These few seconds of closest approach were the crux of the engagement, its whole purpose. Monopoles, point defects, would rip a hole in a nightfighter wing, or a Sugar Lump face. But you had to get close enough to deliver them. And you had to hit the Xeelee craft when they were vulnerable, which meant the few seconds or minutes after the nightfighters had emerged from the Sugar Lump emplacements, when they were slow, sluggish, like baby birds emerging from a nest. That was why you had to get in so close to the Sugar Lump, despite the ferocious fire, and you had to use the precious seconds of closest approach as best you could – and then try to get out before the Xeelee assembled their overwhelmingly superior weaponry. That was why Luca was here; that was why so many were screaming and dying around him.
Luca felt hate well up inside him, hate for the Xeelee and what they had done to mankind, the deaths and pain they had inflicted, the massive distortion of human destiny. And as the human weapons ripped holes in the Xeelee emplacement he roared a visceral cry of loathing and triumph.
But now somebody stood over him, shadowed against the Sugar Lump face.
‘Bayla? Teel?’
A heavy hand reached down, grabbed a handful of his tunic, and hauled Luca up. He was carried across the surface, floppy-limbed, with remarkable speed and efficiency. The sky, still crowded with conflict, rocked above him.
He was hurled into a hole in the ground. He fell through low gravity and landed in darkness on a heap of bodies, a tangle of limbs. Med cloaks were wrapped around the injured, but many of the cloaks glowed bright blue, the colour of death, so that this chamber in the rock was filled with eerie electric-blue shadows.
More bodies poured in after Luca, tumbling on top of him. The mouth of the tunnel closed over, blocking out the light of battle. There was a second of stillness. Luca squirmed, trying to get out from under the heap of bodies.
Then the stomping began. It was exactly as if some immense boot was slamming down on the asteroid. The people in the chamber were thrown up, dropped back, shaken. Splinters of bright white light leaked into the tunnel through its layers of sealing dirt. Luca found himself rolling, kicked and punched. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder he fought with his fists and feet until he found himself huddled in a corner of wall and floor. He hugged his knees to his chest, making himself a small, hard boulder.
Still the slamming went on. He could feel it in his bones, his very flesh. He closed his eyes. He tried to think of the Conurbation where he had been born, and joined his first cadres. It had been an open place of parks and ruined Qax domes. In the mornings he would run and run, his cloak flapping around his legs, the dewy grass sharp under his bare feet. He had never been more alive – certainly more than now, sealed up in this suit in a hole in the shuddering ground.
He huddled over, dreaming of Earth. Perhaps if he dug deep down inside himself he would find a safe place to live, inside his memory, safe from this war. But still the great stamping went on and on, as he remembered the dew on the grass.
Luca. Novice Luca.
He had never understood.
Oh, logically he knew of the endless warfare at the heart of the Galaxy, the relentless deaths, the children thrown into the fire. But he had never understood it, on a deep, human level. So many human dead, he thought, buried in meaningless rocks like this or scattered across space, as if the disc of the Galaxy itself is rotten with our corpses. There they wait until the latest generation joins them, falling down like sparks into the dark.
Luca.
He tried to remember his ambitions, how he used to feel, when the war had been a fascinating exercise in logistics and ideology, a source of endless career opportunities for bright young Commissaries. How could he have been so dazzled by such fantasies?
It was as if a great crime was being committed, out of sight. Whether humans won this war or not, nothing would ever be the same – nothing ever could compensate for the relentless evil being committed here. We’re like those wretched children on New Earth forced to commit atrocities against those they love, he thought. We can’t go back. Not after what we have done here.
Luca. Luca. ‘…Luca. You are alive, like it or not. Look at me, Novice.’
Reluctantly, shedding the last of his cocoon of grass-green memory, he opened his eyes. He was still in the chamber of dirt. There was no light but the dimming glow of med cloaks. Nothing moved; everybody was still. But the stomping had stopped, he realised.
And here was Dolo’s Virtual head, a fuzzy ball of pixels, floating before him, glowing in the dark.
‘I’m in my grave,’ Luca said.
‘Less melodrama, please, Novice. The Navy knows you’re here. They’re on the way to dig you out.’
‘Teel—’
‘Is dead. So is Bayla, our anti-Doctrinal religionist.’ Dolo reeled off more names, everybody Luca could think of in the units he had met. ‘Everybody is dead, except you.’
Teel was dead. He tried to remember his feelings for Teel, that peculiar wistful love reciprocated by her on some level he had never understood. It had been everything in the world to him, he thought, just hours ago, and even after what he had seen of the child soldiers on New Earth and the rest, his head had been full of dreams of fighting alongside her – and, yes, of saving her from this place, just as she had understood. Now it all seemed remote, a memory of a memory, or the memory of a story told by somebody else.
As if they were back in the seminary, Dolo said, ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’
‘I have no sense of the true scale of this, the moral scale. I don’t even know what my own life is worth. I’m too small. I’ve nothing to measure it against.’
‘But it was that very scale that saved you. What defence do we have, we feeble humans, against the Xeelee?’
‘None.’
‘Wrong. Listen to me. We are fighting a war on an interstellar scale. The Xeelee push out of the Core; we push them back, endlessly. The Front is a vast belt of friction, right around the Galaxy’s centre, friction between huge wheels spun by the Xeelee and ourselves, rubbing away lives and material as fast as we can pour them in. It’s been this way, virtually static, for two thousand years.
‘But if you are caught in the middle of it, your defence is numbers. Your defence is statistical. If there are enough of you, even if others are taken, you might survive. We have probably been using such strategies all the way back to the days without fire or tools, on some treeless plain on Earth. When the predators come, let them take her – the slowest, the youngest or oldest, the weakest, the unlucky – but I will survive. Death is life, remember; that was what Teel said: the death of others is my life.’
Luca looked into Dolo’s eyes; the low-quality image had only empty, staring sockets. ‘It is a vermin’s strategy.’
‘We are vermin.’
‘Does the arch still stand?’
‘It is sited on the far side of the asteroid, away from the main weapons sites. Yes, it stands.’
‘Let it be,’ Luca said. ‘The religion. The worship of Poole at Timelike Infinity.’
Dolo’s head pushed closer. ‘Why?’