Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

long time, sir.’
    Kapur turned. ’Mace and I? How old are you, gunner?’
    ’Eighteen standard, sir.’
    ’Eighteen.’ He shook his head. ’I first met Mace before you were
born, then. I was seconded here by the Commission, on the failed
first contact with the Snowflake.’
    ’Seconded?’
    ’I was a Guardian, a policeman. As the Expansion grows, the rate
of Assimilation itself accelerates, and specialists are rare… My
own brand of forensic intelligence proved adequate for the role. My
job was to understand the Snowflake. Mace’s was to destroy it.’
    Mari understood the tension. Resources were always short. The
Assimilation, the processing of newly contacted alien species on an
industrial scale, followed an accelerating Expansion that now spanned
a quarter of the Galaxy’s disc and had reached the great globular
clusters beyond.
    And, in one of those clusters, they had found the Snowflake. It
surrounded a dwarf star, a tetrahedron fourteen million kilometres on
a side: a stupendous artefact, a vast setting for an ancient, faded
jewel of a star.
    So far as anybody knew, the Snowflake had been constructed to
observe: simply that, to gather data, as the universe slowly cooled.
Since the building of the Snowflake, thirteen billion years had
shivered across the swirling face of the Galaxy.
    Assimilation was a matter of processing: contact, conquest,
absorption - and, if necessary, destruction. If Kapur had been able
to determine the goals of the Snowflake and its builders, then
perhaps those objectives could be subverted to serve human purposes.
If not, then the Snowflake had no value.
    Mari guessed, ’Lieutenant Mace gave you a hard time.’
    Kapur shook his head. ’Mace was a good officer. Hard, intelligent,
ambitious, brutal. He knew his job and he carried it out as best he
could. I was in his way; that was uncomfortable for me. But I always
admired him for what he was. In the end the Snowflake resisted Mace’s
crude assaults.’
    ’How?’
    ’We were - brushed aside.’
    He tried to explain what had happened. Their ship had been hit by
a beam of lased gravity waves, that had come from outside the Galaxy.
It seemed that the Snowmen, the builders of the ’Flake, had been able
to manipulate something humans called Mach’s principle. Mach, or
Mar-que, it was a name all but lost in the Qax Extirpation.
    Kapur said, ’You are embedded in a universe of matter. That matter
tugs at you with gravity fields - but the fields surround you
uniformly; they are equal in all directions, isotropic and timeless.
The Snowmen had a way of making the field… unequal.’
    ’How?’
    Kapur laughed uneasily. ’We still don’t know. I guess you learn a
lot in thirteen billion years.
    ’It has taken twenty-two years for the Academies to figure out how
to deal with the Snowflake. For deal with it we must, of course. Its
stubborn, defiant existence is not a direct threat to us, but it is a
challenge to the logic of our ideology.’ Now he smiled, remembering.
’After our failed mission we corresponded, Mace and I. I followed
Mace’s career with a certain pride. Do you think it’s getting
hot?’
    ’Sir - ’
    ’When I was assigned to this second assault on the Snowflake, Mace
was seconded to accompany me. He had risen to lieutenant. It galled
him to have to become a wetback.’
    ’Sir. Lieutenant Mace is dead.’
    Kapur drifted to a halt, and sighed. ’Ah. Then knowing me did him
little good in the end. What a pity it ends like this.’
    Gently Mari pulled the broken body from Kapur’s back. Kapur didn’t
resist; he drifted to the wall, running his fingers over its moist
surface. Mari pulled the cloak off Mace’s inert body, but it had been
used up by its efforts to keep Mace alive.
    She was surprised to learn of a friendship between a
straight-and-true Navy man and a domehead. And then Kapur had
attempted to haul his friend along with him, even though it must have
been obvious that Mace couldn’t survive - even though Kapur, as their
passenger Academician, would have been in his rights to demand that
the rest of them carry him along.
    People always surprised you. Especially those without military
training and the proper orientation. But then, she had never gotten
to know any domeheads before, not before this disaster, today.
    She shoved the body back the way they had come, up into the
darkness. When she was done she was sweating. Maybe it was getting
hotter in here, as they penetrated deeper into the core