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  To Nilis, Gramm said uncomfortably, “This is Luru Parz, Commissary. My … ah … consultant.”

  Pirius had absolutely no idea who this woman was or what she wanted, and it baffled him that Gramm didn’t even seem to want her here.

  But there was no time to think about that, for now Gramm was looming over Torec. “What an exotic little creature. The color of her uniform—the texture of her flesh—why, she’s like a little toy.” He reached out and laid his fat fingers on her shoulder.

  Torec endured this, expressionless. But when his hand slid down her shoulder to her breast, she grabbed his finger and bent it back.

  He recoiled, clutching his hand to his crotch. “Lethe. I think she broke it!”

  Luru Parz was laughing. “No, she didn’t. You deserved that, you fat fool.”

  Gramm glared up at Nilis. “I’ll hold you responsible, Commissary.”

  Nilis was trembling with anger, Pirius saw. “Well, you have that right, sir. But I point out that it is exotic little creatures like these who are fighting and dying on our behalf, even as we speak, right across the Front. It has been difficult enough for me to persuade these two that Earth is more than a cesspit of decadence. They certainly deserve more respect than to be treated as playthings, even by a Minister.”

  Luru Parz opened her mouth to laugh louder. Her teeth were quite black, Pirius saw. “He has you there, Gramm!”

  Gramm glared at her. “Shut up, Luru; sometimes you go too far.”

  The slim woman, Pila, watched all this with an air of detachment. “If the pleasantries are over, shall we start?”

  Still cradling his hand, Gramm slumped in a chair. “Let’s get it over.”

  Nilis bustled to the head of the room with his bot.

  Pirius and Torec cautiously took their seats as far from the others as possible. Luru Parz sat, too, but Pirius saw that her Virtual wasn’t perfect, and she seemed to hover above her chair.

  A servant appeared—not a bot, Pirius saw, wondering, a human servant—with drinks and a tray of some kind of hot, spicy food, which he set before the Minister. Gramm pushed the fingers of his uninjured hand into the food and began to eat steadily.

  A glass of water, Virtually generated, materialized before Luru Parz, and she picked it up and sipped it gently. She saw the ensigns staring at her, and she smiled. “Here on Earth, children, there is even an etiquette for dealing with a Virtual guest. High culture, you see. Isn’t that something worth fighting for?”

  Nilis was ready to make his presentation. “Minister, Madam Parz, Madam Pila, Ensigns—”

  Gramm growled, “Get on with it, Nilis, you bumbling idiot.” The servant discreetly wiped grease from his mouth.

  Nilis pointed dramatically at Pirius. “I brought these child soldiers back from the Front for two reasons. First they symbolize our endless war. All across the Front, bright young people are fighting—and dying in hordes. And it has been that way for three thousand years.”

  Gramm asked, “Is this to be one of your interminable moral lectures, Nilis?”

  Nilis said urgently, “Moral, you say? Don’t we at least have a moral responsibility to try to curtail this endless waste? Wouldn’t that be moral? And that’s the second reason I brought these two home. Because this one, Pirius, will—or would have, in an earlier timeline draft—would have found a new way to strike at the Xeelee. You can see the results in the derelict I brought home to Saturn. Minister, Pilot Officer Pirius showed that we can think differently about the war, even after all this time.”

  “Tell me what you’re proposing, Commissary.” The Minister sounded languidly bored.

  Nilis snapped his fingers. His bot unfolded a white screen, and produced a clutch of styluses with a kind of flourish. And above its hide, a Virtual of the Galaxy coalesced. The central bulge was bright enough to cast shadows on the polished surface of the conference table, and its paper-thin disc sparkled with supernova jewels.

  “Here is the Galaxy, with its four hundred billion stars,” Nilis said. “I have consulted the archives of the Navy, the Green Army, and other military groups. And here are their current targets for military action.” He snapped his fingers again. A series of bright green specks lit up across the Galaxy’s image. “You can see there are still a few in the disc—pockets of resistance we’ve yet to clear out—and more in the halo, beyond the range of this image. But the main action is of course at the Front.” This was a sphere, emerald green, embedded in the Galaxy’s central bulge. “It’s an impressive disposition, the culmination of a grand military ambition. But our strategy is missing one crucial element.”

  A new Virtual coalesced in the air, before the Galaxy image. It was another spiral, looking like a cartoon version of the star city behind it.

  Pirius recognized it immediately. “That’s the Baby Spiral,” he said. “It’s inside the Front—the system at the very center of the Galaxy.”

  Nilis said, “Quite right, Ensign. But look here …” The image magnified, until the center of the Baby Spiral loomed large and bright, and its crowded arms feathered off into the surrounding darkness. Nilis pointed to an unassuming speck of white light, just off-center from the spiral’s geometric heart. “Ensign Pirius, can you tell us what that is?”

  “That’s Chandra. Sir, the Xeelee’s Galactic Prime Radiant is based at the three-million-stellar-mass black hole at the center of the Galaxy. The Xeelee seem to use it as their operational command post.”

  Nilis nodded. “Good, good.”

  “Yes,” said Luru Parz. “And a summary appropriately hedged with qualifications.”

  Gramm glared at her. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Seem to use it for this and that—Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, Minister, that after three thousand years of siege warfare around this Prime Radiant, we know so little about it, and indeed about our foe?”

  Gramm turned away from her. “Make your point, Commissary.”

  Nilis said, “My point is this.” He pointed dramatically to the display. “The Prime Radiant is surrounded by military targets, as you can see. But the Prime Radiant itself is not a target.” He looked at their faces, waiting for comprehension to dawn.

  “And,” Gramm said around a mouthful of food, “you’re saying it should be.”

  “Of course it should! The Prime Radiant is properly named, for it is in a real sense the source of the Xeelee presence in our Galaxy. And if we could strike at it—” He snapped his fingers again. Suddenly the center of the Baby Spiral glowed emerald green, and one by one the other lights went out. “Minister, take out the source, and all these other targets, which are downstream of it in a logical sense, are essentially taken out too. Why, it’s a question of economics. If you shut down the factory, you are saved the expense of picking off its products, one by one. Take out the power plant—”

  “Yes, yes. Get on with it, man.”

  “This, sir, is how I believe we should be fighting this war. What I’m asking for is the initiation of a new project. Its ultimate goal will be specific: the destruction of the Xeelee Prime Radiant.”

  Through the fog of his verbiage, Nilis’s meaning suddenly became clear. Pirius felt a deep thrill run through him. To strike at the Prime Radiant itself!

  The meeting was continuing. Pirius tried to focus.

  Gramm picked his teeth. “What a wonderful imagination you must have, Commissary. But is that all you have?”

  “Minister—”

  “Do you imagine that in the long millennia of this war that nobody has come up with such an obvious tactic? Don’t you suppose that if it were ever possible it would have been done by now?”

  “But if you won’t even think it through—”

  Unexpectedly Gramm turned to Pirius. “Why don’t you take the floor, Ensign?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re the hero of the hour. You downed a Xeelee; that’s why you’re here. Why don’t you explain to us why the Commissary’s suggestions are a fantasy? If I asked you t
o take out the Prime Radiant, how would you respond?”

  Pirius stayed where he was, uncertain and embarrassed. But Nilis shrugged and sat down.

  So Pirius stood up, walked to the front of the room, and thought for a moment. He waved his hand to banish Nilis’s expensive Virtual displays, leaving only the whiteboard, and he picked up a stylus. With an apologetic glance at Nilis, he drew a red asterisk at the right hand side of the board. “Sir, I believe there are three fundamental problems. First, even if we could get through the Xeelee defenses in the region of Chandra”—he tapped the asterisk—“we don’t have any weapons that can strike at a black hole, and whatever the Xeelee are doing with it.”

  “Of course not,” said Luru Parz. “How could we, since we’ve put no effort into finding out what the Prime Radiant actually is? … Go on, Ensign.”

  Pirius drew a red circle around the asterisk. “Second problem. We can’t get through to Chandra anyhow, because if we could get close enough to engage the Xeelee’s inner defensive cordon, they would surely outfly us, outthink us. Their equipment is better than ours. Most important, their computing capability is superior.

  “And third”—Pirius drew a dotted line reaching back to the left of the asterisk, and cut it through with a vertical line—“we can’t even get that close, because of FTL foreknowledge. The Xeelee would see us coming, and shoot us down before we left our bases.” He hesitated, looked at his sketch, and sat down.

  He won an ironic slow clap from Gramm. “Admirably summarized.” The Minister raised an eyebrow at the Commissary. “Nilis? I hope you won’t claim now that you have a solution to all these problems?”

  “No, sir. Not all of them. But, thanks to Pirius and his companions, I can solve one.” He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a stylus and tapped at the red circle Pirius had drawn around the Prime Radiant. “We may have a way to beat Xeelee processing power. It’s uncertain—Pirius Blue and his colleagues improvised it in the middle of combat—but we can take the concept, and build on it. Minister, we can outthink the Xeelee. I know that’s true, because we’ve done it once already. And if one of these ancient obstacles can at least in principle be overcome, then perhaps we can defeat the rest. Suddenly we see a chink of light; suddenly we have hope.”

  Luru Parz was nodding. “Yes, yes. It was this strange news from the Front which drew my attention, too. A new hope.” And that was why she had forced her way into this meeting, Pirius saw, apparently over the objections of a Minister. Whoever this strange woman was, she had power—and her ambition seemed to be a mirror of Nilis’s.

  Gramm glared at Nilis. “And that’s all you have to say? This is the case you’re going to make? Can you not see, Commissary, how you will make an enemy of almost everybody in authority if you go around claiming that better minds than yours have, for millennia, been pursuing the wrong targets—with the wrong weapons, too?”

  Pirius saw that Nilis was struggling to control his anger. “Those ‘better minds’ have been locked into a rigidity of thinking for all those long millennia, Minister.”

  “Don’t go too far, Commissary,” Gramm said.

  Nilis dismissed that with a wave. “I’m well aware that it wouldn’t be your decision alone, Minister, so let’s not play games. All I want at the beginning is seed-corn funding, enough to get us to proof-of-concept of the pilots’ new closed-timelike-curve computing paradigm. When that’s successfully demonstrated, we can move to the next stage, and ask for further funding to be released, stepwise. The political and financial control of the Coalition and the relevant Ministry over every stage of the project would be absolute—”

  “You can bet your life it would,” Gramm shouted.

  “Ask for more,” Luru Parz said immediately.

  Nilis looked confused.

  “Ask for more,” she said again. “We work in ignorance. We’ve seen that today. We have to start a new program of inquiry; we have to understand our enemy, at last. We can begin with your captive Xeelee, Commissary. But we have to find out more about them—especially their Prime Radiant—if we are to defeat them.”

  Nilis had no choice but to nod. “You’re right, of course.”

  Luru pressed Gramm. “Minister, these requests are undeniably reasonable—and politically, will be hard to refuse. After all, Nilis and his heroes and his captive Xeelee have made a real stir here on Earth. If there was no follow-up, questions would surely be asked. Even under the Coalition, public opinion counts for something.”

  Gramm grunted. “The power of the mob. Which the Commissary no doubt intended to stir up when he marched his two pet soldiers through the streets of the Conurbation.”

  Pirius glanced at Nilis. Could it be true that Nilis had been so manipulative as to use them to further his own ends in such a way? There was much of the doings of Earth he had yet to understand.

  But he had listened to this meeting unfold with increasing irritation. He felt bold enough to speak again. “Minister, Commissary—I’m sorry—I don’t understand all this talk of control and caution and stepwise funding. Isn’t winning the war what this is all about? Why don’t we just do this?”

  Gramm raised his eyebrows. “Bravely spoken,” he said with quiet menace. “But no matter what gossip you’ve heard in your barracks at the Front, we don’t have infinite resources, Ensign. We can’t do everything.”

  “But it’s not just that,” said Luru Parz. “Ensign, my dear child, how sweetly naive you are—but I suppose you have to be or you wouldn’t be prepared to fight in the first place. Is winning the war really what we want to achieve? What would Minister Gramm do all day if there were no more need for a Minister of Economic Warfare? I’m not sure our system of government could withstand the shock of victory.”

  Gramm glared at Luru Parz, but didn’t challenge her.

  Recklessly Pirius said to Gramm, “I don’t care about any of that. We have to try to win the war. It’s our duty, sir.”

  Gramm looked at him, surprised, then threw his head back and laughed out loud, spraying bits of food into the air. “You dare lecture a Minister on duty? Lethe, this pet of yours has spirit, Commissary!”

  “But he’s right,” Nilis said, shaking his shaven head gravely.

  Luru pressed again, “So he is. You have to support this, Minister.”

  Gramm growled, “And I will be flayed in Conclave for it. I would have thought you would be the most conservative of all of us, Luru Parz.”

  She smiled. “I am conservative—very conservative. I just work on timescales you can’t imagine.”

  Gramm actually shuddered, hugely. Again Pirius wondered who this woman was, what hold she had.

  Pila, Gramm’s elegant advisor, watched this wordlessly, her lips upturned with disdainful humor. Throughout the whole of the meeting, as far as Pirius could remember, she hadn’t said a single word.

  When the meeting broke up, Nilis came to the ensigns, his eyes shining. “Thank you, thank you. I knew my hunch was right, to bring you here—you have made all the difference! Project Prime Radiant—that’s what we’ll call it—Project Prime Radiant was born today. And the way you spoke back to the Minister—I will be dining out on that for years to come!”

  Torec glared at Pirius, who said dolefully, “Yes, sir.”

  “And now we have work to do, a great deal of work. The Minister has given us seven weeks to report—not long, not even reasonable, but it will have to do. Are you with me, Ensigns?”

  Pirius studied this flawed old man, a man who had dragged him from his training, from his life, had hauled him across the Galaxy and then paraded him to further his own ends—and yet, flawed though he might be, Nilis was working for victory. Pirius could see no higher duty. “Yes, sir.”

  Nilis turned to Torec. “And you won’t worry about being turned out of your job, when we win the Galaxy?”

  Torec smiled. “No, sir. There are always more galaxies.” Her tone was bright, her smile vivid.

  But Pirius saw Nilis pale at her words.

&
nbsp; Chapter 10

  On Quin Base you lived inside the Rock.

  Once, this Rock had been nothing but a lumpy conglomerate of friable ice and dirt. Now it had been hollowed out and strengthened by an internal skeleton of pillars of fused and hardened stone.

  The Rock’s inner architecture was layered. You spent most of your off-duty time in big, sprawling chambers just under the surface. Here you ate, slept, fornicated, and, perhaps, died. Beneath the habitable quarters was another layer of chambers, not all pressurized, with air and water purifiers, and the nano-food bays which processed rivers of grunt sewage. Right at the heart of the Rock were more essential systems yet: weapons shops and stores, a dry dock area for small craft.

  But Pirius Blue and his crew spent most of their time on the surface. As Service Corps recruits, their job would be to support infantry in combat conditions. And so their training began with basic infantry work.

  Which turned out to be very basic indeed.

  Under Captain Marta’s watchful glare, in squads of a hundred or more, skinsuited cadets were put through hours of parade drill. Then there was the physical work: they bent, jumped, lifted, wrestled, endured endless route marches.

  And they ran and ran and ran, endless laps of the trampled crater rim that seemed to be Marta’s favored form of torture.

  Cohl, gasping, complained to Pirius. “You’d train a rat like this.”

  Pirius forced a laugh. “If they could teach a rat to hold a spade you wouldn’t need infantry grunts at all—”

  “No talking!”

  And off they ran again, glued to the asteroid dirt by their inertial belts.

  It seemed as if every cadet on this Rock was younger than the Navy crew, save only This Burden Must Pass; every one of them was fitter, including Burden. It was galling that the Claw crew came last or near last in every exercise they were put through, and had more work inflicted on them as “punishment.” The younger ones with their hard little bodies actually seemed to relish the sheer physical joy of it.