Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

come to study. Come, Novice; recall your
studies on compensatory belief systems.’
    Luca had to dredge up the word from memory. ’Oh. Superstition. The
troopers are superstitious.’
    Dolo said, ’It’s a common enough reaction. The troopers have
little control of their lives, even of their deaths. So they seek to
control what they can - like the ground they dig, the walls that
shelter them - and they come to believe that such actions in turn
might placate greater forces. All utterly non-Doctrinal, of
course.’
    Luca snorted. ’It is a sign of weakness.’
    Teel said without emotion, ’Imagine this Rock cracking like an
egg. Sometimes that happens, in combat. Imagine humans expelled, sent
wriggling defenceless into space. Imagine huddling in the dark,
waiting for that to happen at any moment. Now tell me how weak we
are.’
    ’I’m sorry,’ Luca said, flustered.
    Dolo was irritated. ’You’re sorry, you’re sorry. Child, open your
eyes and close your mouth. That way we’ll all get along a lot
better.’
    They walked on.
    The horizon was close and new land ahead hove constantly into
view, revealing more pits, more toiling soldiers. Luca had the
disconcerting sensation that he was indeed walking around the equator
of a giant hall of rock, and his vertigo threatened to return.
    It was because he was so busy trying to master his queasiness that
he didn’t notice the arch until they had almost walked under it. It
was a neat parabola, perhaps twenty metres tall. A single trooper was
standing beneath it, hands behind her back, stiffening to attention
as Teel approached.
    ’Ah,’ said Dolo, breathing a little heavily with the exertion of
the suited walk. ’So this is what we have come so far to see.’
    Luca stood under the arch. Its fine span narrowed above him,
making a black stripe across the complex sky. The arch was so
smoothly executed that he thought at first it must have been erected
by machine, perhaps from blown rock. But when he bent closer he saw
that the arch was constructed from small blocks, each no larger than
his fist, stone that had been cut and polished. On each block writing
was etched: names, he saw, two or three on each stone.
    Teel stood at one side of the arch, picked up a pebble of
conglomerate, and with care lobbed it upwards. It followed a smooth
airless arc that almost matched the arch’s span. ’Geometrically the
arch is almost perfect,’ she said.
    Dolo bent to inspect the masonry. ’Remarkable,’ he murmured.
’There is no mortar here, no pinning.’
    ’It was built by hand,’ Teel said. ’The troopers started with the
keystone and built it up side by side, lifting what was already
completed over the new sections. Easy in microgravity.’
    ’And the stone?’
    ’Taken from deep within the asteroid - kilometres deep. The
material further up has been gardened by impacts, shattered and
conglomerated. They had to dig special mines to get to it.’
    ’And all done covertly, all kept from the eyes of their
commanders.’
    ’Yes.’
    Dolo turned to Luca. ’What do you make of it, boy?’
    Luca would have had to dredge for the word if he hadn’t been
studying this specific area of deviancy. ’It is a chapel,’ he said. A
chapel of the dead, he thought, whose names are inscribed here. He
glanced up at the arch’s span. There was writing up to the limits of
his vision. Hundreds of names, then.
    ’Yes, a chapel.’ Dolo walked up to the single trooper standing
under the arch. She held her place, but returned the Commissary’s
scrutiny apprehensively.
    Teel said, ’This is Bayla.’
    ’The one on the charge.’
    ’She faces a specimen charge of anti-Doctrinal behaviour. Similar
charges will be applied to others of the unit here depending on the
outcome of the hearing - on your decision, gentlemen.’
    Dolo looked the trooper up and down, as if he could read her mind
by studying her suited body. ’Trooper. You understand the charge
against you. Are you guilty?’
    ’Yes, sir.’
    ’Tell me about Michael Poole.’
    Bayla was silent for a moment, visibly frightened; the visor of
her skinsuit was misted. She glanced at Teel, who nodded.
    And so Bayla stammered a tale of how the great engineer of ancient
times, Michael Poole, had ridden one last wormhole to Timelike
Infinity, the end of time itself. There he waited, watching all the
events of the universe unfolding - and there he was ready to welcome
those who remembered his name, and honour those who had fallen -