‘You could have sent me to the Commission as a child. I could have been cured then. I need never have even known.’

Sool said dryly, ‘So you would blame your mother rather than the Qax. How - human.’

Spina’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, love, how could I take such a gift away from you - even to protect you?’

‘It’s your decision,’ said Sool.

‘It always had to be,’ said her mother.

Again she swept into orbit with Luru Parz, seeking privacy.

This is how it will be for me from now on, she thought: hiding from people. I will be one of a handful of immortal companions, like crabbed, folded-over Luru here, standing like unchanging rocks in a landscape of evanescent flowers.

That or mortality.

‘I can’t stand the thought of seeing them all growing old and dying around me. For ever.’

Luru nodded. ‘I know. But you aren’t thinking big enough, child. On a long enough timescale, everything is as transient as one of your Halo Dances. Why, perhaps we will even live to see the stars themselves sputter to life, fade and die.’ She smiled. ‘Stars are like people. Even stars come and go, you see. They die all in a blaze, or fade like the last light of the sun - but you’ve never seen a sunset, have you? The glory is always brief - but it is worth having, even so. And you will remember the glory, and make it live on. It’s your purpose, Faya.’

‘My burden,’ she said bleakly.

‘We have great projects, long ambitions, beyond the imagination of these others. Come with me.’

Tentatively Faya reached out her hand, Luru took it. Her flesh was cold.

‘I will have to say farewell—’

‘Not farewell. Goodbye. Get used to it.’

Before they left she visited the amphitheatre, one last time. And - though she knew she could never let anybody watch her, ever again - she Danced and Danced, as the waiting stars blazed.

Even as the Coalition hardened its grip on mankind, and continued its hideous cleansing of Sol system, it launched a new thrust to the stars.

The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet and, driven by the new ideology of Hama Druz, the most purposeful.

I and those like me tried to stay out of the way of the engines of history.

As the Expansion unfolded humanity once more encountered alien kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history. It was only a little more than eighty years after the liberation from the Qax that a first contact of devastating significance was made.

PART TWO - THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS

PART TWO

THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS

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Minda didn’t even see the volcanic plume before it swallowed up her flitter.