She pointed to a name, inscribed in the surface before his face. ‘What do you see?’

‘ “Etta Maris”,’ he read. ‘A name.’

‘Now look at the first letter. Your suit visor has a magnification option; just tell it what you want to do.’

It took a couple of tries before he got it right. A Virtual flickered into existence before his face, the magnified letter. Even on this scale the carving was all but flawless - a labour of devotion, he saw, moved. But now he looked more closely, and he saw there were more names, inscribed within the carved-out grooves of the letter.

He stepped back, shocked. ‘Why, there must be as many names here, in this single letter, as are inscribed on the whole of the arch.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Teel said coolly. ‘Pick a name and look again.’

Again he magnified a single letter from one inscribed name - and again he found more names, thousands of them, crowded in far beneath the level of human visibility.

‘The names in the top layer were carved by hand,’ Teel said. ‘Then they used waldoes, and lasers, and ultimately replicator nanotech . . .’

He increased the magnification again and again, finding more layers of names nested one within the other. There were more layers than he could count, more names than could ever read if he stood here for the rest of his life. Just on this one Rock. And perhaps there were similar memorials on all the other bits of battered debris at every human emplacement, all the way around the core of the Galaxy, a great band of death stretching three thousand light years across space and two thousand years deep in time. He stepped back, shocked.

Teel studied his face. ‘Are you all right?’

His eyes were wet, he found. He tried to blink away the moisture, but to his chagrin he felt a hot tear roll down his cheek. It was a dark epiphany, this shock of the names.

‘I shouldn’t have to teach you the Doctrines,’ Teel said, comparatively gently. ‘We each have one life. We each die. The question is how you spend that life.’ She reached up with a gloved finger to touch his moist cheek - but her finger touched his visor, of course, and she dropped her hand and looked away, almost shyly.

He was astonished. In this brief moment of his own weakness, when he had been overwhelmed by something so much greater than he was, he had at last acquired some stature in her eyes; he had at last made the kind of contact with her that he had dreamed about since they had met.

After several hours on the surface they were escorted to what Teel called a bio facility, a pressurised dome where the soldiers could tend their bodies and their skinsuits, eat, drink, void their wastes, sleep, fornicate, play.