Teel was dead. He tried to remember his feelings for Teel, that peculiar wistful love reciprocated by her on some level he had never understood. It had been everything in the world to him, he thought, just hours ago, and even after what he had seen of the child soldiers on New Earth and the rest, his head had been full of dreams of fighting alongside her - and, yes, of saving her from this place, just as she had understood. Now it all seemed remote, a memory of a memory, or the memory of a story told by somebody else.

As if they were back in the seminary, Dolo said, ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’

‘I have no sense of the true scale of this, the moral scale. I don’t even know what my own life is worth. I’m too small. I’ve nothing to measure it against.’

‘But it was that very scale that saved you. What defence do we have, we feeble humans, against the Xeelee?’

‘None.’

‘Wrong. Listen to me. We are fighting a war on an interstellar scale. The Xeelee push out of the Core; we push them back, endlessly. The Front is a vast belt of friction, right around the Galaxy’s centre, friction between huge wheels spun by the Xeelee and ourselves, rubbing away lives and material as fast as we can pour them in. It’s been this way, virtually static, for two thousand years.

‘But if you are caught in the middle of it, your defence is numbers. Your defence is statistical. If there are enough of you, even if others are taken, you might survive. We have probably been using such strategies all the way back to the days without fire or tools, on some treeless plain on Earth. When the predators come, let them take her - the slowest, the youngest or oldest, the weakest, the unlucky - but I will survive. Death is life, remember; that was what Teel said: the death of others is my life.’

Luca looked into Dolo’s eyes; the low-quality image had only empty, staring sockets. ‘It is a vermin’s strategy.’

‘We are vermin.’

‘Does the arch still stand?’

‘It is sited on the far side of the asteroid, away from the main weapons sites. Yes, it stands.’

‘Let it be,’ Luca said. ‘The religion. The worship of Poole at Timelike Infinity.’

Dolo’s head pushed closer. ‘Why?’

‘Because it gives the troopers a meaning the dry Doctrines can’t supply. A belief in a simple soldiers’ heaven makes no difference.’