Torec was angry. “Maybe it would be better if we put our effort into fighting the Xeelee rather than each other.”

Darc laughed, not particularly unkindly. “Of course there will be honest doubts, too. I tell you, Commissary, there are many serving officers who don’t like your Project just for the feel of it. This fiddling with physics: it’s more like a Ghost project than anything humanity would devise. It has their glistening sheen all over it—that might be our biggest obstacle of all.”

In the next session, the many representatives of the Commission for Historical Truth took over, and the lines of questioning drifted away from the military justification of the Project and into realms of philosophy, ideology, and legalism.

The sinister Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, as the Commission’s ideological police force, had agents throughout the Galaxy, and assigned to every frontline unit: even Arches Base had its political officers, or “Doctrine cops,” as the troops called them. They were widely mocked, but their power was feared. And now the Doctrine cops on this committee dug into the question of the legality of what Nilis had been up to.

It was of course impossible for the Commissary to deny that he had been assisted by a jasoft, or that he had called on a posthuman colony on Mars, or that his gravastar hadn’t been developed by humans at all. But he was able to fend off their probing. It was not him, he pointed out, who had allowed Luru Parz to survive, or let a Coalescence to develop under Mons Olympus, or revived a colony of the long-extinct Silver Ghosts. These developments happened long before he was born, presumably with the full knowledge and even cooperation of the Commission.

“And why did all this happen? Because these divergences are useful. They may be non-Doctrinal, but they are valuable resources, and those who allowed such developments, far wiser than I, knew that it is sometimes necessary to compromise the purity of one’s ideology. If we were to lose the war, all our ideology would count for nothing anyhow. I am merely following in the footsteps of my wiser forebears.”

This mixture of flattery and blame-shifting seemed effective, and he deflected them further with a bit of philosophy. Was knowledge morally neutral? If a fact came from a dubious source, was its utility to be overridden by its ethically compromised origin? If so, who was to be the arbiter of what was “clean” science and what was not? . . .

By the time the Doctrine cops gave up, Nilis was sweating again. He had been on shaky ground. After all, it was one of Nilis’s “pragmatically useful resources,” Luru Parz, who, by threatening to expose the existence of other “morally compromised facilities,” had forced this committee to consider Nilis’s requests in the first place.