Most of the seven new platoon members were cadets, unblooded, fresh from the training grounds. Reunited cadre siblings greeted each other noisily. The survivors of Factory Rock moved in this new crowd as if they had suddenly grown old, Pirius thought. The energy of the youngsters was infectious, and the mood quickly lifted back to something like the brash noisiness it had been before. Soon it was as if the action on the Rock had never happened, as if it had all been some hideous nightmare.

But in the quietest hours of the night, when the rats sang, you could still hear weeping.

Tili Three was changed. She was nothing like the bright, happy kid who had spent her life in intimacy with her lost sisters; now, left alone, she grew hollow-eyed and gaunt.

Pirius longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. He told himself that if not for his own actions, Tili Three might well have lost her life as well. Why, then, did he feel so unreasonably guilty? And how could he feel so anguished about the loss of two privates, when, if you added up all the losses around the Front, ten billion died every year? It made no sense, and yet it hurt even so.

In the end, paralyzed by his own grief and uncertainty, he left her alone.

This Burden Must Pass had been on Factory Rock, but his platoon had been far from the main action and had suffered only one casualty, non-lethal. He had been through all this before.

And, just as the dropship orderly had said to Pirius, Burden told him it was always like this. “They chop up the platoons and push us together, so we’re all crowded in just like before. Soon you don’t see the big hollow spaces, the rows of empty bunks. You forget. You can’t help it.” He spoke around mouthfuls of the treat food.

“It’s not the same, though,” Pirius said. “Not once you’ve been out there. It can’t be.”

“Don’t talk about it,” Burden said warningly. “You’re safe in here, in the barracks. It’s as if what happens out there isn’t real — or isn’t unless you talk about it. If you do that, you see, you let it in, all that horror.” His face worked briefly, and Pirius wondered what else he was leaving unsaid.

“I don’t understand you, Burden. You’ve been in the field six times now. Six times. If none of this matters, if the Doctrines are a joke to you — why put your life on the line over and over?”

“No matter what I believe, what choice is there? If you go forward, you’ll most likely get shot. If you go backward, if you refuse, you’ll be court-martialed and sentenced, and shot anyhow. So what are you supposed to do? You go forward, because the only thing you can shoot at in this war is a Xeelee. At least going forward you’ve a chance. That’s all there is, really.” That was as much as he would say.

Pirius was mystified by Burden’s contradictions. Burden seemed composed, centered. Under his veneer of faith he seemed hardheaded, cynical, and full of a certain gritty wisdom on how Army life was to be survived. He seemed to have strength of faith, and strength of character, too, which he’d displayed once again in the most testing arena possible. But sometimes Pirius would catch Burden looking at him or Cohl almost longingly, as if he was desperate to be accepted, like an unpopular cadet in an Arches Barracks Ball.

And Pirius noticed that in this strange time of the action’s aftermath, Burden was eating compulsively. He devoured as much of the treat rations he could get hold of, and in those first days he always seemed to have food in his mouth. Once Pirius saw him making himself vomit: the ancient system of fingers pushed down the throat.

Burden’s mix of strength and weakness was unfathomable.

Chapter 23

After five days Pirius Red was still stuck on Pluto.

While Nilis spent time working with the Plutinos, Pirius skulked in the spartan comforts of the corvette with the crew. These two Navy pilots, both women, were called Molo and Huber. They categorically refused to set foot off the ship onto this murky little world. They worked, ate, slept in their compartment. They were interested only in journeys, indifferent to destinations: they were pilots.

They had heard rumors about Project Prime Radiant, though. They thought it was all a waste of time. As far as Pirius could make out, they believed that whatever you came up with, the Xeelee would counter it. You were never going to beat the Xeelee, they said. It seemed to be the prevalent attitude, here in Sol system.

Of course there was an immense gulf between the two of them and Pirius. And there was something sexual going on: not uncommon on assignments like this. But at least they were Navy officers. So Pirius shared their bland rations, and played their elaborate games of chance, and immersed himself, for a while, in the comforting routines of Navy life.

He tried to sort out his feelings.

He told himself he hated the Plutinos for what they had done here. In the four months he had spent in Sol system, Pirius had got used to a lot of bizarre ideas. He had seen the wealth of Earth, the strangeness of its people, and the casual, dismissive way the precious Doctrines were regarded here — even what seemed to him the corruption of the likes of Gramm. Perhaps this was too exotic for his simple serving man’s imagination. But the sight of a Silver Ghost drifting over the icy ground of a world of Sol system itself, as if it had a right to be there, as if it owned it, when by rights it shouldn’t even exist — it was a challenge to a soldier’s deepest instincts, violating everything he had been brought up to value.

No matter how much he thought about it, it didn’t get any clearer. And he had nobody to talk it over with. He certainly wasn’t about to discuss this with Nilis, whom he was starting to think was part of the problem. He wished Torec were here.

At lights out he slept as long as he could. But all too soon the morning came.

On the sixth day there was to be a briefing on the revitalized Ghosts’ gravastar technology.

Nilis insisted that Pirius come out of the corvette and join him.

As the two of them followed Draq, Mara, and the other Plutinos through the grubby corridors of the compound at Christy, the Commissary was actually humming. For Nilis, Pirius supposed, a day of lectures and earnest academic discussion was a day in paradise.

“We’re here to assess this material for its weapons potential, Ensign,” Nilis said sternly. “I suggest you put aside your prejudices and do your duty.”

Prejudices? “Yes, sir,” Pirius said coldly.

Mara walked beside Pirius, but she ignored him. She hadn’t said a word to him since his hostile reaction to the Ghost.

They were led to the most spacious dome of the complex. It was a chilly, cavernous place. Chairs and couches had been set in the middle of the hall, an island of furniture in a sea of empty floor. A relic of a failed colony, its surface tarnished to a golden hue by cosmic rays, this dome was far too big for the small modern population. Ancient bots hovered uncertainly, offering unappetizing- looking food and drink.

And Pirius could see a Ghost drifting over the ice just outside the dome, obscured by the tint of the aged dome wall. Perhaps it was the one who called itself the Sink Ambassador. He wished with all his heart that it would go away.

Draq climbed a little podium. Self-importantly, he began to outline the new idea of a “gravastar": based on an ancient human theory, developed by a colony of Silver Ghosts here on Pluto-Charon, discovered by Nilis in his hasty trawls of the Olympus Archive, and identified as having the potential to be useful for Project Prime Radiant. “Everybody knows what a black hole is,” Draq began. “But everybody is wrong…”