“But it has to be done,” Torec said grimly.

“It has to be done.” Hand in hand they took the first step, out into the light.

Nilis strode off along a road that arrowed between the hulking shoulders of blown-rock domes,

straight to the heart of the Conurbation. His robe flapped, the watery sun shone from his shaven head, and a small bot carrying his effects labored gamely to keep up. For all his insistence on checking the ensigns’ appearance, Nilis himself looked as if he had come straight from his rooftop garden; he wasn’t even wearing any shoes.

He didn’t look back. The ensigns had to hurry after him.

The surfaces of the domes were smooth, polished, some even worked with other kinds of stone. One massive dome, coated with a creamy rock, gleamed bright in the sunlight. “The Ministry of Supply,” Nilis called over his shoulder. “Supplied themselves with marble readily enough!”

There wasn’t much traffic, just a few smart cars. But there were pedestrians everywhere, even off the ground. Walkways connected the domes, snaking through the air at many levels, in casual defiance of gravity and logic. People hurried along the ways, chattering; others were accompanied by shells of glowing Virtual displays, as if they carried their own small worlds around with them. In some places the walkways would tip up steeply, or even run vertically, but the crowds bustled over them blithely. The people were so immersed in their own affairs they didn’t even notice the unfailing miracles of inertial engineering that enabled them to walk without effort straight up a wall.

Torec was muttering under her breath, some comforting nonsense. But she kept walking. She was doing well, and Pirius felt proud of her — not that he’d have dared to tell her so. You didn’t look up at the open sky, that was the key. You didn’t think about how exposed you were to the wild. You concentrated on the manufactured environment; you kept your gaze on the smooth surface of the road, or on the buildings around you.

But at one point Torec stopped dead. Through a crack in the road surface a bit of green showed, a weed. It was a bit of raw life pushing through a hole in the engineered reality around them. Pirius was more used to green things than Torec, thanks to Nilis’s garden. But here in the wild it was an oddly terrifying sight.

As they pushed into the dense heart of the city, things got still more difficult for the ensigns. People started to notice them. They stared openly as the ensigns passed, and pointed, and peered down from the walkways. The ensigns’ uniforms didn’t help; their bright scarlet tunics stood out like beacons in the Conurbation crowds, who mostly dressed in plain black Commissary-style robes.

Nilis grinned. “They’ve never seen soldiers before. And you’re famous, Pirius!”

“Commissary, it wasn’t even me—”

Nilis waved a hand. “Never mind temporal hairsplitting. To these crowds you’re the kid who beat a Xeelee. Don’t let them worry you. They’re just human, as you are.”

Torec frowned. “Human maybe, but not like us.”

It was true, Pirius thought. In Arches Base everybody was the same — small, wiry, even with similar features, since most of them had been hatched from the same birthing tanks. “But here,” he said, “everyone is different. Tall, short. There are old people. And they’re all fat. You don’t see many fat people at the Front.”

“No,” Nilis said. “But that’s policy, you see. If you’re kept hungry, if everything in your world is shabby, you have something to fight for — even if it’s just an inchoate dream of somewhere safe and warm, and with enough to eat.”

Torec said, “So you let us fight for you, while you starve us and let us live in shit.”

Pirius was alarmed, but Nilis seemed to admire her outspokenness. “Like it or not, that’s the policy — and since very few frontline troops ever come here, to the heart of things, few people ever know about it…”

In the immensity of the city, Pirius tried to keep his bearings. The whole of human society was like a great machine, so he had always been taught, a machine unified and dedicated to a single goal: the war with the Xeelee. The people around him, absorbed in their important and baffling bits of business, might seem strange, but they were parts of the greater machine too. He mustn’t look down on them: they were warriors in their way, just as he was, as was every human being.

But he thought of Nilis’s extraordinary ambition of ending this war. Perhaps he, Pirius, a mere ensign, would play a part in a revolution that would transform the lives of every human in the Galaxy — including every one of the confident, jostling crowd around him. In that case he had nothing to fear. Indeed, these people of Earth should fear him.

It was a deliciously non-Doctrinal thought. He always had wanted to be remembered.

“Ah, here we are,” said Nilis.

They stopped before another dome, as grand and busy as the rest. Nilis led them out of the glare of day into an antechamber. Much of this dome had been left open; there were partitions and internal walkways, but once inside you could look up and see the great rough sweep of the old Qax architecture itself.

They were subjected to a ferocious security check. Bots clambered over them, their identities were verified, they were scanned for implants, given quick-fire tests for loyalty and mental stability, and subjected to many other examinations whose nature Pirius couldn’t even recognize. Most of this was performed by automated systems, but a single human guard was there to overview the process, a blue-helmeted woman from the Bureau of Guardians. Nilis endured it silently, and Pirius and Torec followed his lead.

At last they were released. A small Virtual marker materialized before them and floated off. It led them to a roofless office, deep in the heart of the dome, with a long conference table and a nano-food niche. With a sigh, Nilis ordered hot tea.

“And now we wait,” he said to the ensigns. “We’re on time, but Gramm won’t be. It’s all part of the game of power, you know…”

This dome belonged to Gramm’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, he told them. Aside from its specifically military arms, like the Navy and the Green Army and the Guardians, mankind’s police force, and agencies with cultural goals such as the Commission for Historical Truth and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, the three greatest Ministries at the heart of the Interim Coalition of Governance were the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Ministry of Supply, and the Ministry of Production.

Nilis chattered on, “Even though they all report in to a single Grand Conclave member — Philia Doon, the Plenipotentiary for Total War — to get anything done you have to deal with all three. Even Minister Gramm can’t deliver anything by himself. But Economic Warfare’s aim is to ensure the dedication of all mankind’s resources to the great goal. To some extent it acts as an intermediary between the other two. And that gives Gramm some leverage. He can be a difficult man, but I couldn’t ask for a more useful ally… Ah, Minister!”

Minister Gramm came bustling into the room. Even by the standards of Earth, Pirius thought, he was stupendously fat; his great belly pushed out his gray cloak so that it hung over his legs, and his fingers, clasped before his stomach, were tubes of pasty flesh. His scalp was shaven and his cheeks heavy, so that his head was like a round moon.

He brought two people with him, both women. The first he briskly introduced as Pila, a senior advisor, whom Nilis had evidently met before. Golden-haired, she was slim, beautiful, expensively dressed, and oddly detached, as if all this was somehow beneath her. She showed no interest in the ensigns.