Burden said he had found no traces of Jees’s lost ship. “It was smashed up. Two of the crew nacelles, more or less intact. But the systems had failed before the safety cut-ins could work.”
“They didn’t survive.”
“We sent the crew blisters into the black hole.” Burden smiled thinly, exhausted. “It seemed fitting.”
“That it does.” Pirius was thinking over what Burden had said. His thoughts were muddy; already the events of the flight seemed remote, as if they had happened a decade ago, or in another life. But there was something missing from Burden’s report. “You didn’t mention the third nacelle. Jees rode with the Silver Ghost.”
Burden grinned. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. I’ll have to report it, I suppose. Of the Ghost’s nacelle I found not a trace. Not only that, it looked to me as if it had been sheared off — I mean, deliberately.”
“The Ambassador escaped,” Pirius said, marveling. Once more there was a Silver Ghost loose in the Galaxy. “But what different can one Ghost make?”
“The Ghosts are remarkable creatures, and very resourceful. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Sink Ambassador. And you have to wonder if, from the Ghost’s point of view, this whole operation was set up — if we were set up — just to give the Ghost a chance to get free.”
“That’s impossible.”
Burden glanced around. “I’m not going to repeat this in the debrief. But I want to go back out there again.” He spread his gloved hands. “After all, the war is over, it seems. They don’t need me to fight any more. Not that I was much use at that in the first place. I want to go back to the center again, to look for the Ambassador.”
“Why?”
“Because we never finished our philosophical discussions. Things are different now. Perhaps we can learn from the Ghosts about how we’re going to live our lives from now on. Oh, Pirius — one more thing.” He dug out a data desk and showed him some complicated schematics. “Something the sensors picked up.”
Burden had observed structures of dark matter drifting through the center of the Galaxy. Invisible to human senses, passing through even the crowded matter around Chandra as if it was no more substantial than a Virtual, the shadowy forms had settled around the central black hole.
Burden said, “I remember what you said about Nilis, and Luru Parz, and their interpretation of history. The Xeelee cleaned these dark matter creatures, the ’photino birds,’ out of the Core. Now the Xeelee are gone — and in less than a day the birds are back.” He put away the data desk. “Silver Ghosts loose, dark matter creatures swarming through the Core — we have planted many seeds, as Nilis would say. Something tells me the future suddenly got a lot more complicated.”
A week after the crews returned from the core, Arches Base received visitors from Earth. The scuttlebutt in the dorms was that one was a member of the Grand Conclave itself, the highest body of governance in the Coalition: one of just twelve people who governed a Galaxy, and she was here. Not only that, the scuttlebutt went, she had come to give them all medals.
The day after that, the crews of Exultant Squadron and everybody connected with Operation Prime Radiant were called to the hangar. The hangar was covered by a translucent dome that gave a view of the sky, and the hot white light of the Core beat down into the interior of the pit. All ten of the ships’ cradles were empty now; the surviving ships would perform a flyby, piloted by reserve crews.
Everybody was here, brought together for the first time since they had dispersed after their debriefing. With Pirius were Torec, Burden, and the rest of the surviving crews. Cohl was here, and Enduring Hope brought a gaggle of grinning ground crew techs. The more senior officers, including Captains Marta, Seath, and Boote, kept apart, resplendent in new dress uniforms.
Others came out for their share of the limelight. Aside from civilians like Commissary Nilis and Pila, there were much more lowly types: workers, techs, administrators. Many of them were older than the flight crews, and their ranks gleamed with metallic implants, for this was the Navy’s way of using its surviving veterans. But they performed the various unglamorous but essential jobs that kept the base running and the ships flying, and with Pila’s help, Pirius had made sure that they would be here.
A piping sounded, a tradition, it was said, dating from a time when man’s ships sailed only the seas of Earth. The officers muttered quiet orders. The military staff and civilians alike drew their ranks up a little tighter and stood rigidly to attention.
A party swept from the shadows into full Galaxy light. Marshal Kimmer and Minister Gramm accompanied a much more imposing figure. Philia Doon, Plenipotentiary for Total War, tall, slender, was dressed in a long golden cloak that swept around her feet. Her gait was graceful — and yet it was not quite natural, as if she used prosthetics, and her footsteps were loud and heavy, abnormally weighty. Kimmer was speaking to her, but she was looking into the sky, and Pirius had the impression that even as she took in Kimmer’s words, she was listening to some other voice only she could hear.
The skin of her slender face shone a subtle silver-gray. There wasn’t a hair on her head.
Doon took her place on a low platform. One by one the staff of the base were presented to her. Marshal Kimmer himself went up first, followed by Nilis, who bowed as he was handed some kind of elaborate data desk. Then Doon began to work her way through the officers, down the ladder of superiority.
When it was his turn, Pirius found his heart thumping as he approached this strange creature. She towered over him.
“Congratulations, Pilot,” the Plenipotentiary murmured. Her voice was rich, but too precise — artificial, he thought. She said, “Your squadron — Exultant — was well named.” But even as she talked there was no expression in that silvered face, and she didn’t even seem to be looking at him. She beckoned him closer, and he smelled a faint scent of burning. She pressed her hand to his chest, and when she lifted it away a bright green tetrahedral sigil glowed there, his new battle honor.
Pirius was very glad when the ceremony was over and they were allowed to break ranks.
Nilis approached Pirius. “Well, Pilot, now you have seen right to the very heart of our marvelous Third Expansion — and that is the type of creature that festers there.”
“You mean Plenipotentiary Doon?”
“She is what is called a raoul,” Nilis said. “Do you not recognize the texture of her skin?”
“I don’t know the technology.”
“Not technology. Not even biology — or at any rate, not human biology. That stuff is the hide of a Silver Ghost. The Plenipotentiary is a symbiote; she has the internal organs of a human, but the flesh of a Ghost. Oh, and she has implants tucked into her belly, I believe: more symbiotes, another conquered alien species living on within the bodies of our rulers, a group-mind entity that once, it is said, conquered the Earth, and is now used to provide instantaneous links between the Plenipotentiaries and their circle of chosen ones.
“There is plenty of justification for all this surgery and genetic tinkering: the Plenipotentiaries have such responsibility that they need such powers, such dispensations from the Doctrines that are supposed to govern us all. But I hardly think Hama Druz would approve, do you? He would say she is a monstrosity, perhaps. But that monstrosity is what you have been fighting for.”
A monstrosity? Watching the Plenipotentiary, Pirius remembered Nilis’s talk of an eleventh step in human evolution. Were those prostheses no more than cosmetic — or would Doon somehow breed true? Perhaps this extraordinary woman really did represent the future, whether she made him comfortable or not.