Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

mud, but if she lay on it she didn’t
sink. She flapped her arms and kicked, and she skidded over the
surface. Her face grey with the dirt, she laughed like a child. ’Sir,
look at me! It’s a lot easier than trying to swim or wade…’
    So it was, when I tried it myself.
    And that was how we got the villagers across the flooded valley,
one by one, to the larger Conurbation - not that much was left of
that by now - where the big transport waited to take us off. In the
end we lost only one of the villagers, the young woman who had been
overwhelmed by the surge. I tried to accept that I’d done my best to
fulfil my contradictory mission objectives - and that, in the end,
was the most important outcome for me.
    As we lifted, Mount Perfect loosed another eruption.
    Tilo, cocooned in a med cloak, stood beside me in an observation
blister, watching the planet’s mindless fury. He said, ’You know, you
can’t stop a lahar. It just goes the way it wants to go. Like this
war, it seems.’
    ’I guess.’
    ’We humans understand so little. We see so little. But when you
add us together we combine into huge historical forces that none of
us can deflect, any more than you can dam or divert a mighty
lahar…’
    And so on. I made an excuse and left him there.
    I went down to the sick bay, and watched Lian tending to the young
from the village. I had relieved her of her regular duties, as she
was one of the few faces on board that was familiar to the
traumatised kids, so she was useful here. With the children now she
was patient, competent, calm. I felt proud of that young marine; she
had grown up a lot during our time on Shade.
    And as I watched her simple humanity, I imagined a trillion such
acts, linking past and future, history and destiny, a great tapestry
of hard work and goodwill that united mankind into a mighty host that
would some day rule a Galaxy.
    To tell the truth I was bored with Tilo and his niggling. War! It
was magnificent. It was inevitable. I didn’t understand what had
happened down on Shade, and I didn’t care. What did it matter how the
war had started, in truth or lies? We would soon forget about dark
matter and the Xeelee’s obscure, immense projects, just as we had
before; we humans didn’t think in such terms. All that mattered was
that the war was here, at last.
    The oddest thing was that none of it had anything to do with the
Xeelee themselves. We needed a war. Any enemy would have served our
purposes just as well.
    I began to wonder what it would mean for me. I felt my heart beat
faster, like a drumbeat.
    We flew into a rising cloud of ash, and bits of rock clattered
against our hull, frightening the children.
     
    Yes, war was inevitable. Too many wanted it too badly. But it did
strike me as ironic that the triggering incident was a Xeelee action
concerned with a different war entirely, a war in which we were
always bystanders - a war which would one day overwhelm all of
us.
    With the final conflict begun at last, the Galaxy-spanning
civilisation of mankind underwent a drastic reconfiguration. For
millennia, under the Coalition, it had been a machine for expansion
and conquest. Now it became a machine of war.
    Humanity resplendent. We undying hid away, waiting for the storm
to pass.
    And human hearts, evolved for a long-forgotten savannah, had to
adapt to the dilemmas of interstellar battlefields.

 
     
     
PART FOUR
     
     
RESPLENDENT

 
THE CHOP LINE
AD 20,424
 
 
I
     
    We’d had no warning of the wounded Spline ship’s return to Base
592, in the heart of the Galaxy.
    Return: if you could call it that. But this was before I
understood that every faster-than-light spaceship is also a time
machine. That kind of puzzling would come later. For now, I just had
my duty to perform.
    As it happened we were off the Base at the time, putting the
Admiral Kard through its paces after a refit and bedding in a new
crew. Kard is a corvette: a small, mobile yacht intended for close-in
sublight operations. I was twenty years old, still an ensign,
assigned for that jaunt as an assistant to Exec Officer Baras. My
first time on a bridge, it was quite an experience, and I was glad of
the company of Tarco, an old cadre sibling, even if he was a male and
a lard bucket. In cold Galaxy-centre light we had just run through a
tough sequence of speed runs, emergency turns, full backdown,
instrument checks, fire and damage control.
    It was thanks to our fortuitous station on the bridge that Tarco
and I