Nilis shouted, “And for that grandiose goal you will tolerate this deviance in the heart of Sol system? Your hypocrisy is galling!” His raised voice disturbed the swimming mothers; they drifted across their pools, away from him.

“You always did think small, Nilis,” Gramm said dismissively. “In a way it’s rather elegant to turn one of our fundamental human flaws into a source of strength, don’t you think? And speaking of corruption and deviance — you,” he challenged Luru Parz. “What is it you want here, you old witch?”

“I told you I knew where the bodies were buried,” she said levelly. “Gramm, once again you’re stalling over funding Nilis’s projects. That will stop.”

Gramm growled, “You have threatened me before. Do you really think exposing this hive-mountain will bring down the Coalition?”

“No,” she said, unperturbed. “But it will show you I’m serious. There are far worse secrets in Sol system than this, Minister Gramm, as you know better than I do. And now you are going to help me find a weapon. Nilis needs something to strike at the Prime Radiant. I think I know where to find one.”

Nilis looked interested. “Where?”

“In the past, of course. But locked away, in an archive buried even deeper than this one.”

Gramm glared at her, his mouth working. But Pirius saw that Luru Parz had beaten him again.

Nilis was staring at her. “Madam, you are a nest of mysteries. But this deeper archive — where is it?”

She said, “Callisto.”

The name meant nothing to Pirius. But Nilis blanched.

The strange standoff lasted a few more minutes, until blue-helmeted Guardians in fully armored skinsuits broke into the chamber to escort them all away.

As they left, Pirius drew Luru Parz aside. “There’s something I still don’t understand. Why did Tek give me that contact chip in the first place? What did he want?”

She sighed. “He was just probing, seeking an opportunity. It’s the way a Coalescence works.”

Pirius shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Tek act on behalf of the Coalescence? He is a parasite.”

“But he’s part of the hive, too. Don’t you see that? It’s just that he doesn’t know it. None of them does.” She plucked his sleeve. “Come on, Ensign, let’s get out of here. Even through my mask, the stink of this place is making me feel ill.”

They hurried after the Guardians, making for the cool, empty surface of Mars.

Behind them, the Coalescent mothers swam in their milky pools, and naked, round-shouldered attendants scurried anxiously.

Chapter 30

Pirius Blue had almost forgotten how it was to sit in a greenship cockpit.

It was like being suspended in open space, with nothing between you and the sky. And this Galaxy- center sky was full of stars, a clustering of globes that receded to infinity. Many of them were bright blue youngsters, but others glowered red, resentfully old before their time. There was a great sense of motion about the barrage of stars, a sense of immense dynamism — and in truth these crowded stars were flying rapidly through this lethal space, though their motion was only visible on timescales of years, too slow for mayfly humans to perceive.

Huddled in a corner of Pirius’s greenship cockpit, Virtual Nilis looked faintly absurd in his skinsuit, Virtual-tailored to fit his ample girth. He said, wondering, “So many stars, giant, violent stars, far more massive than Earth’s sun, crowded so close they slide past like light globes lining a roadway… It is as bright as a tropical sky! There is an old paradox. Once it was believed that the universe is infinite and uniform, everywhere full of stars. But that cannot be so, you see, for then whichever direction you looked, your eye would meet a star, and the whole sky would shine as bright as the surface of the sun. Perhaps that paradoxical sky would look something like this.”

“It’s a beautiful sight, Commissary,” Pirius Blue said. “But remember, in this place, every star is a fortress.”

That shut him up, to Pirius’s relief. Pirius had work to do; the mission clock was counting down. He blipped the greenship’s attitude controllers, tiny inertial generators fixed to each of the three nacelles and to the main body.

Before him, the spangling of crowded Galaxy-center stars shifted. He made out seven sparks against that background, the emerald lights of the seven greenships that were going to accompany him and his crew into the unknown depths of the Cavity.

“Systems seem nominal,” he reported.

Enduring Hope called from his engineer’s position, “Sure, genius, like you can feel the ship’s degrees of freedom just by sitting there. In fact I fixed the inertial control before you started playing.”

“I knew I could rely on you, Hope.”

Now Cohl chipped in, “Do you want to give me some warning before you start throwing this tub around the sky? I’m trying to get the nav systems calibrated. I know that’s merely a detail to you two heroes, but I’m sentimentally attached to knowing where I am.”

“It’s all yours, Navigator…”

Virtual Nilis was wide-eyed. “Pirius — you must be glad to see your crew again. Back in their rightful habitat, so to speak. But is it always like this?”

“Oh, no,” Pirius said. “I think we’re a little subdued today.”

But it had been good when the three of them had been reunited, down on Quin: Cohl with the limp that had been her souvenir from Factory Rock, and Enduring Hope, back from his artillery brigade. Hope, amazingly, had lost weight. It turned out to be tough physical work, out on those monopole- cannon battalions, and after months of it, Hope had never looked fitter.

And it had certainly been a joy when the three of them had first boarded a ship again, which they had quickly dubbed The Assimilator’s Other Claw. It wasn’t much of a combat ship, as it was laden with a massive sensor pod that spoiled the sleek lines of its main body. And it could never be the same as their first ship, of course. But it was a ship nevertheless — their ship. They had marked their skinsuits with sigils that recalled the first Claw, and Pirius Blue felt an extraordinary surge of joy to be back in a greenship blister.

Nilis was watching him with his characteristic mixture of pride and longing. “I suppose the banter is a social lubricant. But I’m surprised you get anything done. Well, I’m privileged to be here. To see this. It’s so different. You know, we humans aren’t designed to function in such an environment. On Earth you are on a plain, so it seems, a few kilometers wide, with clouds a few kilometers up. In the sky everything is so remote it looks two-dimensional — even the Moon. There is no depth. The scale is kilometers, or infinity, with a gap in between. Here, though, you have stars scattered through the depth of the sky — space is filled up — and you get a sense of immensity, of perspective that’s impossible on Earth.”

Pirius shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Oh, I think so.” He peered at Pirius curiously. “To comprehend a sky like this, the very structure of your sensorium, your mind, must differ from mine, Pirius Blue. Genetically we could be identical. But our minds are so different we might as well belong to alien species.”

This was uncomfortably heretical to Pirius. Everybody was essentially the same; that was the Doctrine’s decree. If Nilis wanted to believe he was some kind of divergent, that was up to him. “I’m just trying to do my job, Commissary.”

“I know.” Nilis sighed. “And my gabbling is getting in the way! Thank you again for hosting me.”

Hosting: there was something else Pirius didn’t want to think about too hard. As the whole purpose of the mission was to take Nilis through the Cavity, it had been decreed that the safest place to lodge him was with Pirius — that is, in him. All flight crew had implants of various kinds studded through their nervous systems, serving as trackers, backup comm systems, medical controls, system interfaces. It had been trivial to download Virtual Nilis into Pirius’s head. Trivial, but not welcome. But it had been orders.