Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Pila took her place beside Pirius. Even after working closely with her Pirius couldn’t read the expression on her beautiful, pinched face. Perhaps she thought that with this latest failure, this embarrassing and awkward project would be terminated at last, and she could return to the comforts of Earth, and her slow, complicated ascent through the ranks of the Coalition civil service.

  And, in one corner of the room, a Silver Ghost hovered, a sensor pack strapped to its equatorial line. It was the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Two blue-helmeted Guardians, who had been assigned to it since Sol system, stood at its side, weapons ever ready. Nobody commented, as if having a Ghost here at a Core base was an everyday event. But the Navy guards posted at the door couldn’t help but stare.

  The Guild-master was sleek, only a little plump, and his skin glistened as if he treated it with unguent. He wore a peculiar outfit covered with pockets, insignia, and little readout displays. It turned out to be a stylized skinsuit, of a very archaic design. This commemorated a time when the Engineers had always been the first on the scene in case of some disaster. Those days were long gone, though, and Pirius Red learned that Eliun’s suit wasn’t even functional.

  Though he was a master engineer, Eliun didn’t seem at all perturbed to be summoned to a review of a catastrophic engineering failure. But Pirius knew Eliun need defer to nobody here. The Engineers were independent of the Navy and the Green Army, and in particular of Training and Discipline Command, the powerful interservice grouping that ran this base. In fact, the Engineers were independent all the way to the top, to the Grand Conclave of the Coalition itself. And in the comfortable form of Eliun, Project Prime Radiant had found yet another institutional opponent.

  Darc glowered at Eliun with undisguised hostility, and even Nilis seemed coldly angry. The atmosphere was tense, and Pirius suspected uneasily they were in for some fireworks.

  He was restless himself. Since the test flight two more days had worn away, two days of no progress toward the goal.

  Nilis called the meeting briskly to order. “You know why we’re here.” He clapped his hands to call up a plethora of Virtual displays—far too much information, Pirius thought; it was typical of Nilis. “Let’s start with the basics.”

  Once again the doomed Earthworm slid past the patient face of the target. Once again it blew apart, three fragile crew blisters careening out of the wreckage only just ahead of the main fireball. Pirius winced from embarrassment at having lost a ship, and at the uncomfortable memory of the breakup itself. Two days later, he was still chipping bits of solidified impact foam off his skinsuit.

  Nilis ran the failure again and again, at one-thousandth speed, then one ten-thousandth, then slower still. “You can see that the black-hole cannon did fire, successfully,” he said. “But the structural failure occurred at that moment of firing.” He nodded to Torec, the ship’s engineer.

  Torec walked through key moments in Nilis’s Virtuals, picking out freeze-frame images and referring the audience to bits of technical detail. “Firing the black-hole shells places the greatest stress on the ship’s systems as a whole.” To provide a stable platform when the cannon fired, the greenship’s inertial adjustors had to keep the ship anchored in spacetime. But the recoil of these spacetime bullets put far more strain on the adjustors than they had been designed for. “Remember, each shell has the mass of a small mountain. The energy drain is huge, the momentum recoil enormous. And unless the structural balance is exactly right, you get a failure. As in this case.”

  She spoke well, Pirius thought with a mixture of envy and nostalgia. She had grown so much. The mixed-up cadet who had been press-ganged into flying with him to Earth just a few months ago could never have made such a presentation.

  Eliun spoke for the first time. “Show me the point of failure.” His voice was like the man, oily, unperturbed.

  Torec ran through a series of stop-motion images of the greenship at the moment of its terminal catastrophe, magnified so heavily they broke up into crowding cubical pixels. She showed the first instants of failure, using two bright red laser-pointer beams which intersected on the ship’s Virtual image. The point they picked out was just a flare of light, right at the junction of the cannon pod with the main hull. In that first moment the failure looked harmless, but the ship hadn’t held together for another half-second. Skewered neatly by the crisscrossing beams, the point in space and time when the Earthworm had died was unambiguous.

  Pirius knew that all this was irrelevant, to some extent. For him, the greatest failures of the test flight had been navigation and accuracy. Even if they could overcome the problem of the damn ship blowing itself up in the moment of firing, to get the one-hundredth-of-one-percent accuracy of positioning Nilis was demanding, the navigational control of the ships was going to have to be improved by an order of magnitude.

  Idly Pirius glanced over his shoulder at the source of the laser pointers. They came from light globes that drifted at the back of the room. The beams’ location of the failure point on the Virtual had been precise to well within the size of a pixel on that much-magnified image. An idea hovered at the back of his mind, elusive. He tried to relax his thinking—

  “… Pirius.”

  Nilis was calling his name. Commander Darc was glaring at him.

  “Sir, I’m sorry. I was just thinking that—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Nilis impatiently. “I asked if you as pilot had anything to add to Torec’s expert presentation.”

  “No. I’m sorry,” Pirius said.

  Nilis harrumphed. Now he turned to Commander Darc, as the Earthworm’s navigator.

  Darc had clearly been waiting for this moment. His strong face blank and threatening, he turned on Eliun, who had been looking faintly bored. “I have no report, Guild-master. Only a question.”

  “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “You’ve seen the report. You saw the summary before you walked into the room. How will you help us resolve this issue of structural integrity?”

  Eliun spread his fingers on the table. “I’m sure your analysis, if sufficiently deep, will—”

  “Our analysis,” Darc cut in. “Ours. But the Commissary’s Project is a scratch operation that has been running on a shoestring for a matter of weeks. Whereas you have been running greenships for millennia.” He leaned forward and glared. “I would like to know, Guild-master, why the Engineers have obstructed this project from the day Nilis came here.”

  That unexpected shot got through Eliun’s defenses; for an instant, shock creased his face. But he said with quiet control. “Commander, I’ll enjoy speaking to your seniors about your future career path.”

  Nilis bustled forward, his own agitation obvious, a vein showing in his forehead. This was the crux of the meeting, Pirius saw. Nilis said, “Well, that’s your privilege, Guild-master. But before we descend into personal attacks, shall we examine the issue? You see, faced with our cruel timescale, we’ve been struggling, not only against a shortage of resources and antiquated test craft, but against—how shall I put it?—secrecy.

  “After the prototype work in Sol system, we’re now trying to integrate our new systems into a greenship’s design. But as the Commander implies, we’ve been given nothing by your people on the craft’s technical aspects. Surely you have blueprints, records, practical experience you could offer us? And then there is the GUT engine itself. Again we’ve been given no documentation. Remember, we’re trying to use it to run black-hole cannon! As we’ve tried to work our way through its antiquated interfaces, we’ve felt more like archaeologists than engineers. My eyes, you must have the technical knowledge we’re struggling to retrieve here! You’ve been running ships of more or less this design for, what—three thousand years?”

  “A little longer,” Eliun said smoothly. “And not of ‘more or less’ this design, Commissary—exactly this design.”

  Darc eyed him. “Three thousand years of stasis. And you’re proud of that, are you?”

  “It’s cl
ear that you misunderstand our objectives. Our mission is not innovation but preservation… .”

  The Guild of Engineers was an ancient agency. It had grown out of a loose band of refugees from the Qax Occupation, who had spent centuries stranded in space. When the Qax were thrown out they had come home, their antique technology carefully preserved. In the internecine struggles that had developed during the establishment of the Interim Coalition, mankind’s first post-Occupation government, the Engineers, with their ancient bits of technological sorcery and their proud record of resistance to the Qax, had been well-placed to grab some power for themselves. And they had kept their place at the highest levels of the Coalition ever since.

  “But you’re not engineers,” Darc said contemptuously. “Not if you resist innovation. You’re museum-keepers.”

  Eliun said, “Commander, our technologies reached their plateau of perfection millennia ago. There can be no innovation that does not worsen what we have. We Engineers preserve the wisdom of ages—”

  “You pore over your ancient, unchanging designs, polished with use—”

  “—and we standardize. Have you thought about that? Commander, your pilots fly greenships of identical design from one end of this Galaxy to the other. Think of the cost savings, the economies of scale!”

  Nilis was as angry as Pirius had ever seen him. “But your perfect designs and your standardized parts lists are not winning the war, Guild-master! And—yes, I’ll say it now—in your obstructionism you seem bent on ensuring that this project, which might hasten the war’s end, never gets a chance to fly.”

  Pirius laid a hand on Nilis’s threadbare sleeve. “Commissary, take it easy.”

  Nilis shook him off. “If there’s one thing I can’t bear, Pirius, it is the hoarding of knowledge as power. There’s too much of that on Earth—too much! And I won’t have it here.”

  Eliun said coldly, “And I won’t take lectures in duty from rogue Commissaries and junior Naval officers.”

  “Then we are at an impasse. I suggest we adjourn this meeting until I’ve heard from Earth.” Nilis turned to Pila. “Adjutant, would you please open a channel to Minister Gramm’s office on Earth? I think we must appeal to the Minister, and through him to the Plenipotentiary for Total War and the Grand Conclave itself, where I hope this issue will be resolved.”

  Eliun laughed in his face. “Commissary, don’t you understand? The Engineers have seats on the Conclave, too.”

  “We will see,” said Nilis darkly, and he stalked from the room.

  Pirius felt oddly calm. He had sat through too many meetings like this. And he had been distracted from these fireworks by his vague thoughts about intersecting laser light. As the meeting broke up, he tapped Darc and Torec on the shoulders. “Listen. I have an idea… .”

  As they left the room they passed the Silver Ghost, which hadn’t moved or said a word during the interrupted meeting. Pirius wondered what emotions swirled beneath that glistening, featureless hide.

  On the way, Pirius called ahead for a sim room to be set up.

  Only a few minutes after ducking out of Nilis’s adjourned meeting, the three of them were once more sitting in their crew blisters, at the end of the outstretched limbs of the Earthworm. The Virtual simulation around them was faultless, although the target Rock looked a little too shiny to be true.

  As they waited for the sim to finish booting up, Darc growled, “This is bringing back unhappy memories. Whatever you’re planning, Pirius, I hope it’s worth it.”

  Pirius said hesitantly, “Commander—can I speak freely?”

  Darc laughed.

  “The way you took on the Guild-master. I was surprised.”

  “Did you enjoy watching me blow my career?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not that there’s much left to blow,” Darc said. “Marshal Kimmer will see to that, once this project is over.”

  Pirius said frankly, “When we started this, I’d never have thought you would come out fighting for the Commissary like that. With respect, sir.”

  Darc grunted. “I don’t much like Nilis. I think he’s an irresponsible idiot, and his project is almost bound to fail. Almost. But in that ‘almost’ is a universe of possibility. If there’s a chance we can win the war with it, we have to resource the project until the point at which it fails. That’s our clear duty. And I never imagined the kind of crass reactions and ass-covering conservatism that we have come up against, over and over. I’ve seen a side of our politics I don’t like, Pilot, even inside the military.”

  Torec said, “I suppose we have all come on a long journey.”

  Darc said, “But if either of you repeat any of this to Nilis I’ll rip off your heads with my bare hands. Do you understand me?”

  “Received and understood,” Pirius said.

  With a soft chime the sim signaled it was ready to run.

  Darc said, “It’s time you explained what we’re doing here, Pirius.”

  “I want to try an idea,” Pirius said. “It came to me when Torec used those laser pointers in the meeting.”

  She sounded baffled. “Lasers?”

  “Bear with me. We’ll run through our approach to the rock. Everything will be exactly as before. I’ve downloaded Torec’s structural analyses of the failure—”

  “So we’ll fall apart, like before.”

  “Maybe. But this time, Torec, I want you to fire the starbreakers as we go in.”

  “What’s the use?” she asked. “They will only scratch the Rock’s surface. And if the cannon fails—”

  “Just do it. But, Torec, I want you to cross the beams …”

  They both grasped the idea very quickly. It took only minutes to program new instructions into their weapons and guidance systems.

  Once again Pirius took the controls; once again the ship swooped along its invisible attack arc toward the Rock. They ran the whole thing in real time, and thanks to the simulator’s precise reproduction, the ship’s handling felt as clumsy as it had before.

  But this time around, one second before the closest approach to the Rock, the starbreakers lit up. They swiveled and crossed at a point exactly a hundred kilometers below the ship’s position. So the Earthworm sailed in on its target through the sim’s imaginary space with an immense, slim triangle of cherry-red light dangling beneath it.

  When the ship passed the rock, the crossed starbreakers dug deep into its impact-chewed surface. Dust fountained up: that point of intersection was lost in the rock’s interior layers. Too low, then. But the guidance system, slaved to the starbreakers, jolted the ship upward until the crossing point was touching the Rock’s surface, just stroking it, leaving little more than a furrow of churned-up regolith.

  All this in the second of closest approach.

  When the black-hole cannon fired, the projectiles sailed down the lines of the starbreakers and collided with each other at the point of their intersection, precisely one hundred kilometers below the ship.

  The simulation software wasn’t up to modeling the collision of two black holes, or to show realistically the detonation of an asteroid. But the ship, suffering the same structural failures as before, blew up pretty convincingly. The Virtuals melted away, leaving Pirius, Darc, and Torec sitting side by side in a room walled with blank blue light.

  Torec said, “So we’re going to use starbreakers as an altimeter. You think big when you want to, Pirius, don’t you?”

  Darc brought up a rerun of the last moments. They had to see it with their own eyes before they believed it.

  “I think it worked,” Pirius said.

  Darc growled, “Pilot, you are learning understatement from that fat Commissary.”

  Pirius allowed himself one second of self-congratulation. Then he stood up, pushing away the restraints of his couch. “We’ve a lot to do,” he said. “We’ll need to see what we can do about improving the accuracy of the starbreaker mounts. They weren’t intended for pinpoint work like this. And we’ll have to slave the g
uidance properly to the starbreakers.”

  “Yes,” Torec said, and she added with feeling: “I’d also like to find a way to fire these damn cannon without killing myself.”

  Nilis came bustling into the sim room. “Here you are!” he cried. He was cock-a-hoop. He grabbed Pirius by the shoulders and shook him; for Nilis this was a remarkably physical display. “My boy—my boy!”

  Darc said dryly, “I take it the Grand Conclave endorsed your stance, Commissary.”

  “In every particular. That polished oaf Eliun and his cronies have been ordered to cooperate with us, or else simply hand over their data to my technicians. The Conclave have backed me. They backed me! I have to pinch myself to believe it. Can you see what this means historically? The logjam at the top of human government is finally breaking up! Is the madness that has gripped us for so long at last falling away? And I couldn’t have done it without you, Commander!”

  “Don’t push it, Commissary,” warned Darc.

  Pirius thought this over. He was starting to get a sense of the drama unfolding around this strange project. Today a power center as old as the Coalition itself had suffered a historic reversal. However this mission turned out, nothing would be left the same: twenty thousand years of history really were coming to an end here. And, in a sense, it was because of him.

  With one finger Torec gently closed his mouth, which was gaping open. “So we beat another bureaucrat,” she said. “Now all we’ve got to do is dive-bomb a black hole.”

  “Yes. How soon can we set up a fresh test flight?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Darc. “And then we’re going to have to think about a training program—how to fly this thing in anger … always assuming you can find the crew to fly.”

  “We aren’t going to get bored, sir,” Pirius said.

  Darc laughed.

  They made their way out of the sim room, talking, planning.

  Chapter 41