“I remember Dr Hemans saying the same thing, afterwards,” she admitted. “But some mistakes work out better than others, don’t they?” She wasn’t talking about the wayward ways of mutation. She was talking about the freak of chance that made me go on when I should have turned back, and the one that had made Ed and Kath pause to pull me out of the fume-filled corridor and down the cellar steps to safety. She was talking about the freak of chance that had made me go on when things got tough at the Home Office, blowing my career in government in order to make sure that nobody could put a lid on it even for a little while, and that the government couldn’t even make a convincing show of governing the unfolding situation. She was talking about the mistake that Hemans and his colleagues had made when they decided to try something wildly ambitious, and found that it succeeded far too well. She was talking about the fact that science proceeds by trial and error, and that the errors sometimes turn out to be far more important than the intentions.
“Yes they do,” I agreed. “If that weren’t the case, progress wouldn’t be possible at all. But it is. In spite of the fact that every significant advance in biotechnology is seen by the vast majority of horrified onlookers as a hideous perversion, we do make progress. We keep on passing through the looking glass, finding new worlds and new selves.”
“You’ve been practising,” she said. “Do you really think you can talk yourself back into the corridors of power?”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” I admitted. “But I did my bit for the revolution when I had the chance—and there aren’t many of nature’s humans who can say that, are there?”
“There never used to be,” Alice admitted. “But things are different now. Human history is only just beginning.”
ON THE ORION LINE
Stephen Baxter
Here’s a harrowing look at the proposition that a soldier’s first duty is to survive, especially when trapped behind enemy lines, especially when those “enemy lines” are in the depths of interstellar space, thousands of light-years from Earth, and you have no ship, no shelter and only a quickly dwindling supply of air. In those circumstances, you do anything you have to do to survive—if you’re strong enough to actually do it, that is!
Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century—Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, David Marusek, Geoff Ryman and a half dozen others—British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.
Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed and the three books of the Mammoth sequence, and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. His most recent books are the novels Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space and a novel written in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days.
The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.
The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters—and a few low-grade tars like me—were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line—six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm—and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.
And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.
The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it—an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long—thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.
I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.
My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance any way that was required—most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.
The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theater.
There was a soft warning chime.
The captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring—apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.
I felt my heart beat harder.
Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.
One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.
Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”
There was a half-hearted cheer.
I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.
It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the commissary, to put a stop to that. “Little morons,” she growled.
“Sorry, sir—”
I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumor was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex I could well believe it.
As we neared the cordon the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy countdown. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swiveled across the crowded sky.
E
verybody went quiet.
The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see or hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialize all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?
I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat, long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride.
“Let’s do it, tar,” he growled.
All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this.
“Yes, sir!”
Pael finished his countdown.
All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.
And the ship exploded.
I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.
I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.
I bounced off and drifted. The inertial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood—probably my own.
I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, tingling with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing.
But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.
“Let’s do it,” I murmured.
Maybe I was out of it for a while.
Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. There was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.
“Case. Can you hear me?”
It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.
I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realized that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—
“Case!”
“I—yes, sir.”
“Report.”
I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. “I think I’m all right. I may have a concussion.”
“Good enough. Strap down.” Till handed me a length of rope.
I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.
Till, with practiced ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.
Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering.
The action had been over in seconds. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.
Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs—just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognized those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed, I thought—and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw.
I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.
Jeru was watching me. “Tar—do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?” Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.
“No, sir.”
&8220;No.” Jeru studied Pael with contempt. “We are in a yacht, Academician. Something has happened to the Brightly. The ’dome was designed to break up into yachts like this.” She sniffed. “We have air, and it isn’t foul yet.” She winked at me. “Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?”
I grinned. “Yes, sir.”
Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt water eyes. “Lethe. You people are monsters.” His accent was gentle, a lilt. “Even such a child as this. You embrace death—”
Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joint until he squealed. “Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, into the yacht, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?” And she pushed Pael’s face away.
For some reason I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The captain—dead?
I said, “Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?”
“None,” she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. “Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the captain.”
Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down: if the captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid—or a Pael—than in me.
But Pael seemed more confused than I was.
First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. “Put these on.” He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. “Move it,” said Till. “Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.”
I crammed my legs into my suit.
Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. “Why not heavier armor?”
For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.
Pael twitched.
Till said, “See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems.” He threw the gun aside.
Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.
Till said to me, “Test your comms.”
I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, “One, two, three… “ I could hear nothing.
Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. “… Five, six, seven—can you hear me, tar?”
“Yes, sir.”
The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits—photoreceptors, simple eyes—which could “read” the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.
“That will make life harder,” Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.
Till shrugged. “You take it as it comes.” Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. “These are basic field belt kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses… no, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.” Now came weapons. “We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these.” He handed out combat knives.
Pael shrank back.
“Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.”
I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.
I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot be
tter.
“Two minutes to impact,” Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.
“Seal up.” Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub…
When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.
The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometers across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended in the tangle.
And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.
“Ten seconds,” Till called. “Brace.”
Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.
And we were thrown into chaos again.
I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.
The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.
But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.
The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upward. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.
I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.
I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.
Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.
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