There was little in common in the physical basis of human and quagmite; a quagmite was not much bigger than an atomic nucleus. But the largest of the quagma creatures were composed of a similar number of particles to the atoms which would comprise a human body. So humans and quagmites were comparable in internal complexity, and their inner lives shared a similar richness. Many humans would have appreciated the best quagmite poetry — if they could have survived being bombarded by it.

Meanwhile, the quagmite creatures shared their universe with older forms of life.

The ancient spacetime-chemistry creatures, having survived yet another cosmic transition, gradually found ways to accommodate themselves to the latest climate, even though to them it was cold and dark and dead. In their heyday there had been no “matter” in the normal sense. But now they found they could usefully form symbiotic relationships with creatures formed of condensate matter: extended structures locked into a single quantum state. A new kind of being ventured cautiously through the light-filled spaces, like insects with “bodies” of condensate and “wings” of spacetime defects. It was the formation of a new kind of ecology, emerging from fragments of the old and new. But symbiosis and the construction of composite creatures from lesser components were eternal tactics for life, eternal ways of surviving changed conditions.

In the unimaginably far future humans would call the much-evolved descendants of these composite forms “Xeelee.”

The proto-Xeelee were, meanwhile, aware of another species of matter born out of this turbulent broth. This would one day be called dark matter by human scientists, for it would bond with other types of matter only loosely, through gravity and the weakest nuclear force. There was a whole hierarchy of particles of this stuff, even a sort of chemistry. This faint stuff passed through the quark- cluster cities and the nests of the proto-Xeelee alike as if they didn’t exist. But it was there — and, like the Xeelee, this dark matter was going to be around for good.

As the endless expansion continued, the quagmites swarmed through their quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told their legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

It seemed to the quagmites that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity. But it was a common error. The pace of life scaled to temperature: if you lived hot, you lived fast. The quagmites did not suspect that the creatures who had inhabited earlier, warmer ages had crammed just as many experiences — just as much “life” — into their brief instants of time. As the universe expanded, every generation, living slower than the last, saw only a flash of heat and light behind it, nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead — and each generation thought that it was only now that a rich life was possible.

The comfortable era of the quagmites couldn’t last forever; nothing ever did. It was when the universe was thirty times older than it was at the end of the matter-antimatter conflict that the first signs of the quagmites’ final disaster were detected.

After five weeks of Kimmer’s ten, Exultant Squadron was to be transferred to Orion Rock, from which the assault on Chandra would be mounted.

It took three days for Rock 492 to be evacuated: the living areas emptied out, the squadron’s fifteen greenships lifted off the surface. When Pirius Red had first arrived on 492 it had been a garbage heap, but now that it was time to leave he was sorry. After all, he and Torec had taken this ruin and made it, not just their base of operations, but their home.

And, of his motley assembly of superannuated veterans and misfits, two had died in operations run out of this Rock. So there was blood soaked into its silvery regolith, human bones buried in its loose dirt, as they were buried on a billion other worlds and moons and asteroids across the face of the Galaxy.

On the last night, as the close-out crews did their work, Pirius kept Torec back. In their skinsuits they wandered through the empty chambers, the stripped-out barracks and refectories and dispensaries, the big engineering bays with their floors grooved and shaped to take equipment now removed. They could hear systems shutting down, one by one, the vibrations diminished, the circulation of air and water stopping, as if the Rock itself was slowly dying. As they walked from one chamber to the next, the light cut out behind them, so they were always walking out of darkness.

In the last chamber, they found a corner where they unzipped their skinsuits. The air was rapidly losing its heat, making them both shiver deliciously. They pushed the seams of their suits together and sealed themselves inside.

The inertial generators shut down. They found themselves rising from the floor. All around them specks of asteroid dust, disturbed by the Rock’s residual vibrations, rose up to make the air sparkle.

Deep inside the Cavity, a long way inside the Front, Orion Rock was buried in the North Arm of the Baby Spiral.

To reach it, Exultant Squadron formed a tight convoy. The ten prime greenships, with five backups, were at the center. All the greenships had been modified with the gear for Project Prime Radiant, but the equipment was bedded in now, and after the hours of training flights the crew knew how to handle their ungainly craft. The fighting ships were accompanied by equipment freighters, tenders, and other support craft, and a handful of command vessels, including Commissary Nilis’s corvette. One massive Spline warship loomed over them. Bristling with weapons, its moonlike bulk dwarfed its charges.

It was an unlikely flotilla, Pirius supposed. It was strange to reflect that on this handful of battered, hastily modified old hulks might rest the destiny of the Galaxy.

The group sailed through the Front and made their way down the spine of the Baby Spiral’s arm, moving in a series of FTL hops and sublight-drive glides. Despite the time pressure, the only way to proceed was cautiously: the spiral arm was a crowded corridor of molecular dust, drifting rock, and young stars, a difficult jaunt. But there was so much noise and clutter here in this tunnel of bombarded gas that there was a good chance they would remain undetected by Xeelee scouts all the way in.

After two sleepless days and nights, with the crews stressed-out and weary, they reached Orion Rock.

Pirius, sitting in his pilot’s blister, gaped. He had never seen anything like it. The Rock shone.

Like every asteroid of its size, it was an aggregate shape as lumpy as a clenched fist, deeply pocked by impact craters. But on this Rock the surface had been worked, every square centimeter of it. Every crater hosted a landing pad or a dry dock or a portal, and away from the craters the land had a peculiar ridged texture. As they approached, Pirius saw it was covered by a dense scribble of trenches and foxholes, zigzagging at precise ninety-degree corners. It was ornate, even decorative, like a maze. You could tell that people had been here for a long time.

Orion had been spawned out of random accretions in this spiral arm long ago, and had since drifted down its center line. As it had required no human intervention to steer it onto a path that directed it straight at the Xeelee concentrations, the Rock was a marvelous natural blind. It had been occupied by humans for a thousand years, and the results of that occupation were visible on its surface — and yet it was still unsuspected as a military asset by mankind’s foe.