In the meantime Kapur’s intuition was right. This was a turning point. With the Spline harnessed the Third Expansion accelerated. Mankind burned across the Galaxy.

The vanguard soldiers and Assimilators were reckless.

Destructive.

Magnificent.

THE DREAMING MOULD - AD 12,478

THE DREAMING MOULD

AD 12,478

Tomm found a new patch of dreaming mould. Snuggled into the shade of a damp tree root, it had settled down into a grey circle the size of a dinner plate. Where it had crossed the crimson soil it had left a slimy trail. You often found moulds in shady places like this. They didn’t like the brightness of the growth lights. The muddled starlight cast diffuse colours over the mould, but it was always going to look ugly.

Tomm pressed his hands into the mould. It felt cold, slimy, not bad when you got used to it.

And the mould started to talk to him.

As always, it was like waking up. Suddenly he could smell the ozone tang of the growth lights, and hear the bleating of the goat at the Gavil place over the horizon, and he seemed to be able to see every one of the one hundred and twenty thousand stars in the crowded sky.

And then he spread out sideways, that was the way he thought of it, he reached out, left and right. The crowded stars froze over his head - or maybe they wheeled around and around, blurring into invisibility. He was with the mould now. And he could see its long, simple, featureless life all of a piece, from beginning to end, pulled out of time like a great grey slab of rock hauled out of the ground.

Even his heart stopped its relentless pumping.

But there was a flitter, a spark against the orange stars.

He dropped back into time. He stood and wiped his slimy hands on his trousers, watching the spaceship approach.

He was eight years old.

Kard’s metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. ‘Lethe, I love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light shining through the rubble of a planet?’

This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy’s main disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.

The flitter’s hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.

Xera said carefully, ‘I compliment you on the efficiency of your process.’