Kimmer hissed, “This fat earthworm has fooled you as he fooled the Conclave, Commander.”

“No doubt you’re right, sir. But in the meantime we have our orders.”

Kimmer glared at his aides, who confirmed in whispers that Darc was right. Kimmer’s mouth worked. Pirius knew he would make the Commander pay for what he had said.

“All right, Commissary. As the Commander says, I have my orders. Until I’ve had time to appeal against the executive mandate, you and your stooges can have what you want.” He stabbed a finger at Nilis. “But I do have discretion on how I carry out those orders. I won’t take any usable resources away from our vital struggle. You’ll have your ships. But they will not come from the line: you can have the superannuated, the battle-damaged, the patched-up wrecks. And I won’t let you waste the lives of my best crews either. Do you understand?”

Nilis nodded his head. “Quite clearly.”

“Oh, Nilis — one more thing. If you mean to use Orion Rock you’ll have to be quick about it. It will be in position in ten weeks.”

Nilis gasped. “Ten weeks? Oh, Marshal, but this is — we can’t be ready—”

Darc put his soft hand on Nilis’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Commissary. Ten weeks it is, sir.”

Kimmer seemed still more infuriated. He stalked out of the room, followed by his chattering aides.

The Commissary was trembling. “I thought I had blown the whole thing,” he said hoarsely. “My stumbling and fumbling, like a buffoon — how can I deal with a Marshal if I can’t hold myself together for five minutes?”

“You did fine, sir,” Pirius said awkwardly.

Pila elaborately stifled a yawn. “It was a lot of nonsense anyhow.”

Torec was puzzled. “Ma’am?”

“Oh, come on, Ensign, even you aren’t that naive. Kimmer knows the chain of command as well as any of us. We saw nothing here but the ingrained resistance of a man who can accept no new way of doing things, even if it might resolve the deadlock of this war. And he especially can’t take advice from an outsider like you, Nilis. Kimmer had no choice but to comply, and he knew it. This was all just posturing.”

Nilis said, “Pretty formidable posturing, though!”

Pirius was troubled. “But still, if what the Marshal said comes to pass — if we’re only going to get lousy equipment and useless crew—”

“We’ll make it work,” Nilis said. “Why, you’ve already got Rock 492 up and running, haven’t you?”

Pirius shook his head. “Fixing a broken air cycler is one thing. Putting together a squadron is another.”

Darc glanced at Nilis. “Ah, but the most important element of any squadron is its leader. Isn’t that right, Commissary?”

“Oh, without a doubt, Commander. And how lucky we are to have found the right officer for the job!” Nilis clapped his hand on Pirius’s shoulder and beamed.

Pirius turned cold inside.

Torec’s mouth dropped open. “Him? You are joking, sir.”

“Thanks,” Pirius said to Torec.

Nilis said, “You’ve already been a hero once, Pirius, in another timeline. Now you have to do it again.”

“But sir, I can’t command. I’m not even commissioned.”

Darc grinned. “You are now.”

“But — ten weeks?”

Darc shrugged. “That’s the hand we’ve been dealt; we make it or we don’t.”

Nilis was watching Pirius. “Of course you have to make up your own mind, Pirius. Do you remember the conversation we had at Venus?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So tell me — where has your self-analysis got to now?”

Torec said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Pirius said, “He’s asking me if I have found anything to fight for.” He faced Nilis. “There’s only one goal worth dying for,” he said.

“Yes?”

“And that’s victory — an end to this war. And then we will have to find out what humans are supposed to do with their time.”

Nilis nodded, apparently not trusting himself to speak.

“Oh, how noble you all are.” Pila shook her elegant head. “The preening of you military types never ceases to astound me.”

Darc ignored her. “So what do you say, squadron leader?”

“Where do I start, sir?”

Darc murmured, “Well, that’s up to you. But first I rather think you’ll need to find your crews.”

It was a relief to be able to get back to Rock 492.

At first Pirius and Torec had had to live in their skinsuits, relying on their backpacks for warmth, food, water, even air when the dust got too bad. Before the lavatories had started working they had to relieve themselves in their suits, and every couple of days went out to a flitter to dump their waste. But as the systems recovered, they had begun to sleep with their faceplates open, and at last, as the air slowly became fresh and warm, they abandoned the skinsuits altogether. The filters couldn’t do much about the suspended asteroid dust, and they both suffered irritated sinuses.

That night after the meeting with Kimmer, they slept as usual, huddled together in a corner of the bubble dome, their bodies pressed together under a blanket. The touch of microgravity was so gentle they all but hovered over the floor, drifting like soap bubbles. In the quietest hour, the inertial adjustors suddenly came online. As a full gravity grabbed them they ended up in a tangle of limbs, laughing. The floor was suddenly full of ridges and knobs — they would need a mattress tomorrow, Pirius told himself — and they felt the new, uneven gravity field pull at their internal organs.

The Rock, too, adjusted to its new state. Like most asteroids, 492 wasn’t a solid mass, but a loose aggregate of dust and boulders. As the inertial machines in its core did their work, 492’s components scraped and ground against each other as they sought to find a more compact equilibrium. Pirius could hear the deep groaning of the asteroid, a rumbling that shivered through his own bones, as if they were lying on the carcass of some huge uncomfortable animal.

In the morning, they found their faces and hands were covered with a silvery patina: it was the asteroid dust, which had at last settled out of its suspension in the air.

Chapter 37

The balancing sword tipped and fell. The primordial simplicity of the new universe was lost. From the broken symmetry of a once-unified physics, two forces emerged: gravity, and a force humans would call the GUT force — “GUT” for Grand Unified Theory, a combination of electromagnetic and nuclear forces. The separating-out of the forces was a phase change, like water freezing to ice, and it released energy that immediately fed the expansion of the seedling universe.

Gravity’s fist immediately clenched, crushing knots of energy and matter into black holes. It was in the black holes’ paradoxical hearts that the sleeping monads huddled. But the black holes were embedded in a new, unfolding spacetime: three dimensions of space and one of time, an orderly structure that congealed quickly out of the primitive chaos.

Yet there were flaws. The freezing-out had begun spontaneously in many different places, like ice crystals growing on a cold window. Where the crystals met and merged, discontinuities formed. Because the spacetime was three-dimensional, these defects were born in two dimensions, as planes and sheets — or one dimension, as lines of concentrated energy scribbled across spacetime’s spreading face — or no dimensions at all, simple points.

Suddenly the universe was filled with these defects; it was a box stuffed with ribbons and strings and buttons.

And the defects were not inert. Propagating wildly, they collided, combined, and interacted. A migrating point defect could trace out a line; a shifting line could trace out a plane; where two planes crossed, a line was formed, to make more planes and lines. Feedback loops of creation and destruction were quickly established, in a kind of spacetime chemistry. There was a time of wild scribbling.