Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  The first of them was a woman, a former pilot called Jees.

  Long before Jees reached his office Pirius could hear the whir of exoskeletal supports as she clumped down the corridor. When she came in, he was shocked. Her lower body had been sliced away on a line that ran from her ribs on her right hand side to her pelvis on her left, the flesh and bone and blood replaced by a cold mass of silvery prostheses. When she sat down, the chair creaked at her inhuman weight.

  But her hair, cut short, was a bright blond, and her skin was unlined. She was even beautiful. She could have been no more than his own age—but her eyes were dull.

  She told him her history. She had been involved in two actions. She had survived the first, but had been caught by a starbreaker in the second. She had been lucky to live at all, of course. Most of her squadron, cut apart, hadn’t. She told this story unemotionally, lacing it with dates and reference numbers that meant nothing to Pirius. “If you get back to base they fix you up. The medics.” A half-smile crossed her face. “As long as there’s a piece of you left, they can replace what’s missing.”

  It was impossible to feel pity for her; she was too damaged for that.

  “Your current assignment is ground crew.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You really think you can fly again?”

  “I volunteered,” she said. “I’m a pilot, not a mechanic. You’ve seen my evaluation. My reflexes and coordination and all the rest are as good as they were. Augmented, some of them are better, in fact. But—”

  “You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

  Pila watched Jees, coldly evaluating.

  Jees tapped her head with a metallic finger. “Everything that counts about me is still here. And what I am is a pilot. I want to get back out there and prove it.”

  Pirius nodded, thanked her, and let her go.

  Pila waved her hand, and a box in a Virtual checklist turned from red to green. “It’s obvious. We take her.”

  “We do?”

  Pila shrugged elegantly. “She’s a volunteer, one of the few we’ve had. She can handle the mission technically. Her nerve isn’t broken, according to the psychologists. In fact she’s powerfully motivated; she has a grudge against the Xeelee, and who can blame her? But we aren’t going to find many like her, Pirius.”

  From the beginning Pila had complained bitterly about the pool of available candidates. “The superannuated and the criminal,” she said. “That’s all that’s being made available to us. Crew who are useless anywhere else, and so won’t impede Marshal Kimmer’s own grand goals. And there are precious few of them… .”

  The fact was, in this war walking wounded were rare. Day after day, the fragile greenships flew into Xeelee fire like moths into flames. If anything went wrong, your chances of surviving were slim: death worked efficiently here.

  Even “criminals” were hard to find. Penal units were handed the worst, the most dangerous assignments, and if you happened to survive an action, you were thrown back out again. Life expectancy was not long, the turnover rapid. But then, if you fell out with a Doctrine cop, you had demonstrated some incorrigible character flaw—and, deemed beyond hope of rehabilitation, you were eminently disposable.

  But Pila had quickly found that even these battle-damaged antiques and failed renegades were hoarded, like every other resource, by jealous, empire-building local commanders. Pirius decided he was going to have to visit a penal detail to try to drum up volunteers. And that meant he would have to go to Quintuplet Base, where he knew at least one incorrigible rebel was still stationed—himself.

  When he told her his decision, Pila grinned, her eyes quite without humor. “For the first time I am glad I have been forced into this assignment. I will enjoy watching you confronting your own unresolved issues, Pirius.”

  But he was able to put that aside for a while, as he had a much more agreeable chore to complete first.

  A week after Pirius’s promotion, the first test flights of greenships modified to Nilis’s full design were scheduled. Flexing his squadron leader muscles, Pirius decided to take the very first flight himself.

  So he found himself sitting in a greenship’s pilot blister, with Torec as engineer and the intimidating presence of Commander Darc as navigator. Before the great dislocation of Blue’s irruption into his life, Pirius Red had actually completed his pilot training, but he had never flown in action. It was a huge relief to be aboard a greenship again, back where he belonged.

  He checked over his ship. The greenship sat on its launch cradle on the tightly curving surface of Rock 492. The feather-light gravity of the dock touched the ship gently, and Pirius could see that the rails of the cradle had barely made a groove in the loose surface dust.

  Light as a soap bubble it might be, but it was an ungainly beast even so. It was a superannuated fighter, one of just five begrudgingly donated so far by Marshal Kimmer and his staff. And it had been in the wars. The central body was scarred and much patched—and you could clearly see where the nacelle bearing the pilot’s pod had once been sliced clean through. This ship had been sent out again and again, until it was too battered to be worth fixing up: too worn out, in fact, for any use except Nilis’s complicated project.

  This beat-up old bird would have been ugly enough if it had been left as nature and the Guild of Engineers intended. But Nilis had made things worse with his “enhancements.” Not one but two of Nilis’s patent black-hole cannons had been fixed to its flanks, along with a bulky pod where the exotic ammunition for these weapons was stored. The whole thing was swathed in a tangle of cables and wires and tubing. The ruining of the greenship’s classic streamlined finish didn’t matter, of course, since a greenship never flew in an atmosphere. What did matter was how the massive pods attached to the main body affected the ship’s dynamic stability.

  The greenship was a mess, no two ways about it. Pirius thought the ironic name Darc had given it was apt: Earthworm. This poor ship looked as capable of swooping gracefully through space as fat old Nilis himself.

  But still, this was the bird Pirius was going to fly today. And as he and his crew worked through their final preparations, he felt his heart beat a bit faster.

  Then, with a soft command, he powered up his control systems. Much of the display was standard, concerned with handling the ship in its normal modes under the FTL drive or the sublight drives, after his years of training as familiar to Pirius as his own skin. Most of these displays were Virtual: only life-support controls were hardwired, so they wouldn’t pop out of existence no matter what hit the ship. But now Nilis’s additions booted up. Designed in haste and patched in hurriedly, they overlapped each other as they competed for space, crumbling into flaring, angry-looking crimson pixels.

  Torec was grumbling about this. “Lethe,” she said. “It’s just as it was back in Sol system. You’d think they would have ironed this out by now.”

  Commander Darc said, “We’re all under pressure, Engineer.”

  Despite Torec’s complaints, one by one, the ship’s systems came up. When most of the flags shone green with “go,” Pirius snapped, “Engineer?”

  “It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Torec said gloomily.

  “Then let’s get on with it.”

  Pirius grasped a joystick and pulled it back steadily. He could feel the ship around him coming to life: the thrumming of the GUT-energy power plant, the subtle surges of the sublight drive. But as the ship lifted off the dirt, he could feel an unwelcome wallowing as the ship labored to cope with its additional mass. The inertial shielding seemed to be hiccupping too. He wasn’t surprised when an array of indicators turned red.

  As they hovered over the dirt, his crew labored to put things right. “The problem’s the power plant,” Torec called. “The weapons systems have been patched into it. There’s enough juice to go around, in theory; the problem is balancing the demands. Greenship power plants aren’t used to being treated like this.”

  “Work on it, Eng
ineer,” Pirius said. “That’s what these trial flights are about, to flush out the glitches and fix them.”

  “Well spoken, Squadron Leader,” Darc said dryly. “But you might want to look at your handling. That extra mass has screwed our moments of inertia.”

  Pirius said, “The nav systems have been upgraded to cope with the changes.”

  “Well, the patches don’t seem to be working. The central sentient thinks it’s stuck in one sick ship.” Darc laughed. “It isn’t so wrong.”

  “We’ll deal with it,” Pirius said grimly.

  The crew continued to work until they had got the blizzard of red lights down to a sprinkling. Then, when he thought he could risk it, Pirius lifted the ship away from the Rock. The ascent was smooth enough.

  Pirius glanced down at the receding asteroid. He could see the shallow pit from which they had lifted. Standing around it, in defiance of all safety rules, was a loose circle of skinsuited techs. These complex trials, as Nilis’s team tried desperately to turn their prototypes and sketches into a working operational concept, had drawn a lot of cynicism from these world-weary techs, especially the Engineers’ Guild types: these observers were here, he knew, not to watch a successful trial, but to see a cocky pilot crash and burn. His determination surged. It wouldn’t happen today.

  Darc sensed what he was thinking. “Give them a show, Pilot.”

  Pirius grinned, and clenched his fists around his controls. The Earthworm hurled itself into the sky, straight up. The sublight jaunt, peaking at around half the speed of light, lasted only a fraction of a second, but Pirius glimpsed blueshift staining the crowded stars above him.

  When it was over, Rock 492 had gone, snatched away from his view. And the target rock was dead ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be.

  He felt a surge of triumph. “Still alive—oh, Lethe.” He was encased in red lights once more.

  “We need to stabilize the systems,” Torec warned.

  Pirius sighed. “I hear you, Engineer.” Once again the crew went to work, nursing their deformed steed; gradually the red constellations were replaced by an uncertain green.

  The target, only a couple of hundred kilometers away, was just another asteroid, a bit of debris probably older than Earth. This Rock had been used for target practice by crews from Arches for generations. It was impossible to tell if the immense craters that pocked its surface were relics of the asteroid’s violent birth, or had been inflicted by trigger-happy trainees.

  “Look at that thing,” Darc said. “Looks as if it has been cracked in two.”

  Pirius said, “Let’s see if we can’t crack it again. Engineer, how are the weapons?”

  Two threads of cherry-red light speared out from the pods on the Earthworm’s main body and lanced into the battered hide of the target rock.

  “Nothing wrong with the starbreakers,” Torec said.

  “Then let’s try the black-hole cannon.”

  “My displays are green,” said Torec. “Most of the time anyhow.”

  “Your course is laid in, Pilot,” Darc called from his navigator’s seat.

  Pirius settled himself in his seat, smoothing out creases in his skinsuit. He stared at the rock, trying to visualize his flight.

  Nilis had explained his latest tactics carefully. The microscopic black holes fired by the cannon had been enough to destroy a Xeelee nightfighter, but they would be pinpricks against a Galaxy-center black hole, and the living structures that fed off it—unless, Nilis had determined, two holes could be fired off together. If the holes could be made to collide correctly they would emit much of their mass-energy in a shaped pulse of gravitational waves—and Pirius had seen, in the wreckage of Jupiter, how much damage that could do. If such a bomb were set off at the event horizon of Chandra, the great black hole would flex and ripple, “like a rat shaking off fleas,” as Nilis had said.

  But such a feat required huge accuracy. The greenships were going to have to fly around the black hole at an altitude of precisely a hundred kilometers above the event horizon: precisely meaning not more than ten meters out. Such a jaunt through the twisted space around a massive black hole was going to be “fun,” in Darc’s words, and the resistance of the Xeelee was going to make it more fun still. If they couldn’t achieve that degree of accuracy, the mission was a waste of time.

  So today’s test was crucial. If Pirius couldn’t hit a dumb piece of rock, then Chandra was out of reach.

  As the systems stabilized, the crew grew quiet. They would have to work together tightly during this maneuver. As pilot, Pirius would direct the line, navigator Darc was to check the accuracy of their trajectory, while engineer Torec worked the weapons. But the closest approach, during which they would have to fire the cannon, would happen in just a fraction of a second.

  Darc said, “Pilot? I think we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

  “Roger that. Engineer?”

  “Do it.”

  Pirius took his controls. The ship quivered, poised. “Now or never,” he said. He closed his fists.

  The rock flew at him, exploding to a battered wall that seemed about to swat the greenship out of space. At the last moment the asteroid swiveled, dropped beneath his prow and turned into a lumpy landscape. Closest approach—but as the black-hole cannon fired, it was as if the ship had taken a punch to the guts—and red lights flared everywhere.

  And then his blister flooded with impact foam, and he was cut off, embedded in a rigid casing, in the dark. It was over, as suddenly as that.

  Frustration raging, he screamed, “Tactical display!” A working sensor projected a tiny Virtual image onto the inner surface of his faceplate.

  The cannon had actually fired, and dotted yellow lines, neatly sketched, helpfully showed the track of the black-hole projectiles. They missed each other, and passed harmlessly through the loose bulk of the target rock, which sailed on, ancient and serene. And at the moment of closest approach the ship had exploded. Three crew blisters came flying out of an expanding cloud of debris.

  Only nine weeks left, he thought helplessly. Nine weeks.

  Chapter 39

  The universe inhabited by the spacetime-defect fauna was quite unlike that of humans. There was no light, for instance, for the electromagnetic force which governed light’s propagation had yet to decouple from the GUT superforce. But the spacetime-flaw creatures, huddled around their black holes, could “see” by the deep glow of the gravity waves that crisscrossed the growing cosmos.

  To them, of course, it had always been this way; to them the sky was beautiful.

  The basis of all life in this age was the chemistry of spacetime defects, an interconnected geometric churning of points and lines and planes. Most life-forms were built up of “cells,” tightly interconnected, and very stable. But more complex creatures, built from aggregates of these cells, were not quite so stable. They were capable of variation, one generation to the next.

  And where there is variation, selection can operate.

  On some of the black-hole “worlds,” fantastic ecologies developed: there were birds with wings of spacetime, and spiders with arms of cosmic string, even fish that swam deep in the twisted hearts of the black holes. “Plants” passively fed on energy flows, like the twisting of space at the event horizons of the black holes, and “animals,” exploiters, fed on those synthesizers in turn—and other predators fed on them. Everywhere there was coevolution, as species adapted together in conflict or cooperation: “plants” and “animals,” “flowers” and “insects,” parasites and hosts, predators and prey. Some of this—the duets of synthesizers and exploiters, for instance—had echoes in the ecologies with which humans were familiar. But there were forms like nothing in human experience.

  The creatures of one black hole “world” differed from the inhabitants of another as much as humans would differ from, say, Silver Ghosts. But just as humans and Ghosts were both creatures of baryonic matter who emerged on rocky planets, so the inhabitants of this age, domin
ated by its own dense physics, had certain features in common.

  All life-forms must reproduce. Every parent must store information, a genotype, to pass on to its offspring. From this data is constructed a phenotype, the child’s physical expression of that information—its “body.”

  In this crowded young universe the most obvious way to transmit such information was through extended quantum structures. Quantum mechanics allowed for the long-range correlation of particles: once particles had been in contact, they were never truly separated, and would always share information.

  Infants were budded, unformed, from parents. But each child was born without a genotype. It was unformed, a blank canvas. A mother would read off her own genotype, and send it to her newborn daughter—by touch, by gravity waves. In the process, depending on the species, the mother’s data might be mixed with that of other “parents.”

  But there was a catch. This was a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictated that it was impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the daughter to be born, the mother’s genotype had to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.

  To human eyes this would seem tragic; but humans worked on different assumptions. To the spacetime fauna, life was rich and wonderful, and the interlinking of birth and death the most wonderful thing of all.

  As consciousness arose, the first songs ever sung centered on the exquisite beauty of necrogenesis.

  Chapter 40

  The senior representative of the Guild of Engineers at Arches Base was called Eliun. He arrived for the review of the failed test flight with two aides. The review was held in a shabby conference room deep in Arches’ Officer Country. Eliun immediately made his way to the head of the table and sat comfortably, hands folded over his belly.

  Nilis bustled among his data desks and Virtuals, his movements edgy and nervous. The scratch crew of the lost Earthworm were here: Pirius, Torec, and Darc. All had survived the ordeal intact, save for Commander Darc, whose broken wrist was encased in bright orange med fabric.