Chapter 24

A week later Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at Saturn. They fell into bed.

Pirius buried himself in the noisy pleasure and consolation of sex. She was the center of his universe, and he had returned to her. He wished he could tell her that, but he didn’t know how.

Afterward, he poured out his heart about what had happened on Pluto.

Torec said, “I can’t imagine it.”

But when he described how he had tried to get the Ghost to disassemble itself, she turned away. Even she seemed appalled by his loss of control.

His shame burned deeper — and his fear. They were both changing, both growing, under the dim light of Sol. Maybe that was inevitable, but he was afraid they were growing apart. He wanted things to stay the same, for them both to be just kids, Barracks Ball squeezes. But that, of course, was impossible. He could see she was maturing, finding her own place here as her achievements started to rack up. But he didn’t know the person she was becoming, or if that person would have room for him. Then again, he didn’t understand himself either — but what he did see of himself, he realized reluctantly, he didn’t much like. And if he didn’t even like himself much, how could she love him?

But they had little time together. They had a job to do here at Saturn. They were to devote themselves to work on prototypes and test flights.

Nilis told them that the cost of the Project, especially this latest phase, was continually questioned in the remote reaches of Coalition councils, but he was driving it through. “You can fill Sol system with theories and arguments,” he said. “But, my eyes, I’ve learned what makes these politicos tick. Dry-as-Martian-dust bureaucrats they may be, but there’s nothing like a bit of live technology to make them sit up and take notice! It’s the allure of war, you know, the pornography of destruction and death: that’s what motivates them — as long as it is somebody else’s death, of course.”

The ensigns had to take Nilis’s word for that. But his clarity of purpose as this new phase of his project began was undeniable.

A Navy facility was put at their disposal. It turned out to be a small disused dock in orbit around the bristling fortress world of Saturn, under the overall control of Commander Darc. Once it got underway, the development progressed rapidly, because the engineers were keen. Across the Galaxy, combat technology was pretty much static, and the crew, being engineers, enjoyed the challenge of putting together something new.

From the first Virtual sketches of how a standard greenship might be modified, and the first simulations of how such a beast might handle in flight, the two ensigns immersed themselves in the work. Torec applied the crude management techniques she had learned on the Moon, and the complex project ran reasonably smoothly from the start. Pirius felt comparatively at home here among Navy engineers, far removed from such horrors as reincarnated Silver Ghosts.

So Pirius was infuriated when Nilis called him away for yet another new assignment.

Nilis had taken himself off to the heart of Sol system once more, to initiate studies on the nature of the Prime Radiant itself. It was his way; now that the test program was underway, he regarded the gravastar work as “mere detail,” and had switched his attention to the next conceptual phase of his project, the assault on Chandra itself. And he needed Pirius, Nilis said; he wanted one of his “core team” to be involved in every phase of the project — and Torec’s newfound management skills were just too valuable on the test-flight work; it was Pirius who could be spared.

And so he summoned Pirius to what he called the “neutrino telescope,” before carelessly leaving Pirius to sort out his own travel. It was maddening — and embarrassing. Pirius had no real idea what neutrinos were, or why or how you would build a telescope to study them, or why Nilis felt neutrinos had anything to do with his project.

But his biggest problem was figuring out where the telescope was.

He asked around the Navy facility. None of the engineers and sailors knew what he was talking about. In the end, Pirius was forced to go to Commander Darc — another loss of face. “Oh, the carbon mine!” Darc said, laughing. He said the crew he would assign to Pirius would know where they were going.

Pirius spent a last night with Torec. They shared a bunk in a Navy dorm that was big and brightly lit: not as immense as the Barracks Ball of Arches Base, but near enough to feel like home. They talked about inconsequentials — anything but Silver Ghosts or neutrinos, or their own hearts, or other mysteries.

Then Pirius sailed once more into the murky heart of Sol system.

The corvette he took was spartan compared to Nilis’s, and the crew, hardened Navy veterans irritated at being given such a chore, ignored Pirius for the whole trip. Pirius ate, slept, exercised. It wasn’t so bad; perhaps he was getting used to the strange experience of being alone.

In its final approach the corvette swept around the limb of the planet, approaching from the shadowed side, and the new world opened up into an immense crescent.

Pirius peered out of the transparent hull. The light was dazzling; he was actually inside the orbit of Earth here, and the sun seemed huge. Another new planet, he thought wearily, another slice of strangeness.

But this one really was extraordinary. Under a thick, slightly murky atmosphere, the ground was pure white from pole to equator, and from orbit it looked perfectly smooth, unblemished, like an immense toy. He had never seen a world that looked so clean, he thought, so pristine. The whole surface even seemed to sparkle, as if it were covered in grains of salt.

The corvette entered low orbit and the planet flattened out into a landscape. The air was tall, all but transparent, without cloud save for streaks of high, icy haze. But Pirius saw contrails and rocket exhausts, sparking through the air’s pale gray. Once he saw an immense craft duck down from orbit to skim through the upper atmosphere. It was a kind of trawler; air molecules were gathered into a huge electromagnetic scoop, its profile limned by crackling lightning.

This close, though, the geometric perfection of the world was marred by detail. Pirius made out the shapes of mountains, canyons, even craters. But everything was covered by white dust, every edge softened, every profile blurred. Pirius wondered if the white stuff could be water ice, or even carbon dioxide snow, but the sun’s heat was surely too intense for that.

Small settlements studded the land. Around these scattered holdings, quarries had been neatly cut into the creamy ground, their floors crisscrossed by the tracks of toiling insect-like vehicles. Tiny craft rose into space from small, orange-bright landing pads, carrying off the fruit of the quarries. Many of the buildings were themselves covered with white dust; evidently some of them were ancient.

Pirius asked the Navy crew what the white dust was. Their reply was blunt: “Chalk,” a word that meant nothing to Pirius. But they called this world “the carbon mine,” as Darc had. It was only later that Pirius learned that this “carbon mine” had once had a name of its own, an ancient name with nothing to do with the purposes to which the planet had been put. Once, it had been called Venus.

“So, another stop on your grand tour of Sol system, Ensign Pirius?”

“It’s not by choice, Commissary.”

“Of course. Well, come along, come along…” Nilis led the way along bare-walled corridors, padding over floors rutted by long usage.

Nilis was working in an orbital habitat; the corvette had cautiously docked at the heart of a sprawling tangle of modules, walkways, and ducts. The habitat was devoted to pure science, it seemed; to the planet’s secondary role as a “neutrino telescope.” And it was old: the modules’ protective blankets were cratered by micrometeorite impacts, and blackened by millennia of exposure to the hard light of the sun.