I turned my attention away from the hole and back to the legions awaiting me.

There were a million ships.

I thought of the House of Reclamation and its thinly stretched resources. How much more effective could it be with this horde to supplement its fleet of ageing, second-hand vessels? Between them, the House could cover all the scattered worlds of the Generality, and maybe even the Multiplicity beyond. A tiny fraction of their number would certainly be enough to quell the engagement going on outside. Less than one per cent would have been enough to win the Archipelago War, and maybe even enough to have prevented it from ever happening in the first place.

I tried to imagine the forests of Pelapatarn unharmed, and the millions of human and ship casualties from the war magically prevented. I tried to picture my own guilt evaporating, and wondered where I’d be right now if the massacre I’d been ordered to commit had never happened. Would I understand the universe in the same way I did now? Would I even be the same entity? They say that our remembrances shape our personalities. But what happens to us when our recollections are altered?

Who do we become?

“Where were you?” I asked the white ships. “Why didn’t you stop us?”

We were always here.

“But you could have helped. You could have intervened.”

We could do nothing. We were devoid of purpose.

“But you could have prevented all those deaths.”

A great wave of sadness flooded in through the channel I had been using to communicate with them. I felt their pain and their regret, and even their frustration at not being able to help.

We had no leader, they said. We had no moral guidance. We could not choose a side.

“But now you can?”

Now we have you.

* * *

My sensors alerted me to something in the hole. I was still decelerating stern-first, so my bow—and the majority of my remaining cannons—were facing back the way I had come.

A shadow moved against the stars. Something large occluded the view, diving headlong into the mouth of the shaft.

It was a ship.

The walls of the shaft were distorting its drive signature, but there could be no doubt someone had decided to follow my apparently suicidal dive into the planet’s interior. The Fury and the Nymtoqs would all have been too big to fit through the available opening, which only left—

The Adalwolf burst from the hole like a champagne cork, still accelerating. His torpedo tubes were open and his active sensors swept the space directly ahead of him. He caught sight of me at the same instant I caught sight of him, and his targeting laser illuminated my hull.