Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “Does he love you?”

  She sighed. It was the first time either Pirius had used that word to her. “You know I love you. Both of you.”

  He stroked her back, a spot between her shoulder blades where her skin felt like the smoothest, softest surface he had ever touched. “It’s a mess. A stupid triangle. I don’t know how we will sort it out.”

  “Wait until the mission is over,” she said.

  And see if any of us come back—that was what she left unsaid.

  After a time she drew away from him.

  “You’re going to him,” he said.

  “He needs me, too. And I need him.”

  “I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

  When she had gone, Blue rolled into the part of the bunk still warm from her body, and tried to sleep.

  Two hours before reveille, Cohl was already on the surface of Orion Rock. In her massive, armored skinsuit, she was propped up in a foxhole with the members of her platoon around her. The monopole-cannon emplacement they were ordered to protect was a couple of hundred meters away, a complicated silhouette against a shining sky.

  As it had been since its chthonic birth, this Rock was still immersed in the glowing molecular clouds of the North Arm of the Baby Spiral. But if she looked ahead, she could see a gaggle of stars through the mist, like light globes hanging in smoggy air. That was IRS 16, the cluster of very crowded, very bright stars that coalesced out of the Baby’s infalling material as it poured into the crowded space that surrounded Chandra.

  Orion Rock itself was probably almost as old as the Galaxy itself, and for all that time it had been swimming helplessly along this lane of gas. For a thousand years humans had dug their way into this Rock. Now both those immense intervals of time were coming to a close, for, in two hours from now, this Rock would burst through the last veils of cloud that separated it from IRS 16. It was hard to believe that Cohl should be here at a moment like this.

  What was even harder to believe was that at least half her platoon were asleep, and the rest were eating. But that was life in the infantry. Your priority was eating and sleeping, and you took whatever chance you had to do either—even now, on the brink of battle.

  Cohl was an ambassador. Her mission, given her by Pirius Red, was to ensure that the two halves of the operation—the Navy fliers who would take the greenships to Chandra and the Army infantry down here on the Rock—communicated properly, shared the same objectives, and worked well together when the crunch came. That was what she had been working toward in the weeks since she had been brought here from Quin.

  The senior staff and civilians were going to evacuate Orion before the action, and go back to Arches. Even Captain Boote the Forty-Third had chosen not to stick around to witness this climax of his beloved Rock’s destiny. Pirius Blue had pulled strings to ensure Cohl could go if she wanted to, but she couldn’t bear the thought of running out on the people she had worked with for so long. There was only one place she wanted to be—on the surface, waiting for the sky to fall in, along with the rest of the troopers. And so here she was.

  Blayle wasn’t asleep, though. Blayle, her platoon sergeant, was a good bit older than her, in his midtwenties. She could see his eyes on her, bright blue eyes visible behind his faceplate, a cold blue like the light of IRS 16.

  He asked, “How are you bearing up, Lieutenant?”

  “Fine,” she said uneasily. Her rank was basically honorary, and it made her uncomfortable.

  “I’m proud to be here,” he said, without affectation. “There’s a lot of tradition here on Orion.”

  “I know.”

  “My own birth cadre—Cadre 4677—is mentioned in the Rock’s first operational order, which is preserved in the archives. Of course we never knew what our mission would turn out to be. And nobody ever knew when it would end. But now it’s turned out that it’s me, my generation, who has the responsibility—no, the privilege—to be here at the climax.” He sighed. “A thousand years culminates here and now, in what I do today.”

  Blayle was a disciplined soldier and a good sergeant; as she had worked with this platoon she had learned to lean on him. But he was a thoughtful, soft-bodied, soft-spoken man who seemed to lack the spirit of camaraderie of some of the other troopers, the loyalty that impelled them to fight so hard. Rather, Blayle seemed to embrace the larger mission of Orion Rock, and had to argue himself into fighting. And, like most people on this Rock, Blayle was a combat rookie.

  “Might be best not to think too hard about that stuff, Sergeant. Combat is difficult enough without the feeling that forty generations are looking over your shoulder.”

  “Yes. What would Hama Druz say if he was here? Focus on the moment; the present is all that matters.”

  “He might say, shut your flapping mouth while some of us are trying to sleep,” somebody called, to a ripple of laughter.

  Cohl knew little about the mission of Exultant Squadron. What she did know and her platoon didn’t, however, was that all their elaborate preparations, all the lives that would be lost on this Rock today, were not even the point of the operation. After a thousand years of planning, preparation, and silent running, Orion Rock was to be sacrificed as a diversion. She wasn’t going to say a word about that.

  Cohl tried to relax, letting the Rock’s microgravity cushion her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the situation, to think back to less complicated times, when she had been just another trainee on Arches Base… .

  Even reveille sounded somber that morning.

  It didn’t make any difference to Enduring Hope, who hadn’t slept anyhow. He had spent those last hours checking and rechecking everything he could think of, but the novel systems grafted onto these wretched greenships were about as integrated as a third arm growing out of his own back, and he knew that the paltry weeks of developments, trials, and modifications had not been enough.

  What he was really scared of was that he might be responsible for the mission’s failure. He knew his crews felt the same. So they kept on working, right up until the moment the first flight crews began to arrive, trying to be absolutely sure that this mission wouldn’t screw up because of something they had missed.

  At last the crews of the first wave arrived. And Pila was with them. As the flyers clambered out of their little transporter, Pila stood to one side and began making checks on a data desk she carried. Nobody approached her.

  Everybody still found Pirius’s adjutant more than a little intimidating—this woman from Earth was cold, and strange. But her duties included such mundanity as ensuring that the crews had been served the breakfast they wanted, that the transports had been laid on correctly—a hundred tiny details to make sure that nothing got in the way of the crews doing their jobs. She carried out those duties with calm, invisible efficiency, and people had slowly granted her respect.

  Everybody knew a Ghost was flying this mission. Hope was relieved that it didn’t show up this morning.

  The crews, meanwhile, did what flight crews usually did. They allowed the techs to check over their suits, but ran double checks themselves—if you were flight, you never trusted ground crew with something like that. Some of them quizzed their engineers on the state of their ships, as if anything they could ask now would make a difference. Others indulged in various superstitions, such as walking around their ships, or kicking at their landing rails. One man vomited up his breakfast. A tech cleaned it up for him. The atmosphere remained tense, quiet.

  Hope saw one stocky pilot pull open the front of his skinsuit to squirt a jet of urine over his ship’s landing rail.

  “Pirius,” he called.

  The pilot turned, his face shielded by his visor. “I’m Blue, by the way, to save you making a fool of yourself.”

  “I knew it was one of you from the lumpy shape of your dick,” Hope said, walking over to him. “Where’s your clone?”

  Pirius pointed. Another copy of Pirius, in his own skinsuit but with a commander
’s red flashes on his shoulders, was working his way around the hangar, shaking hands, having a final word with his crews. “Red’s doing his job,” said Pirius Blue.

  “Just what you’d do,” Hope said.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to.”

  “I bunked into the briefing. I heard Nilis speak.”

  “Nilis, yes,” Blue said uncertainly. “What an oddball the man is. Red claims to understand him; I never will.” He regarded Hope. “I don’t think he gave us the truth about what he’s thinking, in that briefing.”

  “The truth?”

  “He has all these ideas about how Chandra is hosting antique life-forms, and if we were to keep on burrowing into it, we’d find more and more. He’s becoming fascinated with Chandra for its own sake, I think. Falling in love with the damn thing.”

  “How does that help us destroy it?”

  “It doesn’t,” Blue said. “You can’t control these Commissaries, though. We had better get the job done before he digs so far he comes up with a reason for us not to attack it in the first place.”

  “Pirius—” I know how scared you are, he thought. But he could never say such a thing.

  Blue held up his hand. “You know how it is. The fear goes away. I’ll be fine once I lift.”

  “I won’t be, though,” Hope said fervently.

  Pirius Blue grasped his hand briefly. “I wish you were flying with us.”

  “Me too.”

  “Just don’t steal my stuff until after I’ve lifted. Show some respect.” And with that, Blue turned and clambered up a short ladder to his cockpit.

  It took only minutes for the crews to load themselves into their blisters. The last maintenance hatches were closed, the last bomb trolley withdrawn. The ground crew pulled out of the hangar floor.

  The roof of the hangar cracked open, and the air vanished in a shiver of frost. The harsh blue light of the Galaxy’s heart flooded into the chamber, overwhelming the glow of the globe lamps that hovered around the ships.

  Hope watched from the hangar’s observation area. Here was Marshal Kimmer, and Captain Marta, and the reserve crews who weren’t making this flight, and others like Tili Three who hadn’t made the grade, and many, many of this strange base’s child-soldier inhabitants, all come to see the launches. Hope suspected that the military types longed to be in those ships, as he did, rather than be stuck here watching them leave. But he wondered how many were here because, morbidly, they expected these crews not to return.

  Pirius Red’s own ship was to be the first to lift. As they worked through their final preparation, the crew’s comm was piped into the observation areas.

  “Waiting for the red flag to power up sublight… . We’ve got a red, we’re clear.”

  “Start number three …”

  “Primed.”

  “Engage three …”

  The greenship raised itself a handsbreadth above its cradle. Hope could feel a pulse in the asteroid’s own inertial field as it tried to compensate for the shift in mass.

  “Pressure rising in the generators.”

  “Copy that. Watch the compensation for the bomb pod, Engineer.”

  “On it.”

  “Waiting on the green for takeoff, crew. Waiting on the green. Green acquired, we’re cleared.”

  As the greenship lifted, its main body bulkily laden with its unfamiliar technology, it wallowed a little.

  “Passing through the roof.”

  “Turn to port, port on my 129. Let’s give them a show, crew.”

  Beyond the hangar’s open roof, in clear space, the greenship spun once, twice, its three crew blisters whirling about the craft’s long axis, an exultant gesture. Then it squirted out of sight.

  There was a hand on Hope’s shoulder. It was Marshal Kimmer. “Fifteen hours,” the Marshal said. “Six hours out, three on station, six back. Then it will be over, one way or the other.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  All over the hangar now, the greenships were rising.

  Cohl hadn’t believed it was possible she would sleep. But she needed a nudge in her ribs from Blayle to jar her awake.

  When she glanced up at the sky, those shining gas clouds were burning away, and a shoal of bright blue stars, hot and crowded, swarmed above her. After billions of years of flight through the glowing clouds of the Northern Arm, Orion Rock, obeying the blind dictates of celestial mechanics, was at last emerging into the open. And for the humans who crawled over and beneath its surface, the moment of destiny was coming.

  Chapter 53

  The impoverished universe expanded relentlessly.

  Space was filled with a bath of radiation, reddening as the expansion stretched it, and by a thin fog of matter. Most of this was dark matter, engaged in its own slow chemistry. The baryonic matter—“light” matter—was a trace that consisted mostly of simple nuclei and electrons. Any atoms that formed, as electrons hopefully gathered around nuclei, were immediately broken up by the still-energetic radiation. Without stable atoms, no interesting chemistry could occur. And meanwhile the ionic mist scattered the radiation, so that the universe was filled with a pale, featureless glow. The cosmos was a bland, uninteresting place, endured with resentment by the survivors of gaudier eras.

  Nearly four hundred thousand years wore away, and the universe inflated to a monstrous size, big enough to have enclosed the Galaxy of Pirius’s time.

  Then the epochal cooling reached a point where the photons of the radiation soup were no longer powerful enough to knock electrons away from their nuclear orbits. Suddenly atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium, coalesced furiously from the mush of nuclei and electrons. Conversely, the radiation was no longer scattered: the new atomic matter was transparent.

  The universe went dark in an instant. It was perhaps the most dramatic moment since the birth of light itself, many eras past.

  To the survivors of earlier times, this new winter was still more dismaying than what had gone before. But every age had unique properties. Even in this desolate chill, interesting processes could occur.

  The new baryonic atoms were a mere froth on the surface of the deeper sea of dark matter. The dark stuff, cold and gravitating, gathered into immense wispy structures, filaments and bubbles and voids that spanned the universe. And baryonic matter fell into the dark matter’s deepening gravitational wells. There it split into whirling knots that split further into pinpoints, that collapsed until their interiors became so compressed that their temperatures matched that of the moment of nucleosynthesis.

  In the hearts of the young stars, nuclear fusion began. Soon a new light spread through the universe. The stars gathered into wispy hierarchies of galaxies and clusters and superclusters, all of it matching the underlying dark matter distribution.

  Stars were stable and long-lasting fusion machines, and in their hearts light elements were baked gradually into heavier ones: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When the first stars died, they scattered their heavy nuclei through space. These in turn were gathered into a second generation of stars, and a third—and from this new, dense material still more interesting objects formed, planets with rocky hearts, that swooped on unsteady orbits around the still-young stars.

  In these crucibles life evolved.

  Here, for instance, was the young Earth. It was a busy place. Its cooling surface was dotted with warm ponds in which a few hundred species of carbon-compound chemicals reacted furiously with each other, producing new compounds which in turn interacted in new ways. The networks of interactions quickly complexified to the point where autocatalytic cycles became possible, closed loops which promoted their own growth; and some of these autocatalytic cycles chanced upon feedback processes to make themselves stable; and, and …

  Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.

  Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their birth, and wondered where they had come from.

  It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impo
ssibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead. They thought that it was only now that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.

  But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished times before.

  Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.

  For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.

  Chapter 54

  Suspended over the glistening surface of Orion Rock, bathed in the fierce light of the Cavity’s crowded stars, Pirius Red formed up his squadron.

  Jees was the shield-master, of course, his best pilot—with a Silver Ghost in her engineer’s blister. Pirius Red himself tucked in just behind and to Jees’s starboard; Commander Darc, the backup shield-master, took the matching position to port. The rest of the ships took their places behind him, one by one calling off, making a formation that after all the training had become as familiar as the inside of Pirius’s own head.

  Pirius felt a peculiar, nervous thrill. Despite the training, this was the first time the squadron, his squadron, had formed up to fly in anger—the first and, if it went well, the last.

  But he was too busy for such reflections. Scout drones were already returning warnings of a Xeelee response to the Rock’s sudden emergence from the spiral-arm clouds. If the squadron didn’t get out of here now it wouldn’t be going anywhere, and the preparation would have been for nothing.

  He went around the loop one last time. The familiar voices called in from the ships: Jees herself, Darc, Torec, This Burden Must Pass, even his own older self, Pirius Blue, all ready to go.

  He called, “Squadron. Go to sublight.”