Exultant (60 page)

Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.

Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their birth, and wondered where they had come from.

It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead. They thought that it was only
now
that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.

But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished times before.

Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.

For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.

Chapter
54

Suspended over the glistening surface of Orion Rock, bathed in the fierce light of the Cavity’s crowded stars, Pirius Red formed up his squadron.

Jees was the shield-master, of course, his best pilot—with a Silver Ghost in her engineer’s blister. Pirius Red himself tucked in just behind and to Jees’s starboard; Commander Darc, the backup shield-master, took the matching position to port. The rest of the ships took their places behind him, one by one calling off, making a formation that after all the training had become as familiar as the inside of Pirius’s own head.

Pirius felt a peculiar, nervous thrill. Despite the training, this was the first time the squadron,
his
squadron, had formed up to fly in anger—the first and, if it went well, the last.

But he was too busy for such reflections. Scout drones were already returning warnings of a Xeelee response to the Rock’s sudden emergence from the spiral-arm clouds. If the squadron didn’t get out of here
now
it wouldn’t be going anywhere, and the preparation would have been for nothing.

He went around the loop one last time. The familiar voices called in from the ships: Jees herself, Darc, Torec, This Burden Must Pass, even his own older self, Pirius Blue, all ready to go.

He called, “Squadron. Go to sublight.”

He felt a subtle push as his ship’s drive cut in. The stars ahead swam, blueshifted. In seconds, the squadron’s ten ships reached ninety percent of lightspeed, the optimum for setting up the grav shield. The formation still looked good; the hours of training were paying off.

“On your call, Jees,” he said.

Directly ahead of Jees’s tiny ship the grav shield coalesced. It was like an immense lens that muddled the fierce light of the Galaxy’s heart.

“Shield stable,” Jees called.

“Good work. Form up, form up.”

The squadron edged forward, perfecting the formation.

Already they were no longer even in the same universe as Orion Rock, Pirius thought; tucked up in this pocket cosmos, streaming through the prime universe at a fraction below lightspeed, the Xeelee would be quite unable to see them. That, anyhow, was the theory.

Before going to FTL, his last duty was to check with his own crew. His engineer was Cabel, the best of the bunch. His navigator was a kid called Bilson. A promisingly bright boy, but woefully inexperienced, for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to get the flying hours of some of the others—which was why Pirius had pulled rank and insisted he fly in his ship.

They were as ready as they would ever be.

If you had to ride behind a grav shield, the first FTL jump was the worst. During the endless training flights, that had been learned the hard way. You had to go into the jump at ninety percent light—and come out at the same velocity, smoothly enough to keep the grav shield stable—
and
keep your formation. They had done it in training; now they had to do it for real.

“Okay,” Pirius called, keeping his voice steady with an act of will. “On my command . . .”

Locked together by a web of artificial-sentient interactions, the ships jumped as one.

Cohl had seen the squadron rise out of its hangar. The greenships clustered in a tight little knot, right at her zenith.

She had done her duty, here on the surface, forging her links between infantry and flyers. She knew how important she had been to the overall mission, and she had welcomed Pirius Red’s trust in her. But now that it was all about to start, she longed to be up there in those ships, where she belonged. And she wondered if it could be true, as the barracks gossip had it, that there was a Silver Ghost somewhere aboard one of those ships.

The greenships seemed to shimmer, as if she were looking through heat haze. She had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was the grav shield, she thought, wondering.

She whispered, “Three, two, one.”

The greenships, ten of them, squirted out of sight, arrowing toward the very center of the Galaxy. Exultant Squadron was gone.

But a cherry-red glow was rising, all around the horizon.

Her platoon tensed, taking their positions. She gripped her weapon harder, and tried to keep her voice light. “Get ready,” she called.

The ground shuddered, and little puffs of dust floated up before her, immediately falling back. The Xeelee assault had begun.

Pirius felt the familiar FTL inertial lurch deep in his gut, and the shining sky blinked around him.

He hastily checked his displays. His ship had come through fine, he saw immediately, and had fallen back into the universe with its ninety percent lightspeed vector maintained.

Jees reported that the shield remained stable. The plan was to hold their positions for fifteen seconds, while they checked the functioning of the shield and other ships’ systems, and if they had been able to hold their formation in these unique conditions.

But there were only nine ships in the sky, not ten.

“We lost Number Six,” called Bilson.

“I see that,” Pirius snapped. He barked out unnecessary orders for the ships around the gap to close up. The ships were already moving into their well-practiced nine-ship formation, just as they had rehearsed for eight and seven and six, and on down.

One jump, they had barely left the hangar, and already a ship was lost. This mission was impossible.

The others seemed to sense his hesitation. “We go on,” Pirius Blue barked.

“Yeah,” Torec growled. “Nine out of ten through the jump is better than we war-gamed.”

They were right, of course. “We go on,” said Pirius.

“Lethe.” That was Bilson. “Look at that.” He brought up a Virtual feed of Orion Rock, already light hours away.

The Rock was under attack. A swarm of black flies was drifting down over its surface, obscuring the earthworks and weapons installations. Human weapons spat fire in response.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pirius said. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just make it worthwhile. Kick in the jump program. Number One—”

“The shield is still nominal, commander,” Jees called.

“On my command.” Again the sentients locked the ships together; without sentient support, the slightest inaccuracy in such enormous and complicated leaps would have left the squadron scattered over the sky. But the ships’ limited sentience, like every weapon in this immense battlefield, was subservient to human command; this was a human war.

“Three, two, one.”

After the second jump the flight got rougher, and nobody had time to look back anyhow.

Cohl’s own monopole-cannon bank had begun to fire. From its banked muzzles, point lights swarmed into the sky, and at its base she could make out human figures running back and forth, tending its ferocious machinery. This bank was one of hundreds emplaced on the Rock’s surface, all firing now, and looking up she could see streams of sparks, each a minuscule flaw in spacetime, washing up toward the bright blue stars of IRS 16. As its great engines of war opened up, the Rock shuddered and shook. It was almost joyous, as if the Rock itself welcomed this sudden conclusion of its own long genesis.

Ships were rising too, disgorged from underground hangars. Most of them were greenships, but of the standard design, lacking the modifications of Pirius’s squadron. They hastily gathered into tight formations and hurled themselves after the monopole fire. But Xeelee nightfighters came barrelling out of the blue starlight, and those brave green sparks flared and faded, starbreaker light stitching through them.

A whistle sounded on the general comm loop, a sound she had learned to dread. She couldn’t hesitate. She had to lead the way.

Her rifle gripped in one hand, she hauled herself over the earthwork’s lip. She didn’t get the move quite right. Her body was a clumsy, ungainly mass with too much inertia in a gravity field that was too weak, and she sailed perilously high over the churned-up asteroid ground. Light flared ahead of her, a battle already underway around the cannon emplacement. But though a few starbreakers flickered nearby, nobody was shooting at her right now. She didn’t look back. It was up to Sergeant Blayle to ensure the rest of the platoon followed her lead.

She careened down into the dirt, face-first. She was still alive, still in one piece. She was huddled in a shallow crater that afforded her a little cover, a few seconds’ breathing space.

She raised her head cautiously. The monopole-cannon emplacement was still firing, but shapes drifted around it, spheres and ellipsoids, all of them jet black. They were Xeelee drones, and they swarmed around the weapon emplacement like bacteria around a wound—as black as night, chillingly black, in a sky that glowed bright as day. The Xeelee would often send in drones like this as a first wave to try to neutralize a Rock, before deploying the heavier weaponry of the nightfighters and other ships. Even the Xeelee conserved their resources, it seemed.

But already the infantry were doing their job. Shadowy figures threw themselves toward the drones, firing as they arced on their short hops from one bit of cover to the next. Their weapons fired pellets of GUT mass-energy that shimmered as they hurled themselves toward their targets, and then burst open like miniature Big Bangs.

One lucky shot took out a drone—but it exploded, a booby trap. Debris showered, a vicious rain that lanced through the bodies of several troopers before digging itself into the churned-up dirt. The endless chatter on the comm loops was interrupted by screams, the first of the action, before the morale filters cut them out.

Cohl’s platoon caught up with her. She checked her telltales. One trooper had fallen already, hit by a bit of shrapnel from that drone. Nine left, then, nine huddling in shallow pits in the broken ground.

“Let’s go!” She dug her hands and feet into the dirt and thrust herself forward again, firing as she flew.

Most of the drones sailed through the fire unperturbed. Xeelee construction material was tough stuff. The trick was to hit a drone at a point of weakness, at a pole of an ellipsoid, or an edge or vertex of a more angular shape. The spheres were toughest of all, but you still had a chance if you could get your shot close to one of the little windows that dilated open to allow the drones’ weapons to fire. Aiming was pretty much out of the question, though; all you could really do was add your rounds to the general fire that washed down over the drones. Cohl never even knew if her shots hit the target.

And meanwhile the Xeelee were firing back, with lances of some focused energy that were invisible except where they caught the churned-up asteroid dust.

Another of Cohl’s platoon fell in that hop. Still another was hit after they landed, her left arm sheared neatly off. The trooper was left alive but stunned, and blood briefly fountained, turning to crimson ice. A medical orderly was soon on her. He slammed his palm against her skinsuit’s chest panel. The wound was cauterized with a flare of light, and her skinsuit sealed itself up and started to glow a bright brick red, the color of distress. The medic began the process of hauling the wounded back to the earthworks she had just come from.

Cohl could see troopers all over the surface of the Rock, firing, falling, dying. There was a constant attrition, a hail of killings and terrible wounding that somehow seemed banal. The medic teams were working between the waves of advancing troops, right up to the front line. As casualties began to flow back from the lines all over the Rock, the strange industry of processing the wounded and the dead had already begun. And they still had a hundred meters to fight through before they closed on the weapons station.

Cohl checked her platoon once more. Three down, seven up. “Let’s go,” she called again. “On my mark. Three, two, one.”

And she threw herself into the fire.

Then there were eight.

Two hours in, Number Three suffered an instability in its GUT-energy generator: it had to turn back and run for home base. Pirius suspected that this failure had been human rather than technical. A major challenge in these bastardized ships was to keep the systems balanced to avoid excess stress on the power systems; a better pilot or engineer might have held it together.

But they were all feeling the strain. His own eyes were gritty, his face pooled with sweat that his skinsuit’s conditioning systems didn’t seem able to clear, and his hands were locked into claws by the effort of applying just the right touch to his controls, as he tried to balance the FTL jumps and sublight glides. But he couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse, not for a second, not if he was going to get his own laden, lumbering ship through this, and not if he was to keep his squadron together.

As they inched their way toward Chandra the astrophysical geography was slowly changing. The squadron was now tracing a feature the planners called the Bar: it was the pivot of the Baby Spiral, a great glowing belt of molecular gas that marked the bridge that joined the East and West Arms. Pirius could see the lane of gas like a shining road beneath him. He knew that road led straight to the system surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole itself, though that central mystery was still invisible to him.