Captain Teel turned her head towards him. She looked tired, but Luca saw how the complex, shifting light of multiple futures softened her expression.

Dolo was watching Luca, the corner of his mouth pulled slightly, as if by a private joke. Dolo had no eyebrows, and his skull was shaved, as was Luca’s. ‘Yes, Novice, I called you. I think I’m going to need an assistant on this project, and Lethe knows you need some field experience.’

‘A project, Commissary?’

‘Sit down, shut up, listen and learn.’ Dolo waved a hand, and a third chair drifted in from a corner of the room.

Luca sat, and absently followed their continuing talk.

From scuttlebutt in the dormitories he already had an idea why Captain Teel had been called here to Earth. In a unit of troopers at some desolate corner of the Front, there had been an outbreak of anti-Doctrinal thinking which, it sounded to Luca’s ill-informed ears, might even be religious in character. If so, of course, it was perilous to the greater efficiency of the Third Expansion. An important issue, then. But not very interesting.

Surreptitiously, as they talked, he studied Teel.

He supposed he had expected some battle-scarred veteran of raids on Xeelee emplacements. But this Navy officer was young, surely about the same age as he was himself, at twenty years. Her face was long, the nose narrow and well-carved, her nostrils flaring slightly; her mouth was relaxed but full. Her skin was unblemished - though it was pale, almost bloodless; he reminded himself that of all the countless worlds now inhabited by mankind, on only a handful could a human walk in the open air without a skinsuit. But that paleness gave her skin a translucent quality. But it was not Teel’s features that drew him - she was scarcely conventionally beautiful - but something more subtle, a quality of stillness about her that seemed to pull him towards her like a gravitational field. She was solid, he thought, as if she was the only real person in this place of buzzing bureaucrats. Even before she spoke to him, he knew that Teel was like no one he had ever met before.

‘Novice.’ The Commissary’s gaze neatly skewered Luca.

To his mortification, Luca felt his face flush like a child’s in a new cadre. Captain Teel was looking a little past him, expressionless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Dolo brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’

Luca looked at Teel. ‘That, with respect, the Captain is young.’

Dolo nodded, his voice forensic. ‘How could one so young - actually younger than you, Novice - have achieved so much?’

Luca said, ‘ “A brief life burns brightly.” ’

Teel’s lips parted, and Luca thought she sighed. The ancient slogan hung in the air, trite and embarrassing.