Exultant (4 page)

Dans said, “You need to cut in your GUTdrive. On my mark—”

“Dans, that’s insane.” So it was; the antiquated GUTdrive was a last-resort backup system.

“I knew you’d argue. Your sublight won’t work. Do it, asshole. Two, one—”

In the heart of the GUTdrive, specks of matter were compressed to conditions not seen since the aftermath of the Big Bang; released from their containment, these specks swelled immensely. This was the energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself; now it heated asteroid ice to a frenzied steam and forced it through rocket nozzles. A GUTdrive was just a water rocket, a piece of engineering that would have been recognizable to technicians on prespaceflight Earth twenty-five thousand years before.

But it worked, even here. A new light flared behind the ship, a ghostly gray-white, the light of the GUTdrive.

Dans winked at Pirius. “See you on the other side.” The Virtual collapsed into a cloud of dispersing pixels.

The neutron star cannonballed at Pirius, suddenly huge. It was a flattened orange, visibly three-dimensional, its surface mottled by electric storms. It slid beneath
Claw
’s prow, and for a moment, continents of orange-brown light fled beneath Pirius’s blister. All these impressions in a second; less. But now a stronger light was looming over the horizon, yellow-white: it was the site of the flare, a grim dawn approaching.

And in the same instant the
Claw
juddered, shook, its drive stuttering.
What now?
Diagnostics popped up before Pirius. Around a Virtual of the GUTdrive core, shadowy shapes swarmed. Quagmites, he saw: the strange entities that were attracted by every use of a GUTdrive in this region—living things maybe, pests for sure, feeding off the primordial energy of the GUTdrive itself, and causing the mighty engine to stutter.

“The fly’s on us!” Cohl cried.

When Pirius glanced at the reverse view he saw the Xeelee fighter. Its night-dark wings flexed and sparked as it swam through space after him. He had never seen a Xeelee so close, save in sims: he didn’t know anybody who had, and lived. It was more than inhuman, he thought, more than just alien; it was a dark, primeval thing, not of this time. But it was perfectly adapted to this environment, as humans with their clumsy gadgetry were not.

And it was still on his tail. All he could do was fly the ship; there was absolutely nothing he could do about the Xeelee.

Ahead, light flared. Over the horizon came rushing a massive flaw in the star’s crust, a pool of blue-white light kilometers wide from which starstuff poured in a vertical torrent, radiating as much energy in a fraction of a second as Earth’s sun would lose in ten thousand years. An arch, yellow-white, was forming above the star’s tight horizon, kilometers high. In places the arch feathered and streamed, tracing out the lines of the magnetic field that restrained it.

On a neutron star, events happened fast. The rent in the surface was already healing, the arch collapsing almost as soon as it had formed, its material dragged down by the star’s magisterial gravity field.

And the
Claw
flew right underneath it.

Pirius’s blister shuddered as if it would tear itself apart. Those mottled surface features whipped beneath, and the arch loomed
above
him. He had never known such a sensation of sheer speed. He might not live through this, but Lethe, it was quite a ride.

There was a punch in the small of his back, the ghost of hundreds of gravities as the
Claw
kicked its way out of the star’s gravity well.

The neutron star whipped away into darkness. The arch had already collapsed.

And in the last instant he glimpsed the Xeelee, behind him. No longer an implacable, converging foe, it was folding over, as if its graceful wings were crumpled in an invisible fist.

The
Assimilator’s Claw
hung in empty space, far from the neutron star. The crew tended their slight wounds, and tried to get used to still being alive. They saw to their ship’s systems; the encounter with the quagmites had done a good deal of damage to the GUTdrive.

And they reconstructed what had happened during those crucial moments at the magnetar.

At its heart the magnetic field embracing the flare had been as strong as any field since the first moments of the universe itself. At such field strengths atoms themselves were distorted, forced into skinny cylindrical shapes; no ordinary molecular structure could survive. Photons were split and combined. Even the structure of spacetime was distorted: it became
birefringent,
Pirius learned, crystalline.

It was this last which had probably done for the Xeelee. Nobody knew for sure how a nightfighter’s sublight drive worked. But the drive
seemed
to work by manipulating spacetime itself. In a place where spacetime crystallized, that manipulation could no longer work—but the
Claw
’s much cruder GUTdrive had kept functioning, despite the quagmites.

All that was straightforward enough. Just physics.

“But what I can’t get my head around,” Pirius told Dans’s Virtual, “is how you appeared out of nowhere, and squirted down the right evasive maneuver for us, based on a knowledge of the flare’s evolution
before it happened.
”

Dans said tinnily, “It was just an application of FTL technology. Remember, every FTL ship—”

“Is a time machine.” Every child learned that before she got out of her first cadre.

“I pulled away. Out of trouble, I watched the flare unfold, recorded it. I took my time to work out your optimal path—how you
would
have avoided destruction if you’d had the time to figure it out.”

Pirius said, “But it was academic. You got the answer after we were already dead.”

“And I had to watch you die,” said Dans wistfully. “When the action was over, the Xeelee out of the way, I used my sublight to ramp up to about a third lightspeed. Then I cut in the FTL.”

Cohl understood; “You jumped back into the past—to the moment just
before
we hit the flare. And you fed us the maneuver you had worked out at leisure. You used time travel to gain the time you needed to plot the trajectory.”

“And that’s the Brun maneuver,” Dans said with satisfaction.

“It’s some computing technique,” Cohl mused. “With the right vectors you could solve an arbitrarily difficult problem in a finite time—break it into components, feed it back to the source. . . .”

Pirius was still trying to think it through. “Time paradoxes make my head ache,” he said. “In the original draft of the timeline,
Claw
was destroyed by the flare, and you flew away. In the second draft, you flew back in time to deliver your guidance, and then you—that copy of you—flew into the neutron star.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” Dans said.

He could see she was waiting for him to figure it out. “But that means, in this new draft of the timeline, we survived.
And so you don’t need to come back in time to save us.
We’re already saved.” He was confused. “Did I get that right?”

Hope said, “But there would be a paradox. If she
doesn’t
go back in time, the information that future-Dans brought back would have come out of nowhere.”

Cohl said, “Yes, it’s a paradox. But that happens all the time. A ship comes limping back from a lost battle. We change our strategy, the battle never happens—but the ship and its crew and their memories linger on, stranded without a past. History is resilient. It can stand a little tinkering, a few paradoxical relics from vanished futures, bits of information popping out of nowhere.” Cohl evidently had a robust view of time-travel paradoxes. As an FTL navigator, she needed one.

But Pirius’s only concern was Dans. “So can you save yourself?”

“Ah,” Dans said gently. “Sadly not. More than one Xeelee chased us after all. If I hadn’t hung around to work out your course I might have got away. I’m all that’s left, I’m afraid. Little pixellated me . . .”

“Dans”—Pirius shook his head—“you gave your life for me.
Twice.
”

“Yeah, I did. So remember.”

“What?”

She glared at him. “When you get back to Arches, leave my stuff alone.” And she popped out of existence.

For long minutes they sat in silence, the three of them in their blisters.

“Here’s something else,” Cohl said at last. “To get back to Arches from here we’ll have to complete another closed-timelike-curve trajectory.”

“A what? . . . Oh.” Another jump into the past.

“We’ll arrive two years before we set off on the mission.” She sounded awed.

Hope said, “I’ll meet my past self. Lethe. I hope I’m not as bad as I remember.”

“And, Pirius,” Cohl said, “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 jolted Pirius awake.

Pirius scrambled out of his lower bunk. He got tangled up with Torec, who was climbing down from the upper tier. Just for a second, Pirius was distracted by Torec’s warm, sleepy smell, reminding him of their fumble under the sheets before they had fallen asleep last night. But soon they were standing to attention before Seath, in their none-too-clean underwear.

Seath was a stocky, dark woman, no more than thirty, and might once have been beautiful. But scar tissue was crusted over her brow, the left side of her face was wizened and melted, expressionless, and her mouth drooped. She could have had all this fixed, of course, but Seath was a training officer, and if you were an officer you wore your scars proudly.

Astonishingly, Torec was snickering.

Seath said, “I’m pleased to see part of you is awake, Ensign.”

Pirius glanced down. To his horror a morning erection bulged out of his shorts. Seath reached out a fingernail—bizarrely, it was manicured—and flicked the tip of Pirius’s penis. The hard-on shriveled immediately. Pirius forced himself not to flinch.

To his chagrin,
everybody
saw this.

To left and right the great corridor of the barracks stretched away, a channel of two-tier bunks, equipment lockers, and bio facilities. Below and above too, before and behind, through translucent walls and ceilings, you could see similar corridors arrayed in a neat rectangular lattice, fading to milky indistinctness. Everywhere, the ranks of bunks were emptying as the recruits filed out for the calisthenics routines that began each day. This entire moonlet, the Barracks Ball, was hollowed out and filled up with a million ensigns and other trainees, a million would-be pilots and navigators and engineers and ground crew, all close to Pirius’s age, all eager to be thrown into the endless fray.