To left and right the great corridor of the barracks stretched away, a channel of two-tier bunks, equipment lockers, and bio facilities. Below and above too, before and behind, through translucent walls and ceilings, you could see similar corridors arrayed in a neat rectangular lattice, fading to milky indistinctness. Everywhere, the ranks of bunks were emptying as the recruits filed out for the calisthenics routines that began each day. This entire moonlet, the Barracks Ball, was hollowed out and filled up with a million ensigns and other trainees, a million would-be pilots and navigators and engineers and ground crew, all close to Pirius’s age, all eager to be thrown into the endless fray.

Arches Base was primarily a training academy for flight crews. The cadets here were highly intelligent, physically fit, very lively—and intensely competitive, at work and off duty. And so the place was riven with factions which constantly split, merged and reformed, and with feuds and love affairs that could flare with equal vigor. Today it was Pirius’s bunk that Captain Seath was standing before, and from the corner of his eye Pirius could see that everybody was looking at him with unbridled glee. His life wasn’t going to be worth living after this.

Seath was walking away. “Pirius, put your pants on. A ship’s come in. You’ve got a visitor.”

“A visitor? . . . Sorry, sir. Can I ask what ship?”

Seath called over her shoulder, “The Assimilator’s Claw. And she’s been in a scrap.”

That was enough to tell Pirius who his visitor must be. Torec and Pirius stared at each other, bewildered.

Seath was already receding down the long corridor, here and there snapping out a command to an unfortunate ensign.

Pirius scrambled into his pants, jacket, and boots. He held a clean-cloth over his face, endured a second of stinging pain as the semisentient material cleaned out his pores and dissolved his stubble, and hurried after Seath. He was relieved to hear Torec hurrying along in his wake; he had a feeling he was going to need some familiar company today.

Pirius and Torec bundled after Captain Seath into a flitter. The little ship, not much more than a transparent cylinder, closed itself up and squirted away, out of the Barracks Ball and into space.

All around Pirius, worlds hailed like cannonballs.

The Barracks Ball was one of more than a hundred swarming worldlets that comprised the Arches Cluster base. Beyond the rocks, of course, hung the hundreds of giant young stars that comprised the cluster itself, tightly packed—in fact, the largest concentration of such stars in the Galaxy. Above the stars themselves was a still more remarkable sight. Glowing filaments, ionized gas dragged along the loops of the Galaxy’s magnetic field, combined into a wispy interstellar architecture constructed on a scale of light-years. The characteristic shape of these filaments had, it was said, given “Arches” its name.

The Galaxy center itself was just fifty light-years away.