“Burden—you said the officers will tolerate genetic drift if the product is useful. But why do they put up with you?”

“Because I’m useful too.” Burden lay back on his bunk. “I told you that’s the key. Of course I am useful! Why else?”

When he saw his first death on the Rock, Pirius learned the truth of this.

Chapter 17

Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at the Berr-linn spaceport. They had been separated for eight weeks. Careless of who was watching them, they wrapped their arms about each other and pressed their mouths together.

“They’re mad,” Pirius whispered. “The earthworms. All of them!”

“I know!” she whispered back, round-eyed.

They stared into each other’s eyes, their faces pressed together, their breath mingling, hot. Again Pirius felt that deep surging warmth toward her that he’d started to feel when they first arrived on Earth. It was as if he was whole with her, incomplete when they were apart, as if they were two halves of the same entity. Was this love? How was he supposed to know?

And—did she feel the same way? It looked as if she did, but how were you supposed to tell?

But they had no time to talk about their feelings, no time to recover from their separate adventures, for the very next day they were to be shipped off, at Luru Parz’s order, to Port Sol.

To a traveler from the center of the Galaxy, a jaunt to the Kuiper Belt, only some fifty times as far out as Earth’s orbit around the sun, should have seemed trivial. But as the sun dwindled to an intense pinpoint, and Port Sol itself at last swam into view, dark, bloodred, Pirius felt that he was indeed going deep: not just deep in space but deep in time, deep into humanity’s murky past.

Nilis’s corvette entered a painfully slow orbit. The gravity of a ball of ice a few hundred kilometers across was a mere feather touch. The passengers crowded to the corvette’s transparent walls.

Port Sol was an irregular mass, only vaguely spherical, and dimly lit by the distant sun. Pirius saw a crumpled, ruddy surface, broken by craters of a ghostly blue-white. Some of these “craters,” though, looked too regular to be natural. And some of them were domed over, illuminated by a soft prickling of artificial light. People still lived here, then. But signs of abandonment overwhelmed the signs of life: shards of collapsed and darkened domes, even buildings that might once have floated above the ice but had now crashed to the ground.

But still—Port Sol!

Even to a Navy brat like Pirius, born and raised twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the name had resonance. Port Sol was the very rim of Sol system, the place where the legendary engineer Michael Poole had come to build the very first of mankind’s starships.