Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  This morning, though, there was a flaw in that sprawling starscape. A shadow against the brilliance, perfectly circular, suspended in the precise middle of the big oval window. Jophiel found it oddly hard to look at, like a flaw in his own vision. His thinking felt slow too. ‘Something new.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Asher. ‘Between us and the star. Tracking our orbit.’

  ‘Is it artificial?’

  ‘Hard to tell. It’s a couple of kilometres across. It’s been there just seconds,’ Asher said, checking a timer. ‘A minute, now. Appeared out of nowhere.’

  ‘Hyperdrive?’

  ‘Of some kind. Looks like it. I’ve run a quick scan of its radiation signature, such as it is. We have observed that you get a quick burst of exotic particles when a craft, umm, folds down out of hyperdrive. Very transient and localised; it took us a while to observe it with the Ghost ships. Here, it appeared right in front of me. Same hyperdrive technology, if I had to guess, or a close variant.’

  ‘So from the same source,’ Jophiel said. ‘Another clone of Xeelee technology, I guess. But that doesn’t look like a Ghost ship.’

  Nicola glanced over the displays. ‘It’s pretty near us, and it’s holding its position – matching our orbit very closely. I can’t see any sign of exhaust plumes, or—’

  ‘Another reactionless drive, then.’

  Asher said, ‘I’m getting more imagery.’

  In her softscreen, that shadowed black circle started to fill with detail. Jophiel realised he was seeing a synthesis of other wavelengths, a translation of more exotic radiations, neutrinos, even scattershot gravity waves.

  Detail. The thing was a sphere. The near side of the kilometres-wide ball was rough, greyish – creased, even wrinkled, and pocked with pits and holes and scars, features almost like navels. In these pits, something glittered. Fragments of technology, perhaps. And in one place a kind of flap was drawing back, like an immense curtain, to reveal a glassy surface beneath.

  Jophiel didn’t dare trust his own interpretation. ‘That hull doesn’t look like metal to me. Or anything artificial – not even Xeelee hull plate.’

  ‘Flesh,’ Nicola said bluntly. ‘Or, more specifically, skin. Like hide. That thing’s not artificial. It’s more like a huge, augmented animal.’

  ‘Those pock marks,’ Asher said. ‘There are some kind of artefacts in them. Monitors, of some kind?’

  Jophiel asked, ‘Or weapons? And that big curtain, drawing back—’

  ‘Not a curtain.’

  A new voice; they turned.

  A Ghost, presumably the Ambassador who usually worked with the humans. And as usual it had just appeared, without warning, out of thin air – a minor technological miracle that Jophiel barely noticed any more.

  ‘Not a curtain, no. An eyelid.’

  They turned back to the window. And now, from that uncovered pit, an eye, unmistakable, with a gleaming lens embedded in a grey background, stared back at them.

  ‘A camera eye,’ Asher said, wondering. ‘A form so useful that evolution rediscovered it many times on Earth, in lineages as divergent as humans and birds and cuttlefish. And here it is again.’ She forced a laugh. ‘Not what I expected to see when I came on station this morning.’

  The Ambassador seemed to speak with urgency, despite the customary tonelessness of its voice. ‘That is Qax. Or more specifically, a Spline warship, with one or more Qax as passengers, as controllers.’

  Asher gaped. ‘A ship – a living vessel?’

  ‘Its origin is an interesting evolutionary parable,’ the Ghost said. ‘Which we can discuss another time.’

  ‘The Qax,’ Jophiel said, remembering. The spacefaring species who, they had been told, had traded the hyperdrive with the Ghosts – and who might one day have conquered humanity. Now here they were. He suppressed a shudder, an almost superstitious reaction. He wondered what a Qax looked like.

  He turned to the Ghost. ‘I guess they’ve been watching you ever since they sold you the hyperdrive, right? And now, just as this vast experiment you’re running on this star is coming to a climax—’

  ‘Here are the Qax, once again,’ Nicola said. ‘And, I’m betting, not to offer their congratulations. I’m getting the sense that this Galaxy we’re crossing is nothing but a food chain. The Ghosts beat up on us, the Qax beat up on the Ghosts, and the Xeelee—’

  Asher said quickly, ‘I think I saw a spark. Light, in one of those surface pits. A weapon, charging up? And – brace!’

  Jophiel saw it. A thread of cherry-red light, crossing space, stabbing into the tangled fabric of this Ghost station. Reflexively he grabbed at a wall, but his Virtual hand sank into the surface, pixels spraying in a painful consistency violation.

  When the bolt hit, he could feel the room shudder.

  Then more strikes flared, more blows were taken; the whole station seemed to convulse. Yet it survived. Jophiel imagined huge energies pouring into the station’s fabric. Maybe the inertial control was being overwhelmed, but the loose, even fractal tangleship structure must be efficient at absorbing energy strikes – and he wondered now if this station, and the tangleships, had been designed to be defensible against this kind of assault.

  This was a fortress. The tangleships were war machines. And he’d never recognised it.

  He recognised that weapon, though.

  ‘That is a planetbuster,’ he growled. ‘And the last time I saw one used in anger it was wielded by a Xeelee as it tried to cage the Earth.’

  ‘We call it a starbreaker,’ the Ghost said drily. ‘But – yes, that is the technology. Acquired by the Qax, we believe, before your kind had learned how to fix stone blades to wooden shafts.’

  So,’ Nicola said, ‘I’m guessing the Qax have come to steal your treasures. Whatever it is you’re doing here at Goober’s Star. What now?’

  ‘We fight back,’ the Ghost stated simply. ‘I fear we cannot guarantee your protection. This system’s space now swarms with Spline warships, from the vicinity of the star itself to the outer planetoids.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘Already?’

  Nicola nodded. ‘Think about it, Jophiel. This is a hyperdrive invasion. You wouldn’t see it coming. There would be no simple, easily tracked approach. No border to defend, no beaches to be landed on. No sky to fall from. The enemy could just show up at targets distributed across the system. Folding down simultaneously, out of nowhere.’ She punched her fist. ‘Lethe. As soon as we recognised the hyperdrive tech for what it is, we should have brainstormed the military possibilities. I wish Max Ward was here, and I never thought I’d say that.’

  ‘Nowhere in the system is safe,’ the Ghost said. ‘But away from the star is safer.’

  Asher frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Nicola interrupted any reply. ‘Jophiel, we should project you back to Goober c. At lightspeed you can be there in sixteen minutes – the assault may already have started there. Warn them, help them prepare.’

  Jophiel nodded curtly. ‘Ambassador, take Asher and Nicola back to Goober c. Asher, don’t argue. By hyperdrive you might even beat me back there.’

  ‘We have transports leaving now,’ the Ambassador said.

  The room shuddered again.

  Jophiel looked around wildly. ‘What was that? Another Qax strike?’

  Nicola’s silvered face crumpled into a grin. ‘The Ghosts are fighting back. Go, go!’

  And, in a flash—

  23

  In a flash, Jophiel was back in the Island lifedome. Rooted to the rock of Goober c. The planet’s one hundred and forty per cent gravity settled heavily on his Virtual bones.

  He looked around quickly. He was standing near the amphitheatre. People were gathered in knots, around heaps of gear. Everyone was either in a skinsuit or donning one. And Susan Chen was with a huddle of the Gourd crew, who were hunched over, loo
king bewildered.

  He felt a surge of satisfaction. The first warning from the sun station must indeed have been delivered here almost instantaneously, by hyperdrive, and, arriving by lightspeed’s crawl sixteen minutes later, he was seeing the crew’s response.

  He looked up through the scuffed surface of the lifedome at Goober c’s perennially cloudy sky. It was still dark, not yet dawn here. But he saw points of light crawling under the clouds. Cherry-red flashes.

  He muttered a command to enable him to access his projection’s source code. ‘Magnify,’ he muttered. Now his eyes worked like zoom lenses, although it hurt. And he saw Spline ships, like fleshy eyeballs, he thought, massive, suspended in the sky of Goober c. Perhaps a dozen in his field of view, they gathered in groups of three or four, perhaps for mutual protection or tactical advantage.

  More elusive, harder to pick out, he saw Ghost tangleships.

  Cherry-red light flickered between the manoeuvring fleets, transcient threads, the paths of the beams clearly visible, if momentarily, like laser light flashing through smoke. So both sides had planetbusters. More Xeelee technology, purloined and sold on. And damage was being done. Big black scars blossomed in the fleshy hides of the Qax vessels, while tangleships folded around the planetbuster strikes, like crumpled paper. There was a sound like distant thunder.

  Jophiel had no way of telling how the conflict was going, which side looked like it might earn victory. Maybe he should be rejoicing that these two enemies of mankind, in one timeline at least, were knocking lumps out of each other in the here and now.

  But what mattered above all, for him and his crew, was that wormhole interface, the tetrahedral pyramid that still, he saw with mixed relief and anxiety, stood apparently intact on top of the lifedome. ‘If you’re out there, Michael,’ he muttered, ‘now would be a great time to show up, relativistic dilation or not.’

  ‘Jophiel.’ Harris Kemp came running up. He had always been clumsy in the heavy gravity – running, in fact, was unofficially forbidden, on safety grounds.

  ‘Harris, how long—’

  ‘The Ghosts told us you were coming back fifteen minutes ago.’ That message delivered by hyperdrive hop. ‘We’ve got them together. The crews, ours and the Gourd. Some are here, some are down in the Valleys. Ready to move, as best we can be. Waiting on your orders.’

  And here was a Ghost, appearing out of nowhere.

  ‘Ambassador?’

  ‘You may assume so.’

  ‘The Qax invasion. This world is surely in peril.’

  ‘Indeed. We are holding the line for now, but the Spline fleet must break through. And when the planetary assault comes, they will surely target our facilities.’

  ‘We need to evacuate this station, and our crew down in the Valleys. Can you get us out of here? Hyperdrive would be fastest.’

  ‘We avoid the use of hyperdrive, as you call it, this deep in the gravity well of a planet.’

  Except when you don’t. Jophiel caught Harris’s eye; Harris looked as sceptical as Jophiel himself felt. He doubted very much that the Ghosts would choose to display the full capabilities of their technology to a species it so obviously saw as at least a potential threat.

  ‘Ambassador—’

  ‘You must protect yourselves to the best of your ability.’ And with that, it vanished.

  Harris was furious. He ran at the space the Ghost had occupied, waving a fist. ‘You Lethe-spawned bastards! You’re abandoning us!’

  Jophiel had never seen Harris so angry. But he had a point.

  ‘So we help ourselves,’ Nicola Emry said, striding towards them, ‘before the Ghosts lose their battle in the sky.’

  ‘Nicola. How in Lethe did you get here so fast? . . .’ Then Jophiel swept a hand towards her. He touched the flesh of her arm – flesh that felt, under his own Virtual hands, like smooth, warm aluminium foil.

  ‘You got it,’ she said. ‘I’m not real. I got myself copied, for once, like you do all the time.’ She looked down at her own hands. ‘This me is a mayfly. I hate this. How do you live with it? Well, whatever. I’m hoping my original will be evacuated, with Asher, when the Ghosts use their FTL to escape. Just before, probably.’

  ‘Before what? Nicola. Why are you here? Why the urgency? I mean, why the extra urgency? What happened since I left the station?’

  ‘I needed to make sure the news got through.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘That we’re running out of time, faster than you might think. The Ghosts’ artificial nova event, in Goober’s Star.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I think they moved it forward.’

  ‘What? . . .’

  ‘Asher spotted it, just after you left, Jophiel. And it’s imminent. Minutes away.’

  Jophiel felt his unreal stomach knot up with a very real tension. A nova, on top of an alien invasion. All those lives in sudden peril, and it was his responsibility that they were here, his mission, his decisions. But, as had been Michael Poole’s lifelong discipline, he tried to calm himself, to get control, to think it through.

  ‘OK. Why would the Ghosts do that now? The nova. I guess because they fear that if they don’t do it now, they might lose the chance of doing it at all. And also, the Qax –’

  Nicola nodded. ‘That’s my thinking. It’s a fair bet that however powerful they are, the Qax will be disrupted by a nova event in the middle of their invasion plan. Either way it’s worth a gamble, for the Ghosts.’

  ‘But we won’t be spared the effect of a nova event. Even on a planet as big as Goober c, even down here on the planet surface, under that thick air, with a magnetosphere like armour plate.’

  She grinned. ‘That’s my other bit of news. You know, you always underestimated me, Poole.’

  ‘I never—’

  ‘Don’t deny it. I’m used to it. And now the Ghosts are underestimating me too. I’m finding I have capabilities the Ghosts don’t seem to recognise – or to have anticipated. Not surprising really; they never tried to integrate a human sensorium into a Ghost shell before.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I see things they don’t know I see. Know things they don’t want us to know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as an energy flux out of that.’ She glanced up at the dome apex, the powder-blue tetrahedron patiently sitting there.

  He grinned fiercely. ‘Something coming through.’

  ‘You, probably, Poole. But your timing might be off, as ever.’

  ‘Be fair. The time dilation is ferocious. Since my first requests for help, when we were captured, it’s been only a few hours, for them, on the Cauchy. He, I, will be coming through as fast as he can.’ He stared at her, feeling oddly awkward. ‘Umm, what about you? I mean, this Virtual. Will you upload back to your original?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not this time. I figure somebody should stay here, under that wormhole mouth, until – well, until whatever is coming through, comes through. They’ll need a fast briefing. Harris, get ready to evacuate the lifedome. Jophiel, you should flash down to the Valleys to warn the crew there.’

  He said bluntly, ‘Nicola, when the nova light hits, you’ll die. This copy. Everything that you are.’

  She shrugged. ‘We’re caught in the middle of an alien war, Poole. There will be casualties.’ She glared at him. ‘Don’t dare try to hug me. The Valleys. Go, go.’

  He forced a grin.

  Then he threw himself down into the Xeelee Valleys.

  24

  Where a storm was raging.

  Jophiel couldn’t feel the wind directly, but the consistency protocols made him stagger. The thick air of Goober c, like a shallow ocean, was sluggish and heavy and took a lot of stirring up. But when it did move, it was an angry sea – a sea with a deep background roar.

  Presumably this was caused by the pr
ecursor events, the star’s flaring. When the true nova light hit, this would feel like a summer breeze.

  Now, hunched over, he ducked his head and pushed through that sea of air, one dogged footstep at a time.

  He could see he was close to a cluster of blocky buildings. This was the outskirts of one of the Xeelee settlements, a fringe of this particular hull-plate forest, where relatively large buildings grew relatively sparsely: cuboid shadows against the gloom. The light was dim, sombre, with barely a glimmer at the dawn horizon. The deep surface of Goober c was always gloomy anyhow, even at noon; the banks of clouds, the sheer density of the oceanic air saw to that.

  But now there was a different light in the sky, he realised.

  He peered upwards. It was like a flapping flag, huge, stained purple, yellow, green, behind the clouds. Aurora light: another precursor of the rage of the star, the product of a wave of high-energy particles already slamming into the upper air. Before that light, the Xeelee buildings were eerie silhouettes.

  Nova weather, he thought desperately. Or a premonition. It was starting.

  ‘Jophiel!’ Ben Goober stumbled towards him, skinsuit closed up, arms wrapped around his body, leaning into the wind. ‘I saw you out here – the Ghosts just took off in their tangleships—’

  ‘Plans have changed. The Ghosts won’t help us. The crazy bastards are going to do it. Blow up the sun. Nicola was right. Where is everybody?’

  ‘This way.’ Goober began to push back towards the buildings. ‘As soon as the storms started up, the Gourd crew ran straight for the nearest big building. We didn’t try to stop them. In fact we let them take the lead. We figured, even if they haven’t been through a day quite as bad as this before, they’ve been here a thousand years. You pick up instincts. And the buildings are made of indestructible Xeelee hull plate. There are worse places to shelter.’

  A fresh gust buffeted them both.

  Goober staggered. ‘Keep going!’

  They neared the building. There was a sheet of some kind of cloth held over the door, a neat flaw in the side of the building. When Goober called out, the cloth was pulled back, and Goober lurched inside.