Zildiz gave a scornful laugh. Rene thought it was her best one yet—very full and throaty. She had a nice voice, all things considered. Pity she didn’t know how to use it right.

“Only a fool could fail to see Its grand design,” she was snarling, “Arachnea is the proving ground whereby the Vitalus shall select its worthiest creations. In the end, only they will remain to inherit the paradise to come—”

“Yes, yes,” the Commodore sighed, “I’ve heard all this before. Your predecessors screamed the same nonsense over the radio as we mowed them down with coil cannons. That was thousands of years ago. Since then not a single one of your Kindreds has ever managed to win your sordid little contest. Curious, isn’t it?”

For the first time since they’d met, the Commodore had Zildiz at a genuine loss for words. She soon rallied, but her reply sounded too well-practiced and lacked conviction:

“The god simply operates along a broader timescale. Only the faithless expect miracles to manifest overnight.”

“I won’t waste my time arguing with a fanatic,” the Commodore pronounced, “I have an idea that’ll speed things up a bit: let’s take turns asking questions. Here, I’ll start. Have the Amits begun swarming yet?”

“They’re always fugging swarming,” Rene chuckled, “That’s what they do, isn’t it? Busy as bees, those bastards. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.”

Who cared if things back home were going to hell in a handbasket? Rene was beginning to feel a lot better about the whole situation; in fact he was quite literally over the moon. Hah, hah.

“Let me rephrase that,” the Commodore said, “Have the Amits begun to display sudden and widespread morphological or behavioural changes?”

“You mean like how their bulls get all randy when it’s the rutting season?” Rene frowned.

“Er, not quite. I’ll take that as a no. It’s your turn now.”

“Are you really all that’s left of your people?” Zildiz spoke up.

“So far as I know. After the schism our fleet scattered in several directions. I don’t know what happened to the other survivors, if there were any.”

“Hang on,” Rene interrupted, “What schism? That wasn't ever mentioned in the Log of the Voidtrekkers. And besides, how can you claim to be part of the Fleet if you ain’t even one of them ancestor-types?”

“It’s a long story and I’d rather not get into it now,” the Commodore said hurriedly, his voice betraying a note of discomfort, “Besides, I’m the one with the microphone now. How did you get the T.O.R.U. working, crewman? You were the one that found it, yes?”

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Rene realized that he was talking about the Divine Engine and related the incident at Mound 13 to him in detail, describing everything up his abrupt ejection in the safety pod.

“So the fuel rods were spent, and all you had were the reserves from the power banks,” the Commodore pondered aloud, “It’s a wonder the damned thing could budge at all. A testament to Exodian materials science. The most logical course of action then would’ve been to turn the Engine around and bring it back behind friendly lines.”

“I may gotten a bit overenthusiastic, now that you mention it,” Rene admitted.

“But instead you ran amuck and squandered what little you had left in an inconsequential act of vengeance,” the Commodore went on, ignoring him completely, “Then again, the enemy would never have allowed the T.O.R.U. to remain in the Fleet’s possession. It would give you an unfair advantage in the simulation, you see. At most your scientists would’ve had a few days to reverse-engineer the thing before the Vitalus came to confiscate it by force.”

“As if we’d let em! The Fleet would fight to the bitter end for a prize like the Engine,” Rene cried, not willing to sell his people short.

“Irrelevant.”

“My arse it’s irrelevant! We’d mobilize every man, woman and peg-legged cripple from Shakka to the core mounds to defend it.”

“It doesn’t matter how many people throw at it,” the Commodore snapped, “Your iteration has yet to even break out of the Amit enclosure—you’re still locked in the basic predator-prey oscillation. You haven’t even faced the Kindreds yet, much less the Hollowores.”

“Sure we did. And we whooped em, too,” Rene said with pride. He went on relate his encounter with Kryptus and the Leapers, and their desperate last stand on the hill against overwhelming odds. But rather than being impressed, the Commodore grew only more exasperated.

“Yes, but you did all that with technology borrowed from another time, another civilization. The Fleet as it stands today can never hope to match the cosmophage threat. You’ve never seen them selectively evolve. Even my people couldn’t keep up with em in the long run, and we were a damn sight more clever than you primitives ever will be.”

Rene gave him an ugly look, his resentment finally burning through the false veneer of cheeriness.

“If they were so smart, then how’d you end up here, hiding up here like a rat in its hole?”

Out came the buzzsaws and the sheet-cutting shears. The Commodore surged forward on his treads, the furniture squealing as he pushed the long trestle tables back by about a half foot. Rene and Zildiz teetered on the back legs of their chairs, the sloped gun platform looming over them like an oncoming glacier.

“Listen here, you impudent shit,” the Commodore’s words trembled with barely-contained fury. He pointed a rotary gun at the Leaper child who still lay slumped over the table, and continued: “You have no idea what these cosmophages are capable of, no conception of the potential contained in their helix modules. There is no environment they cannot endure, no weapon they cannot surpass. They once breathed vacuum and fed on starlight! Before our ancestors ever came to this solar system, before the War of Creation, the galaxy belonged to them. Demons of the howling dark, Rene! Void crawlers. What can mere men do against such limitless evil?”

The Commodore reversed and let their chairs fall back into their places. Rene felt his sphincter slowly unclench. He turned to look at Zildiz and saw the Leaper boy stir, finally nudged awake by the shouting and commotion. Finding himself in an unfamiliar place, he began to look around in panic. His big brown eyes found the pathfinder first. The two stared long and hard at each other, and in that moment it was difficult to say who was more frightened of whom.

“Good morning,” Rene managed to say.

Whereupon the boy scrunched up his face and began to cry.