The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inwards, silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had about the mass of Earth’s sun and, though it was dark, Pala imagined she could feel that immense mass tugging at her.

Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow cloaked, made perfectly black save for pale, pixel-small specks, flaws in the dark mask, specks that were lakes of light. She’d seen the Navy scouts’ reports, even studied the Virtuals, but until this moment she hadn’t been able to believe in the extraordinary reality.

But she had a job to do, and had no time to be overawed. The Navy scouts said there were humans down there - humans living with, or somehow on the star itself. Relics of an ancient colonising push, they now had to be reabsorbed into the greater mass of mankind, their energies engaged in the project of the Expansion. But the Galaxy was wide, and Pala, just twenty-five years old, was the only Missionary who could be spared for this adventure.

Dano was a brooding presence beside her, peering out with metallic Eyes. His chest did not rise and fall, no breath whispered from his mouth. He was projected from an implant in her own head, so that she could never be free of him, and she had become resentful of him. But Pala had grown up on Earth, under a sky so drenched with artificial light you could barely see the stars, and right now, suspended in this three-dimensional arena, she was so disoriented she was grateful for the company even of a Commissary’s avatar.

And meanwhile that hole in the sky, the cloaked star, swelled until its edges passed out of her field of view.

The flitter dipped and swivelled, and swept along the line of the star’s equator. Now she was flying low over a darkened plain, with a starry night sky above her. The star was so vast, its diameter more than a hundred times Earth’s, that she could see no hint of curvature in its laser-straight horizon.

‘Astonishing,’ she said. ‘It’s like a geometrical exercise.’

Dano murmured, ‘And yet, to the best of our knowledge, the photosphere of a star roils not a thousand kilometres beneath us, and if not for this - sphere, whatever it is - we would be destroyed in an instant, a snowflake in the mouth of a furnace. What’s your first conclusion, Missionary?’

Pala hesitated before answering. It was so recently that she had completed her assessments in the Academies on Earth, so recently that the real Dano had, grudgingly, welcomed her to the great and ancient enterprise that was the Commission for Historical Truth, that she felt little confidence in her own abilities. And yet the Commission must have faith in her, or else they wouldn’t have committed her to this mission.