Xeelee: Endurance (16 page)

‘Yes, Father,’ said Beya. ‘As for Jupiter, you know I’ve been reading up on Solar System history . . .’

He didn’t entirely approve of this; it struck him as a guilty reflex.

‘You say this is all because of human action?’

‘That’s the story,’ he said. ‘Though my grasp of ancient earthworm history is shaky.’

A thousand years before, Jupiter had been damaged by the actions of the Friends of Wigner, refugees from the future. The Friends had had in mind some grand, impossible scheme to alter history. Their plan had involved firing asteroid-mass black holes into Jupiter.

‘Whatever these “Friends” intended, it didn’t work,’ Flood said. ‘All they succeeded in doing was wrecking Jupiter.’ He shook his head. ‘The greatest mass in the Solar System after the sun itself, a vast resource for the future – ruined in a single action. How typical of earthworm arrogance!’

Light sparked in the complex sky. Flood saw it reflected in his daughter’s face. He turned.

One of the Alpha ships, the
Destiny of Humankind
, had exploded. The delicate spine was broken, the detached GUTdrive flaring pointlessly, and the fragile lifedome shattered, spilling particles of pink and green into space.

Alarms howled. Virtual control desks appeared before Beya and Flood, crammed with data. The crew, sleepy, shocked, scrambled to get to their positions.

And then another ship detonated. The
Future Hope
, a ship five hundred years old, gone in a second. This time Flood glimpsed the missile that took it out. But there was no time to reflect.

‘Incoming,’ Beya called. ‘Incoming!’

Flood worked at his desk with brisk sweeps of his fingers. ‘All right. We’re evading.’ The lifedome shuddered as the GUTdrive flared, shoving the
Freestar
sideways.

A missile streaked past the lifedome, close enough to see with the naked eye, glowing white-hot.

‘Shit,’ Beya said. ‘How are they
doing
this? The scans showed the volume around us was clear.’

‘Jupiter,’ Flood said, reading his displays rapidly. ‘The missiles are coming
out
of Jupiter. But the velocities are so high – I don’t understand.’

‘The black holes,’ Beya said. ‘Maybe that’s it. They’re slingshotting their missiles off the central black holes. You can pick up a hell of a lot of kinetic energy from an ergosphere.’

‘Yes. And then they punch out of the carcass of the planet, right at us. Incredible.’

Another ship flared and died, a flower of light, pointlessly beautiful.

‘The
Dream of Beta
,’ Flood read. ‘That’s three of us gone in a few seconds. They’re picking us off. Three of us left, against a dozen Navy cruisers. We’ll have to withdraw. Regroup if we can—’

‘No.’ Beya was working hard at her desk. ‘Dad, there’s no time for that. Tell the survivors to make for the Poole hub.’

‘Why? The wormhole links are severed; we can’t get away from there.’

‘It will give us a bit of cover. And I’ve an idea,’ she said, distant, working.

Flood frowned. He didn’t enjoy it when this determined side of his daughter showed itself; it made her seem too strong, too independent – he couldn’t protect her any more. But she had called the black-hole missile manoeuvre correctly. He saw no better option than to accept her recommendation.

He snapped out the orders. The
Freestar
’s GUTdrive kicked in. The acceleration mounted quickly, to two, three, four gravities. Flood felt it in his bones, but he stood his ground, determined. Above his head, Jupiter slid with ponderous slowness across his field of view. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come
on . . .
’

Aboard the bridge of the Imperial Navy ship
Facula
there was much cheering at the rapid downing of half the rebel fleet – premature cheering, as far as Stillich was concerned.

‘Status,’ he yelled at Pella, above the noise.

‘Three down, three to go.’

‘But the three survivors aren’t running.’

‘Not from Jovian space, no sir. They seem to be making for the Poole hub.’

‘Why there?’

Pella tapped a desk. ‘The war-game AIs have no idea. If they need cover they could run to one of the moons . . .’ She grinned. ‘Sir, who cares? We have twelve ships against three. Even with one to one losses we can shoot them out of the sky.’

Stillich felt deeply uneasy, but he couldn’t argue with that analysis. ‘All right. Call the fleet; set up an attacking perimeter.’

‘Sir.’

The GUTdrive surged smoothly.

Twelve ships against three.
The decision to withdraw the Sol fleet to Jupiter had been a good one, Stillich thought. The hinterland of the giant planet was a dangerous, complex place, laced with strong gravitational fields, intense radiation and hazards like the Io flux tube. It was a battleground much more familiar to the defending Imperial Navy than to the attackers – there were no Jovian worlds in Alpha System – and he had been impressed by the innovative thinking at a Navy college on Earth that had come up with the notion of using the black hole slingshot to pick off the rebels before the ships had even engaged. But once he had accepted the stratagem, Stillich had argued for withdrawing
all
of Earth’s fleet to Jupiter or its environs, not to leave half of it mounting a futile picket fence against the incoming wave of relativistic missiles.

Still –
twelve against three.
It was more reassuring than twelve against six had been, but Stillich was in no mood for anything less than a complete victory, an annihilation. The security of the System demanded it, and the more overwhelming the odds the better.

On the
Freestar
, the Poole hub was already approaching, a cluster of Interface portals hurtling over the horizon towards the surviving rebel ships, a tangle of electric blue.

‘Lethe,’ Beya breathed. ‘I didn’t know how beautiful it was.’

Flood said softly, ‘The wormholes are gateways to other times, other places. They should be beautiful, like all great engineering.’

Alarms chimed once more.

Beya studied her data desk. ‘They’re closing in, Father, a dozen Navy cruisers.’

‘Then this is it.’

She kissed him on the cheek, a lingering gesture that still felt too brief. ‘Cover me.’

‘What?’

She turned and ran, faster than he could hope to catch her. ‘I told you. I have an idea.’ And she ducked out of sight, through a hatch to the ship’s spine.

A missile soared past the lifedome, and the crew ducked, involuntarily. Then there was a speckle of laser light, and the dome blister blacked itself out. Grey Morus, Flood’s second in command, yelled across, ‘They’ve got our range, Flood. We’re shooting back but—’

Flood’s data desk chimed. The AIs had quickly come up with a defensive configuration for the ships, lifedomes together, tails out, backed up against the Poole hub, using their combined superhot GUTdrive exhaust for defence. Flood punched his data desk. ‘Copy this and implement,’ he snapped at Grey. ‘Beya! Where are you? Beya!’

In Beya’s flitter, her father’s voice was as clear as if he was riding alongside her. She was determined to keep her voice level. ‘Can’t you see me, Father? I’m up around your ten o’clock – oh, but your blister is blacked out.’

‘What the hell are you doing?’

The flitter ducked sideways, jolting her against her restraints. ‘I’m taking fire, that’s what I’m doing. Dad, if you’ve got a spare laser, cover me!’

Now the flitter swept around. She was heading straight for the Poole hub, a tangle of wormhole mouths, powder-blue. She saw the three ships of the rebel fleet backing up, pirouetting clumsily into their defensive position. But the Imperial Navy ships swept across her view, soulless, mechanical, spitting missiles at the rebels, bathing them with laser light. There were so many of them, a dozen against three.

And as she watched, a Navy missile got through, hammering into the GUTdrive pod of the
Mercy and Tolerance.
Slowly the great ship began to drift out of position. But even as she did so she spat fire in Beya’s direction, and picked a Navy missile out of the sky.

‘Thanks,
Mercy
,’ she whispered.

‘You’re welcome,’ came a reply.

‘Beya, what are you doing?’

‘Dad, do you trust me?’

‘I – you know I do. What kind of question is that?’

‘Well enough to gamble your life on my say-so?’

‘I may not have a choice. If you’d just tell me—’

‘Just another bit of Solar System history, Father. Something I read, an incident at a planet called Pluto, long ago . . .’ She stared out at the dazzling sky-blue of the nearest portal’s exotic-matter tetrahedral frame. The faces were like semi-transparent panes of silvered glass; she could make out the watercolour oceans of Jupiter, swirled around in a fashion the eye could not quite track, like visions in a dream. ‘So beautiful.’

‘Beya?’

She drove the flitter straight at the Interface. She ran a quick calculation on her data desk.

‘Five seconds, Father.’

‘Until what?’

‘Fire up on my mark, and get out of there with everything you have.’

She passed through the glimmering face as if it did not exist, and now she was inside the blue frame of the Interface.

Her father’s voice was distorted. ‘Beya, please—’

‘This is for you, for Mother, for Alpha. Remember me. Mark!’ And she stabbed down her finger at her data desk.

The flitter’s engine exploded.

Something slammed into her back. Electric-blue light flared all around her.

Remarkably, she was still alive. She was jammed up in the little ship’s cabin, which had been ejected from the wreck. She gasped with the pain of broken bones. She made herself look around.

There was something wrong with space. A ball of light, unearthly, swelled up behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead was like a rip in the sky. Tidal forces plucked at her belly and limbs. Nobody had been on a ride like this in a thousand years.

And she saw Navy ships scattered like bits of straw in a wind.

The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance of Sol. And the flitter cabin imploded, without fuss.

It took long minutes before the crew got the tumbling of the
Facula
under control.

Pella came to Stillich, her brow bloodied. ‘Damage report—’

‘Never mind that. What just happened?’

‘An Alcubierre wave.’

‘A what?’

Pella dragged her fingers through mussed hair. ‘Captain – a wormhole is a flaw in space. It’s inherently unstable. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That’s matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—’

‘
What’s an Alcubierre wave?
’

‘Something exploded inside the Interface. And the Interface’s negative energy region expanded from the tetrahedron, just for a moment. The negative energy distorted a chunk of spacetime. The chunk containing us.’

On one side of the wave, spacetime had contracted like a black hole. On the other side, it expanded – like a rerun of the Big Bang, the expansion at the beginning of the universe.

Pella scanned her data desk. ‘We lost contact altogether with five of our ships. None of the rest are operational. The
Facula
—’

‘What about the surviving rebels?’

‘Two disabled.’ She looked up. ‘One got away. It’s heading for Earth.’

‘Can we give chase?’

‘No, sir, we—’

‘Get me a line to Admiral Kale. Patch it through to the Palace if you can—’

She looked up from her slate, shocked. ‘Sir. I’ve a standing order, to become operative in case of failure.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘You’re relieved of command. In fact, you’re under arrest.’

Stillich laughed. ‘Fine. I’m in your custody, Number One. Now get hold of a working flitter and get me back to Earth.’

S-Day plus 11. Orbit of Neptune.

The final attempt to stop the relativistic
Fist
ships was the most dramatic.

After ice-moon debris had put an end to
One
and then
Four
, it was a GUTship that tried to halt the two last survivors,
Three
and
Two
. Not far within the orbit of Pluto, on the rim of the Solar System proper, moving at a fraction of the attackers’ near-light-speed, it tried to ram them. It was an extraordinary bit of relativistic navigation.
Fist Three
, taking the lead, destroyed it with an equally remarkable bit of sharp-shooting. But the detonation hurled debris into the path of
Three
, and that was that.

When it was done, there was
Fist Two,
alone, sailing within the orbit of Neptune at over ninety-eight per cent of light-speed. This was the fastest velocity ever attained within the Solar System, it was believed, save for cosmic rays, atomic nuclei ejected from distant supernovas. But
Fist
was no subatomic particle.
Fist
was a warship, a relativistic weapon, manned, sailing among the fragile worlds of the mother System.

It was wrong, Densel Bel thought. It was monstrous. And yet here he was. Densel Bel was glad the time remaining to him was so brief.

Stillich was brought to the Empress’s New York bunker in shackles.

Admiral Kale was here. With an impatient command he ordered the shackles removed, and dismissed the guard.

Beside the logic pool, in its eerie, shifting light, the Empress brooded. Some Virtual display was playing itself out before her: a globe, a point of light, a glowing splinter – over and over.

Stillich approached his superior, rubbing his ankles. ‘Sir. How long?’

Kale snapped his fingers; a small Virtual data display appeared in the air. ‘That fucking relativistic ship is crossing Saturn’s orbit.’

Stillich thought. ‘Seventy-eight minutes from Earth, then.’

‘And we’re still waiting on this rebel bastard – this Flood.’