We were, after all, the same person. As I had grown up it had been drummed into me that there was no honour in growing old - and something in Dakk, even now, despite all she had gone through, still felt the same way. After surviving her earlier engagements she was not content to be a living hero. On some deep level she was ashamed to be alive. So she had let Hama, our lost child, live out her own dream - a dream of certain youthful death. Even though in the process she violated orders. Even though it damaged humanity’s cause. And now she envied Hama his moment of glorious youthful suicide, even though it was an incident lost in a vanished future.

I think Dakk wanted to say more, but I turned away. I was aware I was out of my depth; counselling your elder self over the erasure of her whole career, not to mention her child, isn’t exactly a situation you come across every day.

Anyhow I was feeling elated. Despite disgrace for a crime I’d never committed, despite my own screwed-up career, despite the loss of a baby I would never know, despite the wrecking of any relationship I might have had with Tarco, I was relieved. Frankly, I was glad I wouldn’t turn into the beat-up egomaniac I saw before me. And I would never have to live through this scene again, standing on the other side of the room, looking back at my own face.

Is that cruel? I couldn’t help it. I was free.

Tarco had a question to ask. ‘Sir - do we win?’

Varcin kept his face expressionless. He clapped his hands, and the images over our heads changed.

It was as if the scale expanded.

I saw fleets with ships more numerous than the stars. I saw planets burn, stars flare and die. I saw the Galaxy reduced to a wraith of crimson stars that guttered like dying candles. I saw people - but people like none I’d ever heard of: people living on lonely outposts suspended in empty intergalactic spaces, people swimming through the interior of stars, people trapped in abstract environments I couldn’t even recognise. I saw shining people who flew through space, naked as gods.

And I saw people dying, in great waves, unnumbered hordes of them.

Varcin said, ‘We think there is a major crux in the next few millennia. A vital engagement at the centre of the Galaxy. Many of the history sheaves seem to converge at that point. Beyond that everything is uncertain. The farther downstream, the more misty are the visions, the more strange the protagonists, even the humans . . . There are paths to a glorious future, an awesome future of mankind victorious. And there are paths that lead to defeat - even extinction, all human possibilities extinguished. Your question isn’t a simple one, ensign.’