—If we’re the second, what happened to the others?

—They perished in paradox.

Roger’s former naivety made him smile.

At some point, half a million years ago, Kenna had pushed through a transcendent reworking of her physical and mental self – again – to become exquisitely conscious of causal history and the sheaves of possible paths not taken; and if she had some awareness of those other destinies, then why just one other?

To be aware of an infinite number of disasters, and yet face this reality with confidence and courage: the more he understood of Kenna’s nature, the more awed he became.

Now, he took Gavriela’s hand, glanced at Dmitri, and turned to Kenna.

—Perhaps we should all fly together.

—To Valhöll?

—Exactly.

Dmitri smiled his Trickster smile.

They walked through the shining halls, all nine war leaders with Kenna in the lead, each taking a shield and some other weapon en route, until they came to a great gleaming ramp that led outside to the stark lunar landscape beneath ink-black sky.

As they placed the shields horizontally two centimetres above the ground and released them – the shields vibrated and hung in place – Magni seemed embarrassed.

—Must we travel this way?

Kenna touched his arm.

—For show before our armies, it is best.

In vacuum, soundlessly, Magni sighed.

—I’d rather be fighting.

—Soon enough, you will be.

Magni was not the only one to nod, accepting Kenna’s words. Resurrection and a million years of preparation were about to boil down to that most ancient phenomenon, an army of one species throwing itself against another, all the wonders of civilisation reduced to the need to fight, and do it well.

It was a bitterness that Magni, of all of them, had found hardest to swallow, while Rathulfr – and perhaps Dmitri, in a less wholesome way – experienced a kind of fulfilling joy, even vindication, in preparing for war, leaving the others to commit themselves out of duty and necessity.

Each of the nine stepped upon a floating, quivering shield. Then, as one, they looked up to Earth’s disc, banded with silver and crimson, serene in the night.

Kenna gave the command.

—We fly.

They rose amid invisibly roiling vacuum; and then they soared, heading for Valhöll.

To a battle-ready Earth.

They flew the skies, made speeches that were beamed across all nine armies within this, the ninth wave of Einherjar, of resurrected warriors. Battalions stood to attention as the exhortations rang in their minds, and the strategic pictures unfurled: the visual representations of that which could not be seen, the darkness, and its journey comprising hundreds of millions of lightyears across a cosmic void and onwards to this galaxy.

It had a bridgehead established at the core, weaker than it had intended but existing nonetheless, and it had continued its advance, for it was almost here, almost at the galaxy’s edge.

In the inevitable aeons to come, when two trillion years have passed, baryonic matter will cease to dominate the universe, and each galaxy will be alone, the others receded far beyond an impenetrable black horizon. That will be the epoch of darkness.

—But we will not allow it to hasten that victory.

To fight a holding action that would last two trillion years was the greatest victory that ordinary, baryonic-matter lifeforms could hope to achieve.

Across the Earth, billions of humans and Haxigoji of living crystal shared those broadcast thoughts and images and grew fierce, because this was their reason for existing now: to beat back the enemy’s advance, to hurt it enough that it would never try again.

The earlier waves were in final preparation, having fought training campaigns in the depths of Jovian oceans and interstellar space; soon the greatest deployment the galaxy had ever seen would begin.

When the initial speeches and briefing were over, the nine war leaders split their mid-air formation and flew to their respective armies. Gavriela chose to walk among her troops as an individual instead of addressing them from on high, so she glided across the metallic crimson expanse of a continent-sized arsenal, in parallel to one of the silver regions where the crystalline warriors grew.

At random, she picked a spot and swooped down to land on metal.

Among her warriors, standing at ease now, were humans of the modern kind like Magni, born to this form, and those who were grown for the battle, Haxigoji and human alike, their neural patterns laid down via cross-temporal resonance: some personalities copied many times over, to varying degrees of fidelity.

Each possessed true warrior spirit: they were grown that way, absorbing from the very start paraneural crystal shards analogous to archaic logotropes, whose purpose was only to awaken natural potential. Any individual is the descendant of billions of years of ancestors who fought and survived: the son, daughter or clone of champions.

Gavriela stopped before a strong-looking crystalline woman.

—I am Gavriela. What was your name, originally?

Diffractive spectra shifted as the woman smiled.

—My name was Rekka, War Leader.

—And do you remember your first life?

The woman shook her head.

—Vague dreams, is all. Though I have spirit-sisters who remember more, some of them clearly.

—And your thoughts on the war? Or on the way we resurrected you?

Again, the Rekka-echo shook her head.

—If you hadn’t resurrected me, I wouldn’t exist, and that would be a shame. And as for the darkness, whether the hatred comes from the training or just from being me, who can tell?

This was the moral question faced by every commander:

—Is it worth fighting against?

—With respect, War Leader, you know it is.

Once, Gavriela would have been unhappy at being addressed as a military commander, but half a million years had hardened the notion inside her.

The other warriors in the platoon nodded agreement.

—Good luck, Gavriela told them.

She stepped upon her shield and soared upward.

So many weapons. So many warriors.

But against an enemy like the darkness, was even the population of Earth-turned-Valhöll enough?

Perhaps they were like children playing with toy guns and mock-heroic fantasy, to be brushed aside and killed when the real invaders came.

When the war leaders reconvened, eight of them floating in a circle surrounding Kenna at the centre, they raised their arms and tuned their minds to the crystalline armies standing to attention on those silver and crimson pseudo-continents banding the globe, to the eight waves floating ready across the solar system, and for a time they became one being, unifying their purpose: protecting life, protecting the galaxy.

We fight until we win.

Or die.

It was thought and emotion combined, shared and uniting them all. Then every warrior raised a weapon and transmitted a single intention:

Win.

Nine times nine billion warriors were ready for the fight.

For Ragnarökkr.

SIXTY-TWO

SHADOW GATE AT HALO’S EDGE, ARCHAIC GALACTIC ANTI-CENTRE, 1005300 AD

The galaxy had continued to rotate, but the jet had not, relative to distant stars: it still pointed in the direction of Auriga, though Valhöll-once-Earth no longer lay exactly on that radial line. The enemy’s bridgehead linked the dark-matter star at the galactic core to the intricately structured dark-matter halo enclosing the galaxy like an eggshell.

A black bridge from intergalactic space stretched from beyond a distant void all the way to the galactic core: so long that it would take photons hundreds of millions of years to travel from end to end. Beyond the galaxy’s halo, it was thick and intricate and strong; inside the galaxy proper, its narrower presence could be sensed only by the spotter squadrons, deep space reconnaissance groups composed of Haxigoji warriors, their crystalline bodies resonating with the zero-point energy of spacetime itself, needing no ships to fly, no more than fish needed assistance to swim.