Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

fragments.
    I sat there until my heart stopped rattling. Then I followed him
down.
     
    ’My fall is slow,’ he said, analytic, observing. ’Low gravity,
high air resistance. You could probably retrieve me. But you
won’t.’
    ’Come on, L’Eesh. It’s business, just as you said. You know what
happened. These palettes extract their energy from the vacuum energy
sea.’
    ’Leaving some kind of deficit in their wake, into which I flew.
Yes? And so we both die here.’ He forced a laugh. ’Ironic, don’t you
think? In the end we’ve cooperated to kill each other. Just like the
inhabitants of these desolate moons.’
    But I was thinking it over. ’Not necessarily.’
    ’What?’
    ’Suppose I head up to the midpoint of the bridge and burn my way
through the wall. Pohp ought to see me and come in for me. I’d surely
be far enough out of the vacuum field for the Spline to approach
safely.’
    ’What about the quarantine ships?’
    ’They must primarily patrol the moons’ low orbits. Perhaps I’d be
far enough from the surface of either moon to leave them asleep.’
    He considered. ’It would take days to get there. But it might
work. You have something of your mother’s pragmatism, little Raida. I
guess you win.’
    ’Maybe we both win.’
    There was silence. Then he said coldly, ’Must I beg?’
    ’Make me an offer.’
    He sighed. ’There has been a sighting of a school of Spline. Wild
Spline.’
    I was startled. ’Wild?’
    ’These Spline are still spacegoing. But certain of their
behavioural traits have reverted to an ancestral state. They believe
they swim in their primordial ocean - ’
    I breathed, ’Nobody has ever hunted a Spline.’
    ’It would be glorious. Like the old days. Hily would be proud.’ It
was as if I could hear his smile.
    I was content with the deal. It was enough that I’d beaten him; I
didn’t need to destroy him.
    Not yet. Not until I knew who killed my mother.
    We argued percentages, all the way down towards the light.
     
    The human victory was probably always inevitable. We were better
at waging war: after all, we had spent a hundred thousand years
practising on each other.
    But the war transformed humanity too. After seventeen hundred
years of conflict the Coalition’s grip on mankind, body and soul, was
total.
    We undying kept out of sight, tending our own long-term concerns.
But we never went away.
    The Expansion swept on across the face of the Galaxy, centralised,
united, purposeful, ideological, purified by war.
    It was not healthy to be in its way.

 
     
     
PART THREE
     
     
ASSIMILATION

 
LAKES OF LIGHT
AD 10,102
     
     
    The Navy ferry stood by. From the ship’s position, several stellar
diameters away, the cloaked star was a black disc, like a hole cut
out of the sky.
    Pala was to descend to the star alone in a flitter - alone save
for her Virtual tutor, Commissary Dano.
    The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inwards,
silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had
about the mass of Earth’s sun and, though it was dark, Pala imagined
she could feel that immense mass tugging at her.
    Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow
cloaked, made perfectly black save for pale, pixel-small specks,
flaws in the dark mask, specks that were lakes of light. She’d seen
the Navy scouts’ reports, even studied the Virtuals, but until this
moment she hadn’t been able to believe in the extraordinary
reality.
    But she had a job to do, and had no time to be overawed. The Navy
scouts said there were humans down there - humans living with, or
somehow on the star itself. Relics of an ancient colonising push,
they now had to be reabsorbed into the greater mass of mankind, their
energies engaged in the project of the Expansion. But the Galaxy was
wide, and Pala, just twenty-five years old, was the only Missionary
who could be spared for this adventure.
    Dano was a brooding presence beside her, peering out with metallic
Eyes. His chest did not rise and fall, no breath whispered from his
mouth. He was projected from an implant in her own head, so that she
could never be free of him, and she had become resentful of him. But
Pala had grown up on Earth, under a sky so drenched with artificial
light you could barely see the stars, and right now, suspended in
this three-dimensional arena, she was so disoriented she was grateful
for the company even of a Commissary’s avatar.
    And meanwhile that hole in the sky, the