Stars were stable and long-lasting fusion machines, and in their hearts light elements were baked gradually into heavier ones: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When the first stars died, they scattered their heavy nuclei through space. These in turn were gathered into a second generation of stars, and a third — and from this new, dense material still more interesting objects formed, planets with rocky hearts, that swooped on unsteady orbits around the still-young stars.

In these crucibles life evolved.

Here, for instance, was the young Earth. It was a busy place. Its cooling surface was dotted with warm ponds in which a few hundred species of carbon-compound chemicals reacted furiously with each other, producing new compounds which in turn interacted in new ways. The networks of interactions quickly complexified to the point where autocatalytic cycles became possible, closed loops which promoted their own growth; and some of these autocatalytic cycles chanced upon feedback processes to make themselves stable; and, and…

Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.

Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their birth, and wondered where they had come from.

It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead. They thought that it was only now that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.

But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished times before.

Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.

For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.

Chapter 54

Suspended over the glistening surface of Orion Rock, bathed in the fierce light of the Cavity’s crowded stars, Pirius Red formed up his squadron.

Jees was the shield-master, of course, his best pilot — with a Silver Ghost in her engineer’s blister. Pirius Red himself tucked in just behind and to Jees’s starboard; Commander Darc, the backup shield- master, took the matching position to port. The rest of the ships took their places behind him, one by one calling off, making a formation that after all the training had become as familiar as the inside of Pirius’s own head.

Pirius felt a peculiar, nervous thrill. Despite the training, this was the first time the squadron, his squadron, had formed up to fly in anger — the first and, if it went well, the last.

But he was too busy for such reflections. Scout drones were already returning warnings of a Xeelee response to the Rock’s sudden emergence from the spiral-arm clouds. If the squadron didn’t get out of here now it wouldn’t be going anywhere, and the preparation would have been for nothing.

He went around the loop one last time. The familiar voices called in from the ships: Jees herself, Darc, Torec, This Burden Must Pass, even his own older self, Pirius Blue, all ready to go.

He called, “Squadron. Go to sublight.”

He felt a subtle push as his ship’s drive cut in. The stars ahead swam, blueshifted. In seconds, the squadron’s ten ships reached ninety percent of lightspeed, the optimum for setting up the grav shield. The formation still looked good; the hours of training were paying off.

“On your call, Jees,” he said.

Directly ahead of Jees’s tiny ship the grav shield coalesced. It was like an immense lens that muddled the fierce light of the Galaxy’s heart.

“Shield stable,” Jees called.

“Good work. Form up, form up.”

The squadron edged forward, perfecting the formation.

Already they were no longer even in the same universe as Orion Rock, Pirius thought; tucked up in this pocket cosmos, streaming through the prime universe at a fraction below lightspeed, the Xeelee would be quite unable to see them. That, anyhow, was the theory.

Before going to FTL, his last duty was to check with his own crew. His engineer was Cabel, the best of the bunch. His navigator was a kid called Bilson. A promisingly bright boy, but woefully inexperienced, for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to get the flying hours of some of the others — which was why Pirius had pulled rank and insisted he fly in his ship.

They were as ready as they would ever be.

If you had to ride behind a grav shield, the first FTL jump was the worst. During the endless training flights, that had been learned the hard way. You had to go into the jump at ninety percent light — and come out at the same velocity, smoothly enough to keep the grav shield stable — and keep your formation. They had done it in training; now they had to do it for real.

“Okay,” Pirius called, keeping his voice steady with an act of will. “On my command…”

Locked together by a web of artificial-sentient interactions, the ships jumped as one.

Cohl had seen the squadron rise out of its hangar. The greenships clustered in a tight little knot, right at her zenith.

She had done her duty, here on the surface, forging her links between infantry and flyers. She knew how important she had been to the overall mission, and she had welcomed Pirius Red’s trust in her. But now that it was all about to start, she longed to be up there in those ships, where she belonged. And she wondered if it could be true, as the barracks gossip had it, that there was a Silver Ghost somewhere aboard one of those ships.

The greenships seemed to shimmer, as if she were looking through heat haze. She had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was the grav shield, she thought, wondering.

She whispered, “Three, two, one.”

The greenships, ten of them, squirted out of sight, arrowing toward the very center of the Galaxy. Exultant Squadron was gone.

But a cherry-red glow was rising, all around the horizon.

Her platoon tensed, taking their positions. She gripped her weapon harder, and tried to keep her voice light. “Get ready,” she called.

The ground shuddered, and little puffs of dust floated up before her, immediately falling back. The Xeelee assault had begun.

Pirius felt the familiar FTL inertial lurch deep in his gut, and the shining sky blinked around him.

He hastily checked his displays. His ship had come through fine, he saw immediately, and had fallen back into the universe with its ninety percent lightspeed vector maintained.

Jees reported that the shield remained stable. The plan was to hold their positions for fifteen seconds, while they checked the functioning of the shield and other ships’ systems, and if they had been able to hold their formation in these unique conditions.

But there were only nine ships in the sky, not ten.

“We lost Number Six,” called Bilson.

“I see that,” Pirius snapped. He barked out unnecessary orders for the ships around the gap to close up. The ships were already moving into their well-practiced nine-ship formation, just as they had rehearsed for eight and seven and six, and on down.

One jump, they had barely left the hangar, and already a ship was lost. This mission was impossible.

The others seemed to sense his hesitation. “We go on,” Pirius Blue barked.

“Yeah,” Torec growled. “Nine out of ten through the jump is better than we war-gamed.”