There was an arm around his throat — a suited arm. He struggled, but his lungs were aching. He heard Denh’s voice call: “Kill the breeders. Move it!” A gloved hand passed before Abil’s face, closing his faceplate, shutting out the noise of babies crying, and through its murky pane he saw fire flare once more.

The captain sat on the edge of Abil’s sick bay bed. “Denh is acting corporal for now,” Dower said gently.

Abil sighed. “It’s no more than I deserved, sir.”

Dower shook her head. “That damn curiosity of yours. You certainly made a mistake, but hardly a fatal one. But you weren’t adequately briefed. In a way the fault’s mine. I argue with the Commissaries before every drop. They would tell you grunts nothing if they had the chance, I think, for they believe nobody but them needs to know anything.”

“What happened to me, sir?”

“Pheromones.”

“Sir?”

“There are many ways to communicate, tar. Such as by scent. You and I are poor at smelling, you know, compared to our senses of touch, sight, hearing. We can distinguish only a few scent qualities: sweet, fetid, sour, musky, dry … But those Coalescent drones have been stuck in their hole in the ground for fifteen thousand years. Now, the human species itself is only four or five times older than that. There has been plenty of time for evolutionary divergence.”

“And when I cracked my faceplate—”

“You were overwhelmed with messages you couldn’t untangle.” Dower leaned closer. “What was it like?”

Abil thought back. “I wanted to stay there, sir. To be with them. To be like them.” He shuddered. “I let you down.”

“There’s no shame, tar. I don’t think you’re going to make a corporal, though; command isn’t for you.” Dower’s metal Eyes glistened. “You weren’t betrayed by fear. You were betrayed by your curiosity — perhaps imagination. You had to know what it was like in there, didn’t you? And for that you risked your life, and the lives of your unit.”

Abil tried to sit up. “Sir, I—”

“Take it easy.” Dower pushed him back, gently, to his bed. “I told you, there’s no shame. I’ve been watching you. It’s one of the responsibilities of command, tar. You have to test those under you, all the time, test and assess. Because the only way the Expansion is going to prosper is if we make the best use of our resources. And I don’t believe the best use of you is to stick you down a hole in charge of a bunch of grunts.” Dower leaned closer. “Have you ever considered working for the Commission for Historical Truth?”

A vision of chill intellects and severe black robes filled Abil’s mind. “The Commission, sir? Me? ”

Dower laughed. “Just think about it … Ah. We’re about to leave orbit.”

Abil could sense the subtle inertial shift, as if he was in a huge elevator, rising from the frozen planet.

Dower snapped her fingers, and a Virtual of the Target materialized between their faces. Slowly turning, bathed in simulated light, the planet was like a toy, sparkling white, laced here and there by black ridges of true rock, stubborn mountain chains resisting the ice. Starships circled it like flies.

Dower reached out to touch one dimpled feature.

The view expanded, to reveal a broad, walled plain. Abil realized he was looking down on the warren he had visited. Around the mountain peak, great cracks had been cut into the ground. Drones were being shepherded out of the warren by the mop-up squads. The drones filed toward the bellies of freighters that had settled from space, down onto the ice, to swallow them up. The drones looked bewildered, and they milled to and fro. Here and there one or two broke lines, and even lunged at the troopers. The silent spark of weapons cut them down.

For every live drone that came walking to the surface, Abil saw, a dozen carcasses were hauled out.

Dower saw his expression. “There were probably a billion drones in that one hive alone. A billion. We’ll be lucky to ship out more than a hundred thousand.”

“A hundred thousand — is that all, sir?”

“The waste is terrible — yes, I know. But what does it matter? They were a billion purposeless lives, the culmination of a thousand pointless generations. And look here.”

She tapped at the floating image. The deep-buried colony turned red, showing as a clear torus shape around the ice-buried mountain. And when the viewpoint pulled back, Abil saw that there were many more such red blotches scarring the planet’s white face, from pole to pole, around the equator.

“There are about a thousand warrens on this one planet,” Dower murmured. “Probably most of them unaware of each other. We probably won’t even be able to clean them all out. I’ve seen this before, many times, on worlds as different from this, tar, as you can imagine — but all warrens are essentially the same. Anywhere where the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing.”

In one place two of the colonies were in contact; tendrils of pale pink reached out from their red cores, and where they touched, crimson flared. Dower spoke a soft command. The simulated image’s time scale accelerated, so that days, weeks passed in seconds. Abil could see how the two colonies probed toward each other, over and again, and where they came in contact crimson flared — a crimson, he realized, that showed where people were dying.

“They’re fighting,” he said. “It’s almost as if the colonies are living things themselves, sir.”

“Well, so they are,” Dower said.

“But — a thousand of them. That makes um, a trillion people on this light-starved planet alone — all living off the scrapings from the thermal vents …”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it? Oh, the Coalescents are efficient. But they are just drones. We own history.” She waved her hands and produced a new image, a star field, crossed by a great river of light. She pointed to the Galaxy core. “Leave the Coalescents to their holes in the ground. That is where we are going, tar; that is where our destiny will be made — or broken.”

When she had gone Abil restored the image of the slowly turning globe, its white surface pustulous with warrens.

There were no cities here, he thought, no nations. There were only the Coalescent colonies. The huge entities waged their slow and silent battles against each other, shaping and spending the lives of their human drones — drones who may have believed they were free and happy — and all without consciousness or pity. On this world the story of humankind was over, he thought. On this world, the future belonged to the hives.

But there were other worlds.

The starship leapt away with an almost imperceptible lurch. The frozen world folded over on itself and dropped into darkness.