Still the slamming went on. He could feel it in his bones, his very flesh. He closed his eyes. He tried to think of the Conurbation where he had been born, and joined his first cadres. It had been an open place of parks and ruined Qax domes. In the mornings he would run and run, his cloak flapping around his legs, the dewy grass sharp under his bare feet. He had never been more alive - certainly more than now, sealed up in this suit in a hole in the shuddering ground.

He huddled over, dreaming of Earth. Perhaps if he dug deep down inside himself he would find a safe place to live, inside his memory, safe from this war. But still the great stamping went on and on, as he remembered the dew on the grass.

Luca. Novice Luca.

He had never understood.

Oh, logically he knew of the endless warfare at the heart of the Galaxy, the relentless deaths, the children thrown into the fire. But he had never understood it, on a deep, human level. So many human dead, he thought, buried in meaningless rocks like this or scattered across space, as if the disc of the Galaxy itself is rotten with our corpses. There they wait until the latest generation joins them, falling down like sparks into the dark.

Luca.

He tried to remember his ambitions, how he used to feel, when the war had been a fascinating exercise in logistics and ideology, a source of endless career opportunities for bright young Commissaries. How could he have been so dazzled by such fantasies?

It was as if a great crime was being committed, out of sight. Whether humans won this war or not, nothing would ever be the same - nothing ever could compensate for the relentless evil being committed here. We’re like those wretched children on New Earth forced to commit atrocities against those they love, he thought. We can’t go back. Not after what we have done here.

Luca. Luca. ‘. . . Luca. You are alive, like it or not. Look at me, Novice.’

Reluctantly, shedding the last of his cocoon of grass-green memory, he opened his eyes. He was still in the chamber of dirt. There was no light but the dimming glow of med cloaks. Nothing moved; everybody was still. But the stomping had stopped, he realised.

And here was Dolo’s Virtual head, a fuzzy ball of pixels, floating before him, glowing in the dark.

‘I’m in my grave,’ Luca said.

‘Less melodrama, please, Novice. The Navy knows you’re here. They’re on the way to dig you out.’

‘Teel—’

‘Is dead. So is Bayla, our anti-Doctrinal religionist.’ Dolo reeled off more names, everybody Luca could think of in the units he had met. ‘Everybody is dead, except you.’