Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Nicola grinned. ‘A ride at super-speed a few metres above the floor of an alien artefact? I volunteer to pilot.’

  ‘Fine,’ Max snarled. ‘So pick a backup, and a backup for the backup, and train yourselves up. This isn’t some stunt, Emry. We’re taking on an enemy here, and we have to assume the environment itself is hostile. Seven days,’ he said now.

  Poole looked confused. ‘Seven days?’

  ‘To finalise a plan. To sort out our gear and prepare our assault. Look, I know we just went through a trauma. There is such a thing as pushing too hard. But seven days is enough. We haven’t time for much more anyhow.’ He glanced around, at sombre faces. ‘You can all contribute. Keep your eyes open. Observe, think, make a note, report. When we come up with a plan, question it, probe it, figure out your own part in it, and rehearse it over and over. And prepare your survival options. Wherever you are, work out where you would go, what you would do, who you would need to help, if the worst came to the worst. Practise it, over and over.

  ‘Seven days, until we go get that Xeelee. Are we done? Are we all clear? Then let’s make a start.’

  As the meeting broke up Jophiel stood with Nicola.

  He whispered, ‘You think I should have said something? Michael should have responded to that challenge. Make it clear this is his mission as much as Max’s.’

  She snorted softly – and quite artificially, a special effect, Jophiel realised; her nostrils were smooth, inflexible air ducts. ‘What, intervene in the stand-off of the two alpha males? This is the moment Max has been waiting for since we left Cold Earth. As for Michael, maybe the only thing worse than not achieving a lifelong goal is achieving it. Michaela’s mutiny affected him, I think. Maybe he feels he’s lost his way . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Max, though. For all the tough talk, don’t you think he seems – brittle?’

  ‘Terrific perception,’ Nicola said sourly. ‘Remind me again why I followed you losers from Jupiter? Well, at least we know what the plan is. As Max says, let’s make a start.’

  So they made their seven-day plan, and followed it through.

  While, in the universe beyond the Wheel, ninety-six thousand years shivered past.

  On the seventh day Max assembled selected seniors: Poole, Jophiel, Nicola, Harris, Asher, Chinelo. He pre-empted the use of one whole truck so they could have some privacy.

  And he projected a Virtual map along one long wall. It had a green cross close to the left-hand end, Jophiel saw, a red cross to the right. Otherwise it was blank.

  Max glared around at them. ‘Behold your neighbourhood. A stretch of the deck a bit more than a million kilometres long. And it’s not to scale, by the way; the section on the chart should be as wide as it is long. Spinward, which we call east, is to the right.

  ‘Here we are, the green mark to the left. Still close to the Xeelee wormhole assembly.

  ‘And over there,’ – and he walked the length of the cabin to make the point – ‘is the Xeelee. As far as we can tell. Right, Asher?’

  She nodded. ‘Confirmed, by the drones we dared send up. It has a distinctive signature – gravity waves, for instance. Physically it is a knot of spacetime anomalies.

  ‘But we have also detected some kind of structure out there. Hull plate: with its opacity to neutrinos, that’s easy to identify. We sent up some drones, and have some long-range visuals. And we see some similarities with the wormhole close by here: a cube, it looks like, and the same colour, visually, that soft blue. The same kind of signature in other spectra. Nicola really wasn’t so far off when she called that transit system from Deck Three a “wormhole”. It is an artefact of folded spacetime, in part, just like a wormhole, and it emits some of the signatures of a wormhole: negative-energy particle cascades, for instance.’

  Poole grunted. ‘So the Xeelee has another wormhole over there?’

  She shook her head. ‘We don’t think so. Similar engineering maybe, but this is bigger, apparently more complex. We think the structure has some other purpose.’ She grinned. ‘We’re calling it the Nest. Not very scientific, I know.’

  Max snapped his fingers, and more detail coalesced on the map, between the two locations: pale circles, mostly, Jophiel saw, with no interior detail.

  ‘There is some structure between us and the Xeelee,’ Max said. ‘Which we’re probably going to have to see close up, to figure out.’ He pointed to the circular notations on the map. ‘These are like craters, or so they look from afar, each maybe a thousand kilometres across. Like small cupworlds, maybe? A thousand kilometres might not sound much – lost against this background – but that’s as wide as the Mare Imbrium on the Moon. Anyhow we don’t think these circular features are any threat. So we bypass them. Most of them, anyhow.’

  ‘Bypass?’ Harris Kemp said. ‘Something you admit we haven’t even seen before? And we just ignore them?’

  Max shrugged. ‘This isn’t science we’re doing here. This isn’t exploration.’ He pronounced that word as if it was an obscenity. ‘We’re trying to achieve a goal. And whatever is irrelevant en route to that goal we can leave aside. But we have to secure our base first.’ He snapped his fingers again, and a new green mark appeared in the map, some distance to the left of the symbol that marked the human camp. ‘We know the Xeelee has used our wormhole to get through to Deck Three, and supervise repairs. That’s how we got here, correct? So we know it has travelled anti-spinward along this swathe of Deck One, from its nest as far as this hatch. So now I propose we make our permanent camp in the other direction. Further anti-spinward. Just in case the Xeelee comes out to its wormhole again.’

  Jophiel nodded now. ‘That makes sense. Make your base outside its known range.’

  ‘Right. So we load the trucks, and send them thataway. Away from the Xeelee. While the rest of us go visit the Xeelee ourselves.’

  ‘One chance only,’ Nicola said. ‘No time to scout, even. It’s all or nothing.’ She grinned, feral. ‘I love it.’

  Jophiel, having thought it over, didn’t. ‘Michael, what about backup options? I mean, we only have one flyer. How would we retrieve the crew if . . .?’

  Poole looked uncomfortable too. But he shrugged. ‘This is all we have.’

  Max snapped, ‘Look, it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. And at least we have a play.’

  Chinelo looked alert, engaged, excited. ‘We really are going out there, aren’t we, Max? Going to face the Xeelee.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Well, that is why we came all this way.’

  But Jophiel found the strange blankness of Poole’s expression, as he took one step nearer to his goal, deeply troubling.

  70

  It took them two more days to prepare. To finish the stripping-down and checking out of the flyer itself. To select and load their gear. Two days in which the remainder of the crew started the process of moving the trucks and other gear which sustained their lives westward, away from the Deck hatch installation, and the sullen Xeelee.

  There were to be just six in the flyer, all that the craft would take comfortably, with their gear and supplies for the ninety-day round trip Max had planned for.

  The six:

  Max, of course. Expedition leader.

  Michael Poole.

  Asher Fennell, never a warrior but the nearest thing Max had to a source of intelligence on the Xeelee.

  Nicola, the pilot. Anticipation for the extraordinary flight shone from her silvered face.

  Chinelo Thomas. Max called her the best fighter of the new generation. And Jophiel agreed it was right that at least one of the ship-born should be present to witness the climax of a saga with roots reaching back all the way to the Solar System and Cold Earth. A witness for the future, however it turned out.

  And Jophiel himself. Who at least didn’t take up any room, he reflected wryly.

  Michael Poole was the last to scramble aboard, carr
ying one last item: a box of what looked like bamboo.

  Jophiel saw this.

  Nicola missed it. She and Chinelo were too caught up in preparing the flyer’s systems to pay attention. Nicola said she intended to use the mission to teach Chinelo to fly, and she had started that process already. Asher was immersed in her softscreens, as usual, as if saying goodbye to her own projects.

  But Max noticed the bamboo box, and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  Jophiel recognised the style of the box, though he didn’t know what was inside. ‘Bamboo. From Gallia Three, right?’

  Poole nodded curtly. ‘A gift from Miriam Berg. Keep it to yourself.’

  Gallia Three, a heavily stealthed station in Jovian orbit, had been a key source of intelligence and weaponry for Poole’s effort to resist the Xeelee during its assault on the Solar System. And Miriam Berg had been one of Poole’s closest allies and colleagues. Never quite a lover. So this was significant.

  And Jophiel thought hard. Looked inwards, looked for memories, or rather gaps in his memory.

  ‘I don’t know what’s in that box. Yet when Miriam handed it over, it was long before I was spun off. I was there, so to speak. Why don’t I know what you do?’

  Poole looked embarrassed. ‘Security. In this case, it applies even to you. I apologise. I can imagine how it must feel to know that you’ve been – edited.’

  Jophiel was bemused. Furious. ‘You don’t trust me? You didn’t trust yourself?’

  Poole’s expression hardened. ‘It was done when you were spun off. You were being sent over to the Gea, remember, where, it turned out, there was a mutiny going on.’

  ‘Have you tinkered with my head any other way?’

  ‘No. I swear. Just this.’

  ‘But I’ll never know if that’s the truth, will I?’

  ‘You’d have done the same,’ Poole said bluntly.

  And Jophiel knew he was probably right. He turned away, conflicted, confused. ‘Well, I hope whatever Lethe-spawned thing you have in that box is worth it.’

  ‘So do I.’

  One last round of goodbyes. Another break-up, just as when they had all climbed down through the wormhole from Deck Three, Jophiel thought. He thought there was a sense of relief once the flyer hatch was finally closed.

  Nicola touched the controls, lifted the flyer to a height of fifty metres above the smooth hull-plate floor, and steadily, cautiously, began the ramp-up to full speed.

  Jophiel, strapped into a passenger couch, locked into his consistency protocols, barely felt a touch of acceleration. Once they were out of the clutter of trucks and temporary shelters the extraordinary sky of the Wheel opened up around them, light curved into a false dawn, an unending sunset.

  A thousand kilometres an hour.

  ‘Sweet as a nut,’ Nicola said.

  ‘Well, let’s keep it that way,’ Poole said. ‘No stunts, Nicola. No matter how bored you get.’

  She grinned. ‘Oh, I’m all grown up now, don’t worry about that. Let’s just hope it stays as smooth and calm all the way to the Xeelee, in six weeks’ time.’

  ‘Well said.’ Max pulled his skinsuit hood up around his face – following Max’s crew rules, they were all to wear their skinsuits all the time – and settled down in his couch, his legs stretched out before him. ‘Wake me up when there’s something to see.’ He opened one eye and looked over at Chinelo. ‘Part of the drill, kid. You sleep when you can, eat when you can. You never know when you’ll get the next chance.’

  But Chinelo, wide-eyed, looked as if she would never sleep again.

  Jophiel leaned over to her. ‘Why don’t you go out back and get some exercise? There’s room in the hold. You can rig up a rower, a treadmill.’

  Chinelo seemed reluctant to leave the control cabin, but it was apparent that nothing was going to happen any time soon. ‘You’ll call me if—’

  ‘I suspect you’ll know all about it. If.’

  She grinned. ‘OK. Thanks, Jophiel.’

  And Jophiel had the uneasy feeling that Max wasn’t asleep at all, despite his performance.

  As it turned out, there was no ‘if’ for four days.

  Then, early on the fifth day, more than a hundred thousand kilometres from the Cauchy camp, they found something.

  It was as if the flyer flew over a cliff edge.

  Jophiel watched from a side window. The aircraft kept to its course, and he saw a neat hull-plate floor far below.

  He glanced around. Nicola and the rest were staring out at the scenery, intent – all save Asher, who was frowning into a softscreen.

  ‘OK,’ Nicola said. ‘I used pilot’s prerogative on how to deal with this. We’re flying over one of the teeny circle marks on Max’s map. You remember? Craters a mere thousand kilometres across. So we should take an hour to cross it. And a few kilometres deep, as you can see. Just like Max said back at camp, it’s a feature as big as the largest seas on the Moon, but lost in the detail of this deck.

  ‘We came onto this one roughly along its centre line. Which is why I decided to fly over it instead of around. There’s no sign of danger. If we’d skirted the feature it would have added half an hour to the journey. And I kept our altitude constant. I could fly down if you feel it’s worth inspecting the surface.’

  Max shook his head. ‘Nothing down there, you can see it. Good choice about the route, Nicola. No evident threat. You have to prioritise. We’re not here to explore.’

  Asher sniffed. ‘Maybe, but we ought to make time for finding out what this is. Otherwise we’re flying blind.’

  ‘It’s like a cupworld,’ Chinelo said. ‘Don’t you think? A lot smaller; they were more like ten or twenty thousand kilometres across, I think. With all that detail . . .’ She trailed off, uncertain. ‘Maybe not so much like it, then.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right, Chinelo,’ Asher said. ‘There are similarities. An order of magnitude smaller, yes, no detailed sculpting. But – here’s one of the things you can’t see in a glance, Max – it does have a Lid over it. Like the force-field “skies” we saw over the true cupworlds. So maybe it is meant as a habitat of some kind, even if it’s empty for now.

  ‘Other differences, though . . .’ She pointed at a softscreen. ‘That perimeter, the edge we flew over, looks remarkably fragile to me. Loosely coupled to the wider Wheel structure, by remarkably thin strips of hull plate. As if the whole thing, this great bowl, is meant to be detached.’

  Poole looked baffled. ‘Detached?’

  ‘And more odd energy signatures,’ she said. ‘This time of the kind we associated with the Xeelee when it was in flight. Planar spacetime flaws, like the Xeelee discontinuity drive.’

  ‘Propulsion systems?’ Poole stared at her. ‘Are you saying this – dish – has a propulsion system? Independent of the Wheel?’

  ‘Looks that way. As if the whole thing could just detach and fly off.’

  ‘A disc-ship,’ Jophiel said. ‘We need to name this, right? Always the first step in managing the unknown. It’s a disc and it’s a ship, too. Probably. A disc-ship.’ He frowned. ‘But I don’t recall us observing these features before, when we first hit this deck. Before we went off up to the higher decks, I mean.’

  Asher shook her head. ‘No indeed. So maybe this is new. Maybe the Wheel is moving to some new configuration, as the end of its five-million-year mission approaches – always assuming we’re right about that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a lifeboat,’ Chinelo said now. ‘The disc-ship, I mean. A lifeboat for a whole world – I mean, a cupworld. If you really had to take off the whole population, if something went badly enough wrong on the Wheel.’

  Nicola laughed.

  ‘You think it’s crazy,’ Chinelo said defensively.

  ‘No! No, not at all. I think it’s a beautiful idea. And just crazy enough to be true.’

 
Max Ward grunted. ‘Maybe so. But if this is a lifeboat, what kind of iceberg is the Xeelee anticipating up ahead?’

  As Nicola predicted, it took them an hour to cross the disc-ship.

  They flew on.

  The days settled into a rhythm of sameness.

  Max slept an astounding amount of the time.

  On the nineteenth day – not yet halfway through the journey – they came upon another disc-ship. It was the same size and configuration as the first.

  But this one was occupied.

  It brimmed with roiling gas, a sombre red tainted with purple and black – a bowl of clouds, illuminated from within by immense lightning bolts. The disc-ship seemed to contain a single huge storm, a thousand kilometres wide.

  Nicola gave this disc-ship a cautious wide berth, but Asher gathered data eagerly.

  ‘Jupiter cloud-tops,’ Poole murmured. ‘When I was at Io I spent many hours staring up at views like that.’

  ‘Like a sample,’ Jophiel said. ‘Cupworlds are as big as planets. This disc-ship is like a piece of a world. Like an ecohab in one of our greenships, like the Island. You were right, Chinelo. A disc-ship is a lifeboat.’

  They flew on. In the next hours, days, they observed more disc-ships: mostly empty, but some were bowls of rock and metal, liquid and gas. Asher gathered data assiduously, muttering to herself, sometimes speaking to Harris Kemp and others back at the trucks.

  When she fell silent at last, some days beyond the Jupiter disc-ship, Jophiel prompted her. ‘Come on, Asher, we know you by now. You have some new unsettling idea fermenting, don’t you?’

  She looked at him sourly. ‘If you want to put it like that. I’m exchanging data with the trucks all the time. The observations are still chancy.’ She said hesitantly, ‘It’s hard to be sure. I think we’re seeing evidence of a wider reconfiguration.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the Wheel. The whole Wheel, Michael. We’re surveying the wider structure of the Wheel as we move through it. With triangulation we can see some dramatic changes up there on the decks, even the struts . . . The cupworlds seem to be moving.’