“We came here looking for weapons.”

“Weapons?” he said vaguely. “Ah — yes, of course. Weapons. The Prime Radiant — you needn’t look at me like that, Ensign; I haven’t forgotten our mission!”

“So did you find anything?”

“As a matter of fact, I think I did. Ensign, in your base at the Core, did they teach you about gravastars?”

They hadn’t, but this was what Nilis had turned up in his first hasty search for techniques to counter FTL foreknowledge. And as it turned out, Nilis started to explain, Pirius was going to have to make yet another journey into strangeness, here in Sol system, to track down what Nilis thought he had discovered.

But Nilis stopped and stared at Pirius’s arm. “Ensign, what’s that on your sleeve?”

Pirius glanced down. A lozenge shape, glittering brightly, rested on his uniform sleeve; it was no larger than his thumbnail. And it was just where Tek had touched him. Without thinking he clapped his hand over the chip. “Nothing, sir. Uh, an insect.”

Nilis raised bushy eyebrows. “An insect? In here? It’s possible, I suppose — who’s to say? I think our business is done for today. Tomorrow we will return and start digging properly into this business of the gravastars.”

As they were led out of the Archive and back to the golden-brown surface of Mars, Pirius glanced again at the chip. He wasn’t disturbed by it so much as by his own reaction. Why had he concealed it from Nilis?

He felt deeply troubled. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good soldier after all.

They fell down to Factory Rock.

Chapter 20

A dropship was small and basic, just a transparent cylinder big enough for two platoons, twenty infantry, crammed in shoulder to shoulder with their bulky rad-shielded skinsuits and equipment. When Pirius Blue looked out through the ship’s curving hull, he could see the fleshy bulk of the Spline warship that had brought them here from Quin. His own ship was one of thousands committed to this action. From a dozen orifices in the Spline’s hull, the dropships poured out in gleaming streams. And when he looked down he could see how the little ships were falling all across the broad face of the target Rock.

The surface of the Rock was covered by a zigzag lattice of trenches. He was already low enough to see people, tiny figures like toys scurrying clumsily along the trenches or hurling themselves over stretches of open ground. But everywhere points of light sparkled, pink and electric blue, bright on a gray background, and some of those running figures fell, or exploded in soft bursts of crimson. As far as he could see, the whole surface of this asteroid was covered by the crawling figures and the sparkling lights. The fire was reaching up to the sky too; a thread of cherry-red light would connect the ground to one of the falling dropships, and it would burst, spilling bodies into space.

And all this in utter silence, broken only by the hiss of air through his suit’s systems.

He had known in abstract what to expect. He had seen such Rocks before, from the comfortable cockpit of his high-flying greenship. But he had not imagined this. The scene was even beautiful, he thought.

But there was no more time. The ground flew up at him.

They had been briefed by Captain Marta.

This was an unusual action, she said, because it was taking place outside the Front.

This Rock — known as Factory Rock — wasn’t an assault platform but a human base, a munitions dump and the site of several monopole factories. Monopoles were defects in spacetime, each a nasty little knot with the mass of a trillion protons. They had been manufactured in the early universe during its period of GUT-driven inflation, and now GUT energy was used to churn them out, to a uniform mass and charge, in the vast numbers required by the human war effort. They were useful weapons; they would cut through Xeelee construction material, or even the spacetime-flaw wings of their ships, like steel through flesh.

Factory Rock was an old establishment. It lay in the hinterland beyond the Galaxy center, a little closer in to the Front than most. In a thousand years of operation, it had had no significant problems save for quagmites, the odd little virus-like critters that were attracted to all GUT engines in factories and ships.

But now the Xeelee had seen a chance to break out of their usual cordon. They had taken this Rock, and had set up well-fortified positions across it. It was a terror tactic. As this Rock went sailing on its own slow orbit behind the human lines, like a rat loose in a barracks, it was causing disruption far out of proportion to its size and direct threat.

So Pirius and his buddies were being dropped to clear the Xeelee emplacements, and if possible to take back the monopole factories.

Captain Marta hadn’t tried to hide the fact that these frontline troopers were raw. Some of them had had only days’ training on their weapons, their laser rifles and starbreaker pistols. But as this target was well behind the main front line, more hardened troops couldn’t be spared.

“Remember, all that matters is that one of you gets through to the objective. And you will make that happen. I know you will all do your duty.” She smiled, her metallized half-face gleaming. “The Coalition has invested a lot in each of you, in giving you life and in your training. Now’s the time to make it worthwhile.”

“Yes, sir!”

The dropship didn’t so much land as crash. It just plummeted to the ground, burying its nose in a meter of asteroid dirt.

The hull immediately popped, and the inertial shielding turned off. Following his training, Pirius threw himself out of the ship and into the nearest trench.

The trench was shallow, barely enough to cover him. In fact it was a piece of shit, he thought, surveying it with a now-professional eye; he could dig better in half an hour. But lines of cherry-red light already stitched the air above him, and he pressed himself into the dirt.

The members of his platoon, 57 Platoon, all made it to this crudely dug trench. He saw the corporal, a very young man called Pace, and his sergeant, and Cohl, and the two surviving Tilis in their gaudily customized skinsuits. The Tilis seemed to be functioning, even though it was only three weeks since the death of Two, and Three was still getting used to her prosthetic hand. Many of the troopers were wrestling with their clumsy weapons. But Pirius and Cohl, as Service Corps, were laden with trenching tools, flares, comm posts, med supplies, and other nonlethal essentials.

As the enemy fire intensified above them, they were all pushing themselves into the broken dirt, their gleaming new weapons already scuffed and coated with dust. He wondered if Burden had made it down safely. His platoon had been scheduled to land some distance away.

Corporal Pace whirled a finger, ordering them to switch their comms to the platoon’s dedicated loop. “Listen up,” he said heavily. “We’re down safe. The line’s intact and we’re in a strong section of it. We have Guards to the left, and more to the right, further down the line.” That was good. Guards were pains in the ass on the base, but in action, Guard units were reassuring to have close, protecting your flank. “We’re about two kilometers from our target factory, which is that way.” He pointed. “In thirty seconds the artillery barrage will start, and in five minutes we’ll move. Everybody clear? Good.”

And then, to Pirius’s amazement, he snapped his fingers and a Virtual appeared in the air above him, floating over the trench like a multicolored specter.

It was a pep talk. A smiling woman’s face mouthed words — no doubt uplifting Doctrinal propaganda — that Pirius couldn’t hear. They were shown images of field guns, mostly monopole cannon. These were in batteries a couple of kilometers behind Pirius’s position, and he knew there were emplacements of more massive siege guns, “heavies,” further back still. The slanting tubes were oddly graceful, Pirius thought, oddly fragile-looking for such powerful weapons. They were lodged on the ground, sacrificing flexibility of deployment for the shelter of the asteroid’s bulk.