Exultant (8 page)

She stroked the center line of his chest. “What do you think it will be like?”

“Earth? I have
no
idea.” It was true. To Navy brats like Pirius and Torec, Earth was a name, a remote ideal—it was what they were fighting for. But they had never been told anything about Earth itself. What would be the point? None of them was ever going to go there. Earth was a totem. You didn’t think of it as a place to
live.

“
So what does Nilis want you to do?”

“Win the war.” He laughed. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Maybe the Commissary is working out a training program for us.”

“Yes, maybe that.” It was a comforting thought. They were used to having every waking second programmed by somebody else. Everybody moaned about the regime the whole time, of course, but Pirius admitted to himself it would be reassuring when they heard a brisk knock on the door and the Commissary issued them their orders.

But twenty-four hours went by, and still they heard no such knock.

They began to grow uncomfortable. It was hard even to sleep. They weren’t used to being enclosed, isolated like this. Back at Arches, where they had grown up, they had spent their whole lives in vast open dormitories, like the ones in the Barracks Ball, places where you could always see thousands of others arrayed around you, eating, sleeping, playing, fighting, bitching. Again everybody complained, and snatched bits of privacy under the covers of their bunks. But the fact was, it was reassuring to be cocooned in a vast array of humanity—to have your little slot, and to fill it. Now they had been ripped out of all that, and it was disquieting.

Already Pirius could see Captain Seath’s wisdom. If not for the presence of Torec, somebody he could share all this with, he probably would go crazy. The two of them clung to each other for reassurance. But it wasn’t enough.

At the end of that first twenty-four hours they felt a soft judder—probably a docking, causing a ripple in the corvette’s inertial field as it interfaced with a port’s systems. They surely couldn’t be at Earth yet, but they were
somewhere.

They jumped out of their tousled bed, pulled on uniforms, and hurried out of their cabin, leaving it for the first time since Arches.

Through the transparent hull they saw a plain of metal that softly curved away, like a plated-over moon. The corvette had nuzzled against a dock on this metallic worldlet, and to left and right they could see more ports, receding beyond the metal world’s tight horizon, complex puckers within which more ships rested.

There was no sign of the corvette’s crew. But Commissary Nilis stood here, gazing out. He hadn’t noticed the ensigns. He had his hands behind his back, and he seemed to be
humming.

Torec and Pirius glanced at each other. Pirius stood to attention and plucked up his courage. “Sir.”

Nilis was startled, but he smiled. “Ah, my two ensigns! And how are you enjoying the trip? Well, we’ve barely started. If there’s anything you need, just ask.” He turned back to the window. “Look over there—remarkable—I think that’s a Spline ship.” So it was, Pirius saw. The great living vessel nestled in its dock; it looked like a bulging eyeball.

Torec nudged Pirius, who asked, “Sir—Commissary—can you tell us where we are?”

“Well, this is Base 528, I believe,” Nilis said. “We’re here for our first provisioning stop.” He glanced at them. “And what does that number tell you?”

Pirius was confused, but Torec said: “Sir, that it’s an old base. Arches is 2594. The older the base, the lower the number.”

“Quite so. Good. Now, come,
see.
” He walked past them to the other wall.

Pirius saw ships: many ships, of all shapes and sizes, crisscrossing before his vision. The nearer ships shuttled into docks, or left them. Beyond there were many more, just sparks too remote to make out any detail, a shifting crowd that sorted itself into streams that swept away. The ships were beyond counting, he thought, stunned, and this vast streaming must continue day and night, all from this one base.

But Torec was looking beyond the ships to the stars. “Pirius. The sky is
dark.
”

The sky was dense with stars, many of them hot and blue. But in every direction he looked, between the stars the sky was black, black as velvet. “We aren’t in the Galaxy center anymore,” he said.

“Quite right,” Nilis said. “We are actually in a spiral arm—called the Three-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost arm of the Galaxy’s main disc.”

“Three-Kilo,” said Torec, wondering. “I heard of that.”

“Many famous battles were fought here,” Nilis said. “But long ago. Once this base was on the front line. Now it is a resupply depot. The Front has since been pushed deeper into the heart of the Galaxy, deeper toward the Prime Radiant itself. In this part of the Galaxy there are ports, dry docks, graving yards, weapons ships: it is a belt of factory worlds that encloses the inner center, a hinterland that spans hundreds of light-years.” He sighed. “I’ve traveled here a dozen times, but the scale of it still bewilders me. But then, a war spread across a hundred thousand light-years, and spanning tens of millennia, simply cannot be grasped during a human life spanning mere decades. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the idea of
winning
this war is beyond the imagination of even our most senior commanders.”

Torec said hesitantly, “Commissary?”

“Yes, child?”

“Please—what do you want us to
do
?”

Nilis laughed. “Why, nothing. You must relax—treat this as a holiday, for believe me, we will have plenty to do once we get to Earth.” He slapped them on their shoulders. “For now, just enjoy the ride!” And he disappeared into his cabin.

Pirius and Torec shared a bewildered glance. For Navy brats, leisure was an alien concept. They stared out at the streaming ships.

The next leg of the journey would be the longest, a straight-line cut through the spiral arms of the Galaxy spanning six days and no less than fifteen thousand light-years, before they reached a resupply depot at the Orion Line.

In the humming womb of the corvette, Pirius and Torec still had nothing to do.

By the end of the second day the rich food began to make them feel bloated. There was always sex, of course, but even the appeal of that faded. Pirius came to suspect uneasily that the fact they could screw as much as they liked here took away a lot of the appeal of their under-the-blanket barracks fumbles.

In quiet moments on the third day, Pirius tried to analyze his feelings for Torec.

Obviously Seath had assumed they were a stable couple, that their relationship was strong. But the truth was that Torec had only ever been a buddy. For now she was his favored squeeze, and vice versa, but that might have changed overnight, without hard feelings or regrets. In the Barracks Ball, there was a lot of choice, and a
lot
of bunk-hopping. Sex was all about athletics, and a bit of comfort. Surely they weren’t in
love.
Were they doomed to spend their lives together even so?

Of course there was nobody to discuss this with—certainly not the Commissary, and they hadn’t even
seen
the crew. The ensigns had nobody but each other.

And so, naturally, on the fourth day they turned on each other.

By the fifth day, after hours of screaming rows, they were exhausted and regretful. In their striving to hurt each other they had both said many things they hadn’t meant, the most hurtful for Pirius being the charge that he had ruined Torec’s life, for it held a grain of truth.

They came back to each other for comfort. The day became a good day, a day of tenderness. Having endured the storm, Pirius sensed they had moved to some new level in their relationship. Perhaps, he began to wonder, eventually they really would find love.

But then the sixth day came, just another day in this unwelcome luxury, and still the journey dragged on.

At the end of the sixth day Torec escaped into sleep. But Pirius was restless. He slipped out of bed, sponged down with a clean-cloth, and pulled on a uniform. Torec stayed asleep, or at any rate pretended to.

Pirius found Nilis sitting in a chair before the transparent hull, working at a data desk propped on his knee. The Commissary smiled at Pirius and waved him to another chair.

Pirius sat stiffly, and gazed at the panorama out of the window.

The corvette’s FTL drive, working smoothly and silently, was making many jumps per second, and it seemed to Pirius that the scattered stars were sliding past his field of view. But after each jump the corvette was briefly stationary relative to the Galaxy’s frame of reference. So there were none of the effects of velocity you’d expect from a sublight drive, no redshift or blueshift, no aberration; they crossed the Galaxy in a series of still frames.

For Pirius it was a strange sky. Far from the Core now, they were moving out through the Galaxy’s plane. They were passing through the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, one of its richest regions outside of the Core itself. There were plenty of stars, but they seemed scattered and remote—and, remarkably,
not one
of them was close enough to show a disc. Even between the stars the sky was odd, black, and empty. It seemed a quiet, dull, low-energy sort of environment to Pirius.

Not only that, you could actually tell you were embedded in a sheet of stars. If Pirius looked straight ahead his eyes met a kind of horizon, a faint band of gray-white light that marked the position of the Galactic equator: the light of millions of stars muddled up together. Away from the plane, overhead or down below, there were only scattered handfuls of nearby stars—you could immediately see how thin this disc was—and beyond that there was only blackness, the gulf, he supposed, of intergalactic space.

The corvette wasn’t alone. It was one of a stream of ships, a great thread of swimming sparks that slid across the face of the Galaxy. If he looked around the sky he could see more streams of light, all more or less parallel to this one, some of them passing back to the center, others running out to the periphery. Occasionally a companion ship passed close enough to make out detail. These were usually Spline vessels, vast meaty spheres pocked with glistening weapons.

Nilis was watching him. Pirius started to feel self-conscious.

Nilis waved a hand. “Marvelous, isn’t it—all this? A human Galaxy! Of course, if you were to drop at random into the plane of the Galaxy, chances are you’d see little enough evidence of human presence. We’re following a recognized lane, Ensign, a path where ships huddle together in convoys for mutual protection—this convoy alone is hundreds of light-years long. And you can see the Navy Splines assigned to guide and shield us. We’ve driven the Xeelee back to their Prime Radiant in the Core, but they are still out there—in the galactic halo, even in other galaxies—and they are not averse to plunging down from out of the disc to mount raids.”

Pirius glanced up uneasily at the dark dome of the sky.

Nilis went on, “But even so, even on a galactic scale, you can see the workings of mankind. Think of it! On hundreds of millions of worlds right across the Galaxy’s disc, resources are mined, worked, poured into the endless convoys that flow into the Core—and there on the factory worlds they are transformed to weaponry and fighting ships, to be hurled inward and burned up, erased by the endless friction of the Front itself. Of course, after so long, many worlds are dead, used up, exhausted and abandoned. But there are always more to be exploited. So it goes on, it seems, until the Galaxy itself is drained to feed the war, every bit of it devoted to a single purpose.”

Pirius wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s remarkable, sir.”

Nilis raised an eyebrow. “Remarkable? Is that all?” He sighed. “The Coalition discourages the study of history, you know. That’s according to the Druz Doctrines, in their strictest form. There is no past, no future: there is only
now.
And it is a now of eternal war. But
I
have looked back into the past. I have consulted records, libraries, some official, some not, some even illegal. And I have learned that we have been devoted to this single cause, to expansion or war, for
twenty thousand years.
Why, the human species itself is only some hundred thousand years old!

“It’s been too long. We have become rigid, ossified. There is no development in our politics, our social structures, even our technology. Science is moribund, save for the science of weaponry. We live out lives identical in every respect to those of our forebears. You know, there used to be more innovation in a
decade
than you see in a thousand years now.

“In a way, the Xeelee themselves don’t matter anymore—no, don’t look so shocked, it’s true! You could replace the Xeelee with another foe and it would make no difference; they are a mere token. We have forgotten who we are, where we came from. All we remember, all we know, is the war. It
defines
mankind. We are the species that makes war on the Xeelee, nothing else.”

“Sir—is that such a bad thing?”

“Yes!” Nilis slammed his fist onto the arm of his chair. “Yes, it is. You know why? Because of the
waste.
” He reeled off statistics.

Around the Front there were a hundred human bases, which supported a billion people each, on average. And the turnover of population in those bases was about ten years.

“That means that ten billion people a year are sacrificed on the Front, Pirius. The number itself is beyond comprehension, beyond empathy.
Ten billion.
That’s more than three hundred every single second. It is estimated that, in all, some thirty
trillion
humans have given their lives to the war: a number orders of magnitude higher than the number of stars in this wretched Galaxy we’re fighting over. What a waste of human lives!

“But there is hope—and it lies with the young, as it always did.” Nilis leaned forward with a kind of aged eagerness. “You see, at Sag A East, despite a lifetime of conditioning, when it came to your crisis you—or at least your future self—threw off the dead imperative of the Doctrines. You improvised and innovated, you showed initiative, imagination, courage. . . . And yet, such is the static nature of this old people’s war, you are seen as a threat, not a treasure.”