As they waited for the sim to finish booting up, Darc growled, “This is bringing back unhappy memories. Whatever you’re planning, Pirius, I hope it’s worth it.”

Pirius said hesitantly, “Commander — can I speak freely?”

Darc laughed.

“The way you took on the Guild-master. I was surprised.”

“Did you enjoy watching me blow my career?”

“No, sir.”

“Not that there’s much left to blow,” Darc said. “Marshal Kimmer will see to that, once this project is over.”

Pirius said frankly, “When we started this, I’d never have thought you would come out fighting for the Commissary like that. With respect, sir.”

Darc grunted. “I don’t much like Nilis. I think he’s an irresponsible idiot, and his project is almost bound to fail. Almost. But in that ’almost’ is a universe of possibility. If there’s a chance we can win the war with it, we have to resource the project until the point at which it fails. That’s our clear duty. And I never imagined the kind of crass reactions and ass-covering conservatism that we have come up against, over and over. I’ve seen a side of our politics I don’t like, Pilot, even inside the military.”

Torec said, “I suppose we have all come on a long journey.”

Darc said, “But if either of you repeat any of this to Nilis I’ll rip off your heads with my bare hands. Do you understand me?”

“Received and understood,” Pirius said.

With a soft chime the sim signaled it was ready to run.

Darc said, “It’s time you explained what we’re doing here, Pirius.”

“I want to try an idea,” Pirius said. “It came to me when Torec used those laser pointers in the meeting.”

She sounded baffled. “Lasers?”

“Bear with me. We’ll run through our approach to the rock. Everything will be exactly as before. I’ve downloaded Torec’s structural analyses of the failure—”

“So we’ll fall apart, like before.”

“Maybe. But this time, Torec, I want you to fire the starbreakers as we go in.”

“What’s the use?” she asked. “They will only scratch the Rock’s surface. And if the cannon fails—”

“Just do it. But, Torec, I want you to cross the beams…”

They both grasped the idea very quickly. It took only minutes to program new instructions into their weapons and guidance systems.

Once again Pirius took the controls; once again the ship swooped along its invisible attack arc toward the Rock. They ran the whole thing in real time, and thanks to the simulator’s precise reproduction, the ship’s handling felt as clumsy as it had before.

But this time around, one second before the closest approach to the Rock, the starbreakers lit up. They swiveled and crossed at a point exactly a hundred kilometers below the ship’s position. So the Earthworm sailed in on its target through the sim’s imaginary space with an immense, slim triangle of cherry-red light dangling beneath it.

When the ship passed the rock, the crossed starbreakers dug deep into its impact-chewed surface. Dust fountained up: that point of intersection was lost in the rock’s interior layers. Too low, then. But the guidance system, slaved to the starbreakers, jolted the ship upward until the crossing point was touching the Rock’s surface, just stroking it, leaving little more than a furrow of churned-up regolith.

All this in the second of closest approach.

When the black-hole cannon fired, the projectiles sailed down the lines of the starbreakers and collided with each other at the point of their intersection, precisely one hundred kilometers below the ship.

The simulation software wasn’t up to modeling the collision of two black holes, or to show realistically the detonation of an asteroid. But the ship, suffering the same structural failures as before, blew up pretty convincingly. The Virtuals melted away, leaving Pirius, Darc, and Torec sitting side by side in a room walled with blank blue light.

Torec said, “So we’re going to use starbreakers as an altimeter. You think big when you want to, Pirius, don’t you?”

Darc brought up a rerun of the last moments. They had to see it with their own eyes before they believed it.

“I think it worked,” Pirius said.

Darc growled, “Pilot, you are learning understatement from that fat Commissary.”

Pirius allowed himself one second of self-congratulation. Then he stood up, pushing away the restraints of his couch. “We’ve a lot to do,” he said. “We’ll need to see what we can do about improving the accuracy of the starbreaker mounts. They weren’t intended for pinpoint work like this. And we’ll have to slave the guidance properly to the starbreakers.”

“Yes,” Torec said, and she added with feeling: “I’d also like to find a way to fire these damn cannon without killing myself.”

Nilis came bustling into the sim room. “Here you are!” he cried. He was cock-a-hoop. He grabbed Pirius by the shoulders and shook him; for Nilis this was a remarkably physical display. “My boy — my boy!”

Darc said dryly, “I take it the Grand Conclave endorsed your stance, Commissary.”

“In every particular. That polished oaf Eliun and his cronies have been ordered to cooperate with us, or else simply hand over their data to my technicians. The Conclave have backed me. They backed me! I have to pinch myself to believe it. Can you see what this means historically? The logjam at the top of human government is finally breaking up! Is the madness that has gripped us for so long at last falling away? And I couldn’t have done it without you, Commander!”

“Don’t push it, Commissary,” warned Darc.

Pirius thought this over. He was starting to get a sense of the drama unfolding around this strange project. Today a power center as old as the Coalition itself had suffered a historic reversal. However this mission turned out, nothing would be left the same: twenty thousand years of history really were coming to an end here. And, in a sense, it was because of him.

With one finger Torec gently closed his mouth, which was gaping open. “So we beat another bureaucrat,” she said. “Now all we’ve got to do is dive-bomb a black hole.”

“Yes. How soon can we set up a fresh test flight?”

“Tomorrow,” said Darc. “And then we’re going to have to think about a training program — how to fly this thing in anger… always assuming you can find the crew to fly.”

“We aren’t going to get bored, sir,” Pirius said.

Darc laughed.

They made their way out of the sim room, talking, planning.

Chapter 41

As the young universe unfolded, some of the spacetime-chemistry races developed high technologies. They ventured from their home “worlds,” and came into contact with each other. Strange empires were spun across galaxies of black holes. Terrible wars were fought.

Out of the debris of war, the survivors groped their way to a culture that was, if not unified, at least peaceable. A multispecies federation established itself. Under its benevolent guidance new merged cultures propagated, new symbiotic ecologies arose. The endless enrichment of life continued. The inhabitants of this golden time even studied their own origins in the brief moments of the singularity. They speculated about what might have triggered that mighty detonation, and whether any conscious intent might have lain behind it.

Time stretched and history deepened.

It was when the universe was very old indeed — ten billion times as old as it had been at the moment of the breaking of its primordial symmetry — that disaster struck.

Light itself did not yet exist, and yet lightspeed was embedded in this universe.

At any given moment, only a finite time had passed since the singularity, and an object traveling at lightspeed could have traversed only part of the span of the cosmos. Domains limited by lightspeed travel were the effective “universes” of their inhabitants, for the cosmos was too young for any signal to have been received from beyond their boundaries. But as the universe aged, so signals propagated further — and domains which had been separated since the first instant, domains which could have had no effect on each other before, were able to come into contact.