“You’re insane,” said Pirius Blue. “We’re going to strike at Chandra itself?” But Red saw that his eyes were alive with excitement.

Red said carefully, “You want me to take you off the mission? I could do that, though you know too much now; you’d have to be kept in custody until the flight was over.”

“And let somebody else fly this?” Blue grinned; he looked feral. “Not a chance.”

Pirius turned to Burden. “What about you?”

Burden seemed more troubled. “This could shorten the war.”

“Or lengthen it,” Blue said, “if it goes wrong badly enough.”

“Either way,” said Burden, “things must change.”

Pirius nodded. “Does that trouble you?”

“Whatever we do doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And it’s a noble action.”

Pirius had trouble decoding this glimpse of an alien mindset. “Does that mean you’re in?”

Again Pirius perceived a flash of fear. Blue saw it, too, and glanced at Burden, worried.

But Burden straightened his shoulders. “Yes, sir!”

Once the last transport had docked, Pirius Red brought his recruits to 492’s largest pressurized dome and had them draw up in good order before him. With Pila at his side, he stood awkwardly on a crate, the only rostrum he could find.

He looked along their lines, at Jees’s clunky artificial torso, at the anomalously old, like Burden, at damaged children like Three—and, Lethe, at his own sullen, other-timeline face. He found it hard to believe that there had been such a rabble drawn up anywhere on the Front in all this war’s long history.

Nevertheless they were a squadron, and they were his.

“Forty of us,” he said. “Forty, including Pila, here, my adjutant. And this is our base. It isn’t much, but it’s ours. And we’re about to be transferred into Strike Arm. We’re a squadron now. And we’re special,” he said.

There was a guffaw, quickly suppressed.

“So we are,” Pirius went on. “We are a special generation, with a special duty, a privilege. The Galaxy-center engagement with the Xeelee began three thousand years ago. And we are the first generation in all those long years to have a chance of winning this war—of winning the Galaxy itself. Whether we succeed or we fail, they will remember us, in the barracks-rooms and the shipyards and the training grounds, and on the battlefields, for a long time to come.”

The crews just stood silently and stared back at him. His words had sounded empty, even to him. His self-doubt quickly gathered.

Enduring Hope spoke up. “We need a name.”

“What’s that?”

“A name. For the squadron. Every squadron needs a name.”

Pila murmured a suggestion in his ear, and he knew it was right. “Exultant,” he said. “We are Exultant Squadron.”

They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.

When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.