But it’s too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and we’ll never know what happened here.
Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground. ‘Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether you’re right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over. We’ve cleaned out this Galaxy. There’s nothing left to oppose us now - nothing but one more opponent.’
‘I have my assessment to finish—’
‘Nothing happened here, Commissary. Nothing.’
Tomm sat back, smiling.
It seemed to Xera that the young pilot’s face relaxed, that he breathed a little easier, before he was still.
Personally I have more sympathy for Xera and her complex ethical dilemmas than with Kard.
But it was Kard’s arrogant impatience that caught the flavour of the times.
Mayfly generations tick by terribly quickly. And almost all mayflies, embedded in history, believe that their epoch is eternal, that things will be this way until the end of time. Almost all. It takes a special mayfly to understand that he is living through a time of flux, a time when great forces are shifting - and even more special to be able to influence those forces.
Kard turned out to be one such.
Just as he had said, the Galaxy was cleaned out. Only one more opponent remained. Only one war remained to be completed.
But it had to be started first.
THE GREAT GAME
AD 12,659
We were in our 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 tenseness in the way they clutched their static lines, and their unusual reluctance to rib the wetbacks.
Well, when I looked through the blister’s transparent walls and out into the dangerous 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 our Spline ship threw itself gamely through its complicated evasive manoeuvres, 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 the target star jiggled around the sky as the Spline bucked and rolled.
And, leaving aside the vertigo, what twisted my own stress muscles was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings - unmistakable, they were Xeelee nightfighters. The Xeelee were the Spline 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, 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.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant.’ She was the youngest of the troop, at seventeen ten years younger than me.
I handed her a wipe. ‘I’ve seen worse, marine. Anyhow you’ve left the wetbacks something to clean up. Keep them busy when we’ve gone.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The mood was fragile, but I was managing it. 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 was her role 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.
Admiral Kard picked me out. ‘Lieutenant Neer, correct?’
I stood up, brushing vomit off my suit. ‘Sir.’
‘Welcome to Shade,’ he said evenly.
I could see how the troops were tensing up. We didn’t need this. But I couldn’t have thrown out an admiral, not on his flagship.
‘We’re ready to drop, sir.’
‘Good.’
Just then 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; you could see that from space.
The Commissary peered 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, set out before us for our education.’
He was rewarded for that with a glare.
I kept silent, uncomfortable. Everybody knows about the strained relations 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. Two centuries? 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. You know the setup here. The Expansion reached this region five hundred years ago. When our people down there called for help, the Navy responded. That’s our job.’ He had cold artificial Eyes, and I sensed he was testing me. ‘And those Xeelee units are swarming like flies. 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.
Of course she was right. One of our objectives, in fact, was to pick up proof that the Xeelee were responsible for the calamities befalling the colonists on this battered world, Shade. But even so I could see my people stir at the Admiral’s words. There had been tension between humanity and Xeelee for centuries, but 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, at long last. 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 of the Third Expansion humans had spread out in a great swarm through the Galaxy, even reaching the halo beyond the main disc, overwhelming other life forms as we encountered them. We had faced no opponent capable of systematic resistance since the collapse of the Silver Ghosts - none but the Xeelee, the Galaxy’s other great power, who sat in their great concentrations at the Core, silent, aloof.
This had been the situation for five thousand years. In my officer training I’d been taught the meaning of such numbers - for
instance, that was an interval as long as that between the invention of writing and the launch of the first spaceships from Earth. It was a long time. But the Coalition was older yet, and its collective memory and clarity of purpose, all held together by the Druz Doctrines, even across such inhuman spans of time, was flawless. Marvellous when you thought about it.
And now - perhaps - here I was at the start of the final war, the war for the Galaxy. What I felt was awe. Also fear, maybe. But that wasn’t what the moment required.
‘I’ll tell you what I feel, sir. Relief. Bring it 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. The Spline was entering the planet’s atmosphere. I sat before I was thrown down, and the loadmaster at last 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 centuries-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 months 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 this was all the Xeelee’s fault. The Academician had somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear. Our mission, along with helping with the evacuation of the locals, was to find and retrieve Tilo and his data. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I thought; the Commissaries, paranoid about their own power, were famously suspicious of the alliances between the Navy and the Academies.
Green lights marked out the hatch in the transparent wall. Show time.
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.’
‘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 stood 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.
My static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit’s Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock of no-gravity can be a jolt to the stomach, 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. Our open drop blister was a glistening scar on its flank. The Spline 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 that 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, searching for the valley I was aiming for.
I was able to pick out the target. The Commission’s maps, two centuries old, 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 from the air was different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of the domed Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it, as if the colonists had moved out of the buildings provided for them. Well, you expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of everything.
Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. Amid the domes 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.
But I had a problem, I saw now. My marines were heading straight for the nominal target, the Conurbation, just as they should. But there was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller, stranded halfway up the flank of the mountain. There was no sign of domed Conurbation architecture, but there seemed no doubt this was human. Another village? And then I saw a pale pink light blinking at me from the middle of that cluster of shacks.
I’m not sentimental, and I don’t go for heroic gestures. In a given situation, with given resources, you do what you can, what’s possible. Given a free hand I’d have concentrated my energies on evacuating the Conurbation which undoubtedly held the bulk of the population. I wouldn’t have gone after that isolated handful of people, wouldn’t have approached that village at all - if not for that pink light. 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. I knew my people would be able to supervise the evacuation of the main township without me; it was a simple mission. Then I redirected my own descent, down towards the smaller community. I’d go get Tilo out of there myself.
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 ground raced up to meet me. Feet together, knees bent, back straight, roll when you hit - and then a lung-emptying 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 I wasn’t on a ship any more, 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.
I tried to get my bearings. The sky was deep. Beyond clouds of ash, sunsats swam. And past them I glimpsed the red pinprick of the true sun, and the wraith-like Galaxy disc.
I was just outside that mountainside village. Below 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 centre. A single, elegant bridge spanned the valley, reaching towards the old Conurbation on the far side. Further upstream I saw what looked like a logging plant, giant pieces of yellow-coloured 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 centre maybe, and there were a couple of battered ground transports. Beyond, I glimpsed the rectangular shapes of fields - apparently ploughed, not a glimmer of replicator technology in sight. It was like a living-history exhibit. But today it was all covered in ash.
People were standing, watching me, grey as the ground under their feet. Men, women, children, infants in arms, old folk, people in little clusters. There were maybe thirty of them.
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