He turned to Enduring Hope. “Engineer, why don’t you sum up how far we’ve got in twenty-four hours?”

Hope consulted a data desk. He looked as ticked off as Pirius felt. “The priorities are, one, setting up a manufactory on the far side of the Rock for producing the point black holes we will need for the cannon; two, modifying the hangar for our upgraded greenships.” He snapped the data desk down on the tabletop. “So far we’ve argued a lot, and we’ve laid down the foundations for the manufactory. And that’s it.”

Pirius said, “I wanted to be flying by” — he checked the Virtual chronometer that hovered over Pila’s head — “two hours ago. You all committed to that yesterday. What’s gone wrong?”

Hope took the bait. He jabbed a finger at Captain Boote. “It’s those people. They block everything we propose. Or they defer it for discussion further up the chain of command.” His tone, dripping with sarcasm, was deeply insolent. “They’re blocking us, Pirius.”

Captain Boote sputtered. “I won’t be spoken to like that!”

“Quite right,” Nilis murmured. “Why don’t you tell us your perception of the problem here, Captain?”

The Captain turned his magnificent hairless head to Pirius. “Squadron Leader, we support your project. That’s our function. But you must recognize the practical difficulties. For a thousand years — a thousand years, sir! — we have worked and polished and honed this base until it is perfectly fit for its purpose, which is to strike a great blow against the enemy. Now you are asking us to change all that. To rip holes in our walls — to install equipment so new it won’t even interface to our kit!” He held up his hands. “Of course we must accept the challenge of the new. But all I’m asking for is time; while recognizing the pressure of your schedule, a measured and thoughtful response…”

He talked smoothly, liquidly, one sentence blending into another so seamlessly that Pirius couldn’t see a way to cut into the flow. And he was so plausible that after a while Pirius found himself helplessly agreeing. Of course these new things couldn’t be done here; what other point of view was possible?

In the end Nilis managed to break into the monologue. “If I may say so, Captain, I think there is a failure of imagination here. You and your antecedents have been here so long, loyally following the dictates laid down long ago, that I don’t think any of you quite grasp that some day all this must end.”

Boote’s mouth dropped open. But then he shook his head. “If it is my generation that has the privilege of fulfilling the mission of Orion Rock, I will grasp the opportunity with both hands…” Once again he talked on. But it sounded like another rehearsed speech, and Pirius saw that he himself didn’t believe a word he was saying.

With a smooth motion, Captain Marta produced a handgun. Darc made a grab for the weapon, but Marta fired off her shot. Boote was hit in the arm. It was a projectile weapon, and the impact threw him backward off his chair and against the wall. For a moment his spindly legs waved comically in the air, while his aides flapped around him.

When they had him upright and back on his chair again, he had his hand clamped over a spreading patch of blood on his upper right arm. His face was florid with anger and fear.

Nilis was shocked into pallid silence. Pila hadn’t so much as flinched when the shot was fired; looking faintly annoyed, she brushed blood spots off her sleeve. Hope and Torec were trying hard not to laugh.

Boote pointed a shaking finger at Marta. “You shot me!”

“A flesh wound,” she said. “A half hour in sick bay will fix that.”

“I’ll have the hide flogged off your back for this.”

“That’s your privilege, sir,” Marta said evenly. “But I thought I should introduce a little reality into the discussion. This is real, Captain. The sky really is falling.”

Pirius stared at her. Then, as the silence lengthened, he realized it was his cue. He turned to Boote. “Captain, I’m not in a position to adjourn the meeting. Time is too short. I’ll ensure Captain Marta answers any charges you care to raise later. Commander Darc, would you accept her custody for now?”

Darc inclined his head ironically.

“Captain Boote, you need to be excused to get that graze seen to. In the meantime, who would you nominate to represent you in the continuing negotiations?”

After that, things went much better.

Chapter 49

The trouble started in the most innocuous, most mundane of ways: problems with waste.

For many quagmite kinds, eliminated waste was in the form of compressed matter, quarks and gluons wadded together into baryons — protons and neutrons. You could even find a few simple nuclei, if you dug around in there. But the universe was still too hot for such structures to be stable long, and the waste decayed quickly, returning its substance to the wider quagma bath.

Now, as the universe cooled, things changed. The mess of sticky proton-neutron cack simply wouldn’t dissolve as readily as it once had. Great clumps of it clung together, stubbornly resistant, and had to be broken up to release their constituent quarks. But the energy expenditure was huge.

Soon this grew to be an overwhelming burden, the primary task of civilizations. Citizens voiced concerns; autocrats issued commands; angry votes were taken on councils. There were even wars over waste dumping. But the problem only got worse.

And, gradually, the dread truth was revealed.

The cooling universe was approaching another transition point, another phase change. The ambient temperature, steadily falling, would soon be too low to force the baryons to break up — and the process of combination would be one way. Soon all the quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of life, would be locked up inside baryons.

The trend was inescapable, its conclusion staggering: this extraordinary implosion would wither the most bright, the most beautiful of the quagmite ecologies, and nobody would be left even to mourn.

As the news spread across the inhabited worlds, a cosmic unity developed. Love and hate, war and peace were put aside in favor of an immense research effort to find ways of surviving the impending baryogenetic catastrophe.

A solution was found. Arks were devised: immense artificial worlds, some as much as a meter across, their structures robust enough to withstand the collapse. It was unsatisfactory; the baryogenesis could not be prevented, and almost everything would be lost in the process. But these ships of quagma would sail beyond the end of time, as the quagmites saw it, and in their artificial minds they would store the poetry of a million worlds. It was better than nothing.

As time ran out, as dead baryons filled up the universe and civilizations crumbled, the quagma arks sailed away. But mere survival wasn’t enough for the last quagmites. They wanted to be remembered.