But his pilot’s training prompted more questions. Why stick to such a crude strategy? Even using ground troops you could imagine more subtlety. You could coordinate your forces, strike with precision, move on.

He wasn’t about to ask such questions of Captain Marta, but, soaking up his training, he could figure out what the answers would be. A Rock offered shelter, so you had to stick to its ground. But in combat a Rock was drenched in firepower—and, even if the Xeelee didn’t show up to play, in the hard radiation of the Core. You couldn’t rely on communication, coordination, in such circumstances; you had to train for a worst case, in which every platoon, maybe every trooper, was cut off from everybody else, save for what she could see of the battlefield around her. In this ultimate war, only the crudest of tactics could be relied on to work.

But, guided by his conversations with This Burden Must Pass, he began to suspect that the truth behind the strategy was ideological. Clinging to humanity was the essence of the Druz Doctrines, the principles that had kept mankind united across twenty thousand years and the span of a Galaxy. So humans had to wage this war, humans had to dig their trenches, and fight and die, not their machines.

Pirius built up a new image of the Front in his head. It was a great shell enclosing the center of the Galaxy, and it was studded with worldlets like this one, and on every one of them there were human beings, digging and burrowing. They were digging for victory; that was what the instructors told them. And whether or not they ever achieved that victory, Pirius thought, with every spadeful of glistening asteroid dirt, the Druz Doctrines and the unity of mankind were reinforced that little bit more.

Chapter 14

Two weeks after Pirius Red’s first test flight of the Xeelee nightfighter, Nilis set up a briefing for the Minister. It was held on Enceladus, moon of Saturn. Minister Gramm attended with his peculiar Virtual “advisor” Luru Parz, and Commander Darc and one of his adjutants represented the Navy.

And Nilis began to lecture. Even before this glowering crew, in his typical overly academic way, the Commissary would never just state his conclusions: no, that wasn’t his style. He had to establish the facts first; he had to educate his audience.

Since analyzing the results of the tests on the Xeelee craft, Nilis said, he had hardened his ideas about the nature and origin of the Xeelee. He tried to talk his way through a very complex series of graphics which supported, he said, his hypothesis about the nature of the Xeelee nightfighter: that it was not just a machine.