Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Everybody understood the need for security. Generally you had no idea until a day or so before the launch of a mission exactly what your target was to be. This mission had been no different—save only for the novel bits of technology they all had to become used to. As always, there had been much speculation. The advantages of the new superfast processors and the formidable black-hole cannon were obvious. But nobody could figure out what the grav shield, difficult and temperamental, was actually for. Nor could anybody come up with a convincing target. It was sure to be something big, though—big and therefore exceptionally dangerous. But all this was scuttlebutt.

  This morning, though, it was clear that things had changed: from somewhere in the higher echelons, it was being said, orders had arrived to proceed. Right now Pirius Red was probably briefing the senior staff, and everybody else was supposed to be in the dark. But it was astonishing how these things got out, how people picked up on almost imperceptible cues, if it really mattered to them—and this was an issue of life or death.

  Hope knew his duty, anyhow. He was going to make sure each of these dinged-up greenships was ready to do whatever its crew demanded of it, if he had to crawl into the guts of every one of them himself. He went to work with a will.

  In the middle of the morning, Virtual images of Pirius Red appeared around the hangar, summoning the flight crews to a general briefing in one of the big conference rooms. The crews gathered in little knots, talking quietly, and began to drift out of the hangar.

  It’s real, Hope thought; it really is happening. He felt an odd pull. It wasn’t so long since he had been flight crew himself.

  He walked quickly around the hangar. Work was going well. In fact, he told himself, if he hung around watching over his technicians’ shoulders, he would get in the way. He could be spared for a couple of hours.

  So, as the last crews walked down the short corridor to Officer Country, Hope followed them.

  Torec was on security duty at the door of the conference room. Hope found his way blocked by her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “The briefing.” Through the open door Hope glimpsed the thirty-odd flight crew milling, finding seats. They all seemed to be here, both primary crews and reserves. On a dais at the front sat the two editions of Pirius, Burden, Commissary Nilis, and others. As the officers prepared their briefing material, Virtual images flickered tantalizingly over their heads.

  “Flight crew only,” Torec said. “I can’t let you in.”

  “Come on, Torec,” he whispered. “I used to fly, remember?”

  “I don’t know why you want to be here.”

  Neither did Hope, quite. He looked into the room. “Because it’s history.”

  “Yes,” she said. “There is that. Okay.” She lifted her arm. “But if anybody spots you I’ll say you slugged me.”

  He grinned his thanks and hurried into the room.

  The atmosphere in there was even stranger than out in the hangars. The tension in the air was like ozone. All the flight crew seemed to be talking at once, and the air was full of noise. But the talk was meaningless, just banter, ways to drain off stress. Hope spotted pilot Jees, who sat a little apart, as always, like a half-silvered statue; with no apparent nerves, she watched the platform and waited for the show to start.

  Hope found space at the back, between two burly navigators. Of course everybody in this audience knew who he was, but they had all worked with him on their ships and seemed to accept him.

  Pirius Red stood up on the platform. He raised his arms for silence, but he needn’t have; the hubbub died away instantly. Pirius looked out over the crews, a complex expression on his face. “You know why we’re here.” He spoke without amplification, and his voice, gruff with tension, was precise, determined. “Operation Prime Radiant is on.” There was a rumble of appreciation at that; one or two stamped their feet. “I know it’s still not much more than a name for most of you, but that’s about to change.

  “I’ve already had briefings with the flight commanders, and representative specialists—pilots, navigators, engineers—and we’ve put it all together, as best we can. Commissary Nilis here will give you an overview of the objectives and strategy, and then Blue, Burden, and I will go through the operation in more detail. At the end of this briefing you’ll be given copies of the draft Operation Order by the adjutant. After that we’ll split for briefings in your specialist groups. We have more detailed Virtuals of the mission profile, including sims if you’ve the time to sit through them.

  “At every stage I want you to answer back. What we’re going to attempt is something nobody’s done before. So if you spot a screwup waiting to happen, or can see a better way to do things, say so. At the end of the day the adjutant and I will pull all that feedback into a fresh draft of the Op Order, and we’ll hold another update session in here. Is that clear?”

  There was no reply. He paced, as if suddenly uncertain, and gazed out at them; the crews watched him silently.

  Pirius said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do tomorrow, in a sentence. We’re going to strike a blow at the Xeelee from which they cannot recover. And I’ll tell you something else. Tomorrow is our best chance, but it’s not the only chance. If you screw up tomorrow, you’ll go back out there as soon as we can patch up the ships, and patch you up, and do it again. And you’ll keep on going out until the job is done. So if you don’t want to go back, do it right first time.” He glared at them, as if daring them to defy him. Then, to silence, he sat down.

  Enduring Hope glanced around cautiously. Pirius wasn’t the kind of leader who cracked jokes or expected you to applaud him. But Hope saw no frowns, no pursed lips, no skepticism. If you were a flyer you didn’t expect coddling. These crews knew Pirius by now, and his older self, and they respected him. They were ready to follow him, wherever he was about to lead them. Lethe, Hope thought, he would follow Pirius, either of them, just as he had before, if given the chance.

  Nilis was next up. The Commissary, bulky and much older than the flight crews arrayed before him, was dressed in a black Commission robe that was frayed at the cuffs. He fumbled with his data desks and coughed to clear his throat. Nilis seemed a lot more nervous than Pirius had been—or maybe it was just that Pirius hid it better.

  Nilis began by summarizing the novel technical elements of the mission: the grav shield, the CTC processor, the black-hole cannon weapon. “That’s as much as you know, I suppose,” he said. “That and, as Pirius said, the name of the mission: Operation Prime Radiant. Now I can tell you that the name refers to the most significant Prime Radiant of all: the base of the Xeelee in this Galaxy.” There was an audible gasp at that. He looked out at them, squinting a little, as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces. “I think you understand me. After three thousand years of inconclusive siege warfare, we—you—are going to strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, at the supermassive black hole known as Chandra, the center of all Xeelee operations.”

  Enduring Hope felt numb. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

  Nilis began to go through a bewildering array of Virtuals. Gradually the outline of the mission became a bit clearer.

  Very shortly, after a billion years of drifting down the arm of the Baby Spiral, Orion Rock would erupt into the open. Emerging deep inside the Cavity, this heavily armed Rock was an immediate threat to the foe, who would surely attack. But Orion was a diversion. While the local Xeelee firepower spent itself on the Rock’s defenses, Exultant Squadron would slip away.

  The greenships would fly deeper into the Cavity behind their grav shield, whose purpose, Nilis now revealed, was to thwart the Xeelee’s ability to gather FTL foreknowledge about the mission. Later, the CTC processors would be used so they could penetrate the Xeelee’s final layers of defenses. And then the black-hole cannon would be used to strike at Chandra itself, and the Xeelee concentrations that swarmed there.

  As Nilis spoke on, the crews began to mutter. Hope knew what everybody
was thinking. It was well known that nobody had flown so close to the Prime Radiant and lived to talk about it; even Pirius Blue hadn’t gone in that deep. All this novel technology was hardly reassuring either. A crew liked to fly with proven kit, not with the product of some boffin’s overheated brow.

  But I would go, Hope thought helplessly.

  Nilis got through his technical Virtuals. He said, “Your commanders will take you through the operational aspects of the mission in detail. But I want to tell you why it’s so important to strike at the Prime Radiant—no matter what the cost.”

  He spoke of strategic theory. The Galaxy was full of military targets, he said, full of Xeelee emplacements of one kind or another. But those which were “economically upstream” in the flow of resources and information were more valuable. “It is cheaper, simple as that, to strike at the dockyard where greenships are constructed, to destroy it in a single mission, than to run a hundred missions chasing the ships themselves.” He brought up images of the Prime Radiant, heavily enhanced. Somehow the Xeelee used the massive black hole as a factory for their nightfighters and other technologies, he said, and as their central information processor. He spoke of the damage he hoped black-hole projectiles would do to such mighty machines as must exist around Chandra.

  Hope thought it was very strange to hear this obviously gentle man talk of such profound destruction.

  Nilis closed down his last Virtuals. He faced his audience, hands on hips. “You may say to me, why must this be done? And why now? Why you? After all the war is not being lost. We and the Xeelee have held each other at bay for three thousand years. Why should it fall to you to strike this blow—and, I’m afraid for many of you, to pay the price?

  “I’ll tell you why. Because, after twenty thousand years of the Third Expansion, the majority of mankind are soldiers—and most are still children when they die. Most people don’t grow old. They don’t even grow old enough to understand what is happening to them. To our soldiers war is a game, whose lethality they never grasp. This is what we are: this is what we have made ourselves. And the numbers are terrible: in a century, more people die in this war than all the human beings who ever lived on Earth before mankind first reached the stars.”

  He stalked around the dais. He was an old, overweight man walking back and forth, almost comically intense. “The Prime Radiant is central to everything the Xeelee do in this Galaxy. To strike at Chandra will be as devastating to the Xeelee as if they turned their starbreaker beams on Earth itself. And that is what we will do. We will stop this war. And we will stop it now.”

  When he had finished speaking, there was a cold, stunned silence.

  Marshal Kimmer stood now; he had been seated among the flight crews, at the front of the room. He said simply, “I know that you will make this attack succeed. I know you will inflict a tremendous amount of damage. And I know, yes, that you will make history.” Where Nilis had been received in silence, Kimmer won a cheer. He finished, “The first launches will be at reveille tomorrow.” And with that he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

  When Pirius’s detailed briefing was over the crews dispersed quickly.

  Hope hurried to the hangar. There was much to be done. But word had already filtered back to the ground crews about the nature of the mission, and the atmosphere was dark and silent. It was like working in a morgue. But they got the job done anyhow.

  At the end of the day Enduring Hope went to find This Burden Must Pass.

  Burden was in a barracks, surrounded by a small circle of somber-faced flight crew—and not all of them were Friends. Hope joined the little circle, and listened to Burden’s gentle conversation of love and hope, fear and endurance, and the consoling transience of all things.

  But though his voice was steady, strain showed on Burden’s face, like a dark shadow.

  Chapter 51

  The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.

  And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei—although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each nucleus was bare.

  These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.

  For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.

  The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.

  At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.

  The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus-baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen—simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be—ought to be—vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.

  But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.

  The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium—three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.

  The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.

  With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.

  The universe was three minutes old.

  Chapter 52

  That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.

  He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.

  They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.

  Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.

  Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”

  �
��I didn’t know if I should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because …” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve changed. You always were full of depths, Torec… . And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”

  “You’re the same person you were before you left.”

  “Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for two years after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But you never lived through those two years, did you?”

  “I did,” she murmured. “A copy of me did. But that copy has gone, or never existed—gone to wherever deleted timelines go… . It’s so strange, Pirius Blue.”

  “I know. And sad.”

  “Sad? Oh. Because I’m not your Torec.” She snuggled back down to his chest. “But there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? So we may as well get on with things.”

  “Get on?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  Pirius Blue laughed. “As Nilis would probably say, we haven’t evolved to cope with time-looped relationships.”

  “I know what your real problem is,” she said. “And it’s got nothing to do with time paradoxes.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’ve been with him. Your evil time-clone rival.”

  He stifled a laugh. “He thinks the same about me.”

  “Well, you both resent each other. But you’re not the same. I think he’s in awe of you.”

  “But he’s your Pirius.”

  “I don’t think it works like that. You’re growing apart, becoming different people. But you’re still both you.”