Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  And as the enemy’s fist closed around this Rock, she could see no end point but defeat.

  She had long burned off her initial adrenaline surge, long gone through her second wind. Now she was like an automaton, going through the motions of fighting and keeping herself alive almost without conscious thought. She had trained for this, been burned hard enough by her instructors on Quin for this strange condition to be familiar. But it was as if she were no longer even in her own head, but was looking down on her own hapless, dust-coated form in its failing skinsuit, scrunched down in a ditch in the dirt, trying to stay alive.

  She glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her faceplate display. She’d had five minutes’ break; it felt like thirty seconds.

  “It shouldn’t have been me,” Blayle said now.

  “What?”

  “Why me? Why, after all the generations who lived out fat, comfortable lives in this Lethe-spawned Rock, why is it me who has been pushed out here to fight and die? It should have been those others, who died in their bunks,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t have been me—”

  Electric-blue light flared, and asteroid dirt was hurled up before them. Cohl twisted and fired into the blue-tinged fog of dust. She glimpsed Xeelee drones, pressing down on her trench. There was something above her; she felt it before she saw it. She rolled on her back, preparing to fire again.

  But the ship was a flitter, small, unarmored. Its door was open and a ladder hung down.

  “Cohl!” She recognized the voice; it was Enduring Hope. “Evac!”

  “No. The cannon—”

  “The Xeelee shot the heart out of it. The Rock is finished. There’s no point dying here.”

  “I have to stay.” Of course she did; that was Doctrinal. You weren’t supposed to keep yourself alive, not while there were still enemy to shoot at. “A brief life burns brightly,” she said reflexively.

  “Balls,” Hope said with feeling. “Come on, Cohl; I’ve risked my ass to come flying around this Rock looking for you.”

  She made a quick decision. Reluctantly she turned to Blayle. “Sergeant …”

  He didn’t respond. There was a small scar on Blayle’s faceplate, a puncture almost too small to see. A thousand years of history ends here, she thought. She wished she could close his eyes.

  In the end only two of Cohl’s platoon were lifted out with her, two out of the nine she had led out of the trench.

  As the flitter lifted, she saw the landscape of the Rock open up. Its whole surface crawled with light as Xeelee drones and human fighters hurled energy at each other, all in utter silence. It was an extraordinary sight. But already the nightfighters were closing in to end this millennial drama for good.

  The flitter squirted away. Cohl, still locked in her skinsuit, closed her eyes and tried to control her trembling.

  Pirius tried not to watch the chronometer. And he tried not to think about his own fatigue.

  He felt as if he had been walking a high-wire for six hours. He tried to concentrate on the moment, to get through the next jump, and the next, and the next. If you didn’t survive the present, after all, future and past didn’t matter; that old earthworm Hama Druz had been right about that much. For all their training and sims, however, they hadn’t realized how exhausting this was going to be, this tightrope walk through the center of the Galaxy. He hoped he would have the physical and mental strength to actually fight at the end of it.

  He shut the passage of time out of his mind. So he was surprised when a gentle chime sounded on the comm loops, but he understood its significance immediately.

  Ahead, the grav shield was dissolving, and in the sky around him the stars and gas masses of this shining, complex place were swimming back to where they should be.

  “No sign of our escort,” Bilson said.

  “We got through,” Pirius murmured.

  “Yes, sir.” Even Jees’s steady voice betrayed an edge of fatigue now. She should have been spelled by Darc, and Pirius knew that for the last hour she had been nursing one failing system after another. Still, she had delivered them here, just as the operational plan had dictated, and with no more losses: seven ships had survived, out of ten that had started.

  Somebody called, “What’s that?”

  It was a star, a hot, bright, blue star, a young one—not part of the IRS 16 cluster, though; they were far from that now. And there seemed to be a cloud around it, a flattened disc, like the shields of rock from which planets formed.

  “That,” said Bilson, “is SO-2. We’re exactly where we are supposed to be, sir.”

  Engineer Cabel was less clued in. “And SO-2 is—”

  “The innermost star in orbit.”

  “In orbit around what?”

  “Chandra,” said Bilson simply.

  Pirius, for all his fatigue, felt a thrill of anticipation.

  Blue called, “And what is that cloud around the star? Dust, rock—”

  “Wreckage,” Bilson said. “The hulks of human ships—greenships, Spline. Some other designs I can’t recognize. Older ones, perhaps.”

  Burden said grimly, “Even here the Galaxy is littered with corpses.”

  “Xeelee in the scopes,” Bilson said softly. “They know we’re here. Pilot, we don’t have much time.”

  “So we’re not the first to come this way,” Pirius said crisply. “Let’s make sure we’re the last. Defensive formation, seven-fold—come on, you know the drill.”

  The greenships slid into place around him and the squadron edged forward. Pirius scanned the sky, looking for Xeelee fighters, and for Chandra, the strange black hole that was his final destination.

  Chapter 55

  In this age of matter the proto-Xeelee found new ways to survive. Indeed, they prospered. They formed new levels of symbiosis with baryonic-matter forms. The new form—a composite of three ages of the universe—was the kind eventually encountered by humans, who would come to call them by a distorted anthropomorphic version of a name in an alien tongue: they were, at last, Xeelee.

  But soon the new Xeelee faced an epochal catastrophe of their own.

  They still relied on the primordial black holes, formed in the earliest ages after the singularity; they used the holes’ twisted knots of spacetime to peel off their spacetime-defect “wings,” for instance. But now the primordial holes were becoming rare: leaking mass-energy through Hawking radiation, they were evaporating. By the time humanity arose, the smallest remaining holes were the mass of the Moon.

  It was devastating for the Xeelee, as if for humans the planet Earth had evaporated from under their feet.

  But a new possibility offered itself. New black holes were formed from the collapse of giant stars, and at the hearts of galaxies, mergers were spawning monsters with the mass of a million Sols. Here the Xeelee migrated. The transition wasn’t easy; a wave of extinction followed among their diverse kind. But they survived, and their story continued.

  And it was the succor of the galaxy-center black holes that first drew the Xeelee into contact with dark matter.

  There was life in dark matter, as well as light.

  Across the universe, dark matter outweighed the baryonic, the “light,” by a factor of six. It gathered in immense reefs hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Unable to shed heat through quirks of its physics, the dark material was resistant to collapse into smaller structures, the scale of stars or planets, as baryonic stuff could.

  Dark and light matter passed like ghosts, touching each other only with gravity. But the pinprick gravity wells of the new baryonic stars were useful. Drawn into these wells, subject to greater concentrations and densities than before, new kinds of interactions between components of dark matter became possible.

  In this universe, the emergence of life in dark matter was inevitable. In their earliest stages, these “photino birds” swooped happily through the hearts of the stars, immune to such irrelevances as the fusion fire of a sun’s core.

  What did disturb them was the fi
rst stellar explosions—and with them the dissipation of the stars’ precious gravity wells, without which there would be no more photino birds.

  Almost as soon as the first stars began to shine, therefore, the photino birds began to alter stellar structures and evolution. If they clustered in the heart of a star they could damp the fusion processes there. By this means the birds hoped to hurry a majority of stars through the inconvenience of explosions and other instabilities and on to a dwarf stage, when an aging star would burn quietly and coldly for aeons, providing a perfect arena for the obscure dramas of photino life. A little later the photino birds tinkered with the structures of galaxies themselves, to produce more dwarfs in the first place.

  Thus it was that humans found themselves in a Galaxy in which red dwarf stars, stable, long-lived and unspectacular, outnumbered stars like their own sun by around ten to one. This was hard to fit into any naturalistic story of the universe, though generations of astrophysicists labored to do so: like so many features of the universe, the stellar distribution had been polluted by the activities of life and mind. It would not be long, though, before the presence of the photino birds in Earth’s own sun was observed.

  The Xeelee had been troubled by all this much earlier.

  The Xeelee cared nothing for the destiny of pond life like humanity. But by suppressing the formation of the largest stars, the birds were reducing the chances of more black holes forming. What made the universe more hospitable for the photino birds made it less so for the Xeelee. The conflict was inimical.

  The Xeelee began a grim war to push the birds out of the galaxies, and so stop their tinkering with the stars. The Xeelee had already survived several universal epochs; they were formidable and determined. Humans would glimpse silent detonations in the centers of galaxies, and they would observe that there was virtually no dark matter to be observed in galaxy centers. Few guessed that this was evidence of a war in heaven.

  But the photino birds turned out to be dogged foes. They were like an intelligent enemy, they were like a plague, and they were everywhere; and for some among the austere councils of the Xeelee there was a chill despair that they could never be beaten.

  And so, even as the war in the galaxies continued, the Xeelee began a new program, much more ambitious, of still greater scale.

  Their immense efforts caused a concentration of mass and energy some hundred and fifty million light-years from Earth’s Galaxy. It was a tremendous knot that drew in galaxies like moths across three hundred million light-years, a respectable fraction of the visible universe. Humans, observing these effects, called the structure the Great Attractor—or, when one of them journeyed to it, Bolder’s Ring.

  This artifact ripped open a hole in the universe itself. And through this doorway, if all was lost, the Xeelee planned to flee. They would win their war—or they would abandon the universe that had borne them, in search of a safer cosmos.

  Humans, consumed by their own rivalry with the Xeelee, perceived none of this. To the Xeelee—as they fought a war across hundreds of millions of light-years, as they labored to build a tunnel out of the universe, as stars flared and died billions of years ahead of their time—humans, squabbling their way across their one Galaxy, were an irritant.

  A persistent irritant, though.

  Chapter 56

  The seven surviving greenships of Exultant Squadron formed up into a tight huddle. In the sudden calm, the crews gazed around at the extraordinary place they had come to.

  Of all the Galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars, SO-2 was the one nearest the black hole. And now they were within its orbit. This central place, a cavity within a cavity light-weeks across, was free of stars—because any star that came closer than SO-2 would be torn apart by black hole tides. It was filled with light and matter, though, with glowing plasma, but Pirius’s Virtual filters blocked that out. It was as if the seven of them hovered within a great shell walled by crowded stars, like flies inside a Conurbation dome.

  And at the very center of this immense space was a pool of light. From this distance it was like a glowing toy, small enough to cover with a thumbnail held at arm’s length. It was a floor of curdled and glowing gas, as wide as planetary orbits in Sol system. This was the black hole’s accretion disc, the penultimate destination of debris infalling from the rest of the Galaxy—the place where doomed matter was compressed and smashed together, whirling around the hole like water around a leak in a bucket, before it fell into the black hole.

  Of the monstrous black hole itself Pirius could see only a pinpoint spark, an innocent light like a young sun, set in the center of the disc. Somewhere in there was an event horizon that would have engulfed ten Sols side by side; indeed, in Sol system it would have stretched to the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury. The glow was the final cry of matter, compressed and heated as it fell into the hole, the flaw in the universe into which the Galaxy was steadily draining.

  And it was Pirius’s target.

  Cabel was studying magnified images of the accretion disc. He found a bright arc, traced across the churning surface of the disc, glowing brightly. “What’s that?”

  “I think it’s a star,” Bilson said. “A star that came too close. Lethe, there is still fusion going on there.”

  Cabel said slowly, “A star, being torn to pieces. Lethe, what a place we’ve come to.”

  Blue called, “Heads up. Take a look at your tactical displays.”

  Pirius Red’s Virtual maps of the region lit up with virulent crimson sparks, the locations of Xeelee concentrations. Most of them were around the rim of the accretion disc itself.

  Blue reported, “The good news is that I don’t see any nightfighters or other combat ships in this region—none within the orbit of SO-2. So the feint with the grav shield worked. The Xeelee really didn’t anticipate we would get this far, and their reactions are slow. We have some time. But those red points in the accretion disc are Xeelee emplacements, Sugar Lumps, probably used as flak batteries. They are static—they aren’t going to come after us—but they pack a punch.”

  So, Pirius thought, studying his display, to get at the black hole his greenships were going to have to fly through a hail of Xeelee flak, as well as pushing through the hazardous zone of the accretion disc.

  “Let’s get it done before they wake up,” he said. “I’ll go in first. Engineer? Navigator? Are you with me?”

  “Ready, Pilot,” Bilson said, his voice tight with tension.

  Cabel called, “It’s what we came here to do.”

  “Prep the weapons.”

  Pirius worked through his checklist quickly, trying to set aside his own doubts, his fear. He knew they only had a few chances to make this work. Each of the ships carried only one pair of black-hole bombs: they would be able to deliver just one blow each. And this first run, with the Xeelee totally unprepared, was their best chance of all. If he succeeded on this very first strike, they could go home. He desperately hoped he could make it happen.

  The other crews were quiet as they worked. He didn’t want to speak to Torec: he felt it would help neither of them. But he couldn’t forget she was there. Even if he got himself killed, he told himself, if he did his job, nobody else had to die today—she wouldn’t have to die.

  It occurred to him he hadn’t heard a word from This Burden Must Pass since they had arrived in this cathedral of stars. It was a troubling, niggling thought, but he had no time to deal with it.

  Green flags lit up. The ship was ready for the attack run. Pirius said, “Let’s do it.” He clenched his fists around his controls.

  With Cohl and the rest of the final evacuees from Orion, Enduring Hope was lifted to Arches Base. The journey took two hours, so Hope arrived six hours after the greenships had been launched—when, he realized, Pirius should be arriving at Chandra.

  Hope’s feelings were complex. The weeks he had spent preparing for the moment of the launch were over. He felt a great sense of relief, even anticlimax, that he had managed to ge
t his ships away with only one major foul-up, only one ship lost; it had been better than he had expected, in his heart of hearts. And he was pleased to have been able to pull a few strings to get Cohl off Orion.

  And yet frustration was knotting up inside him. He was after all a flyer, and his crewmate from the last, fated mission of Assimilator’s Claw was at this moment flying into a pit of Xeelee fighters at the center of the Galaxy, and he, Hope, wasn’t there. He was stranded here on Arches Base, and until and unless those ships came home, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  Some consolation his creed was now, he thought dismally. He did believe intellectually that all he lived through was just one road among many, all to be resolved at the confluence at the end of time. But it certainly didn’t feel like that, not at moments like this. He wished he could talk it over with This Burden Must Pass—but Burden too was fighting at Chandra.

  Lacking a better alternative, Enduring Hope made his way to his barracks. Perhaps he could get some sleep. He had a duty to keep fresh; when the ships came limping home again, the skills of himself and his engineering crews would be crucial.

  But at the barracks a runner found him. He was to report to Officer Country. Hope was even more surprised when the runner led him to Arches’ main operations room.

  He stood in the doorway, mouth agape. The room was a broad, deep arena, with walkways on several levels surrounding a huge Virtual display at the center. Today the main display was a diorama of the center of the Galaxy, with a brilliant pinpoint that must be Chandra itself, surrounded by an accretion disc and other astrophysical monstrosities. This main display was surrounded by more Virtuals, graphs, diagrams, and scrolling text that were, he recognized, diagnostic data on the Exultant ships themselves. Some of the walkways crossed the pit so that you could walk through the displays, studying them as closely as you liked. Around this pit of ever-changing information, staff worked, talking rapidly, tapping bits of data into the desks they carried. On one high balcony, Hope glimpsed Marshal Kimmer himself, standing gravely with his hands clasped behind his back, surrounded by a cluster of aides.