But it was Kard’s arrogant impatience that caught the flavour of the times.

Mayfly generations tick by terribly quickly. And almost all mayflies, embedded in history, believe that their epoch is eternal, that things will be this way until the end of time. Almost all. It takes a special mayfly to understand that he is living through a time of flux, a time when great forces are shifting - and even more special to be able to influence those forces.

Kard turned out to be one such.

Just as he had said, the Galaxy was cleaned out. Only one more opponent remained. Only one war remained to be completed.

But it had to be started first.

THE GREAT GAME - AD 12,659

THE GREAT GAME

AD 12,659

We were in our blister, waiting for the drop. My marines, fifty of them in their bright orange Yukawa suits, were sitting in untidy rows. They were trying to hide it, but I could see the tenseness in the way they clutched their static lines, and their unusual reluctance to rib the wetbacks.

Well, when I looked through the blister’s transparent walls and out into the dangerous sky, I felt it myself.

We had been flung far out of the main disc, and the sparse orange-red stars of the halo were a foreground to the Galaxy itself, a pool of curdled light that stretched to right and left as far as you could see. But as our Spline ship threw itself gamely through its complicated evasive manoeuvres, that great sheet of light flapped around us like a bird’s broken wing. I could see our destination’s home sun - it was a dwarf, a pinprick glowing dim red - but even the target star jiggled around the sky as the Spline bucked and rolled.

And, leaving aside the vertigo, what twisted my own stress muscles was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings - unmistakable, they were Xeelee nightfighters. The Xeelee were the Spline Captain’s responsibility, not mine. But I couldn’t stop my over-active mind speculating on what had lured such a dense concentration of them so far out of the Galactic Core, their usual stamping ground.

Given the tension, it was almost a relief when Lian threw up.

Those Yukawa suits are heavy and stiff, meant for protection rather than flexibility, but she managed to lean far enough forward that her bright yellow puke mostly hit the floor. Her buddies reacted as you’d imagine.

‘Sorry, Lieutenant.’ She was the youngest of the troop, at seventeen ten years younger than me.

I handed her a wipe. ‘I’ve seen worse, marine. Anyhow you’ve left the wetbacks something to clean up. Keep them busy when we’ve gone.’

‘Yes, sir.’