Exultant

Pirius held his breath. Back at Arches, Torec would already have earned herself a week in the can.

But Nilis just said, flustered, “No. Of course not.”

“Then what? Six days we’ve been on this stupid toy ship. And still you haven’t said what we’re doing here.”

Pirius stood up, between Torec and the Commissary. “Sir, she just woke up…”

She shook him off. She seemed infuriated. She hitched up her gown, showing her thighs. “Is this what you want? Or him? Do you want to get into our bed with us, Commissary?”

Pirius used main force to shove her back into the cabin and pushed the door shut. He turned uncertainly. “Commissary, I’m sorry—”

Nilis waved tiredly. Pirius saw that the skin on the back of his hand was paper-thin. “Oh, it’s all right, Ensign. I do understand. I was young once, too, you know.”

“Young?”

Nilis looked up at him. “Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way. The human societies of the Core really are very young, you know, Pirius — those bases are swarms of children. The only adults you see are your instructors, I imagine. But I see you with a bit more perspective, perhaps. You have the bodies of adults, you are old enough to love and hate — and more than old enough to fight, to kill, and to die. And yet you will suddenly throw a tantrum, like Torec’s; suddenly a spike of childhood comes sticking up through the still-forming strata of adulthood. I do understand, I think.

“And besides, she’s right to ask such questions. After all, I have turned your lives upside down, haven’t I?” He smiled.

Yes, you have, Pirius thought uncomfortably. And he wondered if Torec had seen through to the truth. Maybe all these words about the philosophy of war were meaningless: maybe the truth was, this was just a silly old man who needed company.

Two days out from Earth, the corvette burst out of the crowded lanes of the Sagittarius Arm and passed into the still emptier spaces beyond.

Pirius looked back at Sagittarius. It was a place of young stars and glowing clouds, hot and rich. The outer edge of this spiral arm was the famous Orion Line, where an alien species called the Silver Ghosts had resisted humanity, and the Third Expansion had stalled for centuries. The storming of the Line had been a turning point in human history. Since then, like an unquenchable fire, humanity had roared on, consuming all in its path, to the center of the Galaxy itself.

But they were leaving all that behind. The corvette was approaching the Galaxy’s ragged outer edge now, and the stars were scattered thin. Earth’s sun, he learned, wasn’t even in a proper spiral arm at all, but in a curtailed arc of dim, unspectacular stars.

Their last stop before Earth would be at a system called 51 Pegasi.

As the corvette cruised toward the system’s central star, Torec came out of their room to stand before the transparent hull. Since her outburst, or maybe breakdown, Torec had been subdued. But the Commissary made no comment: it was as if the incident had never happened.

“There.” Nilis pointed. “Can you see? The sailing ships…”

The planetary system here was dominated by one massive world, a bloated Jovian that swept close to the sun, a world so huge its gravity pulled its parent star around. It was that jiggling, in fact, which had led to the world’s discovery from Earth, one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered. Humans had come here in their crude slower-than-light starships, in the first tentative exodus called, retrospectively, the First Expansion.

“I used to come here for vacations,” Nilis murmured. “The sky was always full of sails. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. You know, systems like this are a relic of the history of human advance. Technology tends to get simpler as you approach the source, Earth. It took so long to get to more remote regions that humanity had advanced by the time they got there; each colonizing push was overtaken by waves of greater sophistication. The Xeelee are different, though. All over the Galaxy, their technology is at the same stage of development. So they must have arrived all at once: they must be extragalactic…”

“Commissary,” Pirius asked hesitantly, “where is Earth?”

The Commissary glanced around the sky, blinking to clear his rheumy eyes. Then he pointed to a nondescript star hanging in the dark, barely visible. “There.”

Pirius looked up. For the first time the light of humanity’s original sun entered his eyes.

Chapter 7

Pirius Blue and the crew of the Claw, stranded in their own indifferent past, were taken away from Arches Base.

The transport was a heap of junk, a battered old scow whose best days were long past. They had to keep their skinsuits sealed the whole time, and the Higgs field inertial control had hiccups, making the gravity flicker queasily. You couldn’t even see out through the hull.

But then this wasn’t a Navy boat, as Enduring Hope had pointed out as they had dragged themselves aboard. Its hull was painted Army green, making it even uglier. “And,” said Hope the engineer gloomily, “everybody knows how good the Army is at ru

Cohl wriggled on a heap of sacking, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. “Welcome to your new timeline,” she said.

Pirius was still consumed with guilt for having landed them in this — Cohl and Hope, and their younger selves, including his own. He had no idea how he was going to find the strength to endure what was to come. He could think of nothing to say to his crew.

After two days of living in their skinsuits, two days of sucking emergency rations through straws and stretching their suits’ relief systems to their stinking limit, the scow lumbered to a landing. The ship’s inertial field switched off, plunging them into microgravity, but their training had prepared them for such things, and they all grabbed handholds before they went drifting off.

Without warning, the hull popped open, to reveal gray, trampled ground, a sky crowded with stars.

An Army private in a scuffed green skinsuit appeared at the door. He was wearing a bulky inertial- control belt. “Out,” he ordered.

Pirius led the way. He picked up his bag and loped out of the broad hatchway, letting himself drift to the ground. He looked around. He was on a Rock — a small one by the feel of its gravity. He was standing in a crater, a walled plain, its surface heavily pitted by footsteps, and broader scars where the bellies of ships had touched. The sky was crowded with massive stars, and behind that speckled veil the center of the Galaxy was a wall of light, too diffuse to cast a sharp shadow.

Cohl asked, “Where do you think we are? Those stars are dense enough for it to be a cluster.”

“Not Arches,” said Enduring Hope bleakly. “I suspect we’re a long way from there.”

“Shut up,” the Army private said without emotion. He went along their little line, handed them inertial belts like his own, and took away their bags. “You won’t be needing that shit anymore.”

Pirius knew this was likely the last they would see of their gear, all he had left of his life at Arches.

Everybody had heard the scuttlebutt that buck privates believed Navy flyers were well-off compared to them, and he had expected theft, but not to lose his kit so quickly; it was shocking, denuding. But perhaps that was the idea.

An Army officer stood before them — a captain, according to the stripes on her shoulder. Her skinsuit was battered and much repaired, and through its translucent sheen Pirius saw the gleam of metal down her left side, her leg and torso and arm. She had her hands behind her back, and her face was shadowed, but brown eyes regarded them somberly — and, Pirius saw, startled, a fleck of silver gleamed in each pupil. “Put on your belts,” she said.