Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  He felt a subtle push as his ship’s drive cut in. The stars ahead swam, blueshifted. In seconds, the squadron’s ten ships reached ninety percent of lightspeed, the optimum for setting up the grav shield. The formation still looked good; the hours of training were paying off.

  “On your call, Jees,” he said.

  Directly ahead of Jees’s tiny ship the grav shield coalesced. It was like an immense lens that muddled the fierce light of the Galaxy’s heart.

  “Shield stable,” Jees called.

  “Good work. Form up, form up.”

  The squadron edged forward, perfecting the formation.

  Already they were no longer even in the same universe as Orion Rock, Pirius thought; tucked up in this pocket cosmos, streaming through the prime universe at a fraction below lightspeed, the Xeelee would be quite unable to see them. That, anyhow, was the theory.

  Before going to FTL, his last duty was to check with his own crew. His engineer was Cabel, the best of the bunch. His navigator was a kid called Bilson. A promisingly bright boy, but woefully inexperienced, for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to get the flying hours of some of the others—which was why Pirius had pulled rank and insisted he fly in his ship.

  They were as ready as they would ever be.

  If you had to ride behind a grav shield, the first FTL jump was the worst. During the endless training flights, that had been learned the hard way. You had to go into the jump at ninety percent light—and come out at the same velocity, smoothly enough to keep the grav shield stable—and keep your formation. They had done it in training; now they had to do it for real.

  “Okay,” Pirius called, keeping his voice steady with an act of will. “On my command …”

  Locked together by a web of artificial-sentient interactions, the ships jumped as one.

  Cohl had seen the squadron rise out of its hangar. The greenships clustered in a tight little knot, right at her zenith.

  She had done her duty, here on the surface, forging her links between infantry and flyers. She knew how important she had been to the overall mission, and she had welcomed Pirius Red’s trust in her. But now that it was all about to start, she longed to be up there in those ships, where she belonged. And she wondered if it could be true, as the barracks gossip had it, that there was a Silver Ghost somewhere aboard one of those ships.

  The greenships seemed to shimmer, as if she were looking through heat haze. She had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was the grav shield, she thought, wondering.

  She whispered, “Three, two, one.”

  The greenships, ten of them, squirted out of sight, arrowing toward the very center of the Galaxy. Exultant Squadron was gone.

  But a cherry-red glow was rising, all around the horizon.

  Her platoon tensed, taking their positions. She gripped her weapon harder, and tried to keep her voice light. “Get ready,” she called.

  The ground shuddered, and little puffs of dust floated up before her, immediately falling back. The Xeelee assault had begun.

  Pirius felt the familiar FTL inertial lurch deep in his gut, and the shining sky blinked around him.

  He hastily checked his displays. His ship had come through fine, he saw immediately, and had fallen back into the universe with its ninety percent lightspeed vector maintained.

  Jees reported that the shield remained stable. The plan was to hold their positions for fifteen seconds, while they checked the functioning of the shield and other ships’ systems, and if they had been able to hold their formation in these unique conditions.

  But there were only nine ships in the sky, not ten.

  “We lost Number Six,” called Bilson.

  “I see that,” Pirius snapped. He barked out unnecessary orders for the ships around the gap to close up. The ships were already moving into their well-practiced nine-ship formation, just as they had rehearsed for eight and seven and six, and on down.

  One jump, they had barely left the hangar, and already a ship was lost. This mission was impossible.

  The others seemed to sense his hesitation. “We go on,” Pirius Blue barked.

  “Yeah,” Torec growled. “Nine out of ten through the jump is better than we war-gamed.”

  They were right, of course. “We go on,” said Pirius.

  “Lethe.” That was Bilson. “Look at that.” He brought up a Virtual feed of Orion Rock, already light hours away.

  The Rock was under attack. A swarm of black flies was drifting down over its surface, obscuring the earthworks and weapons installations. Human weapons spat fire in response.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pirius said. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just make it worthwhile. Kick in the jump program. Number One—”

  “The shield is still nominal, commander,” Jees called.

  “On my command.” Again the sentients locked the ships together; without sentient support, the slightest inaccuracy in such enormous and complicated leaps would have left the squadron scattered over the sky. But the ships’ limited sentience, like every weapon in this immense battlefield, was subservient to human command; this was a human war.

  “Three, two, one.”

  After the second jump the flight got rougher, and nobody had time to look back anyhow.

  Cohl’s own monopole-cannon bank had begun to fire. From its banked muzzles, point lights swarmed into the sky, and at its base she could make out human figures running back and forth, tending its ferocious machinery. This bank was one of hundreds emplaced on the Rock’s surface, all firing now, and looking up she could see streams of sparks, each a minuscule flaw in spacetime, washing up toward the bright blue stars of IRS 16. As its great engines of war opened up, the Rock shuddered and shook. It was almost joyous, as if the Rock itself welcomed this sudden conclusion of its own long genesis.

  Ships were rising too, disgorged from underground hangars. Most of them were greenships, but of the standard design, lacking the modifications of Pirius’s squadron. They hastily gathered into tight formations and hurled themselves after the monopole fire. But Xeelee nightfighters came barrelling out of the blue starlight, and those brave green sparks flared and faded, starbreaker light stitching through them.

  A whistle sounded on the general comm loop, a sound she had learned to dread. She couldn’t hesitate. She had to lead the way.

  Her rifle gripped in one hand, she hauled herself over the earthwork’s lip. She didn’t get the move quite right. Her body was a clumsy, ungainly mass with too much inertia in a gravity field that was too weak, and she sailed perilously high over the churned-up asteroid ground. Light flared ahead of her, a battle already underway around the cannon emplacement. But though a few starbreakers flickered nearby, nobody was shooting at her right now. She didn’t look back. It was up to Sergeant Blayle to ensure the rest of the platoon followed her lead.

  She careened down into the dirt, face-first. She was still alive, still in one piece. She was huddled in a shallow crater that afforded her a little cover, a few seconds’ breathing space.

  She raised her head cautiously. The monopole-cannon emplacement was still firing, but shapes drifted around it, spheres and ellipsoids, all of them jet black. They were Xeelee drones, and they swarmed around the weapon emplacement like bacteria around a wound—as black as night, chillingly black, in a sky that glowed bright as day. The Xeelee would often send in drones like this as a first wave to try to neutralize a Rock, before deploying the heavier weaponry of the nightfighters and other ships. Even the Xeelee conserved their resources, it seemed.

  But already the infantry were doing their job. Shadowy figures threw themselves toward the drones, firing as they arced on their short hops from one bit of cover to the next. Their weapons fired pellets of GUT mass-energy that shimmered as they hurled themselves toward their targets, and then burst open like miniature Big Bangs.

  One lucky shot took out a drone—but it exploded, a booby trap. Debris showered, a vicious rain that lanced through the bodies of several tr
oopers before digging itself into the churned-up dirt. The endless chatter on the comm loops was interrupted by screams, the first of the action, before the morale filters cut them out.

  Cohl’s platoon caught up with her. She checked her telltales. One trooper had fallen already, hit by a bit of shrapnel from that drone. Nine left, then, nine huddling in shallow pits in the broken ground.

  “Let’s go!” She dug her hands and feet into the dirt and thrust herself forward again, firing as she flew.

  Most of the drones sailed through the fire unperturbed. Xeelee construction material was tough stuff. The trick was to hit a drone at a point of weakness, at a pole of an ellipsoid, or an edge or vertex of a more angular shape. The spheres were toughest of all, but you still had a chance if you could get your shot close to one of the little windows that dilated open to allow the drones’ weapons to fire. Aiming was pretty much out of the question, though; all you could really do was add your rounds to the general fire that washed down over the drones. Cohl never even knew if her shots hit the target.

  And meanwhile the Xeelee were firing back, with lances of some focused energy that were invisible except where they caught the churned-up asteroid dust.

  Another of Cohl’s platoon fell in that hop. Still another was hit after they landed, her left arm sheared neatly off. The trooper was left alive but stunned, and blood briefly fountained, turning to crimson ice. A medical orderly was soon on her. He slammed his palm against her skinsuit’s chest panel. The wound was cauterized with a flare of light, and her skinsuit sealed itself up and started to glow a bright brick red, the color of distress. The medic began the process of hauling the wounded back to the earthworks she had just come from.

  Cohl could see troopers all over the surface of the Rock, firing, falling, dying. There was a constant attrition, a hail of killings and terrible wounding that somehow seemed banal. The medic teams were working between the waves of advancing troops, right up to the front line. As casualties began to flow back from the lines all over the Rock, the strange industry of processing the wounded and the dead had already begun. And they still had a hundred meters to fight through before they closed on the weapons station.

  Cohl checked her platoon once more. Three down, seven up. “Let’s go,” she called again. “On my mark. Three, two, one.”

  And she threw herself into the fire.

  Then there were eight.

  Two hours in, Number Three suffered an instability in its GUT-energy generator: it had to turn back and run for home base. Pirius suspected that this failure had been human rather than technical. A major challenge in these bastardized ships was to keep the systems balanced to avoid excess stress on the power systems; a better pilot or engineer might have held it together.

  But they were all feeling the strain. His own eyes were gritty, his face pooled with sweat that his skinsuit’s conditioning systems didn’t seem able to clear, and his hands were locked into claws by the effort of applying just the right touch to his controls, as he tried to balance the FTL jumps and sublight glides. But he couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse, not for a second, not if he was going to get his own laden, lumbering ship through this, and not if he was to keep his squadron together.

  As they inched their way toward Chandra the astrophysical geography was slowly changing. The squadron was now tracing a feature the planners called the Bar: it was the pivot of the Baby Spiral, a great glowing belt of molecular gas that marked the bridge that joined the East and West Arms. Pirius could see the lane of gas like a shining road beneath him. He knew that road led straight to the system surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole itself, though that central mystery was still invisible to him.

  And if he looked up, through a cloud of lesser stars he could see the bright blue lamps of the IRS 16 cluster. Orion Rock was somewhere up there, its human cargo fighting and dying.

  Pirius, tucked into the shield’s pocket universe, saw this in a Virtual display. The light that fell on them through the grav shield was heavily stirred and curdled, but with tough processing you could get some information out of it.

  As the fourth hour wore away, the squadron began to attract more attention. Suddenly they had an escort—Pirius counted quickly—a dozen, fifteen, twenty nightfighters, flying in loose formation around them. The Xeelee probed the squadron’s formation with starbreaker beams that folded, wavered, and dispersed as they penetrated the pocket universe. The greenships were able to evade these random thrusts easily enough without bending their formation too far. But the Xeelee weren’t serious; for now they seemed to be more intent on simply tracking this strange new development.

  “That’s got to be good news,” Torec called. “They are surveilling us, not attacking. We’re something new, and they don’t understand.”

  “Just as well,” Pirius Blue growled. “These lumbering beasts couldn’t defend themselves anyhow.”

  “The grav shield is working,” Torec insisted. “The Xeelee don’t have FTL foreknowledge of what we’re up to.”

  Commander Darc called, “I think you’re right. And maybe Orion is doing its job; they may not have the resources to spare for—” But he was cut off.

  Pirius, immediately anxious, glanced up and to his right. The green spark that was Darc’s ship was falling away from the formation.

  “Darc! Number Four, report!”

  For an agonizing second there was silence. Then Darc came on the loop. “Leader, Four. A lucky shot, I’m afraid. I lost my engineer. Lethe, Lethe.”

  “Can you hold formation?”

  “Not a chance. I’m wallowing … dropping out now.”

  Pirius’s heart sank. Losing Darc was like a punch to the heart.

  But even as he was wrestling with whatever was left of his ship, Darc was watching him. “Squadron leader. Snap out of it. Call the seven.”

  Pirius shook his head. “Form up the seven, the seven,” he ordered. Around him the surviving ships swam into the seven-strong formation they had practiced against this eventuality. “But, Lethe,” Pirius snapped, “we just lost our reserve shield-master.”

  “In that case,” Jees said, “we’ll have to get by with one. Sir.”

  Darc called, “Remember my final instruction, Squadron Leader.”

  Darc had sworn to kill the Silver Ghost on Jees’s ship immediately, if it gave him the slightest excuse. Pirius said, “I won’t forget, commander.”

  Darc laughed defiantly. “Get it done, Pirius! I’ll see you when it’s over.”

  Pirius Red could see the Xeelee had triangulated on Darc: he was at the tip of an arrowhead sketched out by lancing crimson light. It was an oddly beautiful sight, Pirius thought, beautiful and deadly.

  Blue said, “He’s taking on our escort. Trying to draw them away.”

  “A brave man,” Burden murmured.

  “He’s showing us the way,” Pirius Red said firmly. “Form up—Six, you’re slack! What do you think this is, a joyride? Form up, form up.”

  He tried to settle down once more to the steady strain of nursing his ship and his squadron, in the wake of the imperturbable Jees. But another distracting display showed him what was happening at Orion Rock, which was now under heavy and concentrated attack. The Rock was fulfilling its primary purpose in the operation, which was to divert Xeelee fire. But such was the energy poured over it that the Rock glowed like a star itself.

  Around the cannon emplacement, Xeelee drones still soared and spat. The fire from both sides had churned up the asteroid dirt, and all signs of the earthworks over which generations had labored had been erased in hours.

  For a moment the action was washing around to the emplacement’s far side, and Cohl had nothing to fire at. She threw herself into a trench, panting. She lay as still as she could, locked in with the stink of her own shit, piss, sweat, blood, and fear, trying to let the fatigue work out of her limbs, and sucked water and nutrients from nipples in her helmet. Even here, the fire of the continuing battle lit up the furrowed surfac
e of asteroid dirt before her, and glared off the scars on her faceplate.

  The morale filters seemed to have been overwhelmed. The comm loops were dominated by wailing now, the massed crying, screaming, pleas for help from thousands of wounded troopers. But the wounded were far outnumbered by the dead. The noise was harrowing and useless.

  There were only four left of Cohl’s platoon, four including herself. They had fallen back to a final perimeter just outside the platform on which the monopole cannon stood. She stole a glance over the lip of the trench. The cannon were still firing, but fitfully; Cohl had no idea how many gunners were alive. But still the Xeelee drones swarmed, a cloud of swimming black forms that seemed to grow denser the more you fired into it.

  She knew it was only chance that had kept her alive long enough to be seeing this.

  Cohl had been sealed up in her suit for four hours already. It was too long, of course. Every soldier knew that if an action took too long it had gone wrong, one way or another. And if the casualty rates inflicted on her own platoon were typical, soon those drones would get through and shut down the cannon for good.

  But there was scuttlebutt on the comm loops that worse was to come: that in the angry sky above, the nightfighters were breaking through the picket line of greenships, and were moving in to finish off the Rock altogether.

  Blayle was beside her, his face an expressionless mask. “A thousand years,” he murmured. “A thousand years of building—of belief, bloodlines forty generations deep, for nothing but to throw a handful of soldiers into Xeelee fire—”

  “Don’t think about it,” Cohl muttered.

  “I can’t help it,” he said, almost wistfully. “The more tired I get, the more I think. A thousand years devoted to a single purpose, gone in hours. It defies the imagination. And what is it for?” He craned his neck to peer up at the brilliant blue lamps of IRS 16. “I don’t know if the action is succeeding. Why, I don’t even know what the Xeelee are doing here, let alone why we’re attacking them.”

  “We don’t need to know,” Cohl said, falling back on Doctrine. Then, more thoughtfully, she said, “But it’s probably always been that way.” If you were a soldier, war was small scale. All that mattered was what was going on around you—who was shooting at you, which of your buddies was still alive and trying to keep you alive. Whatever you knew of the bigger strategic picture didn’t matter when you were at the sharp end.