She said, “I know it’s chance that I’m here at all. It could have been anybody.” She shifted again. “Look, Pirius, I might have been brought here for you. But now I’ve found my own place. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t come swanning back and expect things to be as they were before.”

“I don’t think I ever did expect that,” he said.

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “I need you.”

She snorted. “Yeah. For sex.”

“Not just that.” He hesitated to say the word, knowing it sounded soft. “Company.”

She laughed. “What are you, a Coalescent drone? Life isn’t about company, Pirius. It’s about doing your job.”

Defensively he said, “Yes. But maybe we can help each other to be more effective. Have you thought of that?”

“What help do you need? It wasn’t even you who was sent into that weird other-place on Callisto.”

“It was a copy of me who went off and died, to spare me having to do it. Just as Pirius Blue is a copy of me, who saw friends die in action, who went back into the Core again — and because he lived through that, I won’t have to. All these copies of me, taken away to die. And I’m left standing here.”

“This talk is stupid.”

He whispered, “Or perhaps I’m not real. Pirius Blue could have died out there, at the magnetar. What if he did die? What if I’m just his ghost? Or perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams. Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits—”

“And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.” She pinched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp. “Is that real enough for you?”

Before she could do it again he rolled over and grabbed her. Laughing, they wrestled. He finished up above her, with his hands locking her arms above her head. Her face was a pool of soft shadows beneath him; she looked very young.

He said, “You’re tougher than me. You always were. But don’t you feel… dislocated?”

“Well, a little. But you tell anybody back on Arches I said so, I’ll kick your butt.”

Hesitantly, he bent down, and kissed her, very softly, just brushing her lips. At first she was cold, unresponsive. Then she opened her mouth, and he felt the tip of her tongue on his teeth.

Once again the test rig was readied for a fresh shot at the patient Xeelee nightfighter.

It had been decided to try hooking up the CTC processor to the control systems of the test rig’s GUTdrive engines. It was possible that the CTC’s greater processing speed would permit the refinement of the control of the spacetime wave fronts sufficiently to get the result the designers wanted. Commander Darc railed at the foolishness of hooking up one experimental technology to another, but the CTC had already proven itself, in control of the grav shield. And as Nilis said, “Compared to the rest of this lash-up, CTC is a mature technology.”

The work proceeded fast. Torec had as much experience as anybody with CTC systems, and so she had been drawn back into the heart of the project. Pirius was left stranded on the observation deck of the corvette, watching the techs work on the modified rig. It was easy to spot Torec, with her bright red team leader’s armbands over her skinsuit.

Nilis stood with him. He waved a hand in the air, and brought up Pirius’s old Virtual sketch of the Project. The path to the Prime Radiant, the Xeelee barricade around it were green, the asterisk that represented the Radiant itself was glowing red. “What do you think, Ensign? Is today the day when we will find a weapon to strike at the Prime Radiant itself?”

Pirius was embarrassed by the hubristic sketch. “I hope so, sir.”

Torec’s voice sounded softly in Pirius’s ear. “Are you watching? Three. Two. One.” Pirius pressed his face to the hull.

Again he saw flexing spacetime permeate the crude rig of struts and GUTdrive engines, again those waves of distortion washed into the heart of the rig. But the distortions seemed stronger to Pirius this time, their crowding propagation somehow more urgent.

Purple-white light flared at the center of the rig, a glaring pinpoint. The framework itself pulsed and flexed, and struts snapped. But the frame held, and that central pinpoint cast shadows over its complex structure. The pinpoint of light was a black hole. It was about as massive as a Conurbation dome, crushed into a space the size of an electron, glowing through Hawking evaporation at a temperature measured in teradegrees. It was working, then: he held his breath.

For a second the black hole waited at the heart of the rig. The framework pulsed and cracked.

And then the dazzling spark leapt straight out of the frame and hurled itself in a dead straight line across space to the Xeelee. When it hit, the nightfighter seemed to fold over on itself, as if crushed by a vast fist.

For a long moment, nothing moved: the observers, Saturn’s broad disc, the crumpled Xeelee ship, the broken rig. Then, in Pirius’s monitors, remote cheering started.

Nilis said, “My eyes. I think we’ve done it.” He snapped his fingers. On Pirius’s diagram, the crimson asterisk turned bright green.

Conurbation 11729!

Chapter 34

It was a city known only by the number given to it by alien conquerors, but it was a number known throughout the Galaxy. This place had been the base of Hama Druz himself, twenty thousand years before. Ever since, it had been the beating heart of a human Galaxy.

And it was here that Nilis and his team came to confront the mighty power that had ruled all mankind since Druz’s day, the Interim Coalition of Governance, seeking its blessing to establish a new Navy squadron and to equip it with upgraded ships, with CTC processors and gravastar shields and black hole cannons — seeking its blessing to take Project Prime Radiant to the center of the Galaxy itself.

From the air the city looked almost ordinary, just another of the Qax’s inhuman clusterings of domes of blown rock. But the ancient blisters glittered with windows and balconies, the city was covered with a shining spiderweb of walkways and monorails, and steady streams of traffic, both intra- atmospheric and from space, washed through the ports that ringed the central dome cluster. The old Qax architecture was still the foundation of everything, but the sense of power here was palpable, even compared to the rest of Earth — power, and wealth.

The flitter landed at a small pad outside the largest of the domes. It carried only Nilis and his two ensigns, in their best dress uniforms. But even so, blue-helmeted Guardians insisted on coming on board the ship and subjecting each of them to whole-body searches that lasted long minutes. This massive dome housed the principal headquarters of some of the Coalition’s most powerful ministries and agencies, and there were plenty of enemies of the Coalition who would wish to do harm here, given a chance — not just alien foe, but human rebels. Back in Arches Base, such a thing would have seemed no more than a theoretical possibility, but this was Earth. The ensigns submitted silently.

At last they were released, and Nilis led them into the dome itself.

The tremendous enclosed space was flooded with light, and spectacular buildings soared in contemptuous defiance of the laws of physics. There were arches and T-shapes and inverted cones, their frames studded with inertial controllers and antigravity generators; some of them even floated. People hurried across the floor in streams, or along walkways that threaded through the air between the buildings. There was a hubbub of noise, a constant shouting; it was the sound of merged human voices, a million of them in this one dome alone.