Nilis seemed startled. He prodded the Ghost’s hide, but his Virtual finger slid into the reflective surface, shattering into pixels. “And do you know the meaning of the name?”

“No,” the Ghost said bluntly. “I am a reconstruction. A biological echo of my forebears. We have records, but no memory. There can be no true cultural continuity.”

Nilis nodded coldly. “Despite all our ingenuity, extinction is forever.”

“Yes,” the Ghost said simply.

Mara’s expression was dark. “What do you think now, Ensign?”

Pirius spoke without thinking about it. “The Ghosts killed millions of us.” He faced the Ghost. “I’m glad you are conscious. I’m glad you know about the elimination of your kind. I am glad you are suffering.”

The Ghost didn’t respond.

Mara’s bleak gaze was on Pirius. He had to look away, disturbed by the turmoil inside him.

Nilis seemed fascinated by the Ghost, as his scientist’s curiosity overcame his Commissary’s ideology. “If you don’t know who you are, do you at least know what you want?”

“To serve you,” the Ghost said.

Chapter 22

It took ten hours for a dropship to come pick them up from Factory Rock. Pirius Blue and his two wounded charges spent all that time huddling in the ruins of the Xeelee emplacement.

When the medical-corps orderly clambered out of his little craft, he was surprised to find them. The three of them were the only survivors of two platoons. “You must be the luckiest man alive,” the orderly said.

“I must be,” said Pirius Blue.

Cohl’s injury was obvious; Tili Three was in deep shock. The orderly said he was supposed to separate able-bodied Pirius from Cohl and Tili Three, and send them back through different “processing channels,” as he put it. Pirius refused to be parted from his comrades. It boiled down to a standoff between Pirius and the small, heavy orderly, there on the churned-up surface of the Rock. The orderly caved in, shrugging his shoulders, saying the officers would sort it out later.

So they loaded Cohl and Tili onto the dropship. By now their skinsuits had turned rigid and filled up with a greenish stabilizing fluid full of nutrients, anesthetics, and stimulants. You were actually supposed to breathe this stuff. Pirius had tried it in training and, no matter what assurances he had got about the glop’s oxygen content, it had felt like drowning. But both the wounded were mercifully unconscious; as they were manhandled, the dense fluid sloshed around their faces.

The dropship lifted easily. Pirius glanced back at the ruined emplacement, the scarred bit of ground that marked the site of the monopole factory. It was just another battlefield, in an unending war of a million battlefields. But it could have been the most important place in his entire life, for he could easily have died here. He knew he would never see it again.