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  It was a horrible frustrating mess. Soon Torec had come to hate the prototype, which developed into a baffling, mazelike complex of components that spread across the gray lunar dust. And she came to hate the techs in their expensive Ministry skinsuits, as they clambered over their equipment, prodding, tinkering, and arguing.

  What was worse was that Torec really didn’t care about any of this. This wasn’t her life, her goal; she didn’t want to be here. And when the techs picked up on that they began to ignore her altogether.

  She was here for Pirius, not for herself. That was the basic truth. As it happened, she had had feelings for Pirius, even before Nilis had shown up. She knew their relationship was special—though she wasn’t sure he understood it. But now things were different. She knew the situation wasn’t Pirius’s fault, but it was because of him.

  She hated the Moon, her work, the people she had to deal with. She was very confused about her feelings for Pirius. And what was worst of all was that he wasn’t here.

  When she came out of the shower, the Nilis Virtual was in the room.

  His face was bathed in the light of an invisible sun, but he wasn’t looking her way. He had been uncomfortable in her company since that row on the corvette. He said, “Another disappointment, then.”

  “Yes.”

  The Moon-Earth time lag was small, but enough to be disconcerting until you got used to it. “If only we could use wormholes!”

  “Commissary?”

  “I know you’ve taken to hiking over to the ruins of the old Qax exotic-matter facility. But do you know why the Qax set up that factory? Because you can use exotic matter to make wormholes, superluminal bridges between two points in space and time. If you configure it correctly, a wormhole can be a tunnel to the past. In fact it was a human wormhole time-bridge that started our trouble with the Qax in the first place.”

  Torec had heard some of the techs talking of those semilegendary, preOccupation times, and of “Michael Poole,” the great engineer who had built wormholes to open up Sol system, and past and future, too.

  “Yes. Now, imagine if we could use wormholes to close our processor’s timelike curves, instead of these absurd toy spaceships we have flying everywhere! You know, it’s a Druzite myth that our progress is forever upward; the merest glance at your ruins shows that. If only Michael Poole were alive now! I’m sure he would have our prototype up and running in a day. Ensign, do you ever think that the people of the past were giants—that we are stunted, small by comparison?”

  “No, sir,” she said defiantly. “We are the ones who are here, now. All we can do is our best.”

  “Are you talking about duty again, Ensign?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “’Our best.’” He turned to face her. She wondered how she looked to him: just another Virtual ghost, she supposed, palely lit, hovering in the air in his Conurbation apartment. “How do you feel about your work, Torec?”

  She knew Nilis would not be satisfied with a bland evasion. “I can’t say I’m happy, sir.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “This isn’t what I’m trained for. I can see why you took Pirius to Earth; what he did—Pirius Blue—was astonishing. But I was only brought along to keep Pirius happy.”

  Nilis sighed. “You feel trapped. Perhaps, you think, without my intervention, you would have ended your relationship with Pirius, moved onto somebody else… . You were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and so have ended up here.”

  “Something like that,” she said. She kept her face blank. What did this old fool know? Anyhow, it was none of his business.

  But as it turned out he did know rather a lot. “In fact,” Nilis said dryly, “you wouldn’t have broken up with Pirius.”

  Her face was hot. “How can you know that?”

  “Because I asked Pirius Blue. In that other, vanished timeline, Pirius Blue stayed with, ah, Torec Blue, shall we call her, until he left for his last fateful mission. For two years, Ensign. That was a factor in Captain Seath recommending you to come on this mission. She knew, too.”

  Torec’s feelings were very complex. She didn’t like discussing her emotional life with this soggy old Commissary, and it made her uncomfortable to talk about a relationship she might have had, but now never would. “You’re talking about two years I won’t live through. Two years of choices I don’t get to make.”

  “True,” said Nilis. “So how do you feel now?”

  She thought it over. “Just as trapped. More, maybe.”

  He laughed. “The curse of predestination! Well, if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t my idea to bring you to Earth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But now you’re here you have a job to do. You are at least satisfied that you’re doing your best, are you?”

  “Yes, sir—”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Suddenly his face was blazing.

  She flinched. But it struck her that he must have timed that riposte to beat the timelag—he knew what she would say, before he had heard her reply. “Sir?”

  “We failed again today, Ensign, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “But it isn’t my fault—the techs—”

  “And if we fail in three weeks, when Gramm conducts his final review, then the plug will be pulled. No more funding. Everything will be lost. I suggest you start to do the job I entrusted to you.”

  “Sir—”

  “And don’t tell me it’s beyond you. Let me give you three pieces of advice. First, the bot control issue. That has plagued us since the beginning.”

  “The techs say it might be intractable. The problem of controlling a crowd of FTL bots—”

  Nilis waved a hand dismissively; Torec saw Earth soil under his fingernails. “Then step around the problem. Think sideways, Ensign. Let the bots guide themselves. As long as each bot is aware of the position of the other nearest, and follows the overall imperative, the solution will emerge. Tell your techs to let the bots swarm. Next, discipline. Even I, from half a million kilometers away, can see the open warfare that’s broken out between some of your subteams.”

  Torec said miserably, “Sir, they all say the others are fools, or even saboteurs, who must be forced to do things their way. And when we come together on the test site, nothing ever fits.”

  He laughed. “Well, you’re not the first project manager who’s faced that. Interface management, Torec. Change control. Look up those terms and apply them.” He stood up and brushed dust from his robe; when it left contact with his body it disappeared. “Finally—”

  “Sir?”

  She saw fatigue in his deep eyes; she knew he was spreading himself thin, commuting between Earth and Saturn to give time to all the different, and all demanding, aspects of his project. “Oh, my eyes, I don’t have the words. The people here are soft-bodied technicians from the cities of Earth. They are softer than me! But you, you’re a soldier from the Central Star Mass! And you’re smart, I know that.” He waved his hands. “Kick butt! Is that how you’d put it?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said dully.

  He was staring at her, apparently still unsure if she had got the message. “What do you imagine failure in this project will mean, Ensign?”

  “The war will go on—”

  “Forget about the war. Forget about mankind’s glorious destiny. What about you? Do you imagine you will be shipped back to the Front—that you will be carried back across the Galaxy? Do you imagine anybody would go to such expense, just to get a few combat weeks out of a cipher like you? Do you think that anybody cares that much? Do you think the Coalition loves you, Ensign?”

  She felt crushed.

  He thundered, “I’ll tell you what will happen. You’ll be sent to Mercury. That’s Sol I, the planet closest to the sun. There are mines there, and solar energy farms. It’s a factory world, Ensign, a place of warrens where you never see the blazing sun, and you’re grateful not to. And there you will die—not gloriously, not in combat with your comrades, but mise
rable and alone, when your youth and strength are used up. Do you want that?”

  “Sir, my duty—”

  “Oh, to Lethe with your duty!” he roared. “Is that how you want to die?”

  “No.”

  “What did you say?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Then I suggest you ensure we don’t fail.” His Virtual snapped out of existence.

  Chapter 13

  Even though his training gradually morphed away from simple endurance and fitness work, day-to-day life as an infantry cadet was a lot harder than anything Pirius Blue had suffered in the Navy.

  For one thing, he now spent his whole life in his Army-issue skinsuit. In a greenship blister, at least you could crack your faceplate from time to time and scratch your nose. Here, for hours on end, you just had to endure your itches, chafes, and other discomforts.

  You even got lectured at in your skinsuit, one of thousands standing on the surface of the Rock, by Marta or one of the other instructors.

  “You need to grasp the basic logic of the Rocks,” Marta would say. “The Xeelee have more firepower than we do. But somehow we have to soak up that firepower. And that’s where the Rocks come in. We just throw Rocks, one after the other, in through the Front and into the Cavity around Chandra. The Xeelee come flocking out. But the big mass of a Rock just absorbs all that Xeelee juice… .” It was a crude strategy, but time-tested, said Captain Marta; human troopers riding the Rocks had kept the Xeelee bottled up inside the Front for three thousand years. And soon it would be the honor of these fresh troops to join them.

  Bathed in the light of the Galaxy center, the cadets stood in rows, their biopacks shining green, listening to such stuff in attentive silence. As the hours wore by, Pirius would see rustles of movement as a cadet shifted her inertial-field weight from one booted foot to the other, or her body would subtly relax as she voided her bladder or bowels into her suit’s system, all the time keeping rigidly at attention. Woe betide you if you showed any physical discomfort—and fainting was rewarded by ten days of route marches.

  The theory of infantry strategy didn’t take long to impart, however. To a first approximation, Pirius decided, an infantryman’s job was to dig.

  Every day, troopers would swarm in their thousands out of the great underground barracks and, under the brusque command of their officers, cut into the surface of the Rock. Much of the asteroid was already covered by latticeworks of trenches and foxholes and dugouts left by previous generations, but these were regularly plowed over, so you always had virgin areas to work.

  And in these earthworks Pirius and Cohl learned how to dig.

  There was actually an art to digging, if you had to do it on the surface of an asteroid in a skinsuit. The environment was microgravity, of course, with hard vacuum all around. The trick was to use your inertial belt to pin you to the ground, while digging into the dirt with your spade and trenching tools.

  The upper few meters of asteroid dirt were generally loosely packed; most asteroids were coated with dust, the product of aeons of collisions and micrometeorite bombardment. Under the layer of dust you would eventually reach conglomerate, a rubble of boulders and pebbles, which was pretty much the story the rest of the way in: only the largest asteroids had solid cores. It was easy enough to collect a big spadeful of this stuff and hurl it out of the way; there was no air resistance, and the dust grains followed a spray of neat parabolas. But gravity was so low that it could take many minutes for the grains to fall back—and it took skill to aim your spadeload so that the debris didn’t rain down on your neighbor, or even more embarrassingly, back on top of you.

  Inside the Front, the conditions would be worse still. There, as you dug your trench, you would be drenched by gamma rays and other hard radiation emanating from the exotic objects that crowded the Galaxy’s center. So the trainers sent up drones to pour gamma radiation down over the laboring cadets, and they had to wear stiffer, shielded skinsuits, which made the digging still more tricky. What was worse yet was that the radiation ionized the dust, which made the grains stick to each other and to your skinsuit, and a good proportion of your time was taken up just scraping debris off your suit. It took Pirius and Cohl a long time to get the hang of it.

  A long trench being dug was an oddly beautiful sight, though. You would see neat lines of dust fountains, thrown up by the brisk, enthusiastic work of the cadets, and on the open loops you would hear them sing together as they worked. It was a strange juxtaposition: this very strange place, so far from Earth, with one of the most primitive human technologies.

  As his muscles continued to build up, Pirius almost began to enjoy the endless labor. Even the futility of being sent back day after day to the same crater bed, with the fruits of his previous day’s labor plowed over to be dug out again, didn’t deter him. If he worked hard enough he didn’t have to think at all, and the complication of everything that had happened since the magnetar could be excluded from his mind.

  The regiment known as the Guards was a strong presence on this Rock.

  Pirius’s principal training officer, Marta, was one of them. Even raw Guard trainees would flow across the Rock’s surface as precisely coordinated as components of a machine. What baffled Pirius was the way they always seemed able to keep their kit shining clean, even in the clinging dust. The Guards were an elite, and they knew it, and their superiority began with their obsessive smartness.

  Pirius and Cohl weren’t in the Guards, however. They were assigned to the Army Service Corps, the lowest of the low.

  Their work was to support the frontline troops. Before they had come here, Pirius had vaguely imagined this might mean they would be safer. As it turned out, in combat the Service Corps had to prepare the ground for advances—which, Pirius learned, often meant going forward ahead of the first line of fighting troops. After an action began, they would have to help dig and consolidate earthworks, and move back and forth bearing supplies and maintaining comm links. Sometimes, when the electromagnetic environment was particularly ferocious, they would have to run from the front line to the rear and back, bearing messages by hand.

  And when the action began its terrible grinding, the Service Corps became field medics and stretcher bearers. Infantry skinsuits were designed to keep you alive as long as possible, but they were primarily fighting armor, and traumatic injuries would be beyond any suit’s capacity to stabilize. Pirius was taught how to apply the simple medicine possible through a skinsuit, such as tying off a damaged limb. And he learned how to bundle a body, locked in a rigid suit, onto open-frame stretchers, and to crawl with casualties through the earthworks back to casualty clearing stations.

  So as Service Corps, they would be exposed to fire just as much as the frontline fighters, if not more so. Not that that gained them any respect from the frontliners, who seemed convinced that the Service Corps had it soft, with the first pick of rations, unlimited benefits, and protection from the battle.

  There were a few other Navy exiles, like Pirius, and other undesirables in the Service Corps. But most of their number was made up of infantry troopers who had managed to survive one or two actions and grown too old, or perhaps too wounded or shocked, to fight anymore. These superannuated misfits felt misunderstood and put-upon. As they worked, they would sing their own plaintive song: We are the ASC We work all night, we work all day The more we work, the more we may / It makes no difference … Few of these gloomy veterans were older than twenty.

  Eventually they were introduced to more sophisticated surface operations.

  The cadets were taught to move in the open. They were organized into platoons of ten, which practiced moving together. The basic technique was to advance through lines of trenches toward an enemy position. You scrambled out of one trench, running or crawling across the asteroid dirt, and then hurled yourself into the next. The instructors used drone bots to simulate enemy fire—cadets would be “killed” by laser spots that made their suits go rigid. The inertial belts were priceless;
without them the simplest kick or misstep could send you floating upward—but of course you also practiced how to keep moving forward even if your belt failed. The cadets seemed to enjoy this running around, apparently not imagining how it would be to go through this in combat conditions.

  Pirius quickly learned there was more to it than simple trench-hopping. The cadets had to consolidate and reinforce the trenches they found themselves in. And they practiced leapfrogging, in which a second line of troops would pass through the first to make a more rapid advance.

  It got more complicated still. Platoons of ten apiece were clustered into companies of maybe a hundred warm bodies. They practiced maneuvering as a company, in which one platoon would advance under the covering fire of another, all the while keeping the line intact. The next level up was a battalion, in which a thousand cadets would wash forward in coordinated waves. The instructors would throw unexpected problems in their way, and the cadets learned how to accommodate holes appearing in their lines, or being forced to back up from unexpectedly fortified positions. The cadets did this over and over, until every one of them knew what was expected in any given situation.

  These elaborate maneuvers were all about mutual protection. Each company was covered by those to either side of it, just as each platoon was protected through mutual cover by the fellows down the line—which was why it was so important to keep the line together.

  But for an individual trooper, in the end your only real protection was the presence of those around you, in your own platoon. You had to rely on them to watch your back—and if the worst happened, you had to hope that one of them would take the hit that might otherwise have taken you out.