Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  That, anyhow, was the plan.

  When the jump came, the sky was suddenly so bright it was as if it had exploded.

  Dray was calling. “Two and Four! Wedge Two and Four, report!”

  Pirius ignored everything and checked his ship’s systems. The Cavity was a lethal environment, saturated with radiation and laced with massive particles fleeing at close to the speed of light. But the Other Claw had survived the FTL jump, and was protecting her crew.

  When he was satisfied, he looked up.

  Suddenly he was sitting on the edge of the Cavity, actually inside the central space contained within the Front. Through a blizzard of stars he could clearly see the Baby Spiral. The convoy had emerged from its jump close to the terminus of the spiral arm called East, where it lost its coherence and merged into the mush of the Circumnuclear Ring. From Pirius’s point of view, East was a tunnel of infant stars and crimson-glowing gas that wound deeper into the Cavity. It was like looking into the guts of an immense machine, he thought, a machine of gas and dust and stars. All of this was tinged with blueshift, for he was already flying further inward; the Other Claw had emerged from the hop with a velocity a high fraction of lightspeed, a vector arrowed straight at the heart of the Galaxy.

  Against this astounding background, Pirius had eyes only for the green sparks arrayed around him. The array was noticeably more ragged than it had been before the jump—and seven had been reduced to six, he saw now.

  “Two, Four!”

  “Four here,” came a reply. “We lost Two. The FTL shift brought him too close—I was lucky to pull away myself.”

  Nilis gasped. “We lost a crew? So suddenly?”

  Pirius said grimly, “You can see what kind of cauldron we’re in. FTL jumps aren’t too precise at the best of times.”

  “To die in a place like this.” Nilis had lowered his hands now, and the complex light swam in his eyes. “And are we already moving?”

  Cohl called dryly, “The law of conservation of momentum isn’t particularly relevant if you pass through an FTL hop, Commissary. If you tweak the hop you can emerge with any three-space momentum you want. As my instructors used to say, in operations like this, physics is just a tool kit.”

  “Remarkable, remarkable.”

  “Let’s go to formation B,” Dray called. “Close up.”

  The green lights slid around the sky; once more Dray was at the tip of the wedge, and the other ships, including Pirius’s, formed its flanks.

  Dray ran through the procedures that lay ahead. “One light-day jumps. We wait one tenth of a second at each emergence; we set our formation; we jump again. Everybody clear?”

  “Sir.”

  “On my mark. Three, two.”

  With a gut-twisting lurch The Assimilator’s Other Claw leapt across another thirty billion kilometers, across a space that could have held three copies of all of Sol system out to Pluto side-by-side, a monumental leap completed too rapidly for Pirius’s mind even to be aware of the transition before it was done.

  And then the ship did it again. And again. Virtual Nilis moaned and buried his head in his hands.

  It was an uncomfortable, juddering progress, a series of flickering lurches, ten every second. The miniature spiral arm was a tunnel, a few light-days wide, that stretched out ahead of the ships, leading them toward the still more exotic mysteries of the very center. But the six surviving ships around Pirius pushed on, glowing bright defiant green, their neat wedge formation a challenge to the chaos of the cosmos.

  Virtual Nilis sat up and dared look around, plucking at the threadbare sleeve of his robe. His eyes were wide, and the Virtual generators artfully reflected Galaxy-center light in his eyes. “So much structure, so precisely delineated. Do you realize, even now we know virtually nothing about the details of this place—not the geography, but the why of it. Why should this extraordinary toy Spiral exist at all? And why three arms, why not one or five or twenty? Is it really a coherent structure, or just some chance assemblage, gone in a million years? We have been so busy using this place as a war zone we have forgotten to ask such questions.”

  As Pirius labored at his instruments, Nilis talked on and on, about other galaxies where the central black holes weren’t sleeping giants like this one, but voracious monsters that seemed to be actively eating their way through the gaseous corpses of their hapless hosts; he spoke of galaxies racked by great spasms of star formation, tremendous eruptions of energy that spanned hundreds of light-years.

  “We rationalize all these things away with our physics, coming up with one theory after another. But we know that life’s thoughtless actions have shaped the evolution of matter, even on astrophysical scales. So how can we tell what is natural? We have been waging war here for millennia. But there is evidence that the Xeelee have been fighting here much longer, tremendous ancient wars against a much more formidable foe. And what would be the consequence? Perhaps everything we see is a relic of an ancient battleground, like the trench-furrowed surface of a Rock, worked and reworked by conflict until nothing is left of the original… .” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m talking a lot.”

  “Yes, you are,” Pirius said tensely. “I should have left you back at the base.”

  Nilis laughed, though his face stayed expressionless. “I’ll try to—”

  “Flies! My altitude fifty degrees, azimuth forty …”

  Pirius quickly converted that to his own point of view and peered out of his blister. He couldn’t see the nightfighters. But in his sensor view, there they were, resolutely night-dark specks in this cathedral of light.

  “Remarkable,” Nilis said. “This is a three-dimensional battlefield, with no common attitude. You use spherical coordinates, and you are able to translate from one position to another, in your head—”

  “Shut up, Commissary.”

  Somebody called, “I count five, six, seven—”

  Cohl said, “All nightfighters, I think.”

  Enduring Hope called, “I’m surprised they took so long.”

  “No,” said Dray grimly. “We surprised them. Pattern alpha.”

  The seven greenships turned with the precision of a single machine, and Pirius felt a stab of pride.

  Now the Xeelee were dead ahead. The greenships continued to plow toward them.

  “Sublight,” Dray called. “Half lightspeed.”

  The greenships cut their FTL drives. The Other Claw dropped back into three-dimensional spacetime with a velocity of half the speed of light, arrowed straight at the Xeelee. The enemy was now just light-minutes away, no more remote than Earth was from its sun. The greenships were closing so fast that the background, the Spiral’s boiling clouds of gas and dust, was tinged faintly blue.

  As the nightfighters neared, Pirius could see how they swarmed, flying over, under, around each other, rapid movements whose pattern was impossible to follow, like the flies that had earned them their barracks nickname. Their movements were almost like a dance, Pirius thought; smooth, graceful, even beautiful. But not human.

  And they were close, terribly close. Pirius thought he saw the first tentative cherry-red flicker of a starbreaker beam.

  “Break on my mark,” Dray said. “Three, two, one—”

  The wedge formation dissolved. Three of the greenships peeled away, suddenly making a dash for it back along the great roadway of the spiral arm. The rest, including Dray and Pirius, closed up tighter. Only the four of them now, four green sparks in this dazzling Galaxy-center light storm, four against the dense pack of Xeelee flies dead ahead.

  Nilis murmured, “I don’t understand—”

  “Shut up,” said Pirius.

  For a time—a moment, a heartbeat—the Xeelee held their position, and Pirius thought the subterfuge wasn’t going to work. And if it didn’t he was a dead man.

  But then the Xeelee broke. Moving as one, they tore after the three departing ships.

  Pirius whooped, flooded with relief and exultation. There were answering cries
from the other ships. “Lethe, it worked!”

  Dray briefly shut down the loop, so that only her voice sounded. “Let’s keep the partying for later,” she said dryly. “Formation C. You know the drill.”

  The Other Claw banked and turned.

  Nilis gripped the edge of his Virtual seat. “Oh, my eyes,” he whispered, evidently more upset by a bit of aerobatics than by a head-on approach to a pack of Xeelee fighters.

  The four ships soon settled down into a new simplified wedge. Dray ordered them to sound off once in position: Three, Four, Seven called in. Pirius, in Seven, trailed Dray, the leader; Three flew alongside Dray, trailed by Four.

  Nilis spoke up again. “We flew at the Xeelee. Why didn’t they repel us?”

  “They thought we were a diversion,” Pirius said. “That the others, One, Five, Six, were the ones with the real mission—whatever they imagine it to be. The Xeelee made a quick decision, chased the others. But they were wrong.”

  “Ah. Those others, One, Five Six—they were the diversion. Clever! Perhaps we are better liars than the Xeelee. What does that say of us? … But of course it would only work if the Xeelee didn’t know of it in advance.”

  “We were flying anti-Tolman patterns.” Patterns intended to disrupt the abilities of the enemy to send signals back into their own past. “It’s all part of the game. It’s a gamble, though; you can never be sure what you’ll come up against.”

  “But it worked,” Nilis said. “An ingenious bluff!”

  Pirius saw a flaring of light up around azimuth forty degrees, a green nova. Somebody up there was fighting and dying, all for the sake of an “ingenious bluff.”

  Dray had seen the same lights. She called gruffly, “Let’s make it count.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On my mark. Three, two, one.”

  That juddering light-day hopping began again, and once more the stars swam past Pirius, as he hurtled along the glowing lanes of dust.

  Chapter 31

  Exerting her new power, Luru Parz brought Nilis and his little retinue to Jupiter. A week after the confrontation under Olympus, it was clear that she was the driver of events.

  Pirius Red knew nothing about the “archive” to which he was being brought. Even Nilis, normally so loquacious, would say nothing. But Pirius’s psych training cut in: it was a waste of energy to worry about the unknown.

  Besides, here was Jupiter. And Pirius thought that of all the ancient strangeness he had seen in Sol system, Jupiter was the most extraordinary.

  The sun appeared the tiniest of discs from Jupiter, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Pirius held up his hand, it cast sharp, straight shadows, shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.

  And through this reduced light swam Jupiter and its retinue of moons.

  Once it had been a mighty planet, the mightiest in Sol system in fact, more massive even than Saturn. But an ancient conflict had resulted in the deliberate injection of miniature black holes into the planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart. Whatever the intention of that extraordinary act, the result was inevitable. It had taken fifteen thousand years, but at last the implosion of Jupiter into the knot of spacetime at its core had been completed.

  Once, Jupiter had had a retinue of many moons, four of them large enough to be considered worlds in their own right. In the final disaster, as gravitational energy pulsed through the system, the moons had scattered like frightened birds. Three of those giant satellites had been destroyed, leaving Jupiter with a spectacular ring of ice and dust. But even now bits of moon were steadily falling into the maw of the black hole, and their compression as they were dragged into the event horizon made the central object shine like a star.

  One large moon had survived, to follow a swooping elliptical orbit around its parent, and that was Luru Parz’s destination now. The moon, she said, was called Callisto.

  Pirius watched Callisto’s approach. It was a ball of white, quite featureless to the naked eye, lacking even impact craters as far as he could see. But it was surrounded by a deep, diffuse cloud of drones. Some of them swam close to the corvette. They were fists of metal and carbon that glistened with weapons.

  Nilis said, “A deep defense system. Even Earth itself doesn’t have such aggressive guardians.”

  “And very old,” Luru Parz said. Even she seemed tense as the corvette descended through the cloud. “This cordon was first erected during the lifetime of Hama Druz himself—following Druz’s own visit here, in fact.”

  “I didn’t know Druz had come here,” Pirius said. He actually knew very little about the moral founder of the Third Expansion.

  “Oh, yes,” Luru said. “And what he found here shocked him into the insights that led him to formulate the famous Doctrines—and to order Callisto to be cordoned off. This little moon is a key site in the history of mankind. Twenty thousand years have worn away since then, and the whole setup has been subject to the implosion of a black hole a few light-seconds away. Some of these old drones may be a little cranky. They have been instructed to recognize us. But …”

  “How ironic,” Nilis said grimly, “if we were to be thwarted by a malfunctioning antique robot.”

  “There are many in the Coalition councils who wouldn’t shed a tear to see the back of me—or you, Commissary.”

  The ship continued to descend. The icescape of Callisto flattened out to a frozen ground streaked with color, pale purple and pink; perhaps the ice was laced with organic compounds. It was smooth as far as Pirius could see, smooth all the way to the horizon. But a shallow pit was dug into the ice, and at the center of the pit there was a settlement of some kind, a handful of buildings and landing pads.

  Luru Parz said, “Once Callisto was just a moon, you know. It was peppered with impact craters, like every other moon—not like this. At this site there was a major crater called Valhalla—I don’t know what the name means—and in the time of Michael Poole there were extensive ice mining projects. But it all changed after Hama Druz’s visit.”

  Pirius said, “What happened to the craters?”

  “What do you think?”

  He thought it over. “The surface looks as if it melted. What could melt a moon?”

  “It was moved,” said Luru Parz, watching him. “In the process the surface shook itself to pieces.”

  “Moved …” Pirius knew of no technology which could achieve such a thing.

  Nilis prompted, “And the reason we are here—”

  “This was the last refuge of many jasofts,” Luru Parz whispered. “And here is stored their oldest knowledge. But it will take a sacrifice to retrieve it.” She wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and Nilis looked away.

  Pirius still had no idea what they wanted of him. Despite his training, dread gathered in his belly.

  The corvette passed through the last line of the drones and began its final approach.

  Pirius descended into the deep core of Callisto.

  He rode an elevator with Nilis, Luru Parz, a servant bot, and a taciturn Navy guard. They passed down a shaft cut into the ice, its walls worn smooth. Pirius touched the walls; the ice was slick, cold, lubricated by a layer of liquid water. Beneath a surface patina of dust and grime he saw that the ice had a structure, a lacy purple marbling, receding into meaningless complexity. More strangeness, he thought.

  It was cold, surely not much above freezing, and their breath fogged air that stank, stale. The elevator, a simple inertial-control platform, was itself an antique, and as it descended it shuddered and bucked disconcertingly. He felt as if he was being dragged down into the strata of time that overlaid every world in this dense, ancient system.

  They arrived in a chamber cut deep in the heart of Callisto. Only the handful of floating globes which had followed them down the shaft cast any light, and the party huddled, as if nervous about what might lurk in the dark.

  Pirius stepped off the platform. The chamber was a rough cube maybe twice Pirius’s height, crudely hollowed out. It might a
lmost have been a natural formation, save for notches in the floor, and a regular pattern of holes in the wall. The only piece of equipment he could see was a kind of door frame, set purposelessly in the middle of the floor.

  Luru Parz walked over the ice. “Once this was a mine. Nothing more sinister than that. But when I was last here the mine had long been shut down. Chambers like this, and the tunnels and shafts that linked them, had been pressurized and occupied. There was equipment here.” She pointed to notches in the floor. “That was a kind of bed, I remember.”

  Pirius had been expecting something like Mons Olympus, some kind of library with bots and toiling archivists, Coalescent or not. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Was this the library?”

  “This never was a library,” Luru Parz said. “This was a laboratory.”

  “Then where?”

  “Through there.” She pointed to the door that led nowhere.

  There was a moment of stiff silence, as Pirius looked from one to the other. He said, “I think you ought to tell me what’s going on.”

  Nilis stared at him, agonized. Then, his arms tucked into his sleeves, he padded to the bot. The bot’s carapace opened to reveal a tray of drinks that steamed in the cold. Nilis picked one up, cradling it in his hands. “Lethe, I need this. What a tomb of a place!”

  Luru Parz watched this with contempt. “A man called Reth Cana worked here, Ensign. Long ago. Ostensibly he came to look for life… .”

  Before humans came, nothing much had happened to this moon since it accreted from the greater cloud that had formed the Jupiter system. The inner moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede—had been heated by tidal pumping from Jupiter. Europa, under a crust of ice, had a liquid ocean; Io was driven by that perennial squeezing to spectacular volcanism. But Callisto had been born too far from her huge parent for any of that gravitational succor. Here, the only heat was a relic of primordial radioactivity; there had been no geology, no volcanism, no hidden ocean.

  Nevertheless, Reth Cana had succeeded in his quest.

  They were cryptoendoliths, Luru said, bacteria-like forms living hidden lives within the dirty ice of Callisto. They survived in rivulets of water, kept liquid by the heat of relic radioactivity, and they fed off the traces of organic matter locked into the ice at the time of the moon’s formation.