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?’