Read Exultant for Free Online Page B

architecture constructed on a scale of light-years. The characteristic shape of these filaments had, it was said, given “Arches” its name.
    The Galaxy center itself was just fifty light-years away.
    It was a stunning, bewildering sky—but Pirius, Torec, and Seath had all grown up with it. They made no comment as the flitter laced its perilous route through the shifting three-dimensional geometry of the base.
    Besides, Pirius had more on his mind than rocks and stars.
    Torec looked composed. She was a little shorter than he was, a little broader at the shoulders. She had a thin face, but a full mouth, startling gray eyes, and brown hair she wore in rows of short spikes. Her nose was upturned, a feature she hated, but Pirius thought it made her beautiful. They had been each other’s squeezes, in barracks argot, for a couple of months now—staggering longevity in the fevered atmosphere of the barracks. But, despite the taunting from their colleagues, they showed no signs of falling out. Pirius was glad that Torec’s calm presence was with him as he faced the strangeness to come.
    It was standard policy for any data FTL-leaked from possible futures to be presented immediately to any individual named in that data. Some of Pirius’s friends even knew when and how they were going to
die.
And so Pirius already knew, everybody knew, that in the future he was destined to pilot a ship called the
Assimilator’s Claw.
But the
Claw
hadn’t yet been commissioned. If a version of the
Claw
had come into dock—and a captain had taken the time to come get him from his bunk to meet a visitor—that visitor could only be one person, and his heart hammered.
    The flitter’s destination was a dry dock. Perhaps a hundred kilometers across, this Rock was pocked by pits where ships nestled. They were all shapes and sizes, from one-person fighters smaller than greenships, through to ponderous, kilometer-wide Spline ships, the living vessels that had been the backbone of the human fleet for fifteen thousand years.
    And in one such yard sat a single, battered greenship. It must be the
Assimilator’s Claw,
and as Pirius first glimpsed the scarred hull of his future command, his breath caught in his throat.
    Torec nudged his elbow and pointed. A cluster of ships hovered maybe half a kilometer above the Ball’s surface in a cubical array, and Pirius saw the flicker of starbreaker beams and other weapons. Within the array he glimpsed a sleek shape, caged within that three-dimensional fence of fire, a shape with folded wings, black as night even in the glare of the cluster’s huge suns.
    “Lethe,” he said. “That’s a Xeelee ship.”
    “And that,” said Seath coldly, “is the least of your troubles.”
    There was no time to see more.
    The flitter dropped into a port. Even before the docking was complete, Seath was walking toward the hatch.
    Pirius and Torec followed her into a bustling corridor. It was only a short walk through a hurrying crowd of engineers and facility managers to the
Claw
’s pit. And at the airlock Seath slowed, glanced at Pirius, and stood back to allow him to go ahead first.
    This was Pirius’s moment, then. His pulse pounding, he stepped forward.
    Three crew waited by the lock: one woman, two men. Dressed in scorched and battered skinsuits, their chests adorned with a stylized claw logo, they were clutching bulbs of drinking water. Pirius glanced at the woman—short, wiry, a rather sour face, though with a fine, strong nose. Pale red hair was tucked into her skinsuit cap. One of the men was heavyset. His face was broad and round, his ears protruding; he looked competent, but somehow vulnerable. They were both grimy and hollow-eyed with fatigue.
Cohl,
he read from their nametags, and
Tuta—
or “Enduring Hope” according to a hand-lettered addendum. He had never met them, in his timeline, but he already knew these names from the foreknowledge briefings: they were his future comrades, whom he would choose for