And it was an irony, I thought, that a crude faith of child soldiers, outlawed by the Coalition, should not only outlive the Coalition itself but even shape the history that followed its demise.

BETWEEN WORLDS - AD 27,152

BETWEEN WORLDS

AD 27,152

I

‘She wants to go home,’ said the starship Captain.

‘But she can’t go home,’ said the acolyte. Futurity’s Dream was baffled by the very request, as if the woman who had locked herself inside a starship cabin, with a bomb, was making a philosophical mistake, a category error.

Captain Tahget said, ‘She says she needs to speak to her daughter.’

‘She hasn’t got a daughter!’

‘No, not according to the records. A conundrum, isn’t it?’

Captain Tahget sat very still, his glare focused unblinking on the young acolyte. He was a bulky man of about forty, with scar tissue crusting over half his scalp. He obviously had military experience, but his unadorned body armour, like the bare walls of his private office, gave away nothing of his character; in these fluid, uncertain times, when sibling fought sibling, it was impossible to tell who he might have served.

Before this monolithic officer Futurity, just twenty years old, felt nervous, ineffectual - not just weak, but like a shadow, with no control over events.

Futurity lifted his data desk and checked the Ask Politely’s manifest again. The passenger’s name stood out, highlighted in red: MARA. No mention of a daughter. ‘She’s a refugee. Home for her is Chandra. The black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.’

‘I know what Chandra is.’

‘Or rather,’ Futurity said nervously, ‘home is, or was, Greyworld, a worldlet in orbit around a satellite black hole, which in turn orbits Chandra—’

‘I know all this too,’ said the Captain stonily. ‘Get on with it, acolyte.’

Tahget had been hired by Futurity’s boss, the Hierocrat, to come to this processing station in orbit around Base 478. Here he was to pick up Mara, and other refugees displaced by the Kardish Imperium from their homes in the Galaxy’s Core, and then carry them on to Earth, where the ruling Ideocracy had pledged to welcome its citizens. But Mara had refused to travel on. Because of her, the ship had been held in orbit around the Base, and the other refugees had been evacuated and sent back to holding centres on the surface.

And now it was up to Futurity to sort this mess out. He had no idea where to start.