I could see ships lifting from all around the planet, rushing to the aid of the stricken vessel. It was a heart-warming, magnificent sight, humanity at its best.
As we approached the Spline, the Kard hummed like a well-tuned machine. Right now, all over the ship, I knew, the whole crew - officers and gunners, cooks and engineers and maintenance stiffs, experienced officers and half-trained rookies - everybody was getting ready to save human beings from the great void that had tried to kill them. It was what you did. I looked forward to playing my part.
Which was why I wasn’t too happy to hear the soft voice of Commissary Varcin behind me. ‘Ensign. Are you’ - he checked a list - ‘Dakk? I have a special assignment for you. Come with me.’ Varcin, gaunt and tall, served as the corvette’s political officer, as assigned to every ship of the line with a crew above a hundred. He had an expression I couldn’t read, a cold calculation.
Everybody is scared of the Commissaries, but this was not the time to be sucked into a time-wasting chore. ‘I take my orders from the exec. Sir.’ I looked to the Executive Officer.
Baras’s face was neutral. I knew about the ancient tension between Navy and Commission, but I also knew what Baras would say. ‘Do it, ensign. You’d better go too, Tarco.’
I had no choice, crisis or not. So we went hurrying after the Commissary.
Away from the spacious calm of the bridge, the corridors of the Kard were a clamour of motion and noise, people running every which way lugging equipment and stores, yelling orders and demanding help.
As we jogged I whispered to Tarco, ‘So where has this bucket come from? Where’s the action right now? SS 433?’
‘Not there,’ Tarco said. ‘Don’t you remember? At SS 433 we suffered no casualties.’
That was true. SS 433, a few hundred light years from 592, is a normal star in orbit around a massive neutron star; gravitationally squeezed, it emits high-energy jets of heavy elements - very useful. A month before, the Xeelee had shown up in an effort to wreck the human processing plants there. But thanks to smart intelligence by the Commission for Historical Truth they had been met by an overwhelming response. It had been a famous victory, the excuse for a lot of celebration.
If a little eerie. Sometimes the Commission’s knowledge of future events was so precise we used to wonder if they had spies among the Xeelee. Or a time machine, maybe. Scary, as I said. But there is a bigger picture here. After fifteen thousand years of the Third Expansion, and eight thousand years of all-out war with the Xeelee, humanity controls around a quarter of the disc of the Galaxy itself, a mighty empire centred on Sol, as well as some outlying territories in the halo clusters. But the Xeelee control the rest, including the Galaxy centre. And, gradually, the slow-burning war between man and Xeelee is intensifying.
So I was glad the Commissaries, with their apparent powers of prophecy, were on my side.
We descended a couple of decks and found ourselves in the corvette’s main loading bay. The big main doors had been opened to reveal a wall of burned and broken flesh. The stink was just overwhelming, and great lakes of yellow-green pus were gathering on the gleaming floor.
The wall was the hull of the injured Spline. The Kard had docked with the Assimilator’s Torch as best she could, and this was the result. The engineers were at work, cutting a usable opening in that wall. It was just a hole in the flesh, another wound. Beyond, a tunnel stretched, organic, less like a corridor than a throat.
I could see figures moving in the tunnel - Torch crew, presumably. Here came two of them labouring to support a third between them. Kard crew rushed forward to take the injured tar. I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she. That was how bad the burns were. Loops of flesh hung off limbs that were like twigs, and in places you could see down to bone, which itself had been blackened.
Tarco and I reacted somewhat badly to this sight. But already med cloaks were snuggling around the wounded tar, gentle as a lover’s caress.
I looked up at the Commissary, who was standing patiently. ‘Sir? Can you tell us why we are here?’
‘We received ident signals from the Torch when it downfolded. There’s somebody here who will want to meet you.’
‘Sir, who—’
‘It’s better if you see for yourself.’
One of the Torch crew approached us. She was a woman, I saw, about my height. There was no hiding the bloodstains and scorches and rips, or the way she limped; there was a wound in her upper thigh that actually smoked. But she had captain’s pips on her collar.
I felt I knew her face - that straight nose, the small chin - despite the dirt that covered her cheeks and neck, and the crust of blood that coated her forehead. She had her hair grown out long, with a ponytail at the back, quite unlike my regulation crew-cut. But - this was my first impression - her face seemed oddly reversed, as if she was a mirror image of what I was used to.
I immediately felt a deep, queasy unease.
I don’t know many captains, but she immediately recognised me. ‘Oh. It’s you.’
Tarco had become very tense. It turned out he had thought the situation through a little further than I had. ‘Commissary, what engagement has the Torch come from?’
‘The Fog.’
My mouth dropped. Every tar on Base 592 knew that the Fog is an interstellar cloud - and a major Xeelee concentration - situated inside 3-Kilo, a good hundred light years deeper towards the centre of the Galaxy. I said, ‘I didn’t know we were hitting the enemy so deep.’
‘We aren’t. Not yet.’
‘And,’ Tarco said tightly, ‘here we are greeting a battle-damaged ship that hasn’t even left Earth yet.’