Exultant (3 page)

For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.

Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.

Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”

“My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.

“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”

Pirius had tried to stay away from Enduring Hope’s peculiar sect, who called themselves “Friends of Wigner.” Pirius thought of himself as pragmatic; he was prepared to put up with nonsense names if it kept his engineer happy. But the Friends’ cult violated Doctrinal law just by its very existence.

“You can mock,” Hope said. “But you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me,” Dans said.

“All of this”—Hope made an expansive gesture—“is a first cut. Everybody knows this. In this war of FTL ships and time travel, we stack up contingencies in the Library of Futures on Earth. History is a draft, a draft we change all the time.”

“And if history is mutable—”

“Then nothing is inevitable. Not even the past.”

“I don’t understand,” Pirius admitted.

Dans said, “If you can redraft history, everything can be fixed. He thinks that even if he dies today, then history will somehow, some day, be put right, and all such unfortunate errors removed.”

“Hope, is that right?”

“Something like it.”

Dans snapped, “Pirius, the creed is anti-Doctrine, but it’s just as much a trap as the Doctrines. A Druz junkie thinks death and defeat reinforce the strength of the Doctrines. A Friend believes defeat is irrelevant because it will all be erased some day. Either way,
you don’t fight to win.
You see? Why else has this damn war stalled so long?”

Pirius felt uncomfortable with such heresy—even now, even here.

With a trace of malice Hope said, “But you’re as doomed as we are, Pilot Dans.”

Cohl said, “What about you, Pirius? What do you want to achieve?”

Pirius thought it over. “I want to be remembered.”

He heard slow, ironic applause from Dans.

Cohl muttered, “That is just
so
anti-Doctrinal!”

Hope murmured, “Well, you might be about to get your chance, Pilot. Sag A East is dead ahead. Dropping out of FTL.”

Jumpjumpjumpjump
jump—jump—jump . . .

As the FTL hops slowed, they passed through a flickering barrage of stars, and electric-blue light flared around them: the pilots called it FTL light, a by-product of the energy the ship was shedding, coalescing into exotic evanescent particles. Pirius, relieved to get back to practical matters, tested the controls of the greenship and burped its two sublight drives—including the GUTdrive. This was a backup, a venerable human design, and one you would light up only in the direst of circumstances, for fear of attracting quagmites. . . .

While Pirius worked, the others had been looking at the view. “Lethe,” Dans said softly.

Pirius glanced up.

Sagittarius A East was a bubble of shocked gas, light-years wide, said to be the remnant of an immense explosion in the heart of the Galaxy. Suddenly Pirius was at the center of a storm of light.

Dans called, “And look at that.” She downloaded coordinates.

A pinpoint of crimson light glowed directly ahead, embedded in the glowing murk. It was a neutron star, according to their first scans, a star with the mass of the sun but only twenty kilometers across.

Dans said, “That’s a magnetar. And I think it’s going to blow.”

Pirius understood none of that. “What difference does that make?”

“Here come the Xeelee,” Cohl snapped.

“Split up,” Dans called.

The greenships peeled away from each other. The single nightfighter, emerging from its own sequence of FTL jumps, seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat, as if wondering which of its soft targets to pursue first.

It turned toward the
Claw.

“Lucked out,” Enduring Hope said softly.

“Hold onto your seats,” Pirius said. Lacking any better way to go, he hurled the ship toward the neutron star.

Still the Xeelee followed.

As the
Claw
squirted across space, Pirius called up a magnified visual. The neutron star was a flattened sphere, brick red, its surface smooth to the limits of the magnification. Blue-white electric storms crackled over its surface.

Cohl said, “That thing is rotating every
eight seconds.
”

Dans was standing off, Pirius saw from his tactical displays, watching the fleeing
Claw
and the dark shadow of her pursuer. “Help me out here, Dans,” Pirius muttered.

“I’m with you all the way. When you fly by, take her in as close as you can to the surface of the star.”

“Why?”

“Maybe you can shake off the Xeelee.”

“And maybe we’ll get creamed in the process.”

“There’s always that possibility. . . . The crust is actually solid, you know,” Dans said. “There’s an atmosphere of normal matter, no thicker than your finger. You can get as close as you like. Your shields will protect you from the tides, the radiation flux, the magnetic field. It’s worth a try.”

“OK, guys,” Pirius said to Cohl and Enduring Hope. “You heard Dans. Let’s set a record.”

That won him ribald comments, but he could see that both Cohl and Hope were calling up fresh displays and hunching over their work. For a maneuver like this, all three of them would have to work closely together, with Pirius controlling the line, Cohl monitoring
Claw
’s altitude over the star’s surface, and Hope watching attitude and the ship’s systems. As they settled to their tasks—and so put aside their Doctrine manuals or illicit prayer beads or whatever else they turned to for comfort—Pirius felt reassured. This was a good crew, at their best when they were committed to what they had been trained to do.

Light flared over his Virtual displays. “Woah . . .”

The star’s surface had changed. Cracks gaped, and a brighter light shone from within. For a few seconds there was turmoil, as the whole surface shattered and melted, and remnant fragments swam. But as suddenly as it had begun, the motion stopped, and the crust coalesced once more, settling down to a new smoothness.

“Dans—what was
that?
”

“Starquake,” said Dans briskly.

“Maybe it’s time you told me what a magnetar is. . . .”

When this remnant was hatched out of its parent supernova explosion, it happened to be spinning very rapidly—turning a thousand times a
second,
perhaps even faster. For the first few milliseconds of the neutron star’s life, the convection in the interior was ferocious, and where the hot material flowed it generated huge electrical currents. The whole thing was like a natural dynamo, and those tremendous currents generated an intense magnetic field. As the star lost energy through gravity and electromagnetic radiation, the spin slowed down. But a good fraction of the tremendous energy of that spin poured into the magnetic field.

Dans said, “The field is still there, lacing the star’s interior. The field will decay away quickly—
quickly,
meaning in ten thousand years or so. But while the star is young—”

“And the crust quake?”

“The magnetism laces the solid surface, locking it to the interior layers. But the star is slowing down all the time, and the whirling interior drags at the solid crust. Every so often something gives. Happens all the time—like, hourly. But every so often the magnetic field collapses altogether, and the star flares, and . . . Lethe.”

“What?”

“Pirius, I’ve got another plan.”

“Make your flyby over these coordinates.” Data chattered into the
Claw
’s systems.

“Why?”

“Because a flare is about to blow there.” She downloaded a rapid Virtual briefing: a major collapse of the planet’s magnetic field, more faulting in the crust—and a huge fireball punching out of the star’s interior, a fist of compressed matter exploding out of its degenerate state. The magnetic field would hug the fireball to the star’s surface, whirling it around in a manic waltz.

The energy released by this event, it seemed, would be enough to cause ionospheric effects in the atmospheres of planets across the Galaxy. “Think of it,” Dans breathed. “This flare will batter the upper air of Earth itself—though not for twenty-eight thousand years or so. And you are going to be sitting right on top of it.”

“Tell me why this is good news,” Pirius said grimly.

Dans paged through Virtual data, copying everything to Pirius. “Pirius, in the middle of that flare the structure of spacetime itself is distorted. Now, we know Xeelee ships fly by swimming through spacetime, that their essence is controlled spacetime defects. Surely not even a Xeelee can survive that.”

“And so—”

“So you fly through the middle of the flare. See how it will arch through the magnetic field? If you pick your course right you can avoid the worst regions, while leading the Xeelee right into it.”

“But if a Xeelee can’t survive,” Enduring Hope pointed out reasonably, “how can we?”

Pirius said, “We don’t have a choice right now.”

“Four minutes to closest approach,” Dans said.

Pirius swept his fingers through Virtual displays. “Cohl, I’m sending you Dans’s coordinates. Let’s aim for that flare. We can’t end up any more dead, and at least it’s a chance. Dans—we’ll need time to plot the maneuver. How long will the flare last?”

Dans hesitated. “Only a second or so at its fullest extent. Pirius, a neutron star is a small, very energetic object. Things happen
fast. . . .
Oh.”

For a moment Pirius had actually allowed himself hope; now that warm spark died. It was just too fast. “Right. So that millisecond is all we will have to compute our course, to lay it in,
and
to execute the maneuver.”

Cohl said, “It would take our onboard sentient tens of seconds to compute a course like that. Even if we had prior data on the shape of the flare. Which we don’t. Of course a Xeelee could do it.”

“Three minutes,” Hope said evenly.

Pirius sighed. “You know, just for a moment you had me going there, Dans.”

Dans snapped impatiently, “Lethe, you guys are so
down.
Maybe there’s a way even so. Pirius, have you ever heard of a Brun maneuver?”

“No.”

“Pilot school scuttlebutt. Somebody tried it, oh, a year or more back.”

Pirius hadn’t heard of such a thing. But the turnover in pilots at Arches Base was ferocious; there was little opportunity for field wisdom to be passed on.

“It didn’t work—”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But it could have,” Dans said. “I looked into it—ran some simulations—thought it might be useful some day.”

“Two minutes thirty.”

“Pirius, listen to me. Stick to your course; make for the flare. But keep listening. I’ll compute your maneuver for you. A way through the flare.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Sure it is. And when I download the new trajectory you’d better be prepared to splice it into your systems.” Dans peeled away.

“Where are you going?”

“If this doesn’t work out, don’t touch my stuff.”

“Dans!”

“That’s the last we’ll see of her,” Enduring Hope said laconically.

“Two minutes,” Cohl said. “One fifty-nine . . .”

Pirius shut her up.

As the
Claw
fell through space there was no noise, no sense of motion. The Xeelee’s slow convergence was silent, unspectacular. Even the neutron star would be invisible for all but a few seconds of closest approach. It was as if they were gliding along some smooth, invisible road.

The crew continued to work calmly, the three of them calling out numbers and curt instructions to each other. The
Assimilator’s Claw
was drenched with artificial intelligence, sentient and otherwise, and its systems were capable of processing data far faster than human thought. But the systems were there to support human decision-making, not to replace it. That was the nature of the greenship’s design, which in turn reflected Coalition policy, under the Doctrines. This was a human war and would always remain so.

There was no sense of peril. And yet these seconds, which counted down remorselessly inside Pirius’s head, would likely be the last of his life.

There was a flare of blue light, dead ahead, FTL blue—and then a streak of green. It was a greenship, cutting across his path. Suddenly data was chattering into the
Claw
’s systems. It was a new closest-approach trajectory.

Pirius saw Cohl sit up, astonished. “Where did that come from? Pilot—”

“Load the course, Navigator.”

A Virtual coalesced before Pirius: Dans’s head, disembodied. Her face was small, round, neat, with a wide, sensual mouth, a mouth made for laughing. Now that mouth grinned at Pirius. “Boo!”

“Dans, what—”

“It’s not me, it’s a downloaded Virtual. The real Dans will be hitting the surface of the star in”—she closed her eyes, and the image wavered, blocky pixels fluttering, as if she was concentrating—“three, two, one. Plop. Bye-bye.”

Pirius felt a stab of regret through his fear, bafflement, adrenaline rush. “Dans, I’m sorry.”

“There was no other way—no other trajectory.”

“Trajectory from where?”

“From the future, of course. Pirius, you’re twenty seconds from closest approach.”

He glimpsed a splash of red, wheeling past the blister. It was the neutron star.