Starfall

by Stephen Baxter

  "Your eyes are better than mine," Suber said. "But, you know, I think you're right ... "

  The splinters of light were ships: GUTships, a veritable fleet of them in a medium-altitude orbit over Footprint. Under magnification they showed the classic design, lifedome and GUTdrive pod connected by a spine kilometres long. Somebody was assembling an orbital armada—and presumably bringing in the ships even from other star systems, for there was no facility to construct GUTships anywhere save Sol system itself.

  Suber had heard no announcement about this mustering, seen no news source refer to it, even though it was clearly visible to everybody. He wondered why no imperial official had been out to inspect it. He had even considered trying to get some message to the Empress's court himself. But it was unlikely in the extreme he'd be able to do this without blowing his personal cover.

  It was while he was thinking of Earth, oddly, in that quiet moment with his son, that his life on Footprint ended.

  The voice behind him was soft. "Densel Bel?"

  He turned, unthinking. "Yes?" And then, "Ah." He had responded to a name he hadn't heard spoken since he left Earth.

  The man facing him was dressed entirely in black, some fabric so dark it seemed to absorb the light from the sky; he was a shadow, even his face concealed.

  Densel-Suber did not dare glance around for Su-su. "May I say goodbye to my son?"

  "No." The man pointed a finger.

  There was a shock, not of pain, but of cold. He felt his heart stop before he hit the ground.

  And when he could see again, he was enclosed by walls, in a room, bathed in bright light. He winced, and lifted a hand to shield his eyes. And he staggered, for he was standing, held by a mesh web.

  Somebody handed him a beaker of liquid. He drank, and felt warmth course through his system.

  A man stood before him. A broad face, aged with no apparent recourse to AS, stocky build, crop of grey hair. Densel thought he recognised him. Others stood by—a young woman at this man's side, perhaps a daughter. Densel wondered if they were armed.

  The room had a single window that opened on blackness. The smart webbing filled the room, holding the people unobtrusively. He was in microgravity then, in orbit perhaps.

  The man studied him. "Are you all right, Densel Bel? You were injected with a nano anaesthetic. I hope it didn't hurt; you were obviously unprepared in the conventional medical way."

  "I'm fine." He drew a breath. His chest ached vaguely; he wondered if he had had some minor heart attack. "You know who I am."

  "Obviously. And you know me, don't you?"

  "You are Flood. Ambassador to the Empress's court." Flood's was one of the more famous faces in the small pool of Alpha cultural life.

  "Former ambassador. I retired some years ago. Now I am engaged on other projects."

  "I want to speak to my family—"

  "You mean the two families you raised on Footprint, to whom you lied all their lives? Forget them, Densel Bel. You are dead to them. They are dead to you. That part of your life is over."

  The shock of this abduction seemed to be hitting Densel; if not for the webbing he might have fallen. "For seventy years I have prepared for this moment. Still it is hard."

  "You chose your own path. This always lay at the end of it."

  "How long have you known?"

  "We have known all about you since you came tumbling out of the wreckage of the last Poole wormhole."

  Once Alpha and the other colonised star systems had been linked by faster-than-light wormholes, assembled in Jovian orbit, their interfaces laboriously hauled across interstellar distances by GUTships. Seventy years ago Shira XXXII, on ascending to the Construction Material Throne, had ordered the links to be cut.

  "I was trained since I was a boy for the task," Densel said. "I knew nothing else but the purpose. I suppose you would say I was conditioned. I should have died when the wormhole collapsed."

  "Yes. You are a suicide bomber who failed to die."

  "I was stranded on Footprint. Unexpectedly alive, it was as if I awoke. I built a life, an identity—I built a soul. Do you begrudge me that? I have been cut off from my world for seven decades—"

  "Your world? Isn't this your world now, a world you have helped build with your skills in exotic-matter engineering, skills developed for destruction put to better use?"

  "Why did you not deal with me before?"

  "Because we always thought you might be useful. You were doing no harm in the meantime."

  Densel frowned. "Who is 'we'?"

  "We are a loosely bound, loosely defined group, but with a single clear goal."

  "Which is?"

  "The liberation of the star born from the tyranny of the Shiras. You were involved in the strengthening of the Empresses' grip. The wormholes were cut so that Earth might be protected from us by a blanket of spacetime, while possessing a near-monopoly on GUTship construction technology. So we can be controlled, forever."

  Densel took a breath. "Is the rule of the Shiras so bad? The empire's touch is light—"

  "An interstellar empire makes no sense, economically or politically. There is no possibility of meaningful trade save in information; fabrication will always be cheaper than any possible transport. The taxes we pay are punitive, and don't even enrich the Shiras; they only serve to pay for the Navy ships and bases which enslave us. The purpose of the Empire is purely ideological, purely intended to make us bow down before the light of a star so dim and remote that most of us have trouble finding it. And the Empresses' political control is destructive, even when it is not harsh. It hinders our own political development, our exploitation of this system, and the colonisation of others. Even this, however, we might have tolerated, for all empires wither in time."

  "But something has changed/' Densel guessed.

  "Yes. We believe the latest Shira represents a grave danger to us all. Do you know anything of the court?"

  "I met her once," Densel said. "Shira XXXII. She touched my head; she blessed me in Sol's light, before she sent me to die. I learned nothing of her."

  "Then you've never heard of metamathematical spaces—of logic pools? Of a man called Highsmith Marsden?"

  "No ... "

  "Marsden ran secretive experiments more than a thousand years ago. The result of his meddling was the destruction of a moon of Sol VIII."

  "Neptune."

  "Now we fear that the Empress's meddling with the same technology is liable to cause an even greater danger."

  "Even for us, here in Alpha system?"

  "Even here," Flood said seriously. "Shira must be stopped."

  Densel felt cold, as if his heart were being stopped by nanomachines once more. "You're going to invade Sol system."

  "Yes, we're going to invade. We intend to defeat Sol's navies and armies, to occupy the Earth, and to depose Shira herself. We call this programme the Starfall, the falling of the wrath of the stars upon the Earth."

  Densel laughed. "You can't be serious. You can't defeat Earth. The starborn number a few tens of thousands. Earth's population is billions."

  "We have advantages—the principal one being that nobody has attempted a war on this scale before. And you are honoured, Densel Bel. Because you're going along for the ride. Come to the port." He put an arm around Densel's shoulders. "Can you walk?"

  Densel took cautious steps. The smart webbing released and embraced him smoothly, holding him to the floor.

  Beyond the window GUTships hung in space like toys. Flitters moved between the great vessels, and bots and humans worked on scuffed lifedome bubbles and balky GUT drive pods. This clumsy armada drifted over the nightside face of Footprint.

  "So this is how you're going to defeat Shira XXXII," he said bitterly. "With these rusty scows."

  Flood was unfazed. "Our assault will proceed in four waves, which will arrive at Sol system more or less simultaneously. The First Wave is a lightspeed viral attack and will actually be the last to be launched. The Second Wave, a deepl
y-sublight stealth assault, was assembled and launched some decades ago. These GUTships constitute the Third and Fourth Waves. The Third Wave ships are weapons platforms and troop carriers. I myself will be embarking on the Freestar, the lead ship, very soon.

  "And you, my friend, will be aboard one of the Fourth Wave ships, which we call the Fists. You don't need to be launched for another nine months. You'll catch us up, you see."

  "How? By accelerating at higher gravities?"

  "Oh, no. It's just that you won't be slowing down."

  Densel Bel stared at him. "Why put me on this ship of fools?"

  "I told you. We always thought you were useful. You'll have plenty of time to think it over in flight—more than two years subjective, in fact. But I don't have to tell you any more now. You see that, don't you?"

  "Yes," Densel said. He did see it. For effectively, as Flood had said, his life was over, his ability to make choices about his future already gone.

  "Now let's get on with it. There's only a few more hours before the Third Wave ships light up. My daughter, Beya," he indicated the young woman at his side, "will take you to the ship that is to be your home for the rest of your life ... "

  Densel gazed down on the planet's sparse lights helplessly, wondering if even now Su-su and Fay were looking up at him.

  AD 4815

  Starfall minus 4 years 8 months

  Sol System

  Stillich's orders were clear. As soon as the Facula docked at Port Sol, he was to make his way direct to Earth and report to the imperial court, to expand on the reports he had been narrowcasting from space.

  But as he passed through Port Sol he could not help notice what had become of it during his twenty-seven-year absence.

  Port Sol, mankind's greatest GUT-technology interstellar harbour, was a Kuiper object: a two-hundred-kilometre ball of friable rock and water-ice that circled the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with uncounted companions. As Stillich's flitter dipped low over a crystalline landscape, on its way to the Interface to Earth, the work of humanity was clear. The primordial ice was gouged by hundreds of craters: deep, regular, these were scars left after the supply of the great interstellar GUTships with ice for reaction mass. There were buildings too, housing for dock workers and ship crews, even a couple of hotels, with domes, pylons and arches exploiting the microgravity. But many of the buildings were closed, darkened. Thin frost coated their surfaces, and some of the domes were collapsed. GUTships hung all around the little world, as if jostling for a place to land.

  "Lethe," said Pella. "Something bad happened here."

  Now the flitter lifted away from Port Sol, and a cluster of wormhole Interfaces swam towards them, giant tetrahedra built of struts of electric-blue light. The wormholes to the stars had been cut, but the ancient fast-transit routes within Sol system itself still connected Port Sol to the rest of the system. Without hesitation Stillich's flitter thrust itself towards the largest of the wormholes, the gateway to Earth, only minutes away. Pella watched nervously.

  Stillich was paging through a data desk, looking for information about Port Sol. "Some kind of 'industrial accident', it says here. A GUTship blew up in dry dock. It's put the construction facilities out of action for a decade, and the maintenance facilities are stretched."

  One shimmering triangular face grew huge in their view, an electric-blue frame that swallowed up the flitter. The ship shuddered, buffeted, and blue-white light flared around them.

  "And guess where that GUTship came from? Alpha. Of course Alpha is a pretty common destination. It might be coincidence. Or it might not. Get some images, Pella, and dig around in the data mines. See what else you can find on this."

  "Sir ... "

  Stillich looked up. Pella was gripping her data desk, trying not to cower.

  The wormhole was a throat in space and time: a region of stress, of immensely high curvature, lined with exotic matter throughout its length. Now fragments of light swam from a vanishing point directly above their heads, swarmed down the spacetime walls and, fading, shot down over the horizon. This was radiation generated by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, deep in the throat of the flaw. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of uncontrollable velocity.

  Stillich took pity on Pella, and let her endure the rest of the transit without making her work.

  The flitter burst out of the destination Interface, amid a shower of sparks and exotic particles. Now they were among another cluster of wormhole terminuses, even bigger, even more crowded with jostling ships. This was Earthport, the system's central transit hub, positioned at a stable Lagrange point in lunar orbit. In contrast to the desolation of the outer system, Stillich had a powerful, immediate impression of bustle, prosperity, activity.

  And there, beyond the drifting tangle of exotic-matter tetrahedra, Stillich made out Earth itself, her face broad and lovely, like a slice of the sky.

  The flitter shot out of the mob of ships around Earthport, swept through a layer of defence stations, and within minutes was beginning its descent.

  Huge fusion stations sparkled in their orbits above green-blue oceans. The planet itself was laced with lights, on land and sea. And in the thin rim of atmosphere near the north pole Stillich could just make out the dull purple glow of an immense radiator beam, a diffuse refrigerating laser dumping a fraction of Earth's waste heat into the endless sink of space. The restoration of Earth after the industrialisation of previous millennia had been the triumph of the generations before Michael Poole. Earth was the first planet to be terraformed, it was said. Much of this transformation had been achieved with support from space. Now Stillich tried to imagine this fragile world under attack, from the children it had sent to the stars.

  The flitter slid briskly into the atmosphere, and descended towards the east coast of America. They were making for New York, a great city for three thousand years and now the capital of the Empire of Sol; the Shiras' world government had inherited some of the apparatus of the ancient United Nations.

  They came down on a small landing pad near the centre of Central Park, close to a cluster of small buildings. Stillich and Pella emerged into the sunshine of a Manhattan spring. Flitters darted between the shoulders of ancient skyscrapers at the rim of the park. The sky above was laced by high, fluffy clouds. And beyond the clouds you could see crawling points of light: the habitats and factories of near-Earth space.

  A hovering bot met them, done out in the imperial government's golden livery. They followed it to the nearest of the buildings. This, Stillich knew, was a portal to the complex of bunkers built into the granite keel of Manhattan, far beneath the green surface of the park; this was the gateway to the Empress's palace.

  Pella was peering about curiously. "So this is the future."

  Stillich asked, "So how are you feeling?"

  "Not as disoriented as I expected. Twenty-seven years on, things look the same./I They watched a couple walking with their hands locked together, a young family playing with some kind of smart ball that evaded laughing children. Pella said, "Maybe the clothes are different. The trim on that flitter parked over there."

  Stillich shrugged. "There's a kind of inertia about things. Much of this building stock is very ancient; that won't change short of a major calamity. Technology doesn't change much, on the surface; innovations in Virtual tech won't make much difference to the user interface, which optimised centuries ago. But fashions in clothes, vehicles, music and arts—they are mutable. The language shifts a little bit too; that might surprise you. But the fundamentals stay the same ... Of course AS helps with that."

  AntiSenescence treatments had been available to everybody on the planet for millennia, but long lives hadn't led to social stasis. In practice you abandoned AS after a few centuries, if you were lucky enough to avoid misadventure that long. After seeing four or five or six generations grow up after you, you felt it was time to make room. So in among the smooth faces of the elderly there were always the true-young, with new thinking, new i
deas, a balance between wisdom and innovation.

  It was striking, though, that recruits to the armed services were always the very young. Only the young thought they were immortal, a necessary prerequisite to go to war; the old knew they were not. And for the young, twenty-seven years away was a long time.

  "Have you spoken to your family yet?/I he asked Pella.

  Pella grimaced. "My mother looks younger than I do. My father had the decency to age, but they divorced, and he has a whole new family I never met. I did answer the mails, but—you know."

  "It's hard to make small talk."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You have the orientation packs from the ship. They should help. And the Navy has counsellors. The main thing to remember, and I know this is a bad time to say it, don't just hide away in work."

  "As you do, sir."

  Stillich grimaced. Well, that was true. But his excuse was he had no family, outside a son who he had never really got along with, and who had now actually lived more subjective years than he had. "I'm not necessarily a good role model, Number One."

  "I'm sorry, sir. I'm sure I'll be able to adjust to the time slip just fine," Pella said dutifully.

  "Glad to hear it, Commander," came a gruff voice from the shadow of the portal. "But the question is, are you up to meeting an admiral?"

  They both snapped to attention.

  Admiral Finmer Kale stepped forward. He was a robust man, AS-frozen at an imposing fifty—just as Stillich remembered him from twenty-seven years before. And the sunburst sigil on his uniform seemed to shine brighter than the sun itself. "At ease, both of you."

  "Sir, it's an honour to meet you again."

  "Well, it's been a quarter of a century for me, Captain Stillich, and you're still just as much a pain in the butt as you always were, or I wouldn't be here today. Come on, follow me."

  They stepped out of the sunshine into a steel-walled elevator. The doors slid closed, and the cabin dropped smoothly.

  "I have to tell you, Stillich, that I endorse none of the conclusions of your analysis. This nonsense about an imminent attack from Alpha."