Exultant (58 page)

Enduring Hope glanced around cautiously. Pirius wasn’t the kind of leader who cracked jokes or expected you to applaud him. But Hope saw no frowns, no pursed lips, no skepticism. If you were a flyer you didn’t expect coddling. These crews knew Pirius by now, and his older self, and they respected him. They were ready to follow him, wherever he was about to lead them. Lethe, Hope thought,
he
would follow Pirius, either of them, just as he had before, if given the chance.

Nilis was next up. The Commissary, bulky and much older than the flight crews arrayed before him, was dressed in a black Commission robe that was frayed at the cuffs. He fumbled with his data desks and coughed to clear his throat. Nilis seemed a lot more nervous than Pirius had been—or maybe it was just that Pirius hid it better.

Nilis began by summarizing the novel technical elements of the mission: the grav shield, the CTC processor, the black-hole cannon weapon. “That’s as much as you know, I suppose,” he said. “That and, as Pirius said, the name of the mission: Operation Prime Radiant. Now I can tell you that the name refers to the most significant Prime Radiant of all:
the base of the Xeelee in this Galaxy.
” There was an audible gasp at that. He looked out at them, squinting a little, as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces. “I think you understand me. After three thousand years of inconclusive siege warfare, we—
you—
are going to strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, at the supermassive black hole known as Chandra, the center of all Xeelee operations.”

Enduring Hope felt numb. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

Nilis began to go through a bewildering array of Virtuals. Gradually the outline of the mission became a bit clearer.

Very shortly, after a billion years of drifting down the arm of the Baby Spiral, Orion Rock would erupt into the open. Emerging deep inside the Cavity, this heavily armed Rock was an immediate threat to the foe, who would surely attack. But Orion was a diversion. While the local Xeelee firepower spent itself on the Rock’s defenses, Exultant Squadron would slip away.

The greenships would fly deeper into the Cavity behind their grav shield, whose purpose, Nilis now revealed, was to thwart the Xeelee’s ability to gather FTL foreknowledge about the mission. Later, the CTC processors would be used so they could penetrate the Xeelee’s final layers of defenses. And then the black-hole cannon would be used to strike at Chandra itself, and the Xeelee concentrations that swarmed there.

As Nilis spoke on, the crews began to mutter. Hope knew what everybody was thinking. It was well known that nobody had flown so close to the Prime Radiant and lived to talk about it; even Pirius Blue hadn’t gone in that deep. All this novel technology was hardly reassuring either. A crew liked to fly with proven kit, not with the product of some boffin’s overheated brow.

But I would go, Hope thought helplessly.

Nilis got through his technical Virtuals. He said, “Your commanders will take you through the operational aspects of the mission in detail. But I want to tell you
why
it’s so important to strike at the Prime Radiant—no matter what the cost.”

He spoke of strategic theory. The Galaxy was full of military targets, he said, full of Xeelee emplacements of one kind or another. But those which were “economically upstream” in the flow of resources and information were more valuable. “It is cheaper, simple as that, to strike at the dockyard where greenships are constructed, to destroy it in a single mission, than to run a hundred missions chasing the ships themselves.” He brought up images of the Prime Radiant, heavily enhanced. Somehow the Xeelee used the massive black hole as a factory for their nightfighters and other technologies, he said, and as their central information processor. He spoke of the damage he hoped black-hole projectiles would do to such mighty machines as must exist around Chandra.

Hope thought it was very strange to hear this obviously gentle man talk of such profound destruction.

Nilis closed down his last Virtuals. He faced his audience, hands on hips. “You may say to me,
why
must this be done? And why
now
? Why
you
? After all the war is not being lost. We and the Xeelee have held each other at bay for three thousand years. Why should it fall to you to strike this blow—and, I’m afraid for many of you, to pay the price?

“I’ll tell you why. Because, after twenty thousand years of the Third Expansion, the majority of mankind are soldiers—and most are still children when they die.
Most people don’t grow old
. They don’t even grow old enough to understand what is happening to them. To our soldiers war is a game, whose lethality they never grasp. This is what we are: this is what we have made ourselves. And the numbers are terrible: in a century, more people die in this war than
all
the human beings who ever lived on Earth before mankind first reached the stars.”

He stalked around the dais. He was an old, overweight man walking back and forth, almost comically intense. “The Prime Radiant is central to everything the Xeelee do in this Galaxy. To strike at Chandra will be as devastating to the Xeelee as if they turned their starbreaker beams on Earth itself. And that is what we will do. We will stop this war. And we will stop it now.”

When he had finished speaking, there was a cold, stunned silence.

Marshal Kimmer stood now; he had been seated among the flight crews, at the front of the room. He said simply, “I know that you will make this attack succeed. I know you will inflict a tremendous amount of damage. And I know, yes, that you will make history.” Where Nilis had been received in silence, Kimmer won a cheer. He finished, “The first launches will be at reveille tomorrow.” And with that he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

When Pirius’s detailed briefing was over the crews dispersed quickly.

Hope hurried to the hangar. There was much to be done. But word had already filtered back to the ground crews about the nature of the mission, and the atmosphere was dark and silent. It was like working in a morgue. But they got the job done anyhow.

At the end of the day Enduring Hope went to find This Burden Must Pass.

Burden was in a barracks, surrounded by a small circle of somber-faced flight crew—and not all of them were Friends. Hope joined the little circle, and listened to Burden’s gentle conversation of love and hope, fear and endurance, and the consoling transience of all things.

But though his voice was steady, strain showed on Burden’s face, like a dark shadow.

Chapter
51

The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.

And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei—although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each nucleus was bare.

These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.

For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.

The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.

At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.

The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus-baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen—simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be—ought to be—vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.

But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.

The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more
clumpy
than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium—three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was
too much
lithium to be explained away by natural processes.

The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.

With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.

The universe was three minutes old.

Chapter
52

That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.

He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.

They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.

Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.

Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”

“I didn’t know if I should.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve
changed.
You always were full of depths, Torec. . . . And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”

“You’re the same person you were before you left.”

“Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for
two years
after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But
you
never lived through those two years, did you?”

“I did,” she murmured. “A copy of me did. But that copy has gone, or never existed—gone to wherever deleted timelines go. . . . It’s so strange, Pirius Blue.”

“I know. And sad.”

“Sad? Oh. Because I’m not
your
Torec.” She snuggled back down to his chest. “But there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? So we may as well get on with things.”

“Get on?”

“What else is there to do?”

Pirius Blue laughed. “As Nilis would probably say, we haven’t evolved to cope with time-looped relationships.”

“I know what your real problem is,” she said. “And it’s got nothing to do with time paradoxes.”

“What, then?”

“I’ve been with
him.
Your evil time-clone rival.”

He stifled a laugh. “He thinks the same about me.”

“Well, you both resent each other. But you’re not the same. I think he’s in awe of you.”

“But he’s
your
Pirius.”

“I don’t think it works like that. You’re growing apart, becoming different people. But you’re still both
you.
”

“Does he love you?”

She sighed. It was the first time either Pirius had used that word to her. “You know I love you. Both of you.”

He stroked her back, a spot between her shoulder blades where her skin felt like the smoothest, softest surface he had ever touched. “It’s a mess. A stupid triangle. I don’t know how we will sort it out.”

“Wait until the mission is over,” she said.

And see if any of us come back—
that was what she left unsaid.

After a time she drew away from him.

“You’re going to him,” he said.

“He needs me, too. And I need him.”

“I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

When she had gone, Blue rolled into the part of the bunk still warm from her body, and tried to sleep.

Two hours before reveille, Cohl was already on the surface of Orion Rock. In her massive, armored skinsuit, she was propped up in a foxhole with the members of her platoon around her. The monopole-cannon emplacement they were ordered to protect was a couple of hundred meters away, a complicated silhouette against a shining sky.

As it had been since its chthonic birth, this Rock was still immersed in the glowing molecular clouds of the North Arm of the Baby Spiral. But if she looked ahead, she could see a gaggle of stars through the mist, like light globes hanging in smoggy air. That was IRS 16, the cluster of very crowded, very bright stars that coalesced out of the Baby’s infalling material as it poured into the crowded space that surrounded Chandra.