Exultant (53 page)

The fundamental division of the world was seen as essentially tragic, and inspired many stories.

The various matter species, meanwhile, were not the only inhabitants of this ferocious age. They shared their radiation bath with much more ancient life-forms. To the survivors of the spacetime-chemistry federation, this age of an endless radiation storm was cold, chill, empty, the spacetime defects which characterized their kind scattered and stretched to infinity. But survive they had. Slowly they moved out of their arks and sought new ways to live.

Chapter
44

In the end it took a whole week before Pirius had assembled his team of thirty, including himself and Torec, to serve as primary crew, and nine more as backups. But now there were only seven weeks left before Kimmer’s deadline, and serious work on training and development hadn’t even begun.

Pirius brought his recruits, from Quin and elsewhere, back to Rock 492. Even that was a budget operation; he and Pila had to scrounge spare spaces on scheduled transport ships.

On the journey back from Quin, he couldn’t avoid his other self; whenever they passed each other, their tense silence was chill. Everybody stared, fascinated.

Once back at 492, Red called Burden and Pirius Blue to the office he had had Pila set up. They stood side by side, at attention, but somehow Blue made his insolence show.

“I need two flight commanders,” Pirius Red said without preamble. “So you can guess why I called you here.”

Burden and Pirius Blue glanced at each other.

Burden frowned. Again he seemed oddly evasive. But he said, “It’s not a responsibility I want. But I wouldn’t turn it down.”

Pirius Red nodded. He turned to Blue. “And you?”

Blue was contemptuous. “Do I have a choice?”

Red snapped angrily, “More choice than you gave me when you came back from that magnetar. Look, from my point of view neither of you are ideal candidates. Burden, frankly, I’m suspicious of what’s going on in your head.” Burden looked away. “And Blue—I know you too well, and we’ll never get on. But I need you both; you’re the best I can find. Blue, you of all people know that.”

He waited. At length, Burden accepted the job, but distantly. Blue nodded curtly.

Red was relieved beyond words.

Now he was able to bring both Blue and Burden further into his confidence. All they had known up to this point, like the other candidates, was that the mission would involve difficult flying with novel technology. He began to explain what the target would be.

“You’re insane,” said Pirius Blue. “We’re going to strike at Chandra itself?” But Red saw that his eyes were alive with excitement.

Red said carefully, “You want me to take you off the mission? I could do that, though you know too much now; you’d have to be kept in custody until the flight was over.”

“And let
somebody else
fly this?” Blue grinned; he looked feral. “Not a chance.”

Pirius turned to Burden. “What about you?”

Burden seemed more troubled. “This could shorten the war.”

“Or lengthen it,” Blue said, “if it goes wrong badly enough.”

“Either way,” said Burden, “things must change.”

Pirius nodded. “Does that trouble you?”

“Whatever we do doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And it’s a noble action.”

Pirius had trouble decoding this glimpse of an alien mindset. “Does that mean you’re in?”

Again Pirius perceived a flash of fear. Blue saw it, too, and glanced at Burden, worried.

But Burden straightened his shoulders. “Yes,
sir
!”

Once the last transport had docked, Pirius Red brought his recruits to 492’s largest pressurized dome and had them draw up in good order before him. With Pila at his side, he stood awkwardly on a crate, the only rostrum he could find.

He looked along their lines, at Jees’s clunky artificial torso, at the anomalously old, like Burden, at damaged children like Three—and, Lethe, at his own sullen, other-timeline face. He found it hard to believe that there had been such a rabble drawn up anywhere on the Front in all this war’s long history.

Nevertheless they were a squadron, and they were his.

“Forty of us,” he said. “Forty, including Pila, here, my adjutant. And this is our base. It isn’t much, but it’s ours. And we’re about to be transferred into Strike Arm. We’re a squadron now. And we’re special,” he said.

There was a guffaw, quickly suppressed.

“So we are,” Pirius went on. “We are a special generation, with a special duty, a privilege. The Galaxy-center engagement with the Xeelee began three thousand years ago. And we are the
first
generation in all those long years to have a chance of winning this war—of winning the Galaxy itself. Whether we succeed or we fail, they will remember us, in the barracks-rooms and the shipyards and the training grounds, and on the battlefields, for a long time to come.”

The crews just stood silently and stared back at him. His words had sounded empty, even to him. His self-doubt quickly gathered.

Enduring Hope spoke up. “We need a name.”

“What’s that?”

“A name. For the squadron. Every squadron needs a name.”

Pila murmured a suggestion in his ear, and he knew it was right.
“Exultant,”
he said. “We are Exultant Squadron.”

They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.

When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.

She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime,
Squadron Leader,
we have work to do.”

Chapter
45

Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.

As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and antiquarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed—but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce—and then, inevitably,
all
particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.

Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter-cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.

Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe—and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.

The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and
one
matter particles would be formed—and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.

The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.

Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.

Another metaphorical switch was pulled.

Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.

Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished, leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.

Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.

Chapter
46

Running behind a grav shield was like flying into an endless tunnel.

From her pilot’s blister, Torec looked ahead through the usual clutter of Virtual warning flags, at a wall of turbulence. The result of the gravastar shield’s spacetime distortions, it was like a breaking wave front, roughly circular, blue-white Core light mixed up and muddled and somehow stretched out in a way that hurt her eyes. There was something deeply unsettling about it, she thought, something that offended her instincts on some profound level.

When she glanced around she could see bright green sparks arrayed around her field of view. They were the other greenships of her flight, which was led today by Pirius Blue, high up there in Torec’s sky—Blue, the weird, embittered future-twin version of her own Pirius, who had unaccountably been made flight commander.

The squadron was learning how to fly in formation, and with the grav shield. This was Torec’s second training run of the day, her tenth of the week so far, and in the turnarounds she hadn’t caught a great deal of sleep. But she put aside her eyeball-prickling fatigue and peered ahead, trying to stay focused on the peculiar phenomenon that might one day save her life, if it didn’t kill her first.

The gravastar shield was something not quite of this universe, and the product of inhuman Ghost technology too. No wonder it looked weird. But the theory of its use was simple. Just fly in behind the grav shield, keep to your formation, follow your leader. The flaw was receding from her at nearly lightspeed, and it was her job to keep her greenship plummeting after it, tucked up into this more or less liveable pocket of smooth spacetime, not so close that the tidal stresses and fallout from the shield itself were so severe that they would destroy you, and yet close enough that the Xeelee could have no foreknowledge of your approach, because—and it still took her some hard thinking to grasp this—you were effectively in another
universe.

At the center of her field of view was a greenship tucked right in behind the wall of curdled horror. That ship, the “shield-master” as the crews called it, was laden with the grav field generators. Today it was piloted by Jees, the sullen, determined prosthetic rescued from admin duties by Pirius Red, now proving to be one of the best pilots in Exultant Squadron. There was nobody Torec would have preferred to see up there at point than Jees; if anybody could manage the propagation of a kilometer-wide wave front of spacetime distortion it was her.

But as Torec watched, that central green pinpoint wavered, just subtly. It was enough to send alarms sounding in Torec’s head, long before her Virtual displays lit up with more red flags.

Jees was having stability problems. Already Torec could see the shimmering of the grav shield front, and spacetime distortions heading back down the “tunnel” toward her own ship. They made the images of the more distant stars ripple and swarm, as if seen through a heat haze.

“Here we go again,” she called. “Brace for impact.”

“Pilot, Engineer. I got it. Locking down systems.” That was her engineer, Cabel: very young, very intense.

Torec called, “Navigator? What about you?” When there was no reply, she snapped, “
Three
. Lethe, girl, wake up.”

Tili Three called back, “Uh—Pilot, Navigator. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry. Just do your job.” She glanced at her displays. “Impact in thirty. Twenty-nine . . .”

Cabel, seventeen years old, was very able, and had completed his training for this flight in days. He was one of Pirius Blue’s “baby rats,” as Pirius Red put it a bit sourly, rescued by Pirius’s older self from the lethal servitude of Quin. Having worked with Cabel intensely, Torec backed Blue’s judgment.

Tili Three was another baby rat—but she was different. If anything, she was intrinsically smarter than Cabel. Though she had come into the squadron without having completed her basic navigator training, Pirius Blue had insisted on pushing her into Exultant, and now she had wound up in Torec’s crew. Torec had no doubt about her basic ability,
in the classroom
. But on these training runs—Lethe, even in the sims—she just couldn’t cut it. And so it seemed to be now.

The ripples washed down the tunnel at her. They were intense pulses of gravity waves. Torec saw the lead ships thrown from side to side, like bits of dirt on turbulent water. She braced.

The spacetime wash hit. The stars frothed around her. The ship pitched so violently she could feel it in her gut, even through the inertial shielding. She struggled to hold her line.

The trouble was, the grav shield was fundamentally unstable. No, worse than that, it actually
was
an instability, a fizzing, nonlinear flaw in spacetime. That was why it propagated in the first place, like a breaking wave. So having set it off, if you let it run by itself, it would push up to lightspeed and then disperse in a spectacular, bone-shaking explosion—or else it would collapse back into sublight, dissipating its energy. The propagating grav shield was an edge-of-chaos phenomenon, and had to be tweaked continually by the shield-master if it was to hang together.

But even here, in the calm, flat spacetime around Arches Base, it was all but impossible to hold everything together. Sailing along behind the shield was a constant strain, even when things went well. If the shield so much as wobbled, the little ships in its wake bobbed like motes of dust.