The watching audience cheered — even Torec, who had been there; she couldn’t help it. The nightfighter went limp, deactivated by its human masters, and its escorting ships closed in to return it to its pen.

Nilis closed his fist, and the Virtual died. Without its light and color the briefing room seemed empty.

“We did it,” Torec breathed.

Nilis stayed composed, apparently already thinking ahead to the next step. “It appears so. I’ve sent the records to the relevant Grand Conclave committees, with Commander Darc’s agreement. Now we must wait for approval to move to the next stage.”

“Yes. But we did it. Commissary, we did it!” Whooping, she ran to him, grabbed his arms, and began to jump up and down. After a moment he gave up his pretense of solemnity; barefoot, his scuffed robe flapping, he joined her in jumping around the room.

The Ghost hung silently in the air, and Darc watched it thoughtfully.

Torec had naively imagined that the successful test flight would have been enough to have convinced the brass to give Nilis’s project the go-ahead. All they needed now was to find a weapon that could strike at the Prime Radiant when they got there.

But days went by as they waited for a response from the oversight committees.

And when it came, it was a shutdown. Though the committee members recognized the technical achievements of Nilis and his people — and the promising new technologies would be thoroughly evaluated for applications by the Navy and other forces, et cetera, et cetera — the case for continuing with Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant remained unproven, and no more funds would be released for it. Torec couldn’t believe it. Another success had brought nothing but another canning.

Even Commander Darc seemed sympathetic. “You know I’m no supporter of your project,” he said to Nilis. “But I do admit that your research has been yielding fruit. You always made too many enemies, however, Nilis. And now they’ve caught up with you.”

But Nilis was suffused with a determined grimness that belied his shabby exterior. “It’s not over vet,” he said, and he stalked off.

Chapter 29

Pirius Red was startled to receive a call from Luru Parz. The Virtual image was so good he couldn’t tell if it was a direct broadcast or a copy.

She said simply, “I want you to get me into Mons Olympus, Ensign.”

The call came early in the morning. He was still aboard the Venus orbital habitat. He finger-combed tousled hair and tried to pull his tunic straight. The Virtual just stared at him, humorless. He said, “I’ll make a call to the Commissary—”

“I didn’t call Nilis. I called you. Every agency that knows of my existence, especially the Commission for Historical Truth, has banned me from such facilities as the Archive. I doubt if even Nilis could buck that. I’m asking for your help, Ensign.”

Such a breakdown in anything even remotely resembling a chain of command was deeply disturbing to Pirius. “I don’t know how I can even get to Mars. Or how to get you into the Archive—”

She smiled. “Spread your wings.”

He stared at her. Was it possible she knew somehow of the chip the peculiar Archive Retrieval Specialist Tek had pressed onto his sleeve? He wished he had got rid of that thing the moment he found it — but he’d chosen not to, he reminded himself, and had kept it for two months since.

“Luru Parz, why do you want to do this?”

She nodded, watching him. “A why question. No good soldier ever asks why. But you do, Pirius! Gramm and his cronies continue to block Nilis’s progress. I intend to force them to act. Ensign, our beloved Coalition is a mountain of lies and hypocrisy. Surely you know that by now. That doesn’t bother me personally; it probably has to be that way to survive. But the threat of exposure is my leverage — and that’s why I need to get into the Archive.” Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “Am I frightening you?”

“You always frighten me.”

She laughed, showing her blackened teeth. “How sane you are! But you understand I am working toward the same goal as Nilis, don’t you? A goal which you can’t help but instinctively embrace, despite your lifetime of conditioning.”

He made a decision. “I’ll help you.”

“Of course you will,” she said dismissively. “I’ll meet you in Kahra.” The Virtual broke up and dissipated.

In the event Luru Parz was right. It proved remarkably easy for Pirius to organize this strange trip back to Olympus.

He needed the Commissary’s approval to use his corvette. But Nilis, at Saturn, was still preoccupied with details of the gravastar shield tests, as well as his ongoing studies of the first moments of the universe, and some mysterious business he was conducting in the Core, and continuing battles with Gramm and the Coalition bureaucracy, and, and… When Pirius called he waved his Virtual hand vaguely. “Just get on with it, Pirius.”

As for getting into the Archive, there was Tek’s chip. It wasn’t hard to work out its interface. The clerk’s smudgy Virtual image directed Pirius to a port on Olympus — not the one he had visited before, another of the thousand or so that studded the mountain’s mighty flank.

So he had no excuse not to do as Luru Parz asked, despite his dread at the very thought of her.

The journey to Mars was uneventful. Pirius traveled alone, save for the corvette’s crew; he gambled his way through the interplanetary journey.

As she had promised, Luru Parz met him at Kahra. After an overnight stay they boarded a flitter for the final hop to Olympus.

They landed at coordinates Pirius had extracted from Tek’s chip. When the flitter settled to the ground, the situation — the gentle slope, the dust-soaked sky, the washed-out red-brown colors, the hatch set in the ground — seemed exactly the same as his last visit.

Tek kept them waiting.

Luru Parz was calm. “We have to give him time. Remember he is working covertly in there. Believe me, it’s a difficult environment in which to act independently.” Pirius didn’t know what she meant.

He was restless, anxious. The flitter was little more than a bubble a couple of meters across. Its hull was so transparent it would have been invisible save for a thin layer of Martian dust. And Pirius was stuck inside it with an immortal.

They sat opposite each other, so close in the tiny flitter that their knees almost touched. Even in person Luru had that dark, still quality, as if light fell differently on her. He could smell her, a faint dusty tang, like the smoky smell of the dead leaves that littered corners of Nilis’s unruly garden.

She was studying him. “Do I horrify you, Ensign? I am a living embodiment of everything you have been brought up to despise. Every breath I take is illegal.”

“It isn’t that.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No, it isn’t, is it? I suppose you’ve been in Sol system long enough to be able to perceive shades of gray. Then what?”

“You’re the strangest human being I have ever met.”

She nodded. “If indeed I am still human. After all, as Hama Druz himself understood, human beings aren’t meant to last twenty thousand years.”

It was the first time he had heard the actual number; it shocked him. “It is unimaginable.”

“Of course it is. It is a monstrous time, a time that should frame the rise and fall of a species, not a single life. But the alternative to living is always worse.”

She had been born during the last days of the Qax Occupation. While no older than Pirius she had been forced to make a compromise: to accept the gift of immortality in return for becoming a collaborator. “I thought it was the right thing to do, to help preserve mankind. It would have been easier to refuse.”