Poole had a kindly streak, and was empathetic. He sensed Futurity’s discomfort, and to distract him he brought the acolyte to the Captain’s office, and encouraged him to talk about himself. Futurity was flattered by his interest - this was Michael Poole! - and he responded with a torrent of words.

Futurity had always been cursed with a lively, inquisitive mind. As a young boy on the family farm, surrounded by the lowering ruins of war, he had laboured to tease healthy plants from soil illuminated by pale Galaxy-centre light. It had been fulfilling in its way, and Futurity saw with retrospect that to spend his time on the processes of life itself had satisfied some of his own inner spiritual yearnings. But the unchanging rhythms of the farm weren’t sufficient to sustain his intellect.

The only libraries on Base 478 were deep underground, where Ecclesiast scholars and scribes toiled over obscure aspects of Wignerian theology, and the only academic career available to Futurity was in a seminary. In fact, on a priest-run world, to become an Ecclesiast of some rank or other was the only way to build any kind of career. ‘On 478 even the tax collectors are priests,’ as Futurity’s father had said ruefully.

So the boy said goodbye to the farm, and donned the cassock of a novice. He gave up his childhood name for a visionary Wignerian slogan: Futurity’s Dream.

The study was hard, the rule of the Hierocrats and tutors imperious and arbitrary, but life wasn’t so bad. His intellect had been fully satisfied by his immersion in the Ecclesia’s endless and increasingly baroque studies of the historical, philosophical and theological roots of its faith. He recoiled with humility from the pastoral side of his work, though. It mortified him to hear the confession of citizens older and wiser than he was. But that very humility, one discerning Hierocrat had once told him, might mark him out as having the potential to be a fine priest.

Anyhow now, seven years later, his seemingly inevitable career choices had led him to this extraordinary situation.

‘And who are these “Kards”?’ Poole asked.

‘The Kardish Imperium is a new power that has risen in the Core,’ Futurity told Poole. ‘Named after a famous admiral of the Core wars. Expansive, aggressive, intolerant, ambitious—’

‘I know the type.’

The Kards were on the march. There was only one state, in a Galaxy quilted with petty statelets, capable of resisting the Kards - and that was the Ideocracy, the rump of the collapsed Coalition.