Kard looked disgusted. ‘These dirt-diggers would call my ass sentient if it would hold back the starbreakers one more day.’ He leaned towards the boy, who looked scared. ‘Do you understand what we’re doing here? Planets like yours are rare, in a globular cluster. That’s why we need to blow up your world. So we can use what’s inside it to make more ships and weapons.’

‘So you can blow up more worlds.’

‘Exactly. Slime mould and all.’

‘Isn’t that what the Qax did to humans?’

Xera choked a laugh.

Kard glared. ‘Listen to me. You’re just a snot-nosed earthworm kid and I’m a rear admiral. And any time I want to I could—’

Stub’s med cloak abruptly turned bright blue.

Xera hurried to the dying pilot. Kard swore, stood up and walked away.

Tomm stared.

Xera felt for a pulse - it was desperately feathery - and bent her ear to Stub’s mouth, trying to detect a breath. I’m here to stand in judgement on another race, perhaps much more ancient than my own, she thought. But I can’t even save this wretched boy, lying in the dirt.

Kard stalked around. The crimson dust had stained his gleaming boots. ‘We walked all this way for nothing.’

‘It was your call,’ she snapped. ‘If we had gone to the farmers for help, maybe we could have saved him.’

Kard wasn’t about to accept that. He turned on her. ‘Listen to me, Commissary—’

Tomm was pressing bits of the dreaming mould into Stub’s mouth.

Kard grabbed Tomm’s arm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The mould wants to help him. This is what we do.’

Xera asked quickly, ‘When you hurt, when you die, you do this?’

‘You take him out of time.’

Kard said, ‘You’ll choke him, you little grub.’ He was still holding the boy’s arm.

‘Admiral, let the kid go.’

He said dangerously, ‘This is a Navy man.’

‘But we failed him, Kard. The cloak can’t help. He’s dying. Let the boy do what he wants. If it makes him feel better . . .’

Kard’s face worked. But he broke away.

Bleakly, helplessly, Xera watched the boy patiently feed bits of the mould into the pilot’s mouth.

You take him out of time.

Could it be true? How would it be to loosen the grasp of time - to have a mind filled with green thoughts, like a vegetable’s perhaps - to be empty of everything but self? Kard had said the mould had no goals. But what higher goal could there be? Who needed starships and cities and wars and empires, when you could free yourself at last of the fear of death? And what greater empathy could there be than to share such a gift with others?

Or maybe the mould was just some hallucinogen, chewed by bored farmers.

Stub’s breathing, though shallow, seemed a little easier.