Burden said, “And hope is what I give the cadets.”

Nilis nodded vigorously. “Oh, I see that.”

“Then why,” Burden said evenly, “won’t you talk to them?”

Nilis was immediately nervous again. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly — it isn’t necessary…”

Burden stood smoothly, crossed to the door, and opened it. The disciples who had gathered outside filed in immediately, a dozen or so of them, their small faces solemn. They stared at Nilis, who was probably, Pirius thought, the most exotic creature they had ever seen.

Tili Three walked boldly up to him. She ought to be more wary of a Commissary, Pirius thought. But there was none of the dread antique grandeur of the Commission for Historical Truth about Nilis. Tili reached out to touch Nilis’s robe. Nilis gaped at her silvered prosthetic hand. Her fingers passed through the hem of his robe, scattering pixels like insects. He actually backed up against the wall, his big hands fluttering defensively before his chest. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.

Burden said, “Why are you afraid?”

“They are so young,” Nilis said. “So young — just children—”

“Children who have seen their comrades die,” Pirius said.

“I’m not afraid of them but of me,” Nilis said. He made to pat Tili’s head, but when his palm brushed her hair it broke up into a spray of multicolored pixels. The little firework display made the cadets laugh, and Pirius saw tears well in Nilis’s foolish old eyes. “You see? I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear this, to come to one of these terrible nurseries — even Arches Base was like an academy compared to this — they are so young! And, my eyes, I can’t save them all — I can’t save any of them.”

Pirius Blue said, “Perhaps we can, Commissary.”

Nilis whispered hoarsely, “At any rate we must try.”

Chapter 28

In Saturn’s orbit, the modifications to the last test greenship took a week of hard work.

It may have been conceptually simplifying to hook up the grav generator to the CTC, as Nilis had suggested, but grumbling Navy engineers, trying to marry together two literally alien technologies, were quick to point out the gap between concept and actuality. At least the delay gave Torec a chance to recover from the last run.

And then, suddenly, here she was, strapped into the cockpit of a greenship once more, with the cold, dark spaces of Sol system stretching all around her. This second ship’s blister seemed to be filled with just as much clutter as before, and she had to squirm to get comfortable. It wasn’t indulgence; when you flew, the last thing you needed was to be distracted by a cloth fold up your ass.

Those sparkling monitor ships were all around her, and she could hear the subdued chatter on her comm loop, just as it was before. Saturn was ahead of her — but this time it was visible only as a pinpoint, not a disc, and her tame Xeelee wasn’t visible at all, save in the sensors. The target area was much further away. In the first step of the new mission profile, the greenship would be pushed close to lightspeed by its conventional sublight drive; a drawback of the new maneuver was that it needed much more room to work.

When she glanced at her crewmates in the other blisters of the greenship, it wasn’t two hardened Navy tars she saw, but to her right, in the navigator’s seat, the stolid form of Commander Darc — and to her left a new enlarged blister held the massive form of a Silver Ghost. It looked as if the cabin had been filled with mercury. It was scarcely believable that she, a mere ensign, was sitting here in control of such a craft, with such a strange crew, but here she was. As the last seconds ticked away, and the clock in her head counted down, she shivered with anticipation.

She polled her crew one last time. “Ambassador. Ready?”

“All my systems are nominal,” the Ghost’s translated voice said.

“Commander—”

“Don’t waste time with useless chitchat, Ensign,” Darc snapped.

“No, sir,” she said.

Once more she felt the throbbing of the gravastar generators, deep in her bones. Three, two, one.

The ship jolted forward.

“Sublight nominal,” Darc called.

“Ambassador?”

“The shield generators are ready.”

“All right. Commander, push us to ninety percent light.”

“On your order.”

A deep breath. “Do it.”

The surge was all but intangible. But as they went relativistic, the speckling of stars before her turned blue and swam closer, like disturbed fish.

Darc called, “Ten seconds to Saturn.”

A random thought passed through her mind. If this Ghost wanted to carry out some sabotage — to destroy this test ship, to kill a Navy Commander — it was in a perfect position to do it. Too late to climb out now, Torec.

“Shield on my mark,” she called.

“Ready,” said the Silver Ghost.

Three. Two. One.

The blueshifted stars swam again.

Torec didn’t even know if the trial had been successful until she brought the greenship back to Enceladus. At least this one hadn’t blown up.

The base medical officer tried to bring the crew in for checks, but neither she nor Darc was willing to take time out for so much as a shower. Hot, stiff, sweating after hours in their cramped blisters, they ran down ice-walled corridors to the briefing room where Nilis waited for them. They were trailed by the silent Ghost, with its escort of heavily armed Guardians.

In the briefing room a Virtual representation of the greenship, reconstructed from the records of a dozen monitor drones, was a toy hanging in the air, two meters long. She watched as it went to ninety percent light, and the gravastar shield opened up. The shield was beautiful, Torec thought, a banner of shining, sparkling light, pure white, like some living thing. And behind it she saw only stars. The ship she was riding had been cut out of the universe, and existed once more in a cosmos of its own.

Nilis said, “You created a perfect spherical cap, subtending an angle of around forty degrees. Congratulations, Ensign. I wonder if any human has visited not one but two new universes before. Perhaps you have set a record…”

“I’m just glad it worked.”

He grunted. “As pragmatic as ever! Well, so it did; the Ambassador’s strategy of surfing at the edge of chaos was tricky to manage, but very effective — as you can see.”

Darc said, “Coming up on the Xeelee encounter.”

The view shifted to a static image of the nightfighter. It orbited Saturn, penned in by a swarm of watchful drones. The gravastar cap was a missile that plunged at the Xeelee out of the left side of the image.

Nilis snapped his fingers, and in slow motion the incoming grav cap was reduced to a crawl. “See how the Xeelee is reacting,” Nilis said. “Here it deploys its sublight drive.” Night-dark wings swept before the clouds of Saturn, quite beautiful. “It knows the gravastar cap is coming, of course, but it knows nothing of what it is concealing.” The fly flickered out of the image, which changed to a long shot centered on a shrunken Saturn. Now the Xeelee fly was a black dart that plunged at the cap, flickering, making rapid, short FTL jumps.

Darc said, “That’s a classic Tolman maneuver. It’s trying to send images of the encounter to its own past.”

“Yes. But it’s impossible. It’s looking into a region that isn’t causally connected to the universe it inhabits; all the world lines terminate on that cap.”

The cap dissolved suddenly, turning into a thing of wisps and shards that quickly dissipated. The grav shield gone, the greenship dropped back into its parent universe. And it tore at the Xeelee, monopole cannon firing. The nightfighter tried to evade, but the greenship, controlled by its paradoxical CTC processor, was too fast; it seemed to anticipate every move. A hail of monopoles ripped through the Xeelee’s spacetime wings.