Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Jophiel followed.

  He saw that the cloth, a ragged blanket, was being held in place by three of the Gourd crew, one at each side, one at the base. Once Goober and Jophiel were inside, they resumed their positions, pressing the blanket against the breach in the building’s hull. They looked tireless, practised at the job.

  It was a huge relief just to be out of the wind.

  He was met by drawn faces behind oxygen masks. A couple of compact lamps sat on a heap of backpacks at the centre of the room. Somewhere in that pile of stuff, Jophiel supposed, was the processor that was now sustaining his own Virtual presence. And the people sat on the floor, the two crews mixed up, crowding around the light. Susan Chen was here, with her arms around a couple of the Gourd folk. They all wore sealed-up skinsuits; that blanket was no airlock. One of the Island crew’s new mothers was here, sitting in an odd, bulky skinsuit with the sleeves tied off, adapted so she could hold her infant, only a few months old, inside the suit with her.

  Goober stood by Jophiel and murmured, ‘We had to split up. We’re spread across a few of the buildings. I went round and counted heads. All accounted for.’

  ‘Good work.’ Feeling oddly unsteady, Jophiel went to sit at the fringe of the group, avoiding any contact, any irritating consistency violations.

  Susan turned to him. ‘Maybe we should have some food? Or drink, while we have the chance?’

  At those words, a couple of the Gourd crew began to rummage through the packs on the ground.

  Susan said, ‘You can see that we’ve been through this kind of thing before. Storms are rare here, but they do happen. Stellar flares, too. And we long ago learned the buildings themselves are the best refuge. Strange, isn’t it, that we should be sheltered by the technology of the very species that seems to have declared itself our deadliest foe?’

  ‘Susan, everything about this situation is strange.’

  A flare of light shone around the edge of the blanket, a brilliant pink-violet. Everybody saw it, everybody stirred.

  Goober leaned over to Jophiel, and murmured, ‘That was no aurora, not this time. I think that was a planetbuster.’

  ‘Agreed. Which must mean the fighting is getting closer—’

  The floor lurched, tipped, lifted. Jophiel felt it in his own Virtual gut, a sudden spasm of acceleration. As if the whole building, a cube maybe twenty metres on a side, had suddenly departed from the ground, like the gondola of some immense hot-air balloon. Just as Susan had described, the buildings detaching from the ground when they were imperilled.

  The Island crew made to stand. But, Jophiel noticed, the Gourd crew stayed in place. A couple of them even lay flat on their backs on the floor.

  The tremors came again.

  ‘Stay still,’ Susan Chen snapped. ‘You Island people. Including you, Jophiel Poole. Get down flat if you’ve got room. See how we’re doing it. We know how these buildings behave when there’s big storms or a quake. Follow our lead . . .’

  Jophiel saw some of his crew hesitating. He had no real idea what was going on. But he stayed seated himself. ‘Do as she says. Sit, sit down, lie down. Do it.’

  Goober and the other seniors obeyed.

  Again that tipping, more severe this time. Everybody slid across the floor, as did the heap of bags. The Island crew tried to grab at the loose gear. But the Gourd crew, who were lying flat, were faring better, Jophiel saw; they just slid about at no real risk of anything but soft collisions. Susan herself was sitting up, as if on the floor of a bobbing boat, apparently at ease, smiling. Radiating calm for her crew of grown children. Jophiel envied her self-control.

  Jophiel murmured to Goober, ‘With me, Ben. Let’s get back to that door. We need to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  They crawled cautiously back over the pitching floor. At the door, where the blanket flapped in the wind, Goober, one hand gripping the door edge, cautiously peered out, and Jophiel looked past him.

  And was flatly astonished to see they were high in the air.

  How high, it was hard to tell. The whole building, detached from the ground, was floating. And his view of the ground was obscured by more of the buildings from the hull-plate forest, of all sizes from small hut to city-block tower, rising from the surface, drifting more or less serenely in the buffeting air.

  ‘I spoke to Susan,’ Goober shouted across. ‘She did tell us about this. They’ve observed this . . . behaviour, before. In a fire or a storm, the buildings just uproot and drift away, like seeds out of a forest fire. Maybe this is how they spread. Propagate, even. Incredible, isn’t it? But as far as we’re concerned, as the crew of the Gourd worked out long ago, you could hardly find a better shelter than Xeelee hull plate in a crisis – especially if it’s going to carry you away from the danger. And – there, look!’ He pointed down towards the ground.

  Jophiel saw a kind of spray emerging from the base of his own rising building. Small grey-white packages being expelled into the air, drifting, falling. ‘Lethe. Are those Xeelee flowers?’

  Despite the situation, Goober grinned again. ‘Susan told me to look out for that too. Part of the life cycle of the buildings, if you can call it that. The seeds of a new forest, maybe? And—’ Distracted by a shadow, he looked up, and fell silent.

  Jophiel sensed rather than saw the huge presence above. He twisted, looked up.

  At a ceiling of flesh. Scarred, pocked with weapons blisters. A Spline ship. Not some remote image this time, a silhouette against a turbulent sun. This one was under the clouds, in the atmosphere.

  The Qax were here.

  ‘Back!’ Reflexively he went to grab at the man’s collar – his own gloved fingers passed through Goober’s skinsuit in a sparkle of pixels – but Goober slithered backwards, on his belly.

  Just as a pillar of cherry-red light connected sky to ground, with a crack like thunder. Even against the background of a nova storm, the noise that followed, as dirt and shattered rock was thrown up from the ground, was tremendous.

  Then the Spline, rolling through the air like some huge, solid cloud, seemed to pass on. Jophiel saw the planetbuster flicker again in the distance, and heard thunder as superheated air expanded into the thick atmosphere faster than the speed of sound.

  The Xeelee building shuddered, rocked, then settled in the turbulent air.

  ‘A couple of heartbeats earlier and I could have warned you about that.’

  A familiar voice. Very familiar. Jophiel looked up.

  To see a figure hanging in the sky, illuminated from one side by some out-of-simulation light source. A figure in a grey, armoured skinsuit, electric-blue armbands.

  A Cauchy suit.

  A figure with his own face.

  ‘Michael?’

  ‘This is just another Virtual copy. But I am here, yes. We came through the wormhole. Just in time, eh? What a fix. I won’t say I told you so.’

  Light flapped in the sky, glaring, red and green and purple. Another tremendous aurora, Jophiel saw.

  Poole called, ‘The Ghost transports are lifting, from all over the planet. We’re bringing flitters through the Island wormhole interface. We’ll send a ship to pick up your people down there. Better go. Be seeing you—’

  He vanished.

  Jophiel glanced at Goober. ‘I’d better get back there, to Ghost Plateau. Make sure he doesn’t screw everything up. He will send a flitter for you, though. We Pooles keep our promises. Ben, you’re in command.’

  Goober’s expression was tight. But he nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  With an effort of will, Jophiel got out of there.

  And seemed to fall, just slightly.

  He was back on Ghost Plateau, crouching outside the grounded lifedome of the Island. The area was swarming with human beings now, all in armoured skinsuits: crew from the Cauchy, all carrying heavy weapons of some kind.


  There were Ghosts here too. They seemed to be fleeing, streaming in orderly lines across the broken ground. Heading for their own tangleship transports, no doubt.

  Somebody shouted. Pointed at Jophiel, who had appeared out of nowhere.

  One of the troopers whirled around, saw Jophiel, lifted his weapon.

  Fired.

  With a gush of smoke a small missile shot through the air.

  And then the trooper recognised Jophiel. In that fraction of a second Jophiel could see the expression on the trooper’s face, behind his air mask. What have I done?

  The missile slammed through Jophiel’s stomach.

  He fell into blackness.

  When he came to, he was lying flat on his back.

  Maxwell Ward was standing over him. His face was a grinning mask behind a toughened visor, and he held one of those big projectile weapons in his hands.

  ‘Get up, you baby.’

  Jophiel felt a dull ache through the core of his body, his guts, his lungs, his heart. Consistency-protocol violation pains, then. And you couldn’t break a protocol more emphatically than with a missile in the gut.

  He tried to sit up.

  All around him there was chaos, baffling glimpses of action, noise. The whooshes of more rockets being fired. People running. Ghosts fleeing, in production-line regular rows. And a flitter, tight and compact, drifted in the air – not a cut-down Ghost-controlled hulk, but under human command, its thrusters shrill.

  All this came through the wormhole, he thought. That flitter belongs to the Cauchy, and it came through the wormhole. To rescue us. Just as Michael said.

  But here was that clown Maxwell Ward, still standing over him.

  ‘Max, you shot me.’

  ‘Not me. One of my troopers. We’re trying to secure the position here. You can understand we’re a little keyed up.’

  ‘Keyed up?’

  ‘Waste of a missile, though. Lethe, get up, will you? I—’

  Another missile fizzed through the increasingly smoky air, and Jophiel flinched. It was just a small rocket, he saw as it shot by, probably propelled by a compact fusion-pellet engine. A gadget meant as a science probe, a surface penetrator, adapted as a missile.

  This time, the rocket hit a Ghost.

  The initial rupture of that silver skin itself was savage.

  And then the explosive went off, deep inside the body. The skin seemed to burst, and amid a spray of blood, body parts spilled to the ground, heavy masses of meat, some of them blackened and ripped by the missile’s passage.

  The empty skin, rather pathetically, was itself still alive, and it flopped as it tried to escape. But another Cauchy soldier, face blank, came up and seared it with a flamethrower.

  Michael Poole approached Jophiel now, and Jophiel staggered to his feet. This copy of Poole wore an armoured skinsuit with red armbands. The flesh and blood template, then.

  ‘Look,’ Poole said, ‘you were right to try.’

  Jophiel found himself staring curiously. Only a year had passed for Michael since the Island had split from the Cauchy, twelve subjective years ago for Jophiel. For Michael this must be like resuming an interrupted conversation. ‘Try what?’

  ‘To find the humans. Here at Goober’s Star. And right to swallow your pride and call for help. Even though I told you not to ask.’ He grinned. ‘I would have been too stubborn. Well, here we are. And it’s going well.’

  ‘What is? Max here role-playing the invasion of Iceland all over again?’

  Max grinned. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment. This took a lot of setting up, I can tell you. The raid. With only hours to prepare, for us, since you told us you’d been taken by Ghosts. The weapons, we figured the old Federal Police issue blasters might not be enough, so we took inspiration from your father. When Harry shot the Wormhole Ghost at Jupiter, remember? Blew it to bits with a sampling probe, a deep-surface penetrator . . .’

  Jophiel, still, he suspected, in mild shock, became aware that the din of the assault had diminished. He glanced around. The fighting had stopped because the Ghosts had fled – or were fleeing. Jophiel glimpsed one last survivor, backed up into a corner by three, four troopers with loaded weapons – and then it vanished, smoother than a popped soap bubble.

  ‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Wish I knew how they do that. Do some of them have a personalised hyperdrive?’

  ‘“Hyperdrive”,’ Poole said heavily. ‘Does that mean what I think it means? We suspected there was FTL technology here from the analysis of the signals that drew us, you, to Goober’s Star in the first place.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jophiel said. ‘The Ghosts have a hyperdrive.’

  ‘Strictly speaking they’re renting it.’

  A new voice, in all their ears. Ward frowned and tapped at the hardened skinsuit hood he wore.

  Jophiel recognised it first. ‘Nicola. Where are you?’ He glanced at Poole. ‘Last time I saw her she was in a Ghost station, close-orbiting the star, with Asher. Though she did send a Virtual here.’

  Nicola said quickly, ‘What you need to know is the Ghost station isn’t orbiting the star any more. It just snapped out of there, under FTL, and reappeared at Goober c. Just in time to escape the nova. And we escaped,’ Nicola said bluntly. ‘Asher and me. After the FTL hop. We escaped from the station, into space. We’re drifting around, in our own, very elliptical orbit around Goober c. But we’re OK for now. And I brought out a trophy.’

  Michael Poole frowned. ‘What trophy? . . . Never mind. What nova?’

  And Jophiel, stunned, realised that Michael Poole and his crew had no idea of the bigger picture here. ‘Michael – listen to me. The Ghosts. They just triggered a nova event at the star.’

  Poole looked blank, baffled. Too big a leap.

  Ward took brisk charge. ‘Let me get this straight. The star blew up? How far away is this star?’

  ‘Two AU,’ Poole said. ‘Two astronomical units from—’

  ‘In terms of lightspeed. Time.’

  ‘Sixteen minutes,’ Jophiel said. ‘With FTL, Nicola and Asher were brought out here immediately. OK? But the wavefront from the explosion is following, spreading at lightspeed from the star. An expanding sphere of lethal energies. In sixteen minutes, less, it will reach this planet.’ He tapped his wrist; a glowing countdown clock started. ‘It’s not quite dawn here – we’re still on the dark side of the planet, just. We’ll be sheltered from the direct glare for ten minutes or so. But the disruptions will start once the nova light hits the dayside. Storms. And then we will be turned into the direct nova light.’ He looked at Poole. ‘What a dawn that will be.’

  Poole was grim-faced. ‘Then we need to bring the crew here, and stuff them all through that wormhole, before local sunrise.’

  Jophiel checked a chronometer. ‘Twenty-four minutes from now.’

  ‘All right. So we load up the crew already here immediately. We’ve sent a flitter down for the foraging party in what you call the Xeelee Valleys.’

  ‘Which are on the day side already.’ Jophiel thought quickly. ‘Eight hundred kilometres east of here. For them, dawn is only about four minutes from now.’

  ‘Lethe. Then we have to pick them up before the light storm hits, in fourteen minutes? Less, ideally.’

  ‘And us,’ Asher ruefully called down from space. ‘Also our orbit is decaying, but I suppose that’s somewhat academic.’

  Poole set his jaw. ‘Nobody gets left behind. We’ll send a flitter up for you. Meanwhile we need to keep this place secure. If the Ghosts came back, we’d lose the wormhole.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ Ward snarled. ‘Get your people back here, and I’ll make sure they get through.’

  ‘As for picking up Asher,’ Jophiel said now, ‘Harris Kemp can pilot the shuttle. They crewed together on Larunda. And I’ll go too. She’s one of my people, Michael. As is Nic
ola. I owe her that.’

  ‘No. I need you briefing me,’ Poole said. ‘When I fly down to get the survivors from these Valleys.’

  ‘So I’ll come join you when Nicola and Asher are secured. I’m a Virtual, remember? Travel is cheap.’

  ‘Fine,’ Ward snapped. ‘And if you squabbling twins are done, let’s get to work before we’re all fried.’

  Curt nods from both Jophiel and Poole. Mirror images once again. Poole said, ‘I told you. Nobody left behind.’

  For the first time, looking from the outside, Jophiel saw some of the heroic qualities which others seemed to discern in Michael Poole – in himself. Maybe he had no charisma, no oratorical flair. But what he did have was a vision. And doggedness, determination. No question of giving up.

  They shared a grin.

  ‘Let’s get this right,’ said Michael Poole.

  25

  Tracking down Asher and Nicola was a trivial task for the Cauchy flitter’s smart systems. Just as Nicola had said, they had finished up in a loose, highly elliptical, highly inclined orbit around Goober c. Asher’s skinsuit had a beacon – and she had fixed a separate beacon to the mysterious trophy she had extracted from the Ghosts’ station at the star.

  Still, Harris Kemp watched over the approach manoeuvres intently. Jophiel felt Harris shared his own sense of responsibility.

  But Jophiel found time to look out of the window.

  At Goober’s Star.

  To the naked eye, at this location, it was still the steady, untroubled fusion furnace that had been consuming its hoard of hydrogen fuel for billions of years already, and there seemed no obvious reason why it should not continue to do so for billions of years more. Some of its planets were visible as bright pinpoints against the backdrop of the distant stars, shining by its reflected light. Jophiel had learned to pick out the Venus-like Goober b, the Jupiter-like Goober d, bright sentinels that could be easy to spot through breaks in the cloudy skies over Ghost Plateau.

  It was hard to believe that the star had already exploded, releasing a wave of destruction that would soon splash into the faces of those innocent worlds. A wave held back, for now, only by the finitude of lightspeed.