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“there will be a younger version of Dans. A third version.
Dans won’t have to die.
None of this will be real.”
    Pirius really did hate time paradoxes. “Time loops or not,
we
lived through this. We will remember. It’s real enough. Navigator, do you want to lay in that course?”
    “Sure . . .”
    Hope said dryly, “You might want to delay a little before kicking off for home, Pilot. Take a look.” He projected a Virtual into their blisters.
    It was a shape, drifting in space. Pirius made out a slender body, crumpled wings folded. “It’s the fly,” he breathed.
    Hope said, “We have to take it back to base.”
    Cohl said, “We captured a Xeelee? Nobody ever did that before. Pirius, you said you wanted to make your name stand out. Well, perhaps you have. We’ll be heroes!”
    Hope laughed. “I thought heroism is anti-Doctrinal?”
    Pirius brought the greenship about and sent it skimming to the site of the derelict. “First we need to figure how to grapple that thing.”
    As it turned out—when they had got hold of the Xeelee, and with difficulty secured it for FTL flight, and had hauled it all the way back to the base in Arches Cluster—they found themselves to be anything but heroes.
    Chapter 4
    This was the energetic heart of a large galaxy, a radiation bath where humans had to rely on their best technological capabilities to keep their fragile carbon-chemistry bodies from being fried. But to the quagmites it was a cold, dead place, in a dismal and unwelcoming era. The quagmites were survivors of a hotter, faster age than this.
    They were drawn to the neutron star, for in its degenerate-matter interior there was a hint of the conditions of the warm and bright universe they had once known. But even here everything was frozen solid, comparatively. They were like humans stranded on an ice moon, a place where water, the very stuff of life, is frozen as hard as bedrock.
    Still, every now and again there was a spark of something brighter—like the firefly speck which had come hurtling out of nowhere and skimmed the surface of the neutron star. The quagmites lived fast, even in this energy-starved age. To them the fractions of a second of the closest approach to the neutron star were long and drawn-out. They had plenty of time to come close, to bask in the warmth of the ship’s GUTdrive, and to feed.
    And, as was their way, they left their marks in the hull of the ship, the ghostly, frozen shell that surrounded that speck of brilliance.
    When the ship had gone the quagmites dispersed, ever hungry, ever resentful, searching for more primordial heat.
             
    On Port Sol, Luru Parz turned to her cousin with a quiet satisfaction.
    “I knew they would survive,” she said. “And in the technique they have stumbled upon I see a glimmer of opportunity. I must go.”
    “Where?”
    “Earth.” Luru Parz padded away, her footsteps almost silent.
    Chapter 5
    If you grew up in Arches, meeting your own future self was no big deal.
    The whole point of the place was that from the moment you were born you were trained to fly FTL starships. And everybody knew that an FTL starship was a time machine. Most people figured out for themselves that that meant there might come a day when you would meet a copy of yourself from the future—or the past, depending which end of the transaction you looked at it from.
    Pirius, a seventeen-year-old ensign, had always thought of meeting himself as an interesting trial to be faced one day, along with other notable events, like his first solo flight, his first combat sortie, his first sight of a Xeelee, his first screw. But in practice, when his future self turned up out of the blue, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.
             
    The day began badly. The bunk bed shuddered, and Pirius woke with a start.
    Above him, Torec was growling, “Lethe, are we under attack?—Oh. Good morning, Captain.”
    “Ensign.” Captain Seath’s heavy boot had