Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  It was a Navy ops room at the height of a major operation; it was a nest of tense, coordinated activity. But the discipline and organization were obvious, and despite the complexity of the task and the tension of the hour, not a voice was raised.

  And the information displays changed constantly. The central diorama had obviously been based on the information retrieved by Pirius Blue during his earlier pass through the central regions. But Hope saw now that sections of it were changing all the time, evidently updated with data returned from the ships of Exultant themselves.

  Which meant they got through, he thought hotly. Exultant Squadron had survived, and had pushed through to its target, the very center of the Galaxy. He clenched his fist.

  And now he looked more closely he saw a little cluster of brave green sparks, hovering above the accretion disc. One of those green gems broke from the cluster and was swooping down toward the accretion disc. It was utterly dwarfed, like a fly dropping toward a carpet, but it was advancing anyway. It had begun, Hope realized, thrilled; they were going in for the raid. And if he had survived, that lead spark must be Pirius Red himself.

  “I know you.”

  A woman approached him. She wore a plain white robe, and was short, shorter than he was. The skin of her face was smooth, but it was not the smoothness of youth, and her eyes were hard and sharp, like bits of stone. She said, “You’re Tuta. Who calls himself Enduring Hope.” She opened her mouth and laughed. It was an ugly, throaty noise, and her teeth were black.

  He replied, “I think I know you, too. After he returned from Sol system, Pirius told me about you.”

  “My fame spreads across the Galaxy,” Luru Parz said dryly. “I’m sure Pirius is much happier now that he’s away from Earth’s politicking and scheming, and is able to fly his toys around the center of the Galaxy again.”

  Enduring Hope stared at her; he couldn’t help it.

  Luru snapped, “Speak, boy! Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Hope licked his lips. “I’m thinking I don’t know whether I should offer you a chair, or report you to the Guardians.”

  She laughed again. “You have a better sense of humor than Pirius, that’s for sure. I think I like you, Tuta.”

  He asked hesitantly, “And is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That you are”—he glanced around and spoke quietly—“immortal?”

  “Oh, I doubt that very much. I just haven’t gotten around to dying yet.”

  “Why are you here? And how are you here?”

  “As it happens I played a major part in initiating this project in the first place—as Pirius ought to have told you, though I doubt he understood it himself, Pirius or his bed warmer, those poor baffled children. I’ve come here to see the climax of what I started. I think I’m entitled to that much. As to how I got here, I leaned on Nilis to arrange it. Even so detached a Commissary as that bumbling oaf can still pull strings.”

  “Where is the Commissary?”

  “Frankly he was getting so anxious he was making a nuisance of himself, and the officer in command of the room sent him away. But he was distracted anyway. He’s still analyzing his fragments of data about Chandra, still seeking to discern what he calls its ‘true nature.’ No doubt you know about that. But of course Chandra’s importance to the Xeelee is all that counts. And if we get a chance, we should smash it, simple as that. That’s why I supported this project in the first place. If it were up to me I would stop Nilis’s pointless rootling. All he is likely to find is a reason to pull our punches, and what use would that be?”

  If this woman was one-tenth as old as Pirius’s unbelievable claims, then she must have seen so much, lived so much: Hope’s imagination failed as he tried to grasp what that must mean. “I wouldn’t have thought you would care what happens today, one way or another.”

  “It’s a significant day in the long history of mankind, Tuta, whichever way it turns out. And I intend to be here to see it, triumph or disaster—or, more likely and a lot more fun, a bit of both—eh?” And she opened that hideous mouth again.

  A bustling form emerged onto one of the higher walkways. It was Nilis himself, back despite his banishment. The Commissary recognized Hope and summoned him with a wave. Hope climbed a staircase, and found himself, dauntingly, on the balcony with Marshal Kimmer himself.

  It turned out that it was Nilis who had called for Hope to come to the ops room, during this crucial hour. “I think I know you people by now. You would rather be there—but, given that you’re stuck out here, you will burn up if you don’t know what is becoming of your friends. I asked for Cohl, too, but she’s in sick bay. I arranged a data feed for her though.” He smiled at Hope almost fondly, and again Hope had thought how strange it was that such a gentle, thoughtful man should be responsible for a weapons system of such stunning destructive power.

  Kimmer said softly, “Commissary. The moment approaches.”

  Nilis looked at the display. “So it does. Oh, my eyes …” He went to stand with the still, statuesque form of Marshal Kimmer.

  The room grew silent. That lone green spark was creeping toward the center of the main display. The Commissary’s hands were folded over each other, his knuckles white with tension.

  In a series of short FTL hops, Pirius flew low over the surface of the accretion disc. He and his crew were alone now, the rest of the squadron lost in the glare behind him.

  Below him fled a broadly flat, curdled surface, glowing white, a pool of gas that rotated visibly, churning like storm clouds on Earth. This was all that was left of the mass of stars and planets and living things that had been unlucky enough to fall into this lethal pit. He knew that a black hole destroyed all information about the matter it took into its event horizon, everything but spin, mass, and charge; but whatever the turbulent plasma below had once been, it was already reduced to nothing but fodder for the endlessly voracious Chandra.

  He had long passed the closest approach achieved by his older self, Pirius Blue, on his scouting jaunt. Nobody in human history had ever approached the event horizon of a supermassive black hole so closely—and he had to go in a lot closer yet.

  Nothing he saw was real, of course. All he saw was a Virtual rendering, reconstructed in wavelengths he was comfortable with, the glare turned down; if he had looked out of his blister he would have been blinded in an instant. But he thought he could sense the churning of this dish of plasma the size of a solar system, perhaps even the gut-wrenching gravities of the event horizon itself. He could feel the vast astrophysical processes around him. He was a mote trapped inside an immense machine.

  “One minute to closest approach to the horizon,” Bilson warned.

  Pirius felt his heart beat faster, but he tried to keep his voice light. “Remember your training. We practiced on rocks a couple of hundred kilometers across. Today we’re hitting a target a hundred million klicks wide. It ought to be easy.”

  “But,” Cabel said dryly, “it’s a hundred million klicks of black-hole event horizon.”

  “Shut up,” said Bilson, the fear sharp in his voice.

  “No flak,” Cabel said. “They still haven’t seen us. We might actually live through this.”

  “Thirty seconds,” the navigator called.

  “Stand ready.”

  And suddenly it was ahead of him, the center of everything, a sphere of glowing gas like a malevolent sun rising from the curdled accretion disc. The event horizon itself was invisible, of course: dark on dark, it was a surface from which not even light could escape. The glow he saw was the final desperate emission of infalling matter.

  Under the control of its CTC processor, the ship rose up from the plane of the disc.

  Pirius looked down as the accretion disc fell away. At the disc’s inner edge the infalling matter, having been spun and churned and compressed in its final frantic orbits, at last reached the event horizon. Wisps and tendrils, gaudy and pathetic, snaked in from that inner edge, glowing ever more fe
verishly.

  He looked ahead into the ball of churning gas that surrounded the event horizon. The horizon was a sphere, but vast, a sphere as wide as Mercury’s orbit. The greenship’s path should take it skimming up toward its pole, kissing the surface tangentially at the point of closest approach, a precise one hundred kilometers from the mathematically defined surface of the event horizon itself.

  A shining, electric-blue path appeared in the complicated Virtual sky before Pirius. Projected by navigator Bilson it was his computed course, designed to take him to the hundred-kilometer closest approach distance. Though they would pass vanishingly close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, there was nothing to fear from tides: Chandra was, paradoxically, too big for that, and in fact they could fall all the way down through the event horizon without feeling a thing.

  Seconds left. The last million kilometers fell away, the immense curved surface started to flatten beneath the prow, and the mist of tortured matter cleared ahead of him—

  To reveal a shining netting.

  “Pull up!” Bilson screamed.

  Pirius dragged at his controls, but the ship’s proximity sensors had reacted before he did. The ship climbed up and away. The electric-blue path disintegrated and vanished.

  Suddenly the texture of that wall was fleeing beneath his prow. He made out an irregular mesh of shining threads, spread out like the lights of an immense city, all of it obscured by a storm of infalling plasma. This close he could see no signs of curvature; the event horizon was effectively a plain above which the greenship fled.

  Bilson started to bring up magnified images. That structure really was a kind of net, a mesh of silvery threads. Small black shapes crawled along those threads—but they were “small” only on this tremendous scale; the shortest of those threads must have been a thousand kilometers long. The dominant structure was hexagonal, but the hexagons were not regular, and the effect was more like a spiderweb than a net.

  Bilson breathed, “A web big enough to wrap up the whole of the event horizon. I think those black things are ships.”

  Cabel asked, “Xeelee?”

  “I guess. Not a design we’ve seen before. They seem to be trapping the infalling matter. Feeding off it. And look, there are more ships coming up from inside the mesh.”

  “Then this is the central Xeelee machinery,” Bilson said. “What they use to make their nightfighters, to run their computing. This netting is the engine of the Prime Radiant. It must have taken a billion years to build.”

  Lethe, Pirius thought. What have we got ourselves into?

  Cabel called, “I hate to hurry you. But those flak batteries are waking up.”

  Pirius called, “Bilson—”

  “Understood, Pilot.”

  A new path was laid in, a shining blue road that ducked down into the netting. The ship started to track the new course—but it bucked and swept up again.

  “It’s that mesh,” Bilson shouted. “We weren’t expecting structure over the event horizon. The netting is actually under our hundred-kilometer ceiling, but the ship’s fail-safes won’t let us get close enough.”

  Pirius thrust his hands into the controls. “I’ll override.” Even as he pushed the ship’s nose down, the systems fought back, and the ride was bumpy. “But I can’t hold this for long. Cabel, get the range finder working.”

  Two cherry-red beams lanced out beneath the fleeing ship. Their paths were deflected in arcs, extraordinarily elegant, by Chandra’s ferocious gravity. Pirius, glancing down, saw the triangulating starbreakers slice through the netting as they passed, like burning scalpels passing through flesh. The intersection point should have been at about the level of the event horizon, but he couldn’t make it out.

  “We’re doing a lot of damage,” Cabel reported. “Those flak batteries are definitely growing interested.”

  “Never mind the flak,” Pirius growled. “There’s nothing we can do about the flak. Prepare the weapon. Bilson, are we at the right altitude?”

  “I can’t tell,” Bilson said. “It’s not working—not the way it’s supposed to. There’s some kind of distortion when the beams pass through that netting.”

  Cabel said, “We’re running out of time—”

  Lethe, Pirius thought. To have come all this way and to fail, here … He held the ship steady on its course. “Do your best.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cherry-red light flooded Pirius’s cockpit.

  “They found us!” Cabel yelled.

  He was right; the ship was about to be triangulated by two, three, four starbreakers. Pirius snapped, “I need an answer, Navigator!”

  “Now!” Bilson screamed.

  “Engineer! Fire!”

  Cabel didn’t acknowledge, but Pirius felt the shudder, familiar from training, as the cannon was fired, and twin point black holes shot out of the heavy muzzles mounted on the greenship’s main hull.

  Once the shells were away Pirius relaxed his grip on the manual controls. The ship lifted itself up and away, twisting to evade attack, its CTC processor enabling it to respond faster than any human reaction. The cherry-red starbreaker glow dissipated.

  Pirius lay back and sucked in a deep breath. Still alive.

  The greenship shuddered, as if it were a toy boat bobbing on a bathtub.

  “That was the detonation,” Cabel said.

  Bilson was silent for a few seconds, gathering data. Then he said, “No damage. The weapon worked, but we must have missed the horizon.”

  Pirius felt a heavy despair descend. “All right,” he said. “Keep gathering data. Maybe we can figure this out yet.”

  “I didn’t screw up, Pilot,” Bilson said miserably. “I gave you the best I could.”

  “I know,” Pirius said wearily. He believed him. But he knew that Bilson would blame himself for this for the rest of his life. “We still have work to do. We have six more chances, six more ships. The others will need our help. Keep your heads up. All right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cabel said blankly.

  “Navigator?”

  “Sir.”

  The mood among the remaining crews, at their station high above the plain of the accretion disc, was bleak.

  Torec tried to make the best of it. “Whoever went in first was almost bound to fail. But we learned a lot.”

  Bilson remained very down. “We didn’t know about that mesh. We can’t see through it, and our starbreakers are distorted by it somehow, so we can’t aim. And we haven’t got time to rewrite the attack plan.”

  “He’s right,” said Pirius Blue. “Those flak batteries didn’t see you coming in, but they chased you back out, Red. And the ops room say there are nightfighters on the way.”

  “We have to go back in,” said Pirius Red. “Now, before it gets any worse.”

  “I’ll go,” said Jees abruptly. It was the first time she had spoken since Pirius’s return.

  Pirius Red said, “But your ship’s configured to carry the grav shield.”

  “We don’t need it on the way back. We’ll just be running for home.”

  “No, but your bird will wallow even more than the rest.”

  “Then I’m expendable. And I’m your best pilot,” she said simply. “If anybody can make this work, I can.”

  Torec pointed out: “Pirius. She has a Silver Ghost on board.”

  “That’s irrelevant,” Jees snapped. “Its presence doesn’t affect the operation of the weapon. And now that we’re done with the shield, its usefulness is at an end. The Ghost is just cargo now; it has no say.”

  “She has a point,” Pirius Blue said.

  But, Pirius Red thought, the Ghost was probably listening to every word.

  He called his second flight commander. “Burden? What’s your recommendation?” But, though his comm channel was clearly open, Burden didn’t reply. Again Pirius felt a flicker of unease.

  “Come on, Pirius,” Jees said evenly. “We need a decision.”

  Enough. “Go,” he said. />
  Jees had evidently been waiting for the go-ahead. Her ship immediately looped out of formation and streaked down toward the accretion disc.

  She got about as far as Pirius had. Then starbreaker beams from those Sugar Lump flak stations, four of them probed for her. She held her position, got her own range-finding starbreakers working, and reported doing a little more damage to the net. But her green spark winked out before she even launched her bombs.

  When it was over, just minutes after Jees had left the formation, Pirius forced himself to speak.

  “Okay. Okay. Maybe there’s another way.”

  Enduring Hope was still on the balcony with Nilis, Kimmer, Luru Parz.

  When the news of the second failure, and the loss of Jees and her crew, filtered through to the ops room, Nilis was distraught. He wandered along the walkway, wringing his hands and wiping the soft flesh of his face. “Oh no,” he said, over and over. “Oh no, oh no. It’s my fault. We are failing, and their lives are burning up like sparks, and all for nothing… .” It was a distressing sight. But Enduring Hope reminded himself that Nilis was, at heart, a civilian, with a civilian’s lack of understanding of war.

  Marshal Kimmer did not react, either to the bad news from the target or to Nilis’s loss of control. There was little he could do to shape the course of events, but in this difficult time he was a pillar of rectitude, Enduring Hope thought, a model of strength and determination. Hope had never thought much of Kimmer as a commander, what little he had seen of him; but this dark moment seemed to be bringing out the best in him.

  Pila came hurrying along the walkway. She whispered to the Commissary, something about results concerning the nature of Chandra. Nilis looked shocked, and immediately followed her off the walkway and out of the ops room.