Dans said, “Lethe, child, there are no Commissary arses to lick out here. Don’t you find the Doctrines cold comfort?”

“On the contrary,” Cohl said.

Pirius glanced down at Cohl’s blister. He imagined her in there, wrapped up in her skinsuit, swaddled by machines, clinging to the pitiless logic of the Doctrines.

Thousands of years had worn away since the first human interstellar flight, and since humanity had begun the mighty march across the Galaxy called the Third Expansion. The Expansion was an ideological program, a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind’s near extinction. In the fierce light of human determination lesser species had burned away. At last only one opponent was left: the Xeelee, the most powerful foe of them all, with their concentration at the very center of the Galaxy.

It was already millennia since the Third Expansion had closed around the center. But the Xeelee responded in kind, just as resolutely. The Front had become a great stalled wave of destruction, a spherical zone of friction where two empires rubbed against each other. And seen from factory worlds scattered a hundred light-years deep, the sky glowed pink with the light of endless war.

The Xeelee would not engage with mankind in any way but war. There was no negotiation, no rapprochement, no contact that was not lethal. To the Xeelee, humans were vermin—and they had a right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured. And so, only if each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a whole prevail. This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.

For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.

Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.

Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”

“My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.

“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”