Everybody knew a Ghost was flying this mission. Hope was relieved that it didn’t show up this morning.

The crews, meanwhile, did what flight crews usually did. They allowed the techs to check over their suits, but ran double checks themselves — if you were flight, you never trusted ground crew with something like that. Some of them quizzed their engineers on the state of their ships, as if anything they could ask now would make a difference. Others indulged in various superstitions, such as walking around their ships, or kicking at their landing rails. One man vomited up his breakfast. A tech cleaned it up for him. The atmosphere remained tense, quiet.

Hope saw one stocky pilot pull open the front of his skinsuit to squirt a jet of urine over his ship’s landing rail.

“Pirius,” he called.

The pilot turned, his face shielded by his visor. “I’m Blue, by the way, to save you making a fool of yourself.”

“I knew it was one of you from the lumpy shape of your dick,” Hope said, walking over to him. “Where’s your clone?”

Pirius pointed. Another copy of Pirius, in his own skinsuit but with a commander’s red flashes on his shoulders, was working his way around the hangar, shaking hands, having a final word with his crews. “Red’s doing his job,” said Pirius Blue.

“Just what you’d do,” Hope said.

“I’m glad I don’t have to.”

“I bunked into the briefing. I heard Nilis speak.”

“Nilis, yes,” Blue said uncertainly. “What an oddball the man is. Red claims to understand him; I never will.” He regarded Hope. “I don’t think he gave us the truth about what he’s thinking, in that briefing.”

“The truth?”

“He has all these ideas about how Chandra is hosting antique life-forms, and if we were to keep on burrowing into it, we’d find more and more. He’s becoming fascinated with Chandra for its own sake, I think. Falling in love with the damn thing.”

“How does that help us destroy it?”

“It doesn’t,” Blue said. “You can’t control these Commissaries, though. We had better get the job done before he digs so far he comes up with a reason for us not to attack it in the first place.”

“Pirius—” I know how scared you are, he thought. But he could never say such a thing.

Blue held up his hand. “You know how it is. The fear goes away. I’ll be fine once I lift.”

“I won’t be, though,” Hope said fervently.

Pirius Blue grasped his hand briefly. “I wish you were flying with us.”

“Me too.”

“Just don’t steal my stuff until after I’ve lifted. Show some respect.” And with that, Blue turned and clambered up a short ladder to his cockpit.

It took only minutes for the crews to load themselves into their blisters. The last maintenance hatches were closed, the last bomb trolley withdrawn. The ground crew pulled out of the hangar floor.

The roof of the hangar cracked open, and the air vanished in a shiver of frost. The harsh blue light of the Galaxy’s heart flooded into the chamber, overwhelming the glow of the globe lamps that hovered around the ships.

Hope watched from the hangar’s observation area. Here was Marshal Kimmer, and Captain Marta, and the reserve crews who weren’t making this flight, and others like Tili Three who hadn’t made the grade, and many, many of this strange base’s child-soldier inhabitants, all come to see the launches. Hope suspected that the military types longed to be in those ships, as he did, rather than be stuck here watching them leave. But he wondered how many were here because, morbidly, they expected these crews not to return.

Pirius Red’s own ship was to be the first to lift. As they worked through their final preparation, the crew’s comm was piped into the observation areas.

“Waiting for the red flag to power up sublight… We’ve got a red, we’re clear.”

“Start number three…”

“Primed.”

“Engage three…”

The greenship raised itself a handsbreadth above its cradle. Hope could feel a pulse in the asteroid’s own inertial field as it tried to compensate for the shift in mass.

“Pressure rising in the generators.”

“Copy that. Watch the compensation for the bomb pod, Engineer.”

“On it.”

“Waiting on the green for takeoff, crew. Waiting on the green. Green acquired, we’re cleared.”

As the greenship lifted, its main body bulkily laden with its unfamiliar technology, it wallowed a little.

“Passing through the roof.”

“Turn to port, port on my 129. Let’s give them a show, crew.”

Beyond the hangar’s open roof, in clear space, the greenship spun once, twice, its three crew blisters whirling about the craft’s long axis, an exultant gesture. Then it squirted out of sight.

There was a hand on Hope’s shoulder. It was Marshal Kimmer. “Fifteen hours,” the Marshal said. “Six hours out, three on station, six back. Then it will be over, one way or the other.”

“Yes, sir.”

All over the hangar now, the greenships were rising.

Cohl hadn’t believed it was possible she would sleep. But she needed a nudge in her ribs from Blayle to jar her awake.

When she glanced up at the sky, those shining gas clouds were burning away, and a shoal of bright blue stars, hot and crowded, swarmed above her. After billions of years of flight through the glowing clouds of the Northern Arm, Orion Rock, obeying the blind dictates of celestial mechanics, was at last emerging into the open. And for the humans who crawled over and beneath its surface, the moment of destiny was coming.

Chapter 53

The impoverished universe expanded relentlessly.

Space was filled with a bath of radiation, reddening as the expansion stretched it, and by a thin fog of matter. Most of this was dark matter, engaged in its own slow chemistry. The baryonic matter — “light” matter — was a trace that consisted mostly of simple nuclei and electrons. Any atoms that formed, as electrons hopefully gathered around nuclei, were immediately broken up by the still- energetic radiation. Without stable atoms, no interesting chemistry could occur. And meanwhile the ionic mist scattered the radiation, so that the universe was filled with a pale, featureless glow. The cosmos was a bland, uninteresting place, endured with resentment by the survivors of gaudier eras.

Nearly four hundred thousand years wore away, and the universe inflated to a monstrous size, big enough to have enclosed the Galaxy of Pirius’s time.

Then the epochal cooling reached a point where the photons of the radiation soup were no longer powerful enough to knock electrons away from their nuclear orbits. Suddenly atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium, coalesced furiously from the mush of nuclei and electrons. Conversely, the radiation was no longer scattered: the new atomic matter was transparent.

The universe went dark in an instant. It was perhaps the most dramatic moment since the birth of light itself, many eras past.

To the survivors of earlier times, this new winter was still more dismaying than what had gone before. But every age had unique properties. Even in this desolate chill, interesting processes could occur.

The new baryonic atoms were a mere froth on the surface of the deeper sea of dark matter. The dark stuff, cold and gravitating, gathered into immense wispy structures, filaments and bubbles and voids that spanned the universe. And baryonic matter fell into the dark matter’s deepening gravitational wells. There it split into whirling knots that split further into pinpoints, that collapsed until their interiors became so compressed that their temperatures matched that of the moment of nucleosynthesis.

In the hearts of the young stars, nuclear fusion began. Soon a new light spread through the universe. The stars gathered into wispy hierarchies of galaxies and clusters and superclusters, all of it matching the underlying dark matter distribution.