Dakk, Tarco and I shared glances. Our intertwined destinies were complex. But I bet the three of us had only one thought in our minds at that moment: that we were glad we were mere Navy tars, that we did not have to deal with this.

That was almost the end of it. The formal court was due to convene; the meeting was over.

But there was still something that troubled me. ‘Commissary? ’

‘Yes, ensign?’

‘Do we have free will?’

Captain Dakk grimaced. ‘Oh, no, ensign. Not us. We have duty.’

We walked out of the Map Room, where unrealised futures flickered like moth wings.

As the two sides worked over their successive drafts of history, as timescales stretched to fit the vast spatial arena of a Galactic war, the Coalition laboured to keep mankind united. It succeeded, to an astonishing degree.

But there was always plenty of room, plenty of time, for things to drift.

One such dark corner was an Observation Post, flung far out of the Galaxy itself.

IN THE UN-BLACK - AD 22,254

IN THE UN-BLACK

AD 22,254

On the day La-ba met Ca-si she saved his life.

She hadn’t meant to. It was un-Doctrine. It just happened. But it changed everything.

It had been a bad day for La-ba. She had been dancing. That wasn’t un-Doctrine, not exactly, but the cadre leaders disapproved. She was the leader of the dance, and she got stuck with Cesspit detail for ten days. It was hard, dirty work, the worst.

And would-be deathers flourished there, in the pit. They would come swimming through the muck itself to get you.

That was what happened just two hours after she started work. Naked, she was standing knee-deep in a river of unidentifiable, odourless muck. Two strong hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her flat on her face. Suddenly her eyes and mouth and nose and ears were full of dense, sticky waste.

La-ba reached down to her toes. She found hands on her ankles, and further up a shaven skull, wide misshapen ears.

She recognised him from those ears. He was a We-ku, one of a batch of look-alikes who had come down from the Birthing Vat at the same time, and had clung together ever since. If they had ever had their own names, they had long abandoned them.

She wasn’t about to be deathed by a We-ku. She pressed the heels of her hands into his eyes and shoved.

Her ankles started to slide out of his hands. The harder he gripped, the more his clutching fingers slipped. She pointed her toes and shoved harder.

Then she was free.

She pushed up to the surface and blew out a huge mouthful of dirt. She prepared to take on the We-ku again, elbows and knees ready, fingers clawing for the knife strapped to her thigh.

But he didn’t come for her, not for one heartbeat, two, three. She took the risk of wiping her eyes clear.