This was Pirius’s moment, then. His pulse pounding, he stepped forward.

Three crew waited by the lock: one woman, two men. Dressed in scorched and battered skinsuits, their chests adorned with a stylized claw logo, they were clutching bulbs of drinking water. Pirius glanced at the woman—short, wiry, a rather sour face, though with a fine, strong nose. Pale red hair was tucked into her skinsuit cap. One of the men was heavyset. His face was broad and round, his ears protruding; he looked competent, but somehow vulnerable. They were both grimy and hollow-eyed with fatigue. Cohl, he read from their nametags, and Tuta—or “Enduring Hope” according to a hand-lettered addendum. He had never met them, in his timeline, but he already knew these names from the foreknowledge briefings: they were his future comrades, whom he would choose for his crew, and with whom he would risk his life. He wondered who they were.

He was avoiding the main issue, of course.

The other man, the pilot, wasn’t tall, but he topped Pirius by a good half-head, and, under the skinsuit, was bulkier. Seath had told him that this version was aged nineteen, two years older—two more years of growing, of filling out, of training. At last Pirius looked the pilot in the face.

Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.

According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn’t even a common “now” you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.

But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but the events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.

In this war it wasn’t remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn’t happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn’t unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts back in the past was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn’t perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies—even if decisions made in the present could wipe out many of those futures before they came to pass.

A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.