Xeelee: Endurance (15 page)

‘I thought it was my duty,’ he murmured. ‘She will remember all this, after all, long after the rest of us are dust. I wonder if they are praying.’

‘Who?’ Mura asked.

‘The crew of those ships. For they worship Sol too, do they not? And now we are about to use Sol itself to kill them.’ He lifted his face, and his old skin felt fragile in the sun’s processed light. ‘Do we have the right to do this? Does even Shira?’

She grabbed his arm. ‘Too late now—’

The ships exploded out of the distance.

At closest approach solar gases hosed from the drifting wormhole Interface, turning it into a second, miniature sun. Solar fire swept over the invaders.

Mura whooped and punched the air. Folyon was shocked and troubled.

S-Day plus 4. The Oort cloud, outer Solar System.

Densel Bel wished he could see the sun with his naked eye. After all, he was among the comets now, within the sun’s domain.

He stood in the dark, peering up at the zenith, the way the ship was flying; he tried to imagine he was rising towards the sun in some spindly, superfast elevator. A light-week out from Sol, with the ship travelling at less than two per cent below light-speed, the view from the lightdome of
Fist Two
was extraordinary. All was darkness around the rim of the hemispherical lifedome. The only starlight came from a circular patch of light directly over his head, crowded with brilliant stars, all of them apparently as bright as Venus or Sirius seen from Earth. He knew the science well enough; the starfield he saw was an artefact of the ship’s huge velocity, which funnelled all the light from across the sky into a cone that poured down over his head.

And meanwhile the stars he was able to see were not the few thousand visible in solar space to the unaided human eye. His extraordinary speed had imposed a Doppler effect; the stars behind had been redshifted to darkness, while the ‘visible’ stars ahead, had similarly been blueshifted to obscurity. But conversely red stars, giants and dwarfs pregnant with infra-red, now glowed brightly, crowding the sky: a hundred thousand of them, it was thought, crammed into that tight disc. Sol itself was somewhere in there, of course, at the dead centre of his visual field, and he knew that the navigators on the bridge had elaborate routines to disentangle the relativistic effects. But a primitive part of him longed just to see the sunlight again, with his own unaided eyes, for the first time in so many decades—

A shower of what looked like snow sparkled over the lifedome, gone in an instant. He flinched, half-expecting the blister to crack and crumple. He called, ‘What was
that
?’

A Virtual of Flood appeared in the air before him, the avatar used by the ship’s AI to communicate with the crew. ‘We lost
Fist One
,’ Flood said bluntly.

‘How?’

‘A dust grain got it. The earthworms. They blew up an ice asteroid in our path, creating a screen of dust hundreds of kilometres wide. We have defences, of course, but not against motes that size, and at such densities. At our velocity even a sand grain will hit with the kinetic energy of a—’

‘There shouldn’t be any asteroids here. We’re out of the plane of the ecliptic.’

‘Evidently the earthworms have prepared defences.’

‘So how come
we
survived?’

‘The destruction of
One
blew a hole in the debris cloud. We sailed through.’

Densel considered. ‘Our ships follow each other in line. So even if the lead ship is taken out by further screens, it might clear a path for the rest.’

‘That’s right. And we will still achieve our objective if only three, two, even just one of the
Fist
s
gets through.’ Flood hesitated, and the image crumbled slightly, a sign of additional processing power being applied. ‘There is other news. The Third Wave ships came under fire as they rounded the sun. Two were lost.’

‘That was smart by the earthworms.’ Densel wondered if he ought to be exulting at this victory, for Earth, after all, was his home planet. But his heart was on Footprint, with the families he would never see again. He didn’t want anybody to die, he realised.

Flood said, ‘Smart, yes. But six ships survive, of eight. Meanwhile the earthworms are regrouping. Half of their ships, twelve of them, are heading for Jupiter. To win, we have to eliminate the Imperial Navy. So we have to follow. Jupiter is where the decisive encounter will come, for the Third Wave.’

‘And the other earthworm ships?’

‘Converging on the course of the
Fist
s
. Clearly they understand the danger you represent.’

Densel nodded. ‘But now, in
Two
, I’m in the van. The next in line for the duck shoot.’

Again that hesitation, that fragility. ‘The crews are conferring. That would not be optimal.’

‘Not optimal?’

‘For
your
ship to lead. The line is to be reconfigured.
Fist Two
will continue astern of the remaining ships, not in the lead, protected by the others.’

‘You want to give
Two
the best chance. Why?’

‘Because
Two
has you aboard.’ The avatar grinned, an imperfectly imaged, eerie sight. ‘I told you. You are useful, Densel Bel.’ Theatrically he consulted a wristwatch. ‘Subjectively you are little more than a day away from Sol. Remember, you are moving so quickly that time is stretched, from your perspective. Seven more days left for Earth. Thirty-three hours, that’s all it will be for you. Then it will be done. Try to get some sleep.’ The image crumbled to pixels and disappeared.

S-Day plus 6. Imperial bunker, New York.

Admiral Kale was shocked by what he found of New York.

The great ocean wave had spared some of the mighty old buildings, which stood like menhirs, windows shattered, their flanks stained by salt water. But the human city at their feet was devastated, scoured out, millennia of history washed away. Even now the aid workers and their bots dug into the reefs of rubble the wave had left, and the refugees were only beginning to filter back to what remained of their homes.

But in her bunker, deep beneath the ruin of Central Park, the Empress sat beside her pool of logic and light, imperturbable.

‘You are angry, Admiral Kale,’ she said softly.

‘Every damn place I go on the planet I’m angry,’ he said. ‘The destruction of history – the harm done to so many people.’

‘We are not yet defeated.’

‘No, ma’am, we are not. We are massing the Navy cruisers at Jupiter—’

‘I have viewed the briefings,’ she said.

‘Ma’am.’ He stood and waited, unsure what she wanted, longing to get back to his duties.

‘I have brought you here, Admiral, to speak not of the present but of the past, and of the future. You spoke of history. What do you know of history, though? What do you know of the origin of the Empire you serve – and, deeper than that, the dynasty of the Shiras?’

He was puzzled and impatient. But she was the Empress, and he had no choice but to stand and listen. ‘Ma’am? I’m a soldier, not a scholar.’

‘I need you to understand, you see,’ she rasped. ‘I need
someone
to bear the truth into the future. For I fear I may not survive this war – at least I may not retain my throne. And a determination that has spanned centuries will be lost.’

‘Ma’am, we’re confident that—’

‘Tell me what you know, of the history of my throne.’

Hesitantly, dredging his memory, he spoke of the Emergency a thousand years before, when the great engineer Michael Poole had built a wormhole bridge across fifteen hundred years, a great experiment, a way to explore the future. But Poole’s bridge reached an unexpected shore. What followed was an invasion from a remote future, an age when the Solar System would be occupied by an alien power.

‘An invasion from a bleak future, yes,’ hissed the Empress. ‘An invasion from which the first Shira, founder of the dynasty,
herself was a refugee
.’

Kale was stunned. ‘The first Empress was from the future, the age of occupation?’

‘She
saw
Poole disappear into time, collapsing the wormhole links. And when the way home was lost, Shira was stranded. But she did not abandon the Project.’

‘The Project?’

‘Shira belonged to a philosophic-religious sect called the Friends of Wigner. And their purpose in coming back in time was to send a message to a further future yet . . .’

Kale, frustrated, had to endure more of this peculiar philosophising.

Life, Shira said, was essential for the very existence of the universe. Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being – for without conscious observation there could be no actualisation of quantum potential to reality, no collapse of the wave functions. That was true moment to moment, heartbeat to heartbeat, as it was from one millennium to the next. And if this were true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organise data –
all
data, everywhere – to observe and actualise all events. In the furthest future the confluences of mind would merge, culminating in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.

‘And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer,’ Shira said quietly. ‘And the last Observation will be made.’ She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. ‘It is impossible to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history. The Friends of Wigner, the sect to which Shira belonged, believed that the Observer would have the power to study all the nearly infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer would
select
, actualise a history which maximises the potential of being. Which would make the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain and death.’

The light from the logic pool struck shadows in her face. She was quite insane, Kale feared.

‘We must ensure that humanity is preserved in the optimal reality. What higher purpose can there be? Everything the Friends did was dedicated to the goal of communicating the plight of mankind to the Ultimate Observer. Even the eventual destruction of Jupiter. And even I, stranded here in this dismal past, stranded out of time, have always struggled to do what I could to progress the mighty project.’ She peered into the logic pool. ‘I, in my way, am
searching . . .
’

He stared at her, as he absorbed another huge conceptual shock. ‘Ma’am – you said “we”. You speak of yourself. Not the first Shira.’

She lifted her face, its skin papery.

‘
You are Shira
. The first. There was no dynasty, no thirty-two Shiras, mother and daughter – just you, the first, living on and on. You must be over a thousand years old.’

She smiled. ‘And yet I will not be
born
for more than four hundred years. Am I old, or young, Admiral? Once the Poole wormhole was closed down I had no way back to the future. I accepted that. But there was always another way back.
The long way
. I accepted AntiSenescence treatment. I began to accrue power, where I could. And then—’

‘And then,’ said Kale, barely believing, ‘having built a global empire for your protection, it was a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries, waiting for your time to come again.’

‘You have it, Admiral.’

He peered at her. ‘Were there others like you – others stranded in history?’

Her face was blank. ‘None that survive.’

He was thinking furiously. ‘And you must have used your knowledge of the future to cement your power base.’ He remembered himself. ‘Ma’am, forgive me for speaking this way.’

‘It’s all right, Admiral. Yes, you could put it like that. But it was necessary. After all, there had never been a unified government of mankind, none before me. Quite an achievement, don’t you think? Why, I had to invent a sun-worshipping religion to do it . . . It was necessary, all of it. I need the shelter of power. There are still many obstacles to be overcome in the decades ahead, if I am to survive to the year of my birth.’

‘Ma’am – I thought I knew you.’

‘None of you knows me, none of you drones.’ She withdrew. ‘I tire now. Progress your war, Admiral. But we will speak again. Even if I fall,
the Project must not fail.
And I will entrust in you that purpose.’

He bowed to her. ‘Ma’am.’ And with huge relief he left the chamber, leaving the lonely woman and the light of the logic pool behind him.

S-Day plus 9. Jupiter.

The earthworm fleet was assembling at last, somewhere on the far side of the giant world. The showdown was still hours away, the Alphan planners believed.

Despite the urgency of the situation, despite all Flood’s urging and imprecations, every chance they got the crew of the
Freestar
stared out of their lifedome at Jupiter. After all there were no Jovian planets in Alpha System.

Jupiter was a bloated monster of a world, streaked with autumn brown and salmon pink. The other ships of the rebel fleet, a minuscule armada, drifted across the face of the giant world, angular silhouettes. One other structure was visible following its own orbit, deep within the circle of the innermost moon, Io. It was an electric-blue spark, revealed under magnification to be a tangle of struts and tetrahedral frames. This was the Poole hub, where once Michael Poole had used the energies of a flux tube connecting Jupiter to Io to construct his intra-System wormhole network. One of those ancient Interfaces linked Jupiter itself to Earth – or it had, until the earthworms had cut it as the rebels approached.

And, still more extraordinary, Jupiter itself was visibly
wounded
, immense storms like blackened funnels digging deep into its surface.

It was an extraordinary sight, Flood conceded. ‘Spectacle and history, all mixed up.’