Xeelee: Endurance (22 page)

‘I have. And you’ve done remarkably well, boys, you and the other like-minded enthusiasts we gathered here. You’ve even hit the timescale we set you, of just a month to get this proof-of-concept facility up and running. I’m happy to approve the roll-out to full production, here on the Moon and on other suitable off-world sites. And we’ve no time to lose. Michael Poole took forty years at Jupiter to manufacture the exotic matter for his
Cauchy
project. We have a mere five more months. But we’ll get it done, I have no doubt. Well done, boys.’ He started to clap his hands, and the others joined in. ‘Well done indeed!’

Only the Engineer refused to join in the gentle applause.

3

Another month and the
Endurance
, assembled in Earth orbit, was ready to fly.

The craft was a GUTship, a very ancient design, indeed a design that Michael Poole would have recognised. When finally assembled, Mara thought the
Endurance
looked something like a parasol of iron and ice. The canopy of the parasol was a habitable lifedome, and the ‘handle’ was the GUTdrive unit itself, embedded in a block of asteroid ice which served as reaction mass. The shaft of the parasol, separating the lifedome from the drive unit, was a kilometre-long spine of metal bristling with antennae and sensors.

This craft had been hastily assembled from components retrieved from the breakers’ yards, under the supervision of Engineer Tasqer. In a hundred subtle ways, as Mara observed when Juq gave her eager Virtual tours, the ship’s components showed their age. Every surface in the lifedome was scuffed and polished from use, and many of the major systems bore the scars of rebuilding.

But it worked. And Mara, Earthbound all her life, subject of an alien regime, had never really understood, not in her heart, that mere humans had once mastered such technologies as this.

She was to learn that the ship’s destinations were even more remarkable.

For the ship’s maiden voyage Juq was sent on a grand tour of the Solar System – and specifically the sites where exotic-matter production was rapidly being ramped up, on Luna, Mars, and Titan, moon of Saturn. The purpose was motivation, inspiration.

Though she did not accompany him, Mara watched over and over the excited reports that Juq sent back to her, via secure channels mediated by Jasoft Parz. Luna now fizzed with exotic-matter plants. The designers had settled on gigantic torus-shaped designs for their manufacturing facilities, eggshell blue like the exotic matter itself, and vivid against the grey-brown lunar dust. On Mars too, just a few days’ flight away for the
Endurance
, Mara glimpsed such toruses nestling near the ancient and still-inhabited cities of mankind: the capital, Kahra, and the great arcologies like Cydonia, pyramids on Mars that swarmed with people.

And then there was Titan.

Though on Earth she was more than a light-hour away from the Saturn system, Mara eagerly followed Virtual-feed reports as a flitter piloted by Tasqer dropped from the spine of the
Endurance
and dipped into Titan’s perpetual photochemical smog. Soon the brownish murk began to clear, and she made out a surface, far below, oddly Earthlike, with mountains of ice hard as basalt and oceans, lakes and rivers of liquid methane and ethane, richly polluted by hydrocarbons. Michael Poole himself had opened up Titan for resource exploration, and since not long after Poole’s time this had been the most populous world outside the orbit of Jupiter. Titan had cradled mankind’s most remote cities, and huge factory ships had sailed these complex oceans, trailing high, oily wakes; enough food had been manufactured in those giant ships to feed all of Earth. Well, the oceans were still there, and Mara let the ancient, familiar names roll through her head: there was the Kuiper Sea, the Galilei Archipelago, the Ocean of Huygens, James Maxwell Bay . . . Now Earth had to feed itself, for the Qax had shut down interplanetary human trade, and few ships sailed Titan’s seas.

But there were exotic-matter toruses here, just as on the Moon and Mars, huge blue structures beside the domes of the old cities – even of the capital, Port Cassini.

People on Titan had welcomed the exotic-matter project. It brought a purpose to life beyond mere subsistence on a more or less implacably hostile world. And as the flitter landed at sites like Port Cassini, Mara watched as her son led the party from Earth through civic receptions and rallies for the workers. Tall, bold, handsome, an aristocrat of a powerful old Navy family on Earth, Juq effortlessly dominated such events – although he always had his uncle Chael, the manipulative power behind the throne, at his side.

The
Endurance
project felt human and aspirational, just as Chael had promised. It seemed to Mara, a mere month after Parz had approved this huge expansion of the project, that nobody swept up in all the excitement
cared
that this was a project inspired and owned by the Qax, alien overlords of the Solar System.

Or that even now nobody really knew what this project was ultimately
for.
When she thought this over Mara felt flickers of a deep unease.

And meanwhile her son, in these heady days, was becoming famous.

It came as a shock when Jasoft Parz intervened again. Exotic matter production rates were still not sufficient.

This was despite the fact that the designers had by now found a way to use much less exotic matter than Poole had required to thread his wormholes. The relativistic equations that described wormholes were nonlinear and allowed for feedback effects; it was possible to use a small amount of exotic matter smartly, to produce a kind of shock wave that would propagate down a wormhole throat, enabling a much larger passageway to be held open for the same amount of material . . . Even despite such ingenuity, the production capacity was not enough.

It had been a first instinct to lodge the engineering of this high-energy spaceflight project away from the Earth, for safety reasons. Though good progress had been made, it was soon clear that the populations away from the home world would not be sufficient to achieve the Qax Governor’s target. ‘I remind you again that Michael Poole took forty years over the
Cauchy
,’ Parz said. ‘We have four more months . . .’

Parz commanded, on behalf of the Governor, that fabrication facilities be set up on the surface of the Earth itself. And when, just a few days later, an exotic-matter facility began to be constructed east of Mellborn’s city boundary, Mara’s unease deepened further.

4

Engineer Tasqer visited Mellborn alone.

He told Mara that he was here to begin consultation on the next stage of the project, which would entail collecting exotic-matter stocks from plants like Mellborn’s across the planet and shipping them to Jupiter’s orbit, where, like Michael Poole’s
Cauchy
long ago, the great new wormhole would be assembled. This alone was going to be a huge logistical exercise.

Mara hosted the man for the night. Then in the morning she escorted him out to the exotic-matter plant at Yarraranj, some fifty kilometres to the east of the city.

And at the end of the day, when his meetings were done, she walked with him along a waymarked trail, away from the gleaming new blue torus, and into the country beyond. The exotic-matter plant had been set far enough out of the city to be beyond the suburbs, in a landscape giving way to nature – or at least nature as reconstructed by ecologists and geneticists who predated Michael Poole, back in an age when humans had done their best to fix retrospectively the damage their ancestors had done to the Earth. This was an arid landscape – not as arid as Australe had once been, after millennia of humans burning back the bush, but still only sparsely covered by scrub and gum trees. And here and there tremendous beasts moved, their shadows clear in the intense sunlight. Mara recognised the profiles of huge, muscular kangaroos.

Against this setting, the powder blue of the Qax facility looked ugly and out of place.

To Mara’s amusement, Tasqer, a pilot of interplanetary craft born into a rebel stronghold between worlds, seemed remarkably uneasy to be walking out in the open, on the planet that was after all the home of mankind. Perhaps this was the secret, spiteful reason she’d insisted on taking this walk with him.

‘You’re safe, you know.’

There was a deep growl, almost subterranean.

He glanced around. ‘What was
that
?’

She was embarrassed that she wasn’t sure; she lived her own life in the city. ‘A diprotodon, I think. A big marsupial beast the size of a rhino.’

‘Of a
what
?’

‘The other really big beasts out here are the megalanias, a kind of giant lizard that will take on an adult diprotodon. And dinornis, big flightless birds.’ She eyed him. ‘But don’t think birds. Think dinosaurs.’ This didn’t make him look any more comfortable, she observed gleefully.

He glanced around. ‘And I guess these beasts are all made harmless in some way. Defanged. Conditioned, made unable to attack humans.’

‘Oh, no. What would be the point of that? Human fatalities are remarkably rare . . . Look, I’m kidding with you.’ She gestured at the trail, the sparse posts that lined it. ‘You’re fully protected; there are force fields, sonic barriers. The critters soon learn to keep away. And don’t you think what our ancestors achieved here was remarkable? Although of course the Paradoxa Collegiate reconstruction dates from an age when
AS
technology was becoming widely available, life spans were lengthening, and people started to think seriously of projects on very long timescales.’

He grunted. ‘Because they were suddenly liable to stick around to see the consequences of their actions. You do know your history, don’t you?’

She had always resented his jabs. ‘I know I have a privileged position under this Occupation. Myself and my family, but I do try to use that privilege for good. Such as, yes, keeping human history and culture alive.’

‘Good for you,’ he said dismissively.

She sighed. ‘Very well. So how was your day?’

‘The meetings went well enough, given the magnitude of what we’re trying to do, and the timescale we have to work to. Just months! I took a tour of the facility. So many people labouring in the fusion plants, the Xeelee construction-material parks, the extraction bays – all those containment pods full of exotic matter piling up on lift pallets. Did you know the Qax Governor is demanding a wormhole Interface even
bigger
than the one Poole used? A huge icosahedral design, big enough to swallow a Spline ship . . . Well. Things are going as well as they could be, but the exotic matter dribbles out of facilities like this, and we need countless tonnes up there at Jupiter.’

‘Hm. Chael tells me Jasoft Parz is running another recruitment round. More folk to be transferred from other duties to the exotic-matter plants.’

‘If we had more time we could roboticise the process properly. But we don’t have the time, and we
do
have lots of people, and that’s the resource that’s being applied to speed things up – especially now we’ve located these operations on Earth.’

‘I do wonder about the urgency of it all,’ Mara said. ‘Why the hurry? And what about safety?’

Tasqer didn’t speak. He was staring into the distance, to the west, towards the setting sun; he seemed distracted. Looking that way, Mara thought she could see a speck in the sky, some kind of aircraft on the way in.

‘Engineer?’

‘What?’

‘About safety?’ she repeated sharply.

‘Human safety? In the facility?’ He shrugged. ‘What about it? The Qax don’t care. The plant managers do their best.’

They walked on. She could hear a faint noise in the distance now, off to the west, where Tasqer had been looking: a hum of engines. That aircraft, whatever it was, coming in for a low approach. She said now, ‘I hear rumours.’

‘Rumours?’

‘I do talk to people, you know, I don’t hide away in my town house all the time. There are reports of indentured labour. People forced to work in particularly dangerous environments.’

He looked at her blankly. ‘Look, Mara, the Qax don’t want
us
. They don’t buy or sell us. What they do sell is the exotic biochemistry of creatures like your diprotodons and your gum trees. We are partially useful –
slaves
. And as such we are expendable, to them.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘And to me.’

She was shocked by that last remark, by his deadened tone as much as by the words.

And that engine noise was suddenly growing louder, becoming deafening.

The aircraft, an Earth-to-orbit flitter she saw now, was coming in low and flat above the ground. Heading straight towards the exotic-matter facility. There was some kind of heavy pod suspended beneath its belly—

‘Down!’ Without warning Tasqer grabbed her around the waist and pushed her to the floor.

Twisting to see, she saw the flitter pass overhead and then roar down on the facility.

‘Close your eyes!’ Tasqer yelled, holding her down, his arm around her shoulders. ‘Close them tight!’

The flash was visible even through closed lids.

Then came a wash of air, a hot wind, and the ground itself shuddered, as if some tremendous Pleistocene beast had been felled.

She twisted her head to look at Tasqer.

‘Stay down,’ Tasqer yelled again, over a continuing roar of noise.

‘You did this,’ she screamed. ‘You and your people. The Engineers!’

‘Hell, yes.’ He raised a face crumpled against the noise, the wind, the dust. ‘We still have a few ships the Qax don’t know about, hiding out in the asteroid belt and elsewhere. Yes, we did this.
I
did this. I got into the facility, set a targeting beacon, disabled the defences, such as they were. There should have been simultaneous strikes all across the planet.
This
is why I gave myself up and burrowed into your sick Earth society in the first place. All for this. If we can disrupt this insane new project of the Governor—’

‘But what do you think the response is going to be? Do you think the Governor will just give up? The Governor is going to replace all this with something even worse for us than what you just destroyed. Did you fools think of that? And what about the people you slaughtered, the innocents forced to work in there—’

‘We’re in a war for the future,’ he said.

‘Mankind is to be saved, but people are expendable, to you as to the Qax.’

‘We all must do what we have to do.’

She stood up. ‘I have some police authority. Engineer Tasqer, you’re under arrest.’