Xeelee: Endurance (33 page)

But none of that came. Instead Pesten turned the Mole over in his hands. He said, ‘I can make an educated guess. It’s probably a transport machine – or the clever part. All the working parts were cut away long ago.’

She was bewildered. ‘The clever part?’

‘Like a brain. A brain without a body – but perhaps these little holes are its eyes and ears. After all, it responds when you speak to it, doesn’t it?’

‘Brother – what are you saying? That this is actually from the Ship?’

He sighed. ‘The Brotherhood doesn’t believe in the Ship. But the Ship, nevertheless, existed.’ He smiled. ‘And, yes, you have a piece of it here, preserved through the generations.’

She was astonished by these admissions. ‘You’ve been lying to us!’

‘“Lie” is a hard word,’ he said mildly. ‘The Brothers only want what’s best for everybody. I know we have our faults, Lura, but you have to believe that much.’ He gestured at the tree, and the panorama of the Forest below. ‘Look – you understand what we’re doing here, with all these trees?’

She felt faintly insulted he’d asked. ‘We pull at the star kernel. Eventually we’ll make it fall out of the nebula, and all the way down into the Core of Cores.’

‘And why would we want to do that?’

‘Because in response the Core of Cores produces gushes of fresh air. You Brothers say it harbours gods that do that.’

‘Yes. Air with oxygen, and other gases we need to breathe . . . Lura, a kernel is a massive object, and it takes a lot of pulling to deflect it from its trajectory, which, with the rest of the nebula, is a decaying orbit around the nearest big-star. And we only have the trees to pull it with. It takes whole generations to move a single kernel. But when this one falls we will cut the trees loose and move to another kernel, and we’ll start all over again.

‘This is what we do. This is
all
we can do, hauling kernels across the sky, trying to coax more air out of the Core of Cores. So what good is it for people to fill their heads with dreams of another world, and of a Ship that might have brought them here? Best for them to forget it all, and make do with what they have.’ He lifted the Mole before his face. ‘I’ll regret destroying this, for it is a rarity – I have seen other fragments – I never heard of one that
spoke
before. Remarkable. But it must go, of course.’

‘You have no right.’

‘Of course I do,’ he said gently.

‘Will I be punished?’

‘No. I think losing this will be punishment enough, won’t it? I’ll dispose of it, don’t worry any more. Let’s go down and have something to eat, and hope that the next shift turns out to be a bit more straightforward than this one.’

A shadow crossed the sky behind him.

She pointed. ‘I think
they
might have something to say about that.’

He turned to see.

Out of the sky’s crimson gloom a flock of whales came swimming, their massive tails beating at the air, human riders standing on their translucent backs. Humans with weapons.

Suddenly the Mole spoke again. ‘
Massive sensor dysfunction! Massive sensor dysfunction!
’

3

Vala received two contradictory summonses. They came two standard days after the arrival of the Second Coalition flotilla.

Grumbling, she showed the Virtual messages to Coton. One, heralded by a trumpet blast, was an order to attend a Marshal Sand, evidently the senior military figure on the planet and now the ‘interim governor’. The second was an order to go to a ‘processing’ centre, along with all the Weaponised on Delta Seven. Vala snorted. ‘Typical of this sort of strutting ninny – fanfares and petty cruelty, and sheer incompetence to boot. Which shall I attend, eh? Even if you try to do what these people want it’s impossible to get it right. Curse them!’

As she ranted Coton stood back, rubbing the black tattoo on his forehead.

At last she noticed. ‘Oh, child – I haven’t been thinking of you. Don’t be afraid.’

‘This is how it started on Centre.’

‘I know, I know.’ Gently she pulled his hands away from his forehead. ‘Look at this ludicrous mark – it’s all out of shape. They apply them to babies, you know, and then when you grow . . . Look, they haven’t even mentioned you in the summonses. They probably don’t even know you’re here.’

‘Are we going to have to run again, grandmother?’

‘We’re not running anywhere. The work we’re doing here is much too important.’

‘The Starfolk?’

She squeezed his hands. ‘Not just that. It’s this business of your dreams – if that’s what they are. I’ve been doing some research on those words you keep repeating . . . Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious. We’ll talk properly later. Well, we must obey one of our summonses, but which? We’ll go see this Marshal character, shall we? At least she’s the superior officer. Let’s
both
go, and you can demonstrate your existence.’

The city was in chaos. The streets were crowded with Coalition soldiers and functionaries and their transports, and with citizens, some trying to go about their business, some laden with luggage and wandering anxiously. Many buildings had been requisitioned by the new authorities and displacing their inhabitants, so that heaps of furniture and other detritus were piled in doorways amid crowds of the evicted. One sector, an avenue lined by huge college buildings, had long been given over to a market. This morning the vendors were short of supplies, and the lines of would-be buyers were long and fractious, shabby people with bags and packs, holding unhappy children by the hand.

Vala snorted her contempt as she pushed her way along with Coton. ‘The mighty hand of the Second Coalition at work! Refugees lining up to buy food that doesn’t exist. This is what happens when a new authority tries to take control. They’ll have carved up the region with new boundaries, cutting trading links, forcing people out of their homes to be relocated according to one grand scheme or another . . . Oh, I dare say it will sort itself out. But in the meantime we’ll all go short.’

Coton didn’t feel so judgemental. ‘It’s not just the Coalition’s fault, grandmother. The Scourge is advancing, a curtain of darkness. Whole worlds are thrown into chaos. People abandon their homes, their planets, and fall as refugees onto those further out. We have to expect this over and over in the coming years as the Scourge looms ever closer, driving people ahead of it.’

Vala grimaced. ‘A cold analysis, but probably an accurate one.’

They came to a pencil-slim building, its face adorned by light globes.

‘This is it. Once the Chancellor’s residence. Come on! If we follow the directions we’ve been given, we have to climb all the way to the roof.’

Much of the building was dark. The elevators were working, but patchily, and, comically, they had to break their journey around the middle of the ascent to cross corridors and climb three flights of stairs, transferring from one elevator shaft to another. At last they emerged through another dilating door, and Coton found himself on the roof of the building – and not a pace from the edge, which wasn’t in any way fenced off.

Vala laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that! Jump off and the inertial nets will trap you. It’s quite impossible to come to any harm . . . It’s rather obvious where we’re supposed to go, isn’t it?’ She pointed at a space-going military flitter that sat square in the centre of the roof, adorned with flags bearing a bright green tetrahedral logo. She marched forward. ‘Typical of such people to grasp at the symbols of a better past . . .’

Despite her sparky self-confidence, they were held up by armed guards before being allowed to enter the flitter. Vala had to give both their names, and the guards, in bright green uniforms, eyed their Weaponised identification tattoos suspiciously, and checked their identities against scrolling lists. It didn’t help that Coton wasn’t included in the summons, and they had to refer to an off-world database.

Then they were made to walk through a kind of open framework. When it was his turn Coton felt a kind of tingling, a heat that penetrated to his core.

The troopers puzzled over the resulting Virtual images of his head and Vala’s – and Coton stared, astonished, at the sponge-like structures they had detected, meshed within the frontal lobes of both of their brains.

Vala had no patience with this procedure. She tapped the tattoo on her forehead. ‘Don’t you recognise this? We’re Adepts. And Adepts are born with technology in their heads, just as you see here. Check your databases, man. We’re known. We’re harmless!’

While the man checked, Coton murmured to his grandmother, ‘Technology? What technology?’ Even though he had known he was an Adept, he’d had no idea that he had a head full of technology; his parents had told him nothing of this. It was another unwelcome surprise.

And Vala winked. ‘Only the best. Alien expertise.
Silver Ghost technology . . .
’

The Ghosts: ancient enemies of mankind, long extinct. And he’d been born with their stuff inside his head? Coton, shocked, couldn’t take it in.

It took a while longer, and another referral to the superior, before they were allowed to pass.

The flitter itself was expensive-looking, but heavily armoured. Once inside they were led down a short corridor to an expansive cabin. Here an officer sat behind a desk, with images flickering in the air around her head in response to her murmured commands. She wore a uniform of electric-blue fabric adorned with gold lacing, and a peaked cap sat on the desk beside her. This, evidently, was Marshal Sand. The cabin was functional; there was a cot folded up against one wall, and what looked like a small galley at the back behind the desk. An aide stood at Sand’s side, a tough-looking soldier with a gun cradled in his arms.

While the guard didn’t take his eyes off Vala and Coton, Sand didn’t look up, or acknowledge them in any way. There were no seats, so they had to stand before the desk. Vala, irritable all morning, grew impatient quickly. Coton, aware of the guard’s glare, longed for her to stay quiet.

At length the Marshal snapped her fingers, and her Virtual displays folded away and winked out of existence. She looked up at Vala. She had grey-blonde hair shaved short, and her features were strong, symmetrical. She might have been forty. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting—’ She turned her head, and a Virtual copy of Vala’s summons popped into the air before her. ‘Academician Vala. Ah, yes, the Starfolk scholar.’ She glanced at Coton. ‘And this is your grandson.’

Vala snapped, ‘Do you not have chairs for your guests?’

Sand seemed amused. ‘You aren’t guests. And meetings with me generally don’t last long enough for chairs to be necessary.’ She eyed their tattoos. ‘I did not realise you were Weaponised, however.’ She checked over the Virtual summary. ‘Adepts. Both of you? Your talent is inactive—’

‘We are born with the hardware in our heads, but not the ability. Not for generations.’

‘Of course.’

‘We had another summons that clashed with yours. To be “processed” with the other Weaponised.’

‘You did?’ Sand prodded the air, in the middle of the Virtual. ‘There. I’ve rescheduled your processing, with a note that you’re a special case, Academician.’

‘Thank you,’ Vala said acidly. ‘And what does this “processing” entail?’

‘These are times of turbulence,’ the Marshal said. ‘Of huge population movements – the coming of the Scourge sees to that. Times of fear and suspicion. We’re taking steps to ensure the Weaponised and other minorities are protected. Useful roles will be found for them—’

‘Ghettos? Forced labour?’

‘The policy is not mine. I just implement it, as efficiently as I can. In any event, it will not affect you. Academician, let’s get to the point. I need to discuss your work.’

‘Do you indeed? You might find it’s a short conversation.’

Sand held Vala’s gaze, evidently weighing her up. ‘You’re not the first scholar I’ve spoken to, here on this world of universities and museums – in this bubble of privilege. Well, we of the Second Coalition, dealing with the issues of the real world, are only human. But you will learn that we are in fact mankind’s last hope against the Scourge. Which is why I need to speak to you.’

Vala stood up straight, a small, frail woman in this military ship. ‘You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? Are you going to send me to the front against the Xeelee?’

‘Not you,’ Sand said, unfazed. ‘Your Starfolk.’ She snapped her fingers to summon up more Virtuals.

And they spoke of the Scourge.

It was a story that stretched back nearly half a million years.

From out of the dark aftermath of the Qax Occupation, the Interim Coalition of Governance had turned mankind into a colonising, appropriating force that had ultimately, in the form of the Exultant generation, driven the Xeelee themselves out of the heart of the Galaxy. That had taken twenty thousand years. And then the expansion had continued, deeper in time, beyond the Galaxy.

But the superhuman unity of the Transcendence, half a million years after the Qax terror, had proved the high water mark of humanity’s achievement. When the Transcendence fell, man’s ultimate enemies stirred.

Though they were always distracted by their cosmic war against a greater foe, the star-infesting photino birds, the Xeelee had not forgotten their defeats at the hands of humans. Their vengeance, the Scourge, was a simple strategy, but relentless. One by one the worlds of humanity fell dark, their stars cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled construction material. And humanity was beaten back.

Sand said, a cold anger in her voice, ‘Here they are, back in the Galaxy the Exultants won from them. Here they are, sweeping through the plane of the disc, and on the verge of crossing into the spiral arm containing Sol. It will take millennia more. But they will, in the end, take Earth itself – unless we make a stand.’

Coton found himself oddly stirred by her words. ‘Make a stand? Where?’

‘Have you ever heard of the Orion Line, lad? One of the most famous sites in human history – the inner edge of the Orion Arm, which contains Sol. Here the great human expansion across the Galaxy was held up for centuries by resistance from a species called the Silver Ghosts. Well, we won that war, and now nothing remains of the Ghosts.’

But Coton exchanged a glance with his grandmother, for now he knew that wasn’t true, that the Ghosts, in some way, lived on in his own head, and in Vala’s.

‘After the collapse of unified government, mankind suffered hundreds of millennia of bifurcation. Even speciation, which the First Coalition would never have allowed. But now – in the coming centuries – a new unified government, the Second Coalition, intends to make its own stand on the Orion Line.’

‘How?’ Vala snapped. ‘What bright new weapon do you have that could possibly stop the Xeelee?’

‘Oh, nothing new,’ Marshal Sand said. ‘You know the nature of the age we live in better than most, I’m sure. A million years after mankind first left Earth, anything you can dream of has been invented before, and forgotten, a dozen times: archaeology is a better bet than innovation. And our own clever scholars have dug up a weapon we can use against the Xeelee.’

‘The Weaponised?’ Vala asked. ‘The Starfolk? Are you going to start hurling neutron stars around the Galaxy again?’

‘Not that, Academician. We have a much grander vision . . .’

And, with another Virtual display, she demonstrated the Coalition’s dream.

The plan was simple and breathtaking: to turn back the Xeelee with supernovas, detonated in a wall thousands of light years long, right along the inner edge of the spiral arm.

‘You’re as insane as the Integrality.’ Vala sounded stunned.

‘Quite possibly,’ Sand conceded.

‘And it won’t work. Only the most massive stars go supernova,’ Coton put in. ‘Everybody knows that. And besides, most of the Galaxy’s stars have had their fusion processes tinkered with by the photino birds anyhow.’

Sand regarded him. ‘But that’s what we plan to do – tinker with the stars to suit ourselves. We’ll send in the Starfolk through microscopic wormholes, just as in the past. They’ll be equipped to adjust the fusion processes in a star’s core. The physicists promise that a star of only one or two solar masses could be induced to deliver a good enough detonation for our purposes.’

‘Many of those stars must have worlds. People.’

‘Not by the time the stars are detonated,’ Sand said. ‘Remember, lad, the Scourge will be closing.’

Vala asked, ‘And will you abandon the Starfolk to their fate?’

‘Of course not,’ Sand said evenly. ‘They’ll be retrieved in each case. There will inevitably be losses—’

‘She won’t do it,’ Coton burst out.

Sand looked at him in surprise.

Vala said, ‘Coton, hush—’

‘My mother taught me that what was done to us Weaponised was wrong, and it’s been a wrong that’s lasted generations. Vala’s here to help the Starfolk, not exploit them. She won’t help you. Tell her, Vala.’

Sand glanced at Vala. ‘Academician?’

And, to Coton’s horror, Vala hesitated.