Burden grinned. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. I’ll have to report it, I suppose. Of the Ghost’s nacelle I found not a trace. Not only that, it looked to me as if it had been sheared off—I mean, deliberately.”

“The Ambassador escaped,” Pirius said, marveling. Once more there was a Silver Ghost loose in the Galaxy. “But what different can one Ghost make?”

“The Ghosts are remarkable creatures, and very resourceful. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Sink Ambassador. And you have to wonder if, from the Ghost’s point of view, this whole operation was set up—if we were set up—just to give the Ghost a chance to get free.”

“That’s impossible.”

Burden glanced around. “I’m not going to repeat this in the debrief. But I want to go back out there again.” He spread his gloved hands. “After all, the war is over, it seems. They don’t need me to fight any more. Not that I was much use at that in the first place. I want to go back to the center again, to look for the Ambassador.”

“Why?”

“Because we never finished our philosophical discussions. Things are different now. Perhaps we can learn from the Ghosts about how we’re going to live our lives from now on. Oh, Pirius—one more thing.” He dug out a data desk and showed him some complicated schematics. “Something the sensors picked up.”

Burden had observed structures of dark matter drifting through the center of the Galaxy. Invisible to human senses, passing through even the crowded matter around Chandra as if it was no more substantial than a Virtual, the shadowy forms had settled around the central black hole.

Burden said, “I remember what you said about Nilis, and Luru Parz, and their interpretation of history. The Xeelee cleaned these dark matter creatures, the ‘photino birds,’ out of the Core. Now the Xeelee are gone—and in less than a day the birds are back.” He put away the data desk. “Silver Ghosts loose, dark matter creatures swarming through the Core—we have planted many seeds, as Nilis would say. Something tells me the future suddenly got a lot more complicated.”

A week after the crews returned from the core, Arches Base received visitors from Earth. The scuttlebutt in the dorms was that one was a member of the Grand Conclave itself, the highest body of governance in the Coalition: one of just twelve people who governed a Galaxy, and she was here. Not only that, the scuttlebutt went, she had come to give them all medals.

The day after that, the crews of Exultant Squadron and everybody connected with Operation Prime Radiant were called to the hangar. The hangar was covered by a translucent dome that gave a view of the sky, and the hot white light of the Core beat down into the interior of the pit. All ten of the ships’ cradles were empty now; the surviving ships would perform a flyby, piloted by reserve crews.