Virtuals flickered in their blisters, downloaded by Dans. “I say we cut across the Mass to Sag A East…”

The bulk of the Galaxy’s luminous matter was confined to a flat sheet, the delicate spiral arms contained in a plane as thin in proportion to its width as a piece of paper. But at its heart was a Core, a bulge of stars some five hundred light-years across. This region swarmed with human factory worlds and military posts. Within the Core was the Central Star Mass, millions of stars crammed into a space some thirty light-years wide. The two brightest sources of radio noise within the Mass were called Chandra — or, officially, Sag A*, the black hole at the very center — and Sag A East, a remnant of an ancient explosion.

Such names, so Pirius had once been told by an overinformative Commissary, were themselves relics of deeper human history. The soldiers to whom the Galaxy center was a war zone knew this geography. But few knew that “Sag” stood for Sagittarius, and fewer still that Sagittarius had once referred to a pattern in the few scattered stars visible from Earth.

“Two minutes to closing,” Cohl reported edgily.

“Short hops,” Dans insisted. “Forty minutes to cross a few dozen light-years to East. Maybe we’ll find cover there. We regroup, patch up, go home — and die another day. Come on, what is there to lose? For you it will be easy! At least you still have a navigator.”

Starbreaker beams flickered around Pirius. The nightfighters were getting their range; at any moment one of these beams could touch his own blister. He would die without even knowing it.

“We do it,” he said.

Dans quickly downloaded a synchronization command. “The two of us, then. On my mark. Two — one—”

Space flexed.

The nearby stars winked out of existence. The general background endured, but now a new pattern of hot young stars greeted Pirius, a new three-dimensional constellation.

Space flexed.

Again he jumped, to be faced by another constellation.

And again, and yet another blue-white supergiant loomed right in front of him, immense flares working across its broad face, but it disappeared, to be replaced by another set of disorderly stars, which disappeared in their turn…

Jump, jump, jumpjumpjumpjump…

As the jumps came more frequently than Pirius’s eyes could follow, the ride settled down to an illusion of continuity. There was even a sense of motion now, as distant stars slid slowly past. It did him no good at all to remind himself that with each jump spacetime was pivoting through its higher dimensions, or that even millennia after the technology’s first use the philosophers still couldn’t agree whether the entity that emerged from each jump was still, in any meaningful way, “him.”

First things first, Pirius.

He glanced over his systems and his crew. “Everything nominal,” he said. He raised a thumb to the pilot of the second ship, and through a blister’s starred carapace he saw a gesture in response.

“We’re still breathing,” Enduring Hope said evenly. “But take a look out back.”

The cloud of Xeelee ships had vanished. But a single dogged craft remained, its wings spread black and wide, a graceful sycamore-seed shape.

Dans said, “Stubborn bastards, aren’t they?”

Hope said, “At least we bought some time.”

“Yes. We’ve still got thirty minutes before East,” Pirius said. He waved his hands through Virtual consoles, initiating self-diagnostic and repair routines to run throughout the ship. “This is a chance to take care of yourselves,” he told his crew. “Eat. Drink. Take a leak. Sleep if you have to. Use your med-cloaks if you need them.”

Cohl said blankly, “Eat? Sleep? We’re going to die. We’d do better to review why we have to die.”

Dans said, “Lethe, child, there are no Commissary arses to lick out here. Don’t you find the Doctrines cold comfort?”

“On the contrary,” Cohl said.

Pirius glanced down at Cohl’s blister. He imagined her in there, wrapped up in her skinsuit, swaddled by machines, clinging to the pitiless logic of the Doctrines.

Thousands of years had worn away since the first human interstellar flight, and since humanity had begun the mighty march across the Galaxy called the Third Expansion. The Expansion was an ideological program, a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind’s near extinction. In the fierce light of human determination lesser species had burned away. At last only one opponent was left: the Xeelee, the most powerful foe of them all, with their concentration at the very center of the Galaxy.

It was already millennia since the Third Expansion had closed around the center. But the Xeelee responded in kind, just as resolutely. The Front had become a great stalled wave of destruction, a spherical zone of friction where two empires rubbed against each other. And seen from factory worlds scattered a hundred light-years deep, the sky glowed pink with the light of endless war.

The Xeelee would not engage with mankind in any way but war. There was no negotiation, no rapprochement, no contact that was not lethal. To the Xeelee, humans were vermin — and they had a right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured. And so, only if each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a whole prevail. This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.

For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.

Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.

Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”

“My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.

“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”

Pirius had tried to stay away from Enduring Hope’s peculiar sect, who called themselves “Friends of Wigner.” Pirius thought of himself as pragmatic; he was prepared to put up with nonsense names if it kept his engineer happy. But the Friends’ cult violated Doctrinal law just by its very existence.

“You can mock,” Hope said. “But you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me,” Dans said.

“All of this” — Hope made an expansive gesture — “is a first cut. Everybody knows this. In this war of FTL ships and time travel, we stack up contingencies in the Library of Futures on Earth. History is a draft, a draft we change all the time.”

“And if history is mutable—”

“Then nothing is inevitable. Not even the past.”

“I don’t understand,” Pirius admitted.

Dans said, “If you can redraft history, everything can be fixed. He thinks that even if he dies today, then history will somehow, some day, be put right, and all such unfortunate errors removed.”

“Hope, is that right?”

“Something like it.”

Dans snapped, “Pirius, the creed is anti-Doctrine, but it’s just as much a trap as the Doctrines. A Druz junkie thinks death and defeat reinforce the strength of the Doctrines. A Friend believes defeat is irrelevant because it will all be erased some day. Either way, you don’t fight to win. You see? Why else has this damn war stalled so long?”