So Pirius Red and Torec, having completed a circuit across the face of the Galaxy that had taken them all the way to Earth, returned at last to where they had started.

The flight through the complicated geometry of Arches Base lifted Pirius’s heart. Past the asteroids that wheeled like fists, he made out the burning sky of the Core, the giant stars and light-year-long filaments of glowing gas, the endless explosion of astrophysics beyond. Compared to the cold clockwork emptiness of Sol system, out on the Galaxy’s dead fringe, where you couldn’t even see the Core, this crowded, dangerous sky teemed with life and energy.

“Lethe, it’s good to be home,” he said with feeling.

When they disembarked, Captain Seath herself greeted them. She allowed the Commissary to pump her hand, and nodded curtly to Pirius and Torec. But Pirius read the expression on her reconstructed face. Whatever they had achieved in Sol system, they would always be two jumped-up ensigns to her. It was almost reassuring.

Seath told them that the accommodation for the new “squadron” that was being formed to carry out Nilis’s “project”—she pronounced those words with unmistakable disdain—wasn’t ready yet. So Nilis was offered a room in Officer Country, while Pirius and Torec were taken to a Barracks Ball.

They walked into the big central space of bunks and lavatories. They hadn’t been assigned to this Barracks Ball before. It stank, of course, as all barracks did, of piss and sweat, food and disinfectant, but it didn’t smell familiar. And among the ranks of faces that peered at them, with curiosity, apathy, or hostility, there was nobody they knew.

They were assigned bunks a couple of blocks apart. Torec stroked Pirius’s back, and made her way to her own bunk. Pirius unpacked his few personal effects, and stripped out of his gaudy dress uniform, which made him feel a little better.

But he did this surrounded by staring faces. It wasn’t just the curiosity of cadets confronted by a stranger. They gazed at him as if he had two heads. They said nothing to him, and he had nothing to say to them. They snubbed him when he went to get food. Even when he lay down in the dark, he sensed the strangers around him watching him, assessing him—excluding him.

They looked so young, he thought, their faces blank, like desks empty of data. They were like children. And what was happening to him was childish, as the factions and cliques of the barracks combined to bully a new victim. It was just as Nilis had said: they might look like adults, and they would have to fight and die for mankind. But they were not long out of childhood, and every now and again it showed.

Childish it might be, but the pressure was extraordinary.