Exultant (50 page)

Darc said, “Pilot? I think we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“Roger that. Engineer?”

“Do it.”

Pirius took his controls. The ship quivered, poised. “Now or never,” he said. He closed his fists.

The rock flew at him, exploding to a battered wall that seemed about to swat the greenship out of space. At the last moment the asteroid swiveled, dropped beneath his prow and turned into a lumpy landscape. Closest approach—but as the black-hole cannon fired, it was as if the ship had taken a punch to the guts—and red lights flared everywhere.

And then his blister flooded with impact foam, and he was cut off, embedded in a rigid casing, in the dark. It was over, as suddenly as that.

Frustration raging, he screamed, “Tactical display!” A working sensor projected a tiny Virtual image onto the inner surface of his faceplate.

The cannon had actually fired, and dotted yellow lines, neatly sketched, helpfully showed the track of the black-hole projectiles. They missed each other, and passed harmlessly through the loose bulk of the target rock, which sailed on, ancient and serene. And at the moment of closest approach the ship had exploded. Three crew blisters came flying out of an expanding cloud of debris.

Only nine weeks left, he thought helplessly. Nine weeks.

Chapter
39

The universe inhabited by the spacetime-defect fauna was quite unlike that of humans. There was no light, for instance, for the electromagnetic force which governed light’s propagation had yet to decouple from the GUT superforce. But the spacetime-flaw creatures, huddled around their black holes, could “see” by the deep glow of the gravity waves that crisscrossed the growing cosmos.

To them, of course, it had always been this way; to them the sky was beautiful.

The basis of all life in this age was the chemistry of spacetime defects, an interconnected geometric churning of points and lines and planes. Most life-forms were built up of “cells,” tightly interconnected, and very stable. But more complex creatures, built from aggregates of these cells, were not quite so stable. They were capable of variation, one generation to the next.

And where there is variation, selection can operate.

On some of the black-hole “worlds,” fantastic ecologies developed: there were birds with wings of spacetime, and spiders with arms of cosmic string, even fish that swam deep in the twisted hearts of the black holes. “Plants” passively fed on energy flows, like the twisting of space at the event horizons of the black holes, and “animals,” exploiters, fed on those synthesizers in turn—and other predators fed on
them.
Everywhere there was coevolution, as species adapted together in conflict or cooperation: “plants” and “animals,” “flowers” and “insects,” parasites and hosts, predators and prey. Some of this—the duets of synthesizers and exploiters, for instance—had echoes in the ecologies with which humans were familiar. But there were forms like nothing in human experience.

The creatures of one black hole “world” differed from the inhabitants of another as much as humans would differ from, say, Silver Ghosts. But just as humans and Ghosts were both creatures of baryonic matter who emerged on rocky planets, so the inhabitants of this age, dominated by its own dense physics, had certain features in common.

All life-forms must reproduce. Every parent must store information, a genotype, to pass on to its offspring. From this data is constructed a phenotype, the child’s physical expression of that information—its “body.”

In this crowded young universe the most obvious way to transmit such information was through extended quantum structures. Quantum mechanics allowed for the long-range correlation of particles: once particles had been in contact, they were never truly separated, and would always share information.

Infants were budded, unformed, from parents. But each child was born without a genotype. It was unformed, a blank canvas. A mother would read off her own genotype, and send it to her newborn daughter—by touch, by gravity waves. In the process, depending on the species, the mother’s data might be mixed with that of other “parents.”

But there was a catch. This was a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictated that it was impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the daughter to be born, the mother’s genotype had to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.

To human eyes this would seem tragic; but humans worked on different assumptions. To the spacetime fauna, life was rich and wonderful, and the interlinking of birth and death the most wonderful thing of all.

As consciousness arose, the first songs ever sung centered on the exquisite beauty of necrogenesis.

Chapter
40

The senior representative of the Guild of Engineers at Arches Base was called Eliun. He arrived for the review of the failed test flight with two aides. The review was held in a shabby conference room deep in Arches’ Officer Country. Eliun immediately made his way to the head of the table and sat comfortably, hands folded over his belly.

Nilis bustled among his data desks and Virtuals, his movements edgy and nervous. The scratch crew of the lost
Earthworm
were here: Pirius, Torec, and Darc. All had survived the ordeal intact, save for Commander Darc, whose broken wrist was encased in bright orange med fabric.

Pila took her place beside Pirius. Even after working closely with her Pirius couldn’t read the expression on her beautiful, pinched face. Perhaps she thought that with this latest failure, this embarrassing and awkward project would be terminated at last, and she could return to the comforts of Earth, and her slow, complicated ascent through the ranks of the Coalition civil service.

And, in one corner of the room, a Silver Ghost hovered, a sensor pack strapped to its equatorial line. It was the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Two blue-helmeted Guardians, who had been assigned to it since Sol system, stood at its side, weapons ever ready. Nobody commented, as if having a Ghost here at a Core base was an everyday event. But the Navy guards posted at the door couldn’t help but stare.

The Guild-master was sleek, only a little plump, and his skin glistened as if he treated it with unguent. He wore a peculiar outfit covered with pockets, insignia, and little readout displays. It turned out to be a stylized skinsuit, of a very archaic design. This commemorated a time when the Engineers had always been the first on the scene in case of some disaster. Those days were long gone, though, and Pirius Red learned that Eliun’s suit wasn’t even functional.

Though he was a master engineer, Eliun didn’t seem at all perturbed to be summoned to a review of a catastrophic engineering failure. But Pirius knew Eliun need defer to nobody here. The Engineers were independent of the Navy and the Green Army, and in particular of Training and Discipline Command, the powerful interservice grouping that ran this base. In fact, the Engineers were independent all the way to the top, to the Grand Conclave of the Coalition itself. And in the comfortable form of Eliun, Project Prime Radiant had found yet another institutional opponent.

Darc glowered at Eliun with undisguised hostility, and even Nilis seemed coldly angry. The atmosphere was tense, and Pirius suspected uneasily they were in for some fireworks.

He was restless himself. Since the test flight two more days had worn away, two days of no progress toward the goal.

Nilis called the meeting briskly to order. “You know why we’re here.” He clapped his hands to call up a plethora of Virtual displays—far too much information, Pirius thought; it was typical of Nilis. “Let’s start with the basics.”

Once again the doomed
Earthworm
slid past the patient face of the target. Once again it blew apart, three fragile crew blisters careening out of the wreckage only just ahead of the main fireball. Pirius winced from embarrassment at having lost a ship, and at the uncomfortable memory of the breakup itself. Two days later, he was still chipping bits of solidified impact foam off his skinsuit.

Nilis ran the failure again and again, at one-thousandth speed, then one ten-thousandth, then slower still. “You can see that the black-hole cannon did fire, successfully,” he said. “But the structural failure occurred at that moment of firing.” He nodded to Torec, the ship’s engineer.

Torec walked through key moments in Nilis’s Virtuals, picking out freeze-frame images and referring the audience to bits of technical detail. “Firing the black-hole shells places the greatest stress on the ship’s systems as a whole.” To provide a stable platform when the cannon fired, the greenship’s inertial adjustors had to keep the ship anchored in spacetime. But the recoil of these spacetime bullets put far more strain on the adjustors than they had been designed for. “Remember, each shell has the mass of a small mountain. The energy drain is huge, the momentum recoil enormous. And unless the structural balance is
exactly
right, you get a failure. As in this case.”

She spoke well, Pirius thought with a mixture of envy and nostalgia. She had grown so much. The mixed-up cadet who had been press-ganged into flying with him to Earth just a few months ago could never have made such a presentation.

Eliun spoke for the first time. “Show me the point of failure.” His voice was like the man, oily, unperturbed.

Torec ran through a series of stop-motion images of the greenship at the moment of its terminal catastrophe, magnified so heavily they broke up into crowding cubical pixels. She showed the first instants of failure, using two bright red laser-pointer beams which intersected on the ship’s Virtual image. The point they picked out was just a flare of light, right at the junction of the cannon pod with the main hull. In that first moment the failure looked harmless, but the ship hadn’t held together for another half-second. Skewered neatly by the crisscrossing beams, the point in space and time when the
Earthworm
had died was unambiguous.

Pirius knew that all this was irrelevant, to some extent. For him, the greatest failures of the test flight had been navigation and accuracy. Even if they could overcome the problem of the damn ship blowing itself up in the moment of firing, to get the one-hundredth-of-one-percent accuracy of positioning Nilis was demanding, the navigational control of the ships was going to have to be improved by an order of magnitude.

Idly Pirius glanced over his shoulder at the source of the laser pointers. They came from light globes that drifted at the back of the room. The beams’ location of the failure point on the Virtual had been precise to well within the size of a pixel on that much-magnified image. An idea hovered at the back of his mind, elusive. He tried to relax his thinking—

“. . . Pirius.”

Nilis was calling his name. Commander Darc was glaring at him.

“Sir, I’m sorry. I was just thinking that—”

“Yes, yes,” said Nilis impatiently. “I asked if you as pilot had anything to add to Torec’s expert presentation.”

“No. I’m sorry,” Pirius said.

Nilis harrumphed. Now he turned to Commander Darc, as the
Earthworm
’s navigator.

Darc had clearly been waiting for this moment. His strong face blank and threatening, he turned on Eliun, who had been looking faintly bored. “I have no report, Guild-master. Only a question.”

“Go ahead, Commander.”

“You’ve seen the report. You saw the summary before you walked into the room. How will you help us resolve this issue of structural integrity?”

Eliun spread his fingers on the table. “I’m sure your analysis, if sufficiently deep, will—”

“Our analysis,” Darc cut in. “
Ours.
But the Commissary’s Project is a scratch operation that has been running on a shoestring for a matter of weeks. Whereas you have been running greenships for millennia.” He leaned forward and glared. “I would like to know, Guild-master, why the Engineers have obstructed this project from the day Nilis came here.”

That unexpected shot got through Eliun’s defenses; for an instant, shock creased his face. But he said with quiet control. “Commander, I’ll enjoy speaking to your seniors about your future career path.”

Nilis bustled forward, his own agitation obvious, a vein showing in his forehead. This was the crux of the meeting, Pirius saw. Nilis said, “Well, that’s your privilege, Guild-master. But before we descend into personal attacks, shall we examine the issue? You see, faced with our cruel timescale, we’ve been struggling, not only against a shortage of resources and antiquated test craft, but against—how shall I put it?—
secrecy.

“
After the prototype work in Sol system, we’re now trying to integrate our new systems into a greenship’s design. But as the Commander implies, we’ve been given
nothing
by your people on the craft’s technical aspects. Surely you have blueprints, records, practical experience you could offer us? And then there is the GUT engine itself. Again we’ve been given no documentation. Remember, we’re trying to use it to run black-hole cannon! As we’ve tried to work our way through its antiquated interfaces, we’ve felt more like archaeologists than engineers. My eyes, you
must
have the technical knowledge we’re struggling to retrieve here! You’ve been running ships of more or less this design for, what—three thousand years?”

“A little longer,” Eliun said smoothly. “And not of ‘more or less’ this design, Commissary—
exactly
this design.”

Darc eyed him. “Three thousand years of stasis. And you’re proud of that, are you?”

“It’s clear that you misunderstand our objectives. Our mission is not innovation but preservation. . . .”

The Guild of Engineers was an ancient agency. It had grown out of a loose band of refugees from the Qax Occupation, who had spent centuries stranded in space. When the Qax were thrown out they had come home, their antique technology carefully preserved. In the internecine struggles that had developed during the establishment of the Interim Coalition, mankind’s first post-Occupation government, the Engineers, with their ancient bits of technological sorcery and their proud record of resistance to the Qax, had been well-placed to grab some power for themselves. And they had kept their place at the highest levels of the Coalition ever since.