Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  “We can’t stay here,” Pirius said bluntly.

  “We can traverse in the trench—”

  “There’s no point. We couldn’t get any closer to the factory that way. Remember the standing orders. The only pickup will be at the factory itself. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here, in this trench. We’ve nowhere else to go but forward.” Bilin glared at him, but Pirius stared steadily back. “Can’t you see that? We’re not the first here. Look around you. Do you want to die like this?”

  The boy dropped his gaze.

  Pirius rooted in the grisly bank of frozen body parts beneath him. It didn’t take him long to retrieve a laser rifle. He threw it aside. He kept searching until he found a starbreaker gun; this gravity-wave handgun, essentially a design stolen from the Xeelee, was far more potent. “Search the dead,” he snapped. “If you don’t have a weapon, find one. Take anything else you need: water, med-cloaks.”

  Cohl went at it with a will. The privates—cadets until yesterday, Pirius reminded himself—were more reluctant; they had been trained to accept death, but nothing in their upbringing had prepared them for this gruesome grave robbing.

  Pirius checked over the starbreaker weapon. It was massive in his hands, reassuring. He’d been given only minimal training in it, but its operation, designed for simplicity and robustness on the battlefield, was obvious. He fired a test shot; pink light snaked out. There was no recoil. The gun anchored itself in spacetime, while sending out lased gravity waves that would rip apart anything material.

  After a few minutes they were all equipped.

  “All right,” said Pirius. “If you want to live, do as I say.”

  He’d expected Bilin to challenge him, and he wasn’t disappointed. “Who appointed you, Service Corps?”

  Pirius just stared him down. Again Bilin blinked first.

  Pirius sketched in the dirt on the side of the trench, showing the Xeelee emplacement, and behind it the factory that was their target. “We have to take out the emplacement. We’ll break into two sticks. I’ll lead one. Cohl, you take the other. We’ll go right, you go left …” They would take it in turns, the two parties leapfrogging, alternately covering each other. This routine fieldwork was very familiar to the troopers; they knew how to do it. They started to relax.

  He glanced around at their faces, glowing like red moons by the light of the continuing bombardment overhead. Now that somebody was giving them orders again they almost looked confident, he thought. But Pirius couldn’t unwind the coiled spring inside himself, not a bit.

  He split the seven of them into their two groups. In her group of four, Cohl would take the twins, who he wasn’t about to separate. Pirius took the troublemaker Bilin with himself, along with the slim, intense-looking girl, the first to have tumbled into the trench, who as far as he remembered hadn’t said a word. The two teams moved subtly apart.

  Pirius readied his starbreaker. “We’ve nothing to gain by waiting. We’ll go first. Give us five seconds’ cover, then follow.”

  “See you on the shuttle,” Cohl said.

  The troopers shifted their positions, ready to move again. One boy moved stiffly, staring down at the layer of bodies, obviously reluctant.

  Pirius barked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t like treading on their faces.”

  Pirius forced himself to yell, “Never mind their faces! Just do it!”

  The kid responded with jerky haste.

  Pirius held his hand up. “On my mark. Five, four—”

  Cohl’s troop put their heads over the lip of the trench and began firing.

  “Three, two.” Pirius snapped off his inertial belt and allowed himself one deep breath. “One.”

  He launched his body out of the trench and into the fire-laced vacuum once more.

  The quiet girl fell before she had even got out of the trench, her visor melted open, her face reduced to char. He had never even known her name. But there was no time to reflect, no time to look back, nothing to do but go on.

  Fly, float, scrabble across a hundred meters, less. Fire your weapon if you can, anything to engage the Xeelee guns, and try to ignore the stitching of fire all around you, the way the ground beneath you is constantly raked up by miniature explosions. When you find shelter—a pock-hole in the dirt, a chance heaping—let the inertial belt pull you down as hard as it can. No time to rest. Head above the lip of your cover, start firing again immediately, to cover Cohl’s crew.

  This close to the factory, the ground was littered with bodies, tangled up and frozen, a carpet so deep you sometimes couldn’t see the ground at all. Frozen solid, there was no way of knowing how long they might have been there. There was no decomposition here, no smell; it wasn’t even a human enough place for that. Pirius wondered how many had died here, how long this desperate battle for a desolate piece of rock had gone on.

  Three, four hops, and he was still alive. Their laser beams were invisible save where they passed through kicked-up dust; the starbreakers glowed with their own light.

  At last he found himself in a foxhole fifty meters from the emplacement. The Xeelee structure was a squat, plain box, unbroken by windows. Starbreakers spat from vicious-looking mounts on the roof. Those pale blue rings on their pillars gleamed, set around the structure.

  Bilin tumbled after him into the trench, laden by the heavy surface-to-surface weapon.

  “Those hoops,” Pirius said. “We’ll take them out.”

  “Why?”

  “Enemy comms.” It was probably true. The cerulean hoops were another bit of Xeelee technology. They appeared to use spooky quantum-inseparability effects to allow instantaneous communication. No human scientist knew how they worked; you weren’t supposed to be able to use quantum entanglement to pass meaningful data.

  Bilin, now that he was in action, had shed his petulance and uncovered a kind of steely doggedness. He could make a good soldier some day, Pirius thought. He nodded and said, “Three, two, one.”

  They lunged over the rim of their foxhole and blasted away at the sky-blue hoops. The emplacement’s own starbreaker mounts spat back ferociously, but fire was coming in at the structure from both sides now; the survivors of Cohl’s team were mounting a simultaneous assault.

  When the last hoop had exploded, the enemy starbreakers continued to fire, but wildly.

  Pirius nudged Bilin. “Take it out.”

  With practiced ease, Bilin pulled his surface-to-surface over his shoulder, rested it on the asteroid ground, sighted. When the weapon fired there was no recoil. A bright blue monopole shell shot across the ground, less than a meter above the dirt, tracking a dead straight line.

  The shell hit the emplacement. That construction-material wall buckled and broke, like skin bursting. Inside the structure Pirius glimpsed hulking machinery. All the troopers poured their fire through the breach in the wall, until the machines slumped and failed. Still the starbreaker mounts on the roof continued to fire, but they spat erratically, their aim ever more wild.

  Bilin stood up and whooped. “Nice work, Service Corps!”

  Pirius snapped, “Get down, you idiot!”

  Bilin grinned, and the out-of-control Xeelee starbreaker severed his head, clean at the neck.

  The bombardment curtain was now far away, and Pirius could see no starbreaker light. But still the ground shook, still that deep shuddering worked into his nerves. It took a lot of courage to cross the last bit of open ground to the Xeelee emplacement.

  Cohl and her people were already here. They had taken shelter beneath a wall that seemed to have melted and curled over on itself. On the far side of the wall, away from the huddling humans, the ruined alien machines slumped, as if sleeping.

  Of Pirius’s team, only he had survived, but three of Cohl’s team lived: Cohl herself and the two Tilis. So four of the seven who had come to the trench of corpses were left; in the last couple of minutes another three had died.


  Cohl had taken a shot to her leg. Her suit had turned rigid and glowed orange as its rudimentary medical facilities tried to stabilize her. There was nothing Pirius could do for her.

  Tili One was worse. She had some kind of chest wound. Tili Three cradled her sister’s head on her lap, her mouth round with shock. Pirius saw that to be left alone, to lose both her sisters, was literally unimaginable for this triplet.

  Pirius took his last comm post from his back, stuck it in the ground, and set up a repeater signal. He said to Cohl, “If anybody’s left, they’ll come here. Make the others wait in the shelter.” Then he stood up, hefting a starbreaker, and peered out of the ruins of the emplacement.

  Cohl asked, “Where are you going?”

  “To the factory. It’s only two, three hundred meters from here. It’s the pickup point, remember. I’ll leave a marker to lead the stretcher crews here.”

  Cohl clearly didn’t want him to go, but just as clearly she saw the necessity. “Be careful.”

  He crawled out of the ruins of the emplacement, out into the open. He moved cautiously, as he had been taught. He ducked from ridge to crater to trench to foxhole, no more than ten, twenty meters at a time. It was slow going, and exhausting. The condition of his skinsuit got worse quickly; perhaps it was damaged. The air grew increasingly foul, his faceplate so enclosing he felt as if he was choking, and his mouth and throat grew so dry they were painful.

  It took him half an hour to cross two hundred meters.

  Maybe such caution wasn’t necessary; he hadn’t seen the glow of a starbreaker since the emplacement mount had finally been shut down. But after what had happened to Bilin he wasn’t about to take a chance now.

  When he reached the site of the factory, he only knew he was at the right location because his visor displays told him so. There was no factory left: no landing pad, no power plant, no surface tracks, no machinery. Save for a bit of smashed wall jutting at an angle from the dirt, and a line of white dust that might have marked a foundation, there was nothing here but more broken ground. He saw no sign that anybody else had been here recently, none of the thousands he supposed had been dropped with this target as their objective. Perhaps the Xeelee had destroyed it, or perhaps humans had, or perhaps it had been leveled by the barrage. The artillery was supposed to have spared the factories, which were the objective of the operation; but then the barrage was meant to do many things it had failed to do.

  Pirius built a small cairn of bits of rubble and set a marker on it, with an indication of where the others were sheltering. He felt quite cold, without emotion; perhaps that would come later.

  He looked ahead, to the asteroid’s horizon. The bombardment continued, but far away now. The ground was full of bodies, the relics of previous assaults, and where the shells landed the bodies were hurled up by the explosions. The bodies rose up and tumbled in the dust before falling slowly down to the ground again. It was very strange to huddle there with his dry mouth and his stinking skinsuit, watching those bodies going up and down.

  He shook himself alert. He made his slow, cautious way back to the ruined emplacement, where Cohl and the others were waiting.

  When he got there Tili Three was weeping, utterly inconsolable. Her sister had died in her arms.

  Chapter 21

  The corvette completed its final FTL hop. Suddenly Pluto and Charon hovered before Pirius Red, twin planets that had ballooned out of nothing.

  Nilis flinched and threw his hands up. “My eyes! They might have warned us.”

  Pirius had spent his life training for combat in space. He showed no reaction before the soft old Commissary; he was much too proud for that. But he felt it too. After all, they were both products of a billion years of common evolution at the bottom of a gravity well, and when whole worlds appeared out of nowhere, something deep and ancient inside him quailed.

  The twin worlds’ forms were visibly distorted from the spherical, for they were close to each other. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto diameters; Earth’s Moon was by comparison thirty of its parent’s diameters away from Earth. It was an authentic double planet. This strange little system was dimly lit by a remote pinpoint sun, and the faintness of the light gave the two worlds a sense of dreaminess, of unreality. But the worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue.

  Nilis commented absently on the colors. “That’s to do with a difference in surface composition. Much more water ice on Charon’s surface … it’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it, Ensign?”

  “Yes, sir.” So it was.

  They had come here in search of the “gravastar” technology, hints of which Nilis had dug out of the Archive on Mars. Pirius peered at the double world, wondering what he was going to have to confront here before they got what they wanted.

  A Virtual swirled before them, coalescing from a cloud of blocky pixels. It was a short, plump man dressed in the drab costume of a Commissary. His belly was large, his legs short, his shaven head round and smooth. The Virtual image was projected clumsily, and the little man seemed to be floating a few centimeters above the floor.

  When he saw Nilis and Pirius, this figure barked a nervous laugh, and small hands fluttered before him. “Welcome, welcome! Welcome to Pluto-Charon, and our facility. My name is Draq. You must be Commissary Nilis—and are you the ensign from the Front? I’ve watched all your Virtuals.”

  Pirius had seen some of these. They were cartoonish renderings of Pirius Blue’s maneuvers around the magnetar, produced for popular consumption by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Pirius didn’t recognize much of himself in the lantern-jawed, shaven-headed, Doctrine-spouting caricature that shared his name. “Don’t believe everything you see, sir,” he said. “And besides, the whole episode has been edited out of the timeline. It won’t happen.”

  “Oh, but that hardly matters, does it? In the Library of Futures that sort of editing goes on all the time. But I’ve always thought that potential heroism is as admirable as actualized.”

  Nilis broke in. “Draq, you say? You’re in charge here?”

  Draq blustered. “Yes and no! There are very few of us curators, you see, Commissary Nilis, and we have been here rather a long time. Things are, well, informal.” His hands fluttered again, and the Virtual drifted until it collided silently with the hull, and pixels flared across his round back. “You’ll have to forgive my excitement. We don’t get many visitors.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Nilis said dryly, “since your facility doesn’t officially exist.”

  Draq pulled a mock-solemn face. “It is odd, I admit, to be a legal paradox! But the work is fascinating enough to compensate, believe me.”

  Pirius felt a tightening of his gut, a subtle shifting of the universe around him as the corvette’s drive cut in. Pluto-Charon slid silently across his field of view.

  Draq said, “I have requested your crew to bring you down at our spaceport at Christy. Oh, we’re so excited!” He blurred, and crumbled out of existence.

  Pirius said, “Commissary, what kind of place is this?”

  “Wait and see, Ensign. Wait and see.”

  The final moments of the descent were unremarkable. Pirius glimpsed a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon, but as Christy itself approached the flitter flew over ravines and ridges. Here, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer.

  “Christy,” a very archaic name, turned out to refer to what the corvette’s pilots called the “sub-Charon point” on Pluto. This bit of ground was unique in Sol system. Like Earth’s Moon, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days these worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly. Within Sol’s domain, Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked; they danced like lovers.

  And so this place, Christy, was forever suspended directly beneath the
looming bulk of the giant moon, and the feeble geological energies of these small worlds had been focused here.

  The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.

  They arrived in a dome that was all but transparent. Charon, suspended directly overhead, was visible through the dome’s scuffed surface.

  Draq was here in person. As agitated as before, he bustled up, grinning, as Nilis and Pirius approached. Eight more people stood behind him. Some, smoother-faced, might have been female, but they all looked alike to Pirius, round-faced and potbellied.

  Draq’s robes were clearly old, heavily repaired, and he smelled stale. “Welcome, welcome again. We’re delighted you have visited us, and we’re ready to assist you any way we can… .” As the little man chattered on, Pirius wondered how true that was; Draq must be concerned his covert facility had even been noticed. His colleagues gathered around the Commissary like infants around a cadre leader. They reminded Pirius of the tiny isolated community on Port Sol: these characters weren’t so far from the sun, but they seemed even odder.

  But they weren’t paying any attention to Pirius. He walked toward the dome’s clear wall and gazed out at Pluto.

  There were clouds above him, wispy cirrus, occluding bone-white stars: they were aerosol clusters, according to Nilis’s briefing material, suspended in the atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines—although perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting away from Christy. Sol was a point of light, low on the horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cloud. The inner system was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Pirius to cover with his palm. It was strange to think that that unprepossessing blur had contained all of man’s history before the first pioneers had risked their lives by venturing out to the rim of Sol system, and beyond.