Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  XEELEE: VENGEANCE

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Contents

  Title Page

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  TWO

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  THREE

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  FOUR

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  FIVE

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  SIX

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  SEVEN

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  Afterword

  Also By Stephen Baxter From Gollancz:

  Copyright

  ONE

  The wormholes are gateways to other times, other places.

  They should be beautiful, like all great engineering.

  Ambassador Flood, ad 4820

  1

  Timelike infinity

  Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos.

  Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before.

  And then—

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Michael Poole.’

  2

  ad 3646

  Beyond the flitter’s viewing window, Jupiter loomed.

  The light out here was eerie, Michael Poole thought. Or at least he was reminded of that whenever he had visitors from Earth. The light of the Sun, five times as far away as from the home world, was diminished, yet it was far brighter than any star or planet: a strange in-between light, unfamiliar, and the shadows it cast were sharp and rectilinear. The face of Jupiter itself, huge in the sky, was misty, elusive, an ocean of banded clouds.

  Today, before that face, there drifted a wormhole portal, a spindly tetrahedral framework of electric blue. Automated monitor probes swarmed. And in the portal’s faces, glimmering gold, another world could be glimpsed.

  It looked perfect. It wasn’t.

  Something strange had been detected coming from that wormhole portal. Gravity waves: anomalous bursts of energy. Poole didn’t understand this; nobody understood. And because of that anomaly the wormhole, beautiful as it was, was in danger of being shut down.

  The wormhole was Poole’s creation. His whole career depended on the success of the current trials. Indeed, he felt as if he were on trial himself. He was twenty-five years old.

  There were four people in this flitter, including Poole: two corporeal, and two Virtuals, images projected over from Michael Poole’s own ship, the Hermit Crab, whose elegant bulk was at rest alongside the flitter. Even though they were in zero gravity the flight deck of the Crab Junior felt crowded. The skinsuits they all wore, with helmets at their sides, didn’t help.

  Harry Poole, Michael’s father, was one of the Virtuals. He raised a glass of single malt, as unreal as he was, and tapped the arm of the woman beside him. Shamiso Emry, the UN Oversight Senior Coordinator, soberly dressed, hair silver grey, was the second Virtual, hence her sensation of Harry’s contact; Michael thought she stiffened against the touch.

  Harry said, ‘More whisky, Co-ordinator?’

  ‘I’ve barely touched my glass – thank you, Mr Poole.’

  ‘Harry, please. Beautiful spectacle, isn’t it? Look, I know we’re here on business—’

  ‘We’re here because of a suspected flaw in your prototype wormhole—’

  ‘But when I bring people out here, I always encourage them to take a moment, and just look.’

  Harry was fifty-six years old; AS-preserved, he looked younger than Poole himself. And with his wide grin, blond-white hair and blue eyes he was a contrast to his son, who was shorter, more heavy-set, darker – broad nose, brown eyes, black hair – more like the rest of his family. But then Harry hadn’t been born a Poole. Harry, though, always had more presence than his son, Virtual or not. And so it was now, during this official inspection.

  Harry grinned. ‘What a sight!’

  While Harry and Shamiso Emry sat on Virtual images of comfortable couches, projected from the Crab, Michael Poole and Nicola Emry – Shamiso’s daughter, the fourth occupant of the cabin – sat in bulky, confining pilot couches, side by side.

  Now Nicola looked around. ‘What sight, pray? Jupiter, that big ball of gas? Or the ramshackle thing you Pooles built that’s getting in the way?’

  Poole was irritated by that jab. And it had galled him that Nicola had insisted on taking the left-hand seat, the pilot’s seat, in his flitter. ‘That “ramshackle thing” is an example of the highest technology in the Solar System right now.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Yes. So I say. And look – can you see those flashes of blue, through the gold?’

  Nicola squinted that way. She was shaven-headed, her features sharp. ‘Earth, right? I see clouds, hints of continents – that grey-green splash is the big north European forest, I think. But I thought I saw multiple images. It was . . . kaleidoscopic.’

  ‘Good observation,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Most people miss that.’

  Poole found Nicola difficult to fathom, and intimidating. He knew that the only skill Nicola Emry claimed for herself was as a pilot – hence her monopoly of the left-hand seat – and her eyes, evidently without augmentation, seemed sharp enough. She looked maybe thirty years old. AntiSenescence treatments always turned true ages into the subject of a guessing game, but such was her immaturity, in Poole’s eyes, that he would have been surprised if she was much older – and besides, the mother, who seemed to have allowed herself to age naturally, was only about sixty herself.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is just a prototype, the portal’s a couple of hundred metres across. One day the finished articles will allow ships much bigger than the Hermit Crab over there to travel between Earth and Jupiter. Five astronomical units – that is, five times Earth’s distance from the Sun, around eight hundred million kilometres – spanned in minutes. Effectively faster than light.’

  Nicola raised an eyebrow. ‘Gosh.’

  He pressed on doggedly. ‘As for what you can see through the portal – the wormhole is a short cut. It’s as if we’ve folded spacetime and pinched together
the locations of Jupiter and the Earth. But the transit itself isn’t instantaneous; you still have to travel through the wormhole throat, a finite distance. That’s because of instability problems. Make the throat too short and you find that the exotic-matter structures of the mouths interact . . . Well. Light from Earth can pass through the wormhole – that’s why, sitting here, we can glimpse the planet – but the wormhole throat is long enough, you see, that there is more than one path for that light to travel. Hence the multiple images. Yes, some people call it kaleidoscopic.’

  Now Nicola did laugh out loud, but with a kind of delight.

  Shamiso Emry ducked her head. ‘Well, I can’t see it.’

  Harry said solicitously, ‘That’s probably an artefact of the Virtual projection. We are in a different location from the youngsters.’

  Curiously, Shamiso looked out now at the Crab, floating alongside the flitter.

  The Hermit Crab was Poole’s own design, based on GUTdrive technology long ago patented by earlier generations of Pooles. A spine, a kilometre and a half long and crusted with fuel tanks and antenna clusters, was fixed at one end to a block of ice taken from the crust of Europa, Jupiter’s moon, pocked and blackened where it had been mined for reaction mass, and at the other to the gleaming hemisphere of a lifedome, a splash of Earth colours in the Jovian night. Somewhere in there were the originals of Harry and Shamiso. And so Shamiso was looking back at herself, Poole thought.

  Shamiso said, ‘Tell me again why we need to be in two ships?’

  ‘Safety, Co-ordinator,’ Harry said promptly. ‘Backup options. Jupiter space is a pretty lethal radiation environment. Even as far out as Ganymede you would pick up a lifetime dose of radiation in a couple of years; less, if unprotected. We always send out ships in pairs, or larger flotillas. All this was mandated by some earlier Oversight committee – oh, generations ago.’

  Nicola grinned at Poole, and whispered, ‘Oversight. Isn’t that a fine word? You engineers paid for this huge technology demonstration yourselves, didn’t you? And now here we are, deciding whether to shut you down or not.’

  Poole found her irritatingly intriguing. ‘You talk big, but here you are running around after your mother.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just a cab driver, I know that. Call it nepotism if you like. My mother gave me a choice: this or prison, or a dose of memory-editing.’ She winked at him. ‘I do have a habit of breaking the rules, you see. I’m not a scion of mankind like you and your illustrious forebears, Michael Poole. I’ll tell you this, though. By Lethe, I’m a good cab driver.’

  ‘Perhaps we could get on with it,’ Shamiso snapped. Her face, square, strong, seemed not unfriendly, but her expression was stony. ‘We’re here, after all, because of anomalies you’ve yet to explain away. You spoke of instabilities in the wormhole structure. Could that be the cause—’

  Before Poole could respond, Harry said quickly, ‘I’m confident that’s not the problem, Co-ordinator. Look – a functioning wormhole exploits inherent instabilities. We design them in, manipulate them. We understand this stuff.’ He waved a hand at the gleaming blue tetrahedron. ‘Left to itself, a wormhole would collapse quickly. So you have to thread the throat and portals with exotic matter—’

  ‘That’s the blue frame,’ Nicola said.

  ‘Yes. It’s called “exotic” because it’s a manifestation of negative energy.’

  ‘Which is a kind of antigravity.’

  She seemed to be understanding more than Poole had expected.

  Harry grinned. ‘You’ve got it. And that’s essential to keep the wormhole mouths open – though the process has to be actively managed. You see, these are known, indeed useful instabilities, Co-ordinator.’

  Nicola was looking out, the blue light casting highlights on the planes of her face. ‘I know exotic matter is a quantum-gravity phenomenon, essentially. So those blue rods must scale accordingly. Line density with dimensions governed by lightspeed and the gravitational constant would be . . .’ She conjured up a Virtual workstation in the air, worked it quickly. ‘My, my. Says here that a loop of the stuff a metre across should mass as much as Jupiter.’

  Poole was grudgingly impressed. ‘That’s the kind of estimate they came up with when the idea of traversable wormholes was first floated back in the nineteenth century. Or was it the twentieth? What you see out there is the result of a millennium and a half of engineering development since then. The portal itself is two hundred metres across, but its mass is no more than that of a kilometre-wide asteroid—’

  ‘And he’s longing to give you all the details you already read about,’ Harry said, with a kind of mock fondness in his voice. ‘How we pluck natural wormholes from the quantum foam . . . How we use Io flux-tube energy to extract exotic matter from the Hub, a manufacturing facility based around the quantum gravity field of a mountain-mass black hole suspended deep in the clouds of Jupiter itself . . .’

  Nicola said, ‘There’s nowhere near enough energy density in the flux tube to enable you to build this.’

  Again Poole was reluctantly impressed. ‘True. But we use the tube as a siphon, a trigger for a nonlinear cascade which extracts mass-energy, via coupled magnetic fields, from Jupiter itself.’ He smiled. ‘You should see it. When we inject energy into the portal structure, it grows exponentially, doubling in size, and doubling again—’

  ‘Spare me the sales pitch.’

  Harry said hastily, ‘Of course the most important detail of all this is the cost. Which will be, crucially – when we’re up and running, and if you look at our business case which applies net-present-value discounting – astronomically less than the cost of running GUTships, like the Crab over there.

  ‘It’s not just the efficiency. It’s the scale that will be transformative. One day our wormholes will link all the major bodies of the System, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. And you’ll be able to travel in a flitter like this, all the way to Earth, in a matter of minutes. Whereas now it takes six days in a ship like the Hermit Crab. And, crucially, with the new system, for the first time we will be able to transport very large masses between the worlds cheaply. For such grand purposes as, some day, taking nitrogen from a source like Titan to supply the great arcologies on Mars. Or even carrying food grown in Titan’s organic-chemistry seas to feed Earth.

  ‘All this will have an impact you can barely imagine. But we Pooles have been here before. Everybody thinks the story of the Pooles started with Michael Poole Bazalget.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘Even I heard of him. The Arctic guy.’

  ‘Yes – in the twenty-first century, back in the Bottleneck – the Poole who stabilised methane deposits around the Arctic Circle, thus saving the world from a particularly savage dose of greenhouse-gas warming. One of the pioneering acts of the Stewardship generations . . . Long before him, though, Poole ancestors were involved in the great railway boom of the nineteenth century. The first great modernisation of transport, which opened up industrial development in Britain, and then Europe, America, Asia – and the global economy exploded. Now our wormholes, laid down by this generation of Pooles, are going to do the same thing on an interplanetary scale.’

  Shamiso said dryly, ‘That would be heart-warming if I hadn’t read it all in your brochures. But it doesn’t help us with the problem I was sent out here to resolve, does it? Shall we get to the point?’ She waved a hand and brought up a Virtual display of her own, an orrery-like model of the Solar System, a plane centred on a gleaming, jewel-like Sun.

  Nicola was peering through the forward viewing port, those sharp pilot’s eyes intent. ‘Mother . . .’

  ‘Hush, Nicola. We monitor gravity waves routinely. They have been our main astronomical tool since – well, my grasp of history isn’t as obsessive as yours. And, recently, we saw this.’

  Another gesture, and fine, cherry-red lines shot out from the position of Jupiter, a pink ball in the Virtual model – s
treaks of energy crossing the Solar System. Most of these bolts were in the plane of the System, though they seemed to be laid down at random, not targeting a planet or any other obvious body. But some of them went spearing out of that plane, off into the emptiness of interstellar space.

  Every time Poole saw this image sequence, he felt sick deep in his stomach. It really did look like a weaponised energy beam, he’d thought from the first time he’d seen it: thunderbolts spearing out of the wormhole portal. No wonder the Oversight committee had submitted its order for an inspection of the project. But the fundamental problem was that still nobody knew what this was.

  Shamiso said, ‘I should emphasise these energy tracks are harmless. Spectacular – an unprecedented gravitational-energy phenomenon within the Solar System – but harmless in terms of the perturbation of ships, habitats, still less moons and planets. But naturally the citizenry is concerned. Even more so when the source of these energy bolts was identified.’

  Nicola was still staring out of the window. ‘I think there’s something out there.’

  Harry spread his hands. ‘Co-ordinator, I can assure you – look, there’s nothing intrinsic to the wormhole, its morphology and dynamics, that can have anything to do with these pulses.’

  ‘Yet they exist. Yet they are coming from your wormhole, evidently, even if they aren’t caused by it. If I were to recommend shutting down the project—’

  Nicola turned now, and faced them all. ‘I think it’s too late for that. By the waters of Lethe – look, Mother!’

  At last her forcefulness broke through Shamiso’s concentration. She looked through the view window. And Poole saw her mouth sag, almost comically.

  Finally he turned around himself, swivelling in his chair, and looked out at the wormhole portal.

  To see something coming through.

  3

  Even Harry seemed to forget the politics, his corporate role. He, or his Virtual avatar, drifted to the window, gaping in fascination at the thing, black and huge, that was emerging from the shining blue portal.

  Poole himself saw a moulded black carapace, symmetrical with spiky protuberances, and sharp, curved edges between moulded planes. All of it pushing steadily out of the wormhole. Around this mass the portal face’s golden glow shimmered, flickered, broke up. And behind it Poole made out flashes of light of another quality: purplish, lurid.