They faced each other.
“I didn’t ask to be here,” said Torec. She sounded furious.
“I didn’t ask for you.”
“I’ve better things to do than to be your squeeze.”
Pirius snapped, “I’d rather squeeze that fat old Commissary.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants.”
They held each other’s gazes for a second. Then, together, they burst out laughing.
Torec crammed a handful of the food into her mouth. “Mm-m. These are sweet.”
“I bet the bed’s soft.”
Still laughing, they ran at each other and began to tear off their clothes. Their new uniforms were not like the rough coveralls they had been used to on Arches; officer-class, the uniforms crawled off the floor where they had been carelessly dropped, slithered into the wardrobe, and began a silent process of self-cleaning and repair.
The room had everything they needed: food, water, clean-cloths, even a lavatory artfully concealed behind paneling. “Evidently officers and Commissaries don’t like to admit they shit,” Torec said dryly when they discovered this.
For hours they just stayed in the room, under the covers or on top of them, eating and drinking as much as they could. They knew they had to make the most of this. Soon enough, somebody would come for them and take all this stuff away; somebody always did.
But nobody did come.
“How long do you think it will take to get there?”
Pirius was cradling her head on his arm, and eating tiny purple sweets from her bare belly. “Where?”
“Earth.”
He thought about that. Even now, more than twenty millennia since humanity’s first interstellar jaunt, a trip across the face of the Galaxy was not a trivial undertaking. “Earth is twenty-eight thousand light-years from the center.” Everybody knew that. “FTL can hit two hundred light-years an hour. So…”
Torec had always been fast at arithmetic. “About six days?”
“But we can’t get so far without resupply, not a ship this size. Double the time for stops?”
She stroked the center line of his chest. “What do you think it will be like?”
“Earth? I have no idea.” It was true. To Navy brats like Pirius and Torec, Earth was a name, a remote ideal — it was what they were fighting for. But they had never been told anything about Earth itself. What would be the point? None of them was ever going to go there. Earth was a totem. You didn’t think of it as a place to live.
“So what does Nilis want you to do?”
“Win the war.” He laughed. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Maybe the Commissary is working out a training program for us.”
“Yes, maybe that.” It was a comforting thought. They were used to having every waking second programmed by somebody else. Everybody moaned about the regime the whole time, of course, but Pirius admitted to himself it would be reassuring when they heard a brisk knock on the door and the Commissary issued them their orders.
But twenty-four hours went by, and still they heard no such knock.
They began to grow uncomfortable. It was hard even to sleep. They weren’t used to being enclosed, isolated like this. Back at Arches, where they had grown up, they had spent their whole lives in vast open dormitories, like the ones in the Barracks Ball, places where you could always see thousands of others arrayed around you, eating, sleeping, playing, fighting, bitching. Again everybody complained, and snatched bits of privacy Under the covers of their bunks. But the fact was, it was reassuring to be cocooned in a vast array of humanity — to have your little slot, and to fill it. Now they had been ripped out of all that, and it was disquieting.
Already Pirius could see Captain Seath’s wisdom. If not for the presence of Torec, somebody he could share all this with, he probably would go crazy. The two of them clung to each other for reassurance. But it wasn’t enough.
At the end of that first twenty-four hours they felt a soft judder — probably a docking, causing a ripple in the corvette’s inertial field as it interfaced with a port’s systems. They surely couldn’t be at Earth yet, but they were somewhere.
They jumped out of their tousled bed, pulled on uniforms, and hurried out of their cabin, leaving it for the first time since Arches.
Through the transparent hull they saw a plain of metal that softly curved away, like a plated-over moon. The corvette had nuzzled against a dock on this metallic worldlet, and to left and right they could see more ports, receding beyond the metal world’s tight horizon, complex puckers within which more ships rested.
There was no sign of the corvette’s crew. But Commissary Nilis stood here, gazing out. He hadn’t noticed the ensigns. He had his hands behind his back, and he seemed to be humming.
Torec and Pirius glanced at each other. Pirius stood to attention and plucked up his courage. “Sir.”
Nilis was startled, but he smiled. “Ah, my two ensigns! And how are you enjoying the trip? Well, we’ve barely started. If there’s anything you need, just ask.” He turned back to the window. “Look over there — remarkable — I think that’s a Spline ship.” So it was, Pirius saw. The great living vessel nestled in its dock; it looked like a bulging eyeball.
Torec nudged Pirius, who asked, “Sir — Commissary — can you tell us where we are?”
“Well, this is Base 528, I believe,” Nilis said. “We’re here for our first provisioning stop.” He glanced at them. “And what does that number tell you?”
Pirius was confused, but Torec said: “Sir, that it’s an old base. Arches is 2594. The older the base, the lower the number.”
“Quite so. Good. Now, come, see.” He walked past them to the other wall.
Pirius saw ships: many ships, of all shapes and sizes, crisscrossing before his vision. The nearer ships shuttled into docks, or left them. Beyond there were many more, just sparks too remote to make out any detail, a shifting crowd that sorted itself into streams that swept away. The ships were beyond counting, he thought, stunned, and this vast streaming must continue day and night, all from this one base.
But Torec was looking beyond the ships to the stars. “Pirius. The sky is dark.”
The sky was dense with stars, many of them hot and blue. But in every direction he looked, between the stars the sky was black, black as velvet. “We aren’t in the Galaxy center anymore,” he said.
“Quite right,” Nilis said. “We are actually in a spiral arm — called the Three-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost arm of the Galaxy’s main disc.”
“Three-Kilo,” said Torec, wondering. “I heard of that.”
“Many famous battles were fought here,” Nilis said. “But long ago. Once this base was on the front line. Now it is a resupply depot. The Front has since been pushed deeper into the heart of the Galaxy, deeper toward the Prime Radiant itself. In this part of the Galaxy there are ports, dry docks, graving yards, weapons ships: it is a belt of factory worlds that encloses the inner center, a hinterland that spans hundreds of light-years.” He sighed. “I’ve traveled here a dozen times, but the scale of it still bewilders me. But then, a war spread across a hundred thousand light-years, and spanning tens of millennia, simply cannot be grasped during a human life spanning mere decades. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the idea of winning this war is beyond the imagination of even our most senior commanders.”
Torec said hesitantly, “Commissary?”