Pirius slowly pieced together an understanding of this place.
Rocks were an essential element in most attacks on Xeelee concentrations; they provided cover, resources, and soaked up enemy firepower. But while most Rocks were purposefully deflected onto their required trajectories, Orion Rock, and a number of others, had natural orbits that took them into useful positions in the Core without deflection. So they could be used as cover, to mount covert operations.
But as the Core’s geography spanned light-years, travel times were painfully slow. The planners behind this place had been forced to think ahead, across no less than a thousand years—for that was how long Orion Rock would have to travel before it was in a position to be useful.
Nilis said gravely, “This is the scale of this war, Pirius. Orion Rock is like a generation starship sent to war: forty, perhaps fifty generations doomed to these dark tunnels, all the possibilities of their lives sacrificed to one goal, a strike on the Xeelee, a single assault that might be carried out in their children’s time, or their children’s children.
“A thousand years, though. On preOccupation Earth, a thousand years was a long time: time enough for empires to rise and fall, time enough for history. To us it is just a checkmark on a war planner’s chart!”
As the troops dug and marched and played at maneuvers, their mouths moved in unison, Pirius saw. They were singing again. But, thanks to some fault in the systems, he couldn’t hear their song.
They had been assigned a hangar, a huge one, beneath that paved-over crater where they had landed. Pirius went to inspect it. The hangar was big enough for a hundred greenships, let alone fifteen, and it was fully equipped with repair and maintenance facilities. Crisscrossed by walkways, full of hovering bots, the hangar was fully pressurized, although sections could be opened to vacuum when necessary. The working areas had been kept at microgravity—greenships were built for lightness, and were too frail to support their own weight under full gravity—but the floor and walkways were laced with inertial adjustors. Brightly lit by hovering globe lamps, it was a stunning facility by any standards.
But it didn’t have the feel of a workplace. It was too clean, too orderly. It didn’t even smell right; there was no electric ozone stink, or tang of lubricants, or the hot burning smell of metal that had been exposed to vacuum. It was like a museum; a place where you looked at greenships, rather than where you got your hands dirty working on them.
Pirius joined Enduring Hope, his ground crew leader. But Hope was accompanied everywhere by Eliun of the Guild of Engineers and a couple of that worthy’s aides. Since he had been outmaneuvered back on Arches, Eliun had barely let Hope out of his sight.
The party watched as their precious greenships, crudely modified, nestled into their graving docks.
Eliun punched Pirius in the shoulder, none too gently. “Look at that!” he said. “Pilot, these docks were built more than a thousand years ago. These greenships, on the other hand, are barely five years old—some of them younger than that. And yet dock and ship fit together hand in glove, every surface contoured to match, every interface locking, just as these ships could be lodged in any similar dock across the Galaxy. And why? Because of the Guild: I am talking about uniformity, sir, uniformity on galactic scales of space and time. How do you imagine such a war can be fought without this epic sameness?”
Pirius was short on sleep and overstressed. “Engineer Eliun, I don’t know anything about procurement policy. You’ll have to talk to Commissary Nilis.” The Engineer wasn’t satisfied with that, but Pirius turned deliberately to Enduring Hope. “So what do you think?”
Hope shrugged. “Technically, the hangar’s perfect. But look at this.” He led Pirius to one of the graving docks, where the battered hulk of an Exultant greenship now rested. He ran his bare hand over the massive cradle of fused asteroid rock, metal, and polymer. “It’s worn,” Hope said, wondering. “It’s the same everywhere. Every bit of equipment in this place is worn smooth, until you can see your face in it. For a thousand years they’ve done nothing but polish everything in sight.” Hope grinned nervously. “This is the strangest place I’ve ever seen.”
Pirius grunted. “Well, I don’t care about the last thousand years. All I care about is the next twenty-four hours, because at the end of it I want this place set up for our operations. Now. What about the cannon gear? Do you think you’ll have to cut through that roof to get it in here? …”
They walked on, talking and planning. Engineer Eliun tailed them for a while, but Pirius didn’t acknowledge him further, and after a time Eliun gave up and stomped away.
After the first twenty-four hours, they had achieved only a fraction of what Pirius had demanded. He called a crisis meeting in Nilis’s office.
Boote’s staff were an uninspiring bunch, soft, flabby-looking administrators and clerks who seemed to have no ambition save to replace the Captain one day. Boote at bay, though, had a glint in his eye, and Pirius had the feeling that he had a bit of steel in him, and would put up a fight.
It was yet another obstruction, just as they had encountered all the way from Earth. Pirius was hugely weary, impatient to get back to his ships, and he felt like biting somebody’s head off. The only thing he wanted, he kept reminding himself, was to get the job done.
He turned to Enduring Hope. “Engineer, why don’t you sum up how far we’ve got in twenty-four hours?”
Hope consulted a data desk. He looked as ticked off as Pirius felt. “The priorities are, one, setting up a manufactory on the far side of the Rock for producing the point black holes we will need for the cannon; two, modifying the hangar for our upgraded greenships.” He snapped the data desk down on the tabletop. “So far we’ve argued a lot, and we’ve laid down the foundations for the manufactory. And that’s it.”
Pirius said, “I wanted to be flying by”—he checked the Virtual chronometer that hovered over Pila’s head—“two hours ago. You all committed to that yesterday. What’s gone wrong?”
Hope took the bait. He jabbed a finger at Captain Boote. “It’s those people. They block everything we propose. Or they defer it for discussion further up the chain of command.” His tone, dripping with sarcasm, was deeply insolent. “They’re blocking us, Pirius.”
Captain Boote sputtered. “I won’t be spoken to like that!”
“Quite right,” Nilis murmured. “Why don’t you tell us your perception of the problem here, Captain?”
The Captain turned his magnificent hairless head to Pirius. “Squadron Leader, we support your project. That’s our function. But you must recognize the practical difficulties. For a thousand years—a thousand years, sir!—we have worked and polished and honed this base until it is perfectly fit for its purpose, which is to strike a great blow against the enemy. Now you are asking us to change all that. To rip holes in our walls—to install equipment so new it won’t even interface to our kit!” He held up his hands. “Of course we must accept the challenge of the new. But all I’m asking for is time; while recognizing the pressure of your schedule, a measured and thoughtful response …”
He talked smoothly, liquidly, one sentence blending into another so seamlessly that Pirius couldn’t see a way to cut into the flow. And he was so plausible that after a while Pirius found himself helplessly agreeing. Of course these new things couldn’t be done here; what other point of view was possible?
In the end Nilis managed to break into the monologue. “If I may say so, Captain, I think there is a failure of imagination here. You and your antecedents have been here so long, loyally following the dictates laid down long ago, that I don’t think any of you quite grasp that some day all this must end.”
Boote’s mouth dropped open. But then he shook his head. “If it is my generation that has the privilege of fulfilling the mission of Orion Rock, I will grasp the opportunity with both hands …” Once again he talked on. But it sounded like another rehearsed speech, and Pirius saw that he himself didn’t believe a word he was saying.
When they had him upright and back on his chair again, he had his hand clamped over a spreading patch of blood on his upper right arm. His face was florid with anger and fear.
Nilis was shocked into pallid silence. Pila hadn’t so much as flinched when the shot was fired; looking faintly annoyed, she brushed blood spots off her sleeve. Hope and Torec were trying hard not to laugh.
Boote pointed a shaking finger at Marta. “You shot me!”
“A flesh wound,” she said. “A half hour in sick bay will fix that.”
“I’ll have the hide flogged off your back for this.”
“That’s your privilege, sir,” Marta said evenly. “But I thought I should introduce a little reality into the discussion. This is real, Captain. The sky really is falling.”
Pirius stared at her. Then, as the silence lengthened, he realized it was his cue. He turned to Boote. “Captain, I’m not in a position to adjourn the meeting. Time is too short. I’ll ensure Captain Marta answers any charges you care to raise later. Commander Darc, would you accept her custody for now?”
Darc inclined his head ironically.
“Captain Boote, you need to be excused to get that graze seen to. In the meantime, who would you nominate to represent you in the continuing negotiations?”
After that, things went much better.
Chapter 49
The trouble started in the most innocuous, most mundane of ways: problems with waste.
For many quagmite kinds, eliminated waste was in the form of compressed matter, quarks and gluons wadded together into baryons—protons and neutrons. You could even find a few simple nuclei, if you dug around in there. But the universe was still too hot for such structures to be stable long, and the waste decayed quickly, returning its substance to the wider quagma bath.
Now, as the universe cooled, things changed. The mess of sticky proton-neutron cack simply wouldn’t dissolve as readily as it once had. Great clumps of it clung together, stubbornly resistant, and had to be broken up to release their constituent quarks. But the energy expenditure was huge.
Soon this grew to be an overwhelming burden, the primary task of civilizations. Citizens voiced concerns; autocrats issued commands; angry votes were taken on councils. There were even wars over waste dumping. But the problem only got worse.
And, gradually, the dread truth was revealed.
The cooling universe was approaching another transition point, another phase change. The ambient temperature, steadily falling, would soon be too low to force the baryons to break up—and the process of combination would be one way. Soon all the quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of life, would be locked up inside baryons.
The trend was inescapable, its conclusion staggering: this extraordinary implosion would wither the most bright, the most beautiful of the quagmite ecologies, and nobody would be left even to mourn.
As the news spread across the inhabited worlds, a cosmic unity developed. Love and hate, war and peace were put aside in favor of an immense research effort to find ways of surviving the impending baryogenetic catastrophe.
A solution was found. Arks were devised: immense artificial worlds, some as much as a meter across, their structures robust enough to withstand the collapse. It was unsatisfactory; the baryogenesis could not be prevented, and almost everything would be lost in the process. But these ships of quagma would sail beyond the end of time, as the quagmites saw it, and in their artificial minds they would store the poetry of a million worlds. It was better than nothing.
As time ran out, as dead baryons filled up the universe and civilizations crumbled, the quagma arks sailed away. But mere survival wasn’t enough for the last quagmites. They wanted to be remembered.
Chapter 50
On Orion Rock, time flowed strangely for Pirius Red.
The days seemed to last forever, but his nights seemed very short. And the sum of those long days, as they accumulated into weeks, amounted to no time at all.
Pirius hammered home the ten-week target every time he spoke to his crews, and as the training schedule was compressed and the technical development work accelerated, the effort everybody put in was more and more frantic. But the calendars wore down, regardless.
Suddenly deadline day was here.
And it went, with no word from the Grand Conclave. One day passed, two.
Pirius figured they may as well use the time productively. The flight crews and ground staff continued their training. By now, as well as flying the modified ships on endless low-level loops past hapless target Rocks, they were running full-scale simulations with flight crews and a fully staffed operations room, everybody working together to iron out procedures. Commander Darc’s experience was vital in this—and to Pirius’s surprise, Pila proved observant and helpful, pointing out ways to improve the information flow between ships and the base. Even she seemed finally to be committing herself to the great effort.
All this was useful, as far as it went. Behind the scenes, though, those in the know became increasingly anxious. Even now it was possible that the Grand Conclave would, for its own inscrutable reasons, withhold final permission to fly the mission.
Up to now Nilis had remained remarkably calm. His design of the mission had been largely conceptual—“a mere data-desk sketch,” he said—and now that they were down to operational details there was generally little he could add. He kept himself busy with his continuing analysis of the true nature of Chandra. He said he wanted to make sure they understood what it was they were attacking before they “blew it to smithereens”—although he continued to complain about obstruction and a baffling lack of cooperation from the military authorities who were his hosts. “It’s almost as if they don’t want me to learn about Chandra!” he told a distracted Pirius.
But after the deadline expired, Nilis became increasingly agitated. He started to make lurid threats about how he would return to Earth and storm his way into the sessions of the Grand Conclave itself.
Then, two days after the formal deadline, an “Immediate Message” was handed to Pirius. It had come through the office of Marshal Kimmer, and was signed by the Plenipotentiary for Total War herself: “Operation PRIME RADIANT. Execute at first available opportunity.”
That was all. Pirius read the note again, hardly able to believe what he was looking at. He said, “Suddenly we are no longer a project but an operation.”
Pila was watching him, her beautiful, cold face intent. She seemed fascinated by his reaction. “How do you feel?”
“Relieved,” he said. Then, “Terrified.” He glanced at a chronometer. It was evening. First available opportunity. One more full day to prepare, then; after that, they would fly at reveille. “Thirty-six hours,” he breathed. “We go in thirty-six hours.” He stood up. “Come on, Pila. We’ve work to do.”
That night he called in Pirius Blue and This Burden Must Pass, his flight commanders, for a final operations meeting. With Pila at his side, he locked the door of his office, set up a security shield, and showed them the order. Red watched Burden carefully, still not quite trusting him. But neither he nor Blue showed shock, surprise, or fear. Maybe they didn’t quite believe it, Red thought.
At this point it was their job to go over every detail of the mission, and to talk through tactics regarding the resistance they might encounter, and how they would recover from any foul-ups at various points in the mission profile. After they were done, Pila would draft the final Operation Order that would be disseminated to the flight crews.
As they got to work, Red said, “Maybe this session will be quick. We’ve war-gamed this a dozen times.”
“You’d be surprised,” Burden said dryly. “The i
mminence of real action has a way of focusing the mind.”
Pirius Blue was watching his younger self curiously. “How are you feeling? You haven’t flown a combat mission before.”
Red said, irritated, “Yes, I’m the rookie; thanks for reminding me.”
“That may help,” Blue said awkwardly. “I mean it. There’s no substitute for going through it for real. When you lead crews into a situation where they’re likely to buy it, it frightens you—the responsibility—and that gets mixed up with your own personal fear. You can’t help it. It’s stomach-churning. But experience is one thing; the residual shock is another. You never quite recover. You have enough on your plate today. It may be better that you’re fresh.”
Red said, “I’m not frightened of dying. I’m not even frightened of the responsibility for other people’s lives.”
“But you’re frightened of screwing up,” said Burden.
“Yes,” Red admitted.
“Don’t worry,” Blue said. “We’re at your side.” He sat stiff in his chair, and he couldn’t meet Red’s eyes.
Red knew this was the closest Blue could bring himself to pledging loyalty to his own younger, less experienced, overpromoted self. It would have to do, he thought.
Red pulled a data desk toward him. “Let’s get on with it,” he said gruffly. “First, the launch sequence. We will go in two waves… .”
The next morning, as he began his day, Enduring Hope immediately knew something was up.
He made his usual inspection walk through the bomb dump, a hangar that had been modified as a store for the point black holes. And he walked into the big main hangar, where fifteen heavily engineered, thoroughly worn-out greenships were being treated with tender loving care by his technicians. Everywhere he went, he sensed a heightening of activity, and of tension. For one thing there were more flight crew around than usual, working with the ground crew on the ships they would fly. But there was more to this atmosphere than that. He’d been through this before, back on the other side of the magnetar incident that had cut his life in two, when he had flown his one and only combat mission.
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