Exultant (26 page)

It took him half an hour to cross two hundred meters.

Maybe such caution wasn’t necessary; he hadn’t seen the glow of a starbreaker since the emplacement mount had finally been shut down. But after what had happened to Bilin he wasn’t about to take a chance now.

When he reached the site of the factory, he only knew he was at the right location because his visor displays told him so. There was no factory left: no landing pad, no power plant, no surface tracks, no machinery. Save for a bit of smashed wall jutting at an angle from the dirt, and a line of white dust that might have marked a foundation, there was nothing here but more broken ground. He saw no sign that anybody else had been here recently, none of the thousands he supposed had been dropped with this target as their objective. Perhaps the Xeelee had destroyed it, or perhaps humans had, or perhaps it had been leveled by the barrage. The artillery was supposed to have spared the factories, which were the objective of the operation; but then the barrage was meant to do many things it had failed to do.

Pirius built a small cairn of bits of rubble and set a marker on it, with an indication of where the others were sheltering. He felt quite cold, without emotion; perhaps that would come later.

He looked ahead, to the asteroid’s horizon. The bombardment continued, but far away now. The ground was full of bodies, the relics of previous assaults, and where the shells landed the bodies were hurled up by the explosions. The bodies rose up and tumbled in the dust before falling slowly down to the ground again. It was very strange to huddle there with his dry mouth and his stinking skinsuit, watching those bodies going up and down.

He shook himself alert. He made his slow, cautious way back to the ruined emplacement, where Cohl and the others were waiting.

When he got there Tili Three was weeping, utterly inconsolable. Her sister had died in her arms.

Chapter
21

The corvette completed its final FTL hop. Suddenly Pluto and Charon hovered before Pirius Red, twin planets that had ballooned out of nothing.

Nilis flinched and threw his hands up. “My eyes! They might have warned us.”

Pirius had spent his life training for combat in space. He showed no reaction before the soft old Commissary; he was much too proud for that. But he felt it too. After all, they were both products of a billion years of common evolution at the bottom of a gravity well, and when whole worlds appeared out of nowhere, something deep and ancient inside him quailed.

The twin worlds’ forms were visibly distorted from the spherical, for they were
close
to each other. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto diameters; Earth’s Moon was by comparison thirty of its parent’s diameters away from Earth. It was an authentic double planet. This strange little system was dimly lit by a remote pinpoint sun, and the faintness of the light gave the two worlds a sense of dreaminess, of unreality. But the worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue.

Nilis commented absently on the colors. “That’s to do with a difference in surface composition. Much more water ice on Charon’s surface . . . it’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir.” So it was.

They had come here in search of the “gravastar” technology, hints of which Nilis had dug out of the Archive on Mars. Pirius peered at the double world, wondering what he was going to have to confront here before they got what they wanted.

A Virtual swirled before them, coalescing from a cloud of blocky pixels. It was a short, plump man dressed in the drab costume of a Commissary. His belly was large, his legs short, his shaven head round and smooth. The Virtual image was projected clumsily, and the little man seemed to be floating a few centimeters above the floor.

When he saw Nilis and Pirius, this figure barked a nervous laugh, and small hands fluttered before him. “Welcome, welcome! Welcome to Pluto-Charon, and our facility. My name is Draq. You must be Commissary Nilis—and are you the ensign from the Front? I’ve watched all your Virtuals.”

Pirius had seen some of these. They were cartoonish renderings of Pirius Blue’s maneuvers around the magnetar, produced for popular consumption by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Pirius didn’t recognize much of himself in the lantern-jawed, shaven-headed, Doctrine-spouting caricature that shared his name. “Don’t believe everything you see, sir,” he said. “And besides, the whole episode has been edited out of the timeline. It won’t happen.”

“Oh, but that hardly matters, does it? In the Library of Futures that sort of editing goes on all the time. But I’ve always thought that
potential
heroism is as admirable as
actualized.
”

Nilis broke in. “Draq, you say? You’re in charge here?”

Draq blustered. “Yes and no! There are very few of us curators, you see, Commissary Nilis, and we have been here rather a long time. Things are, well, informal.” His hands fluttered again, and the Virtual drifted until it collided silently with the hull, and pixels flared across his round back. “You’ll have to forgive my excitement. We don’t get many visitors.”

“I’m not surprised,” Nilis said dryly, “since your facility doesn’t officially exist.”

Draq pulled a mock-solemn face. “It is odd, I admit, to be a legal paradox! But the work is fascinating enough to compensate, believe me.”

Pirius felt a tightening of his gut, a subtle shifting of the universe around him as the corvette’s drive cut in. Pluto-Charon slid silently across his field of view.

Draq said, “I have requested your crew to bring you down at our spaceport at Christy. Oh, we’re so excited!” He blurred, and crumbled out of existence.

Pirius said, “Commissary, what kind of place
is
this?”

“Wait and see, Ensign. Wait and see.”

The final moments of the descent were unremarkable. Pirius glimpsed a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon, but as Christy itself approached the flitter flew over ravines and ridges. Here, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer.

“Christy,” a very archaic name, turned out to refer to what the corvette’s pilots called the “sub-Charon point” on Pluto. This bit of ground was unique in Sol system. Like Earth’s Moon, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days these worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly. Within Sol’s domain, Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked; they danced like lovers.

And so this place, Christy, was forever suspended directly beneath the looming bulk of the giant moon, and the feeble geological energies of these small worlds had been focused here.

The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.

They arrived in a dome that was all but transparent. Charon, suspended directly overhead, was visible through the dome’s scuffed surface.

Draq was here in person. As agitated as before, he bustled up, grinning, as Nilis and Pirius approached. Eight more people stood behind him. Some, smoother-faced, might have been female, but they all looked alike to Pirius, round-faced and potbellied.

Draq’s robes were clearly old, heavily repaired, and he smelled
stale.
“Welcome, welcome again. We’re delighted you have visited us, and we’re ready to assist you any way we can. . . .” As the little man chattered on, Pirius wondered how true that was; Draq must be concerned his covert facility had even been
noticed.
His colleagues gathered around the Commissary like infants around a cadre leader. They reminded Pirius of the tiny isolated community on Port Sol: these characters weren’t so far from the sun, but they seemed even odder.

But they weren’t paying any attention to Pirius. He walked toward the dome’s clear wall and gazed out at Pluto.

There were clouds above him, wispy cirrus, occluding bone-white stars: they were aerosol clusters, according to Nilis’s briefing material, suspended in the atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines—although perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting away from Christy. Sol was a point of light, low on the horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cloud. The inner system was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Pirius to cover with his palm. It was strange to think that that unprepossessing blur had contained all of man’s history before the first pioneers had risked their lives by venturing out to the rim of Sol system, and beyond.

Charon hung directly over Pirius’s head. It was a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. He had been trained for spectacles like this, but he flinched from the sight of a world hanging over him like a light globe. Charon’s surface looked pocked. No doubt there was plenty of impact cratering, even here in this misty, spacious place, but many of the gouges he could make out, even with his naked eyes, were deep and quite regular.

“They are quarries.”

He turned. One of Draq’s gaggle of followers had come to stand beside him. She was evidently a woman; her face, turned up to the light of Charon, had a certain delicacy about the brow, the cheekbones.

“Quarries?”

“My name is Mara. I work with Draq.” She smiled at him, then looked away. Though she seemed rather awestruck, she evidently didn’t share Draq’s giggling foolishness. “Michael Poole himself came here, thousands of years ago. Our most famous visitor—before you, of course! He traveled from Jupiter on a GUTdrive ship, and he and his engineers used Charon ice to make exotic matter—”

“To build a wormhole mouth.”

“Yes. Here, Poole completed his cross-system wormhole transit network. When it was done, why, you could travel from Pluto all the way to Mercury almost as easily as you walked through that tunnel from your ship . . . there.” She pointed up toward Charon’s limb. Pirius made out a spark of light, no brighter than the remote stars, but it drifted as he watched. “That’s Poole’s interface station—or the ruins of it.” The Qax had of course shut down Poole’s venerable spacetime engineering, and over the millennia since, most of his interface stations had been broken up, their raw material reused. Not here, though; nobody had bothered to do even that much.

Mara defended her adopted world. “It’s true nobody lives here—nobody but us, that is. The Coalition has tried to establish settlements, but they always fail. There has never been enough to keep people here, no resource you couldn’t find on a thousand Kuiper moons, and in more shallow gravity wells at that. But we do have our marvels.”

Pluto’s orbit was so elliptical it sailed within the orbit of Neptune. At the closest approach to Sol, the atmosphere expanded to three planetary diameters. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.

Mara described all this lyrically. She seemed eager to have someone new to talk to. Those exiled here called themselves Plutinos, she said. Pirius was drawn by her sense of this remote world, which swam through immense, empty volumes while slow, subtle seasons of ice came and went.

“Ah,” she said now. “Look up.”

Puzzled, he glanced up at the looming, misty shape of Charon. “I don’t see anything.”

She waved a hand, and the light intensity in their corner of the dome reduced.

As his eyes dark-adapted, more stars came out, peering around Charon’s limb, and he made out more detail on the moon’s mottled surface. He leaned close to Mara’s shoulder to see, and his cheek brushed the coarse cloth of her robe. There was a mustiness about her, but he was not repelled, as he had been by Draq; she was strange, he thought, even eccentric, but oddly likeable. He wondered what her story was, how she had come to be assigned to a covert establishment on this remote world.

She pointed again. “There—can you see? Look along my arm.”

Suddenly he saw it, stretching between Pluto and its moon. Only dimly visible in Sol’s reduced light, a glimmer here, a stretch of arc there, it was nothing like the Bridge that had been erected between Earth and its Moon—this was finer, more elegant, more organic than that. But it was a line that spanned worlds nevertheless.

Pirius had heard of this. “It’s natural, isn’t it?”

“It’s spiderweb,” she breathed. “Pluto-Charon is swathed in spiderweb.”

Nilis came bustling up. “One of Sol system’s more memorable spectacles,” he said. “And it is only possible here, where both worlds are locked face to face.” He slapped Pirius on the back. “But we aren’t here to sightsee, Ensign! We have work to do.”

Reluctantly they rejoined the rest of the group, who were crowding into a flitter.

The journey was going to be long, Pirius was told; they would be taken right around the curve of the world. He was dismayed that the little craft was already full of these exiled scientists’ peculiar odors.

As they took their places, Mara sat beside Pirius. She said, “You must come back in the spring, when the spiders of Pluto come out to sail between the worlds and build their webbing all over again.”

“Spring? When’s that?”

“Oh, about another seventy years . . .”

The flitter lifted smoothly.

They flew silently through the geometry of the double worlds.

Pirius, retreating from the chattering group, spent the journey preparing a long Virtual message to Torec, who was stuck at Saturn, still working on the development of the CTC processor. He fixed a cloak of antisound around himself so the Plutinos would not be offended by what he had to say about them.

When the cramped little craft began at last to descend, Charon was long lost beneath the horizon. There was nothing to be seen here, nothing but the fractured, ancient ground. But before the flitter, the ground rose to a ridge. Beyond this, evidently, was what they had come to see.