II

The asteroid had an official number, even an uplifting name, provided by a Commissary on distant Earth. But the troopers who rode it just called it the Rock.

‘But then,’ Teel quietly told Luca, ‘they call every asteroid the Rock.’

And from this Rock’s surface, everything was dwarfed by the magnificent sky. They were very close to the Galaxy’s heart now, and the heavens were littered with bright hot beacons which, further out, merged into the clouds of light where they had been born. Beyond that was the curtain of shining molecular clouds that walled off the Galaxy’s true centre - a curtain through which cherry-red light poured unceasingly, a battle glow that had already persisted for centuries.

The three of them, with a Navy guard, were walking on the Rock’s surface in lightweight skinsuits. The asteroid was just a ball of stone some fifty kilometres across, one of a swarm that surrounded a hot blue-white star. The young sun’s low light cast stark shadows from every crater, of which there were many, and from every dimple and dust grain at Luca’s feet. He found himself fascinated by small details - the way the dust you kicked up rose and fell through neat parabolas, and clung to your legs so that it looked as if you had been dipped in black paint, and how some craters were flooded with a much finer blue-white powder that, somehow bound electrostatically, would flow almost like water around your glove.

But it was a difficult environment. His inertial-control boots glued his feet to the dusty rock, but in the asteroid’s microgravity his body had no perceptible weight, and he felt as if he was floating in some invisible fluid, stuck by his feet to this rocky floor - or, if he wasn’t careful about his sense of perspective, he might feel he was walking up a wall, or even hanging from a ceiling. He knew the others, especially Teel, had noticed his lack of orientation, and he was mortified with every clumsy glue-sticky step he took.

Meanwhile, all across the surface of this Rock, by the light of the endless war, soldiers toiled.

The troopers wore military-issue skinsuits, complex outfits replete with nipples and sockets and grimy with rubbed-in asteroid dirt. Some of the suits had been repaired; they had discoloured patches and crude seams welded into their surfaces. These patched-up figures moved through great kicked-up clouds of black dust, while machines clanked and hovered and crawled around them.