She said, ‘I think it’s working.’

Kard wouldn’t even look down. ‘No.’

‘Admiral—’

He turned on her. ‘I know the sentience laws. What defines intelligence? You need to have goals, and pursue them. What goals has a slime mould got? Second, you need to have empathy: some kind of awareness of intelligence in others. And, most fundamentally, you need a sense of time. Life can only exist in a universe complex enough to be out of equilibrium - there could be no life in a mushy heat bath, with no flows of energy or mass. So tracking time is fundamental to intelligence, for a sense of time derives from the universal disequilibrium that drives life itself. There. If these creatures really don’t have a time sense they can’t be intelligent. How do you answer that? There’s nothing here, Commissary. Nothing for you to save.’

She pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Admiral - the history of human understanding is about discarding prejudices, about ourselves, about others, about the nature of life, mind. We have come a long way, but we’re still learning. Perhaps even an insistence on a time sense itself is just another barrier in our thinking . . .’

Kard, she could see, wasn’t listening.

But, she thought, it isn’t just about the sentience laws, is it, Admiral? You can’t accept that you made the wrong call today. Just as you can’t accept that the humble creatures here, the farmers and this boy and even the mould, might know something you don’t. You’d rather destroy it all than accept that.

Data scrolled across her desk. She glanced down. The desk had continued patiently to work on the orbital data. The figure-of-eight configuration was rare, the desk reported now, vanishingly unlikely. Surely too improbable to be natural. She felt wonder stir. Had they been vain, at the last? Before they dissolved down into this humble form, even gave up their shape, had they left a grandiose dynamic signature scrawled across the sky? . . .

But it’s too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and we’ll never know what happened here.

Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground. ‘Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether you’re right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over. We’ve cleaned out this Galaxy. There’s nothing left to oppose us now - nothing but one more opponent.’

‘I have my assessment to finish—’

‘Nothing happened here, Commissary. Nothing.’

Tomm sat back, smiling.

It seemed to Xera that the young pilot’s face relaxed, that he breathed a little easier, before he was still.

Personally I have more sympathy for Xera and her complex ethical dilemmas than with Kard.