‘Because it gives the troopers a meaning the dry Doctrines can’t supply. A belief in a simple soldiers’ heaven makes no difference.’
‘But it does make a difference,’ Dolo said quietly. ‘Remember that we need to manage the historical stability of the Expansion. Far from being damaging, I now believe this proto-religion might actually be useful in ensuring that.’ He laughed. ‘We will probably support it, discreetly. Perhaps we will even write some scripture for it. We have before. In the end we don’t care what they think they are fighting for, as long as they fight.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you do this? And—’
‘And why do I so obviously enjoy it? Ha!’ Dolo tipped back his Virtual face. ‘Because it is a kind of exploration, Novice. There will always be another battlefield – another star, even, one day, another Galaxy – and each is much like the last. But here we are exploring the depths of humanity itself. How far can a human being be degraded and brutalised before something folds up inside? I can tell you, we haven’t reached the bottom of that yet, and we’re still digging.
‘And then there is the war itself, the magnificence of the enterprise. Think about it: we are trying to build a perfect killing machine from soft human components, from swarming animals who evolved in a very different place, very far from here. It is a marvellous intellectual exercise – don’t you think?’
Luca dropped his face. He said, ‘How can we win this war?’
Dolo looked puzzled. ‘But we have no interest in mere winning, but in the perfecting of humanity. And to achieve that we need eternity, an eternal war. Victory is trivial compared to that.’
‘No,’ Luca said.
‘Novice—’
Dirt showered over him. Fragments rained through Dolo’s Virtual, making it flicker. Luca looked up. A machine had broken through the roof of the cavern, revealing the light of the Galaxy Core.
Skinsuited troopers clustered around the hole. One leapt down and just picked up Luca under his shoulders. Luca cried out at the pain of his wound, but he was hoisted up towards the sky and released.
For a second, two, he floated up through the vacuum, as if dreaming.
Then more strong hands caught him. He was wrapped in a med cloak. It snuggled around him and he immediately felt its warmth.
Everywhere he looked he saw more teams digging, and bodies floating out of the dirt. It was as if the whole Rock were a cemetery fifty kilometres across, disgorging its dead. And over his comms system he could hear a great murmuring groan. It was the merging of thousands of voices, he realised, the thousands of wounded that still littered this battered Rock, who themselves were far outnumbered by the dead.
‘No,’ he muttered.
A visored face loomed over him. ‘No what?’
‘We have to find a way to win this war,’ Luca whispered.
‘Sure we do. Save your strength, buddy.’ The med cloak probed at his shoulder. He felt a sharp pain.
And then sleep engulfed him, shutting out the light of the war.
The seed inadvertently planted by Dolo and others, in allowing the soldiers’ new religion to survive, took a long time to bear fruit.
In the meantime Luca was right. Humanity had to find a way to win its war before it lost through sheer exhaustion. It was through the slow sedition of Luca and others like him that the victory came about.
But it would take two more bloody millennia before the heroics of what became known as the ‘Exultant generation’ broke the logjam of the Front, and mankind’s forces swept on into the Core itself.
I had a small part to play in that victory. We undying, hidden away, have sometimes seen fit to steer human history. With patience you can make a difference. But mayflies, blind to the long term, are impossible to herd. You never get everything you want.
Still, a victory.
Suddenly the Galaxy was human.
Victorious child soldiers peered around at what they had won, uncomprehending, and wondered what to do next.
Mankind sought new purposes.
For the first time in many millennia voyages of discovery, not conquest, were launched. Some even sailed beyond the Galaxy itself.
And even there they found relics of mankind’s complicated history.
Some were almost as old as I am.
PART FIVE: THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE
MAYFLOWER II
AD 5420-24,974
I
Twenty days before the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.
‘Rusel. Rusel…’ The whispered voice was insistent. Rusel rolled over, trying to shake off the effects of his usual mild sedative. The room responded to his movement, and soft light coalesced around him. His pillow was soaked with sweat.
His brother’s face was hovering in the air at the side of his bed. Diluc was grinning. The Virtual image made his face look even wider than usual, his nose more prominent.
‘Lethe,’ Rusel said hoarsely. ‘You ugly bastard.’
‘You’re just jealous,’ Diluc said. ‘I’m sorry to wake you. But I just heard – you need to know—’
‘Know what?’
‘Blen showed up in the infirmary.’ Blen was the nanochemist assigned to Ship Three. ‘Get this: he has a heart murmur.’ Diluc’s grin returned.
Rusel frowned. ‘For that you woke me up? Poor Blen.’
‘It’s not that serious. But, Rus – it’s congenital.’
The sedative dulled Rusel’s thinking, and it took him a moment to figure it out.
The five Ships were to evacuate the last, brightest hopes of Port Sol from the path of the incoming peril, the forces of the young Coalition. But they were slower-than-light transports, and would take many centuries to reach their destinations. Only the healthiest, in body and genome, could be allowed aboard a generation starship. And if Blen had a hereditary heart condition—
‘He’s off the Ship,’ Rusel breathed.
‘And that means you’re aboard, brother. You’re the second-best nanochemist on this lump of ice. You won’t be here when the Coalition arrives. You’re going to live!’
Rusel lay back on his crushed pillow. He felt numb.
His brother kept talking. ‘Did you know that families are illegal under the Coalition? Their citizens are born in tanks. Just the fact of our relationship would doom us, Rus! I’m trying to fix a transfer from Five to Three. If we’re together, that’s something, isn’t it? I know it’s going to be hard, Rus. But we can help each other. We can get through this…’
All Rusel could think about was Lora, whom he would have to leave behind.
The next morning Rusel arranged to meet Lora in the Forest of Ancestors. He took a bubble-wheel surface transport, and set out early.
Port Sol was a planetesimal, an unfinished remnant of the formation of Sol system. Inhabited for millennia, its surface was heavily worked, quarried and pitted, and littered by abandoned towns. The Qax had never come here; Port Sol was a museum, some said, of pre-Occupation days. But throughout Port Sol’s long human usage some areas had been kept pristine, and as he drove Rusel kept to the marked track, to avoid crushing the delicate sculptures of frost that had coalesced here over four billion years.