On a data desk, Dolo sketched concentric circles. ‘The Core itself is surrounded by our fortresses, our warrior worlds and cities. As you’ll see, Novice. Behind that, out here we are in the hinterland. Around a belt hundreds of light years thick, factory worlds churn out the material needed to wage the war. And behind that there is an immense and unending inward resource flow from across the Galaxy’s disc, a flow through wormhole links and freighters of raw materials for the weapons factories, the lifeblood of a Galaxy all pouring into the centre to fuel the war.’

‘It is magnificent,’ Luca breathed. ‘An organisation Galaxy-wide, built and directed by humans.’

‘But,’ Teel said dryly, ‘do you think the Galaxy even notices we are here?’

Again Luca was disturbed by her flirting with non-Doctrine.

Dolo laughed softly. He said to Luca, ‘Tell me what you have learned about our mission. Why are we here? Why was Captain Teel required to travel all the way out to Earth? What is there in this outbreak of faith so far from Earth that concerns us?’

What concerns me, Luca thought, is my relationship with Teel. But beyond that was his duty, of course; he aspired to become a Commissary, for the Commission for Historical Truth was the mind and conscience of the Third Expansion, and he did take his mission very seriously. ‘It is only the Druz Doctrines that unite us, that enable the efficient working of the Expansion. If even our front-line troops are allowed to waste energy on foolish non-Doctrinal maundering—’

‘Captain? What do you think?’

Teel pulled her lip, and Luca saw tiny hairs there, shining in the starlight. ‘I think there is more at stake here than mere efficiency.’

‘Of course there is. Perhaps I am training the wrong novice,’ Dolo said ruefully. ‘Luca, human history is not a simple narrative, a story told to children. It is more like a pile of sand.’

‘Sand?’

‘Heaped up,’ Dolo said, miming just that. ‘And as you add more grains - one at a time, random events added to the story - the heap organises itself. But the heap, the angle of the slope, is always at a state at which it is liable to collapse with the addition of just one more grain - but you can never know which grain. This is called “self-organised criticality”. And so it is with history.’

Luca frowned. ‘But the Coalition controls history.’

Dolo laughed. ‘None of us is arrogant enough to believe that we control anything - and certainly not the historical arc of a society spanning a Galaxy, even one as unified as ours. Even the foreknowledge of the future compiled by the Libraries is of no help. All we can do is watch the grains of sand as they fall.’