But sleep rose up like a black tide, regardless.

The next day, his first priority was his crews.

He toured the base. They were in their barracks, or the refectories, or the sick bays, or the gyms and training rooms where they had gone to work out the tension from their systems. A couple of them had gone back to the ships to help the ground crews with their own investigations and debriefing.

Some just accepted what had happened. It was a gamble worth taking, they said; you win some, you lose some. Others were bitter at the stupidity of the commanders, including Pirius himself, who had sent them into the Cavity with such poor intelligence. He absorbed their anger. And some just talked. They went over and over what they had done, telling and retelling their own small war stories as part of the whole. That was all right. It was part of the healing, and Pirius’s job now was to listen. And it wasn’t going to stop here, he knew. The shock of what they had gone through, and the guilt at having survived where others hadn’t, would never leave them.

Pirius had lost a temporal twin, a part of himself, and he wondered which way his own damage would work out—and how Torec, who had lost her lover and welcomed him home at the same time, would sort out her own complicated, guilt-ridden grief.

More than twenty-four hours after Pirius’s return, This Burden Must Pass brought his own battered ship home.

Pirius hurried to meet him, and walked with his crew to the sick bay. With his visor cracked open, Burden’s face was drawn, dried sweat was crusted under his shadowed eyes, and his hair was plastered to his head. Burden said that they had encountered no Xeelee harassment on the way back. “It looks as if it really is true,” he said. “They have abandoned the Galaxy to mankind. And because of us.”

“Quite a story to add to that end-of-time confluence of yours,” Pirius said.

“Yes, quite a story.” Burden said more slowly, “Pirius. About what happened out there—”

“Forget it,” Pirius snapped.

“I can’t do that,” Burden said. “If I’d gone into Chandra as you ordered, as was my duty, maybe Blue would have survived.”

“We’ll never know. We’ve all come home with regrets, Burden. Now we move on.”

Burden nodded, his eyes downcast. “We move on.”

Burden said he had found no traces of Jees’s lost ship. “It was smashed up. Two of the crew nacelles, more or less intact. But the systems had failed before the safety cut-ins could work.”

“They didn’t survive.”

“We sent the crew blisters into the black hole.” Burden smiled thinly, exhausted. “It seemed fitting.”

“That it does.” Pirius was thinking over what Burden had said. His thoughts were muddy; already the events of the flight seemed remote, as if they had happened a decade ago, or in another life. But there was something missing from Burden’s report. “You didn’t mention the third nacelle. Jees rode with the Silver Ghost.”