Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  Harry checked the flitter’s console. ‘Are we recording all this?’

  Poole called up a Virtual slave of the control desk of the Hermit Crab’s instrument suite, much more extensive than Junior’s. ‘All of it, multispectral.’

  ‘I’ll call up Oversight backup imaging too,’ Shamiso said.

  ‘Those purple flashes look like particle cascades to me.’

  ‘It’s brushing the walls of the wormhole throat,’ Harry said. ‘Whatever it is. It’s only just squeezing through. At that size it must be withstanding ferocious tidal stresses. And its surface doesn’t look like any hull material we use. Not metal, not ceramic, not carbon composite. More like a kind of chitin. It looks . . . insectile, doesn’t it? A huge beetle.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Now Poole could see a body behind that misshapen head, slowly emerging into the pale Jovian sunlight – what looked almost like shoulders, extending to some kind of wing.

  ‘We’re seeing more of those gravitational pulses,’ Shamiso said now, glancing at a monitor. ‘Spreading at lightspeed across the System. A storm of them. Evidently the signals we received before were a precursor of this event.’

  Harry muttered bitterly, ‘Well, that should keep your swarms of scrutineers happy for a while.’

  Nicola laughed. ‘You know, Harry, this is something – different. Alien, obviously. It’s got nothing to do with us. Humanity, I mean. Or with your wretched wormhole, even if that is how it’s getting here. And all you can think of is that it’s breaking your pretty toy.’

  Harry glared.

  Poole couldn’t take his eyes off the portal. The steadily emerging anomaly – that head, attached to what looked increasingly like a slim body fitted with flaring wings . . . he felt a deep, instinctive revulsion. ‘This shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t belong.’

  ‘And it’s not alone,’ Nicola said.

  ‘What?’

  She pointed away from the portal itself, to a shining dot, star-like, swimming against the face of Jupiter with its drapery of clouds.

  Poole hastily checked his monitors. ‘There’s a swarm of those things – silvered spheres, each maybe ten metres across, squeezing out of the wormhole around the insectile mass. They’re returning blank reflections from the sensors. Perfectly spherical, perfectly smooth, any irregularities beyond the reach of our instruments. And – look at this display – I think there’s something else, a third class of anomaly, massive, but hard to resolve.’

  Harry moved forward through the air. ‘Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any stranger.’

  ‘I have it.’ Nicola pointed. ‘There. Look, against Jupiter’s face . . . A kind of shadow. Is that your third kind?’

  ‘Show me,’ Poole snapped.

  Her eyes, augmented or not, really were much sharper than Poole’s, and she had to manipulate recorded imagery to show him what she meant.

  Translucent discs, passing over Jupiter’s pale colours.

  Nicola said, ‘I thought at first they were some kind of reflection, or a lighting effect from your wormhole, like the multiple Earth reflections. But I made sure the Crab’s full sensor suite took a look at them. Look at the gravity readings.’

  The ‘phantoms’ were actually regions of spacetime warped by dense concentrations of mass, Poole saw – just granules, but very dense indeed. They were visible through a kind of gravitational lensing, the distortion of light coming from behind the objects by their gravity fields.

  ‘That’s incredible,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing a kernel of matter compressed beyond nuclear densities. Like a knot of quarks. And then, within that, something denser yet, hotter. Those are the temperatures and densities we achieve in our GUT-energy pods.’ He glanced at Shamiso, checking her understanding. ‘GUT – Grand Unified Theory. We compress matter and energy to such densities that we emulate the first moments of the universe, and the forces of physics recombine. It takes us an accelerator wrapped around Copernicus Crater on the Moon to do this. So how can these – knots of the stuff – just be floating there?’

  Harry leaned forward to see. ‘Those silver raindrops of yours are sticking close to the main mass. The beetle. The phantoms are moving out more widely. Filling space. Almost as if they’re searching for something.’

  Shamiso said quickly, ‘“Searching”? I’d hesitate to use such words yet. Because they ascribe agency, you see. As we haven’t encountered minds equivalent to ours anywhere beyond Earth, an assumption of intelligence ought to be a last resort. Of course some hypothesise intelligence in Grantt’s Lattices on Mars, but—’

  Nicola said impatiently, ‘I don’t think this is the time for an academic debate about bugs on Mars, Mother.’

  Harry leaned forward, ignoring the pixelated sparkle where his Virtual self brushed a chair. ‘Look, I think it’s nearly all the way out of the portal now. The big mass.’

  The two ships were so close to the portal that Poole’s view of the anomaly was almost face on. He quickly manipulated the sensors’ data streams until he had produced a composite three-dimensional image of the object as a whole that he could rotate, expand, explore. That central fuselage, the mass that had emerged first, was like a fist in a black glove, clenched tight. And from it, he could see now, two wings swept back, one to either side of the main body, almost paddle-shaped, but flat and sharp-edged – in fact, he saw, flat and sharp to within the resolution limits of the Crab’s equipment. And both black as night.

  ‘Not like a beetle,’ Harry said, wondering. ‘Like a sycamore seed.’

  Symmetrical, with smooth, sweeping lines, the surfaces seamless: if this was engineering, it was fine work. Yet it was not beautiful, as Poole had thought of his wormhole portal. Not ugly either. It did not fit into that category – or any human category. ‘You do not belong,’ he murmured.

  Nicola looked at him, not unsympathetically. ‘Whether it belongs or not, it’s here.’

  ‘But it only just got though,’ Harry said. ‘It couldn’t have got through a wormhole much narrower. It scraped the sides, of the throat, the portal.’

  Shamiso said, ‘Got through from where? The other end of your wormhole is in Earth orbit – correct? Could this sycamore seed and its entourage have come through from Earth, then? Surely some alarm would have been raised . . . Ah, but we’re restricted by lightspeed; any warnings might still be on their way to us.’

  Poole was doubtful. ‘If it’s come through from the Earth end we’d know about it. There are instruments in the portals, test data sent through the wormhole itself.’

  ‘Oh, it’s obvious this thing didn’t come from Earth,’ Nicola said impatiently. ‘You’re thinking too literally – you at least, Mother, if not these two brooding geniuses. One of the reasons the Pooles built this prototype was to understand wormholes themselves better. Correct? It says so in your prospectus. Mother, you think a wormhole is some kind of simple high-speed transit system? There’s nothing simple about it. A wormhole is a flaw, a link between two events that shouldn’t be linked at all. Events that can be anywhere in spacetime – in space, on the other side of the Andromeda Galaxy, or somewhere else in time, anywhen, in past and future. Even in other universes, some think.’

  Harry scowled. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that you hoped to build an interplanetary superhighway. In fact you opened a kind of crack in space that could lead anywhere. And that could let in anything. Didn’t you even think of this, when you were doodling Earth–to-Jupiter subway systems on your softscreens? I’m getting you into focus, Michael Poole. You’re the worst sort of visionary meddler. Like a weapons manufacturer. You can see the glorious technology, and you persuade people to give you the money to build it. But you don’t see the consequences, do you . . .?’

  These ideas swirled in a fog of dread in Poole’s mind. A crack that could let in anything. ‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason that thing,
the sycamore seed, is as big as it is – a reason it’s shown up today, of all days.’

  Harry still didn’t get it. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this is the first time we’ve built a wormhole big enough. You said it yourself; it only just squeezed through. This – thing – has been waiting. Out there somewhere. And as soon as we opened the door far enough—’

  Shamiso looked at him in growing horror. ‘In it barged—’

  Her image broke up in a burst of cubical pixels.

  The flitter lurched. Poole was thrown forward.

  Suddenly the flitter was hurtling backwards. He saw that the portal had shrunk in his vision, as had the sycamore seed ship.

  Nicola was at her controls, sweeping stylised icons through the air with sharp, decisive, very physical gestures. This was her style; it was possible to control a modern craft with the mind, without any bodily movement at all. Right now Poole found he approved.

  As he hastily strapped into his couch Poole glanced over his shoulder. Harry and Shamiso’s Virtuals, reformed, were both back in their projected seats, and both looked shocked. Poole snapped, ‘Put on your helmets and close them up. Make sure the Co-ordinator does it right, Harry.’

  His father nodded, silent for once, and complied.

  Poole turned on Nicola. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Moved us away.’

  ‘Lethe, this is my ship.’

  ‘So’s the Hermit Crab. Look at it.’

  She brought up a display showing the Crab’s status. The display was littered with red alarm flags. Poole had designed the display himself; he read it in an instant. ‘Something is destabilising the Crab’s GUTdrive.’

  ‘Yes. And you know what that something is.’

  ‘The phantoms?’

  ‘The third type of entities. Squirmy, ghostly things made of GUT-stuff themselves. I think that’s what they were searching for – more sources of GUT energy. Feeding, maybe? Or refuelling. Well, they found one. The Crab’s drive pod.’

  ‘And you reacted,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Faster than I did. You got us away. We should be OK in this tub; it only has a fusion drive. The Crab, though – Harry?’

  ‘Here, son. I heard all that.’

  ‘You need to get the Crab back to Ganymede. Use the attitude thrusters, not the main drive.’

  ‘I’m way ahead of you.’ Harry’s Virtual was already throwing invisible switches. ‘I’ll broadcast warnings, to keep GUTships clear until we know what we’re dealing with. I’ll take care of your ship, son. And Co-ordinator Emry. What about you?’

  Poole thought quickly. ‘I’m going to Io. Miriam and Bill are there. The flux-tube teams. Stuck down a deep hole in the middle of the magnetosphere’s most intense region. And their radiation shields are powered by—’

  ‘GUTengines. So they’re in immediate danger. Take care.’

  Nicola Emry watched Poole coldly. ‘OK, since you ask, I’ll come with you. Do you want me to send a message to Earth, the inner System?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s where the sycamore seed ship is heading.’

  When he looked out of the window, for the first time since Nicola’s impulsive manoeuvre, he saw that the huge black object had gone.

  4

  Poole frantically tried to establish a decent link to Inachus Base, at Babbar Patera on Io. At first all he could get was a scratchy head-and-shoulders Virtual image of Melia, senior artificial mind at the base, and even that was prone to breaking up into a fluttering cloud of pixels. And the time delay between her responses, of a second or so, was heart-breaking. It was the kind of delay suffered between Earth and its Moon, and an indication of how far Poole still had to travel to get back from the wormhole site to Io. Such was the scale of the Jovian system.

  But Melia, as she had been designed to be, was calm. ‘I’m doing my best to restore contact with Bill Dzik and Miriam Berg. As soon as I have them I’ll patch them through—’

  ‘If the uplink can handle it.’

  ‘Be assured we’re on the case, Michael.’ She smiled, sketchily. ‘We follow your adventures with interest. As soon as it was clear that there was some kind of anomaly at the portal site, I called a general alert. Retrospectively endorsed by Bill and Miriam.’

  ‘You made the right call. Though you know you didn’t need that authorisation.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ Melia said primly. ‘Every second of down time costs money. The shareholders—’

  ‘Are more unstable than Io’s volcanoes, I know.’ For Poole Industries the wormhole operation had always been out at the edge of the envelope of financial plausibility. And for an investor you couldn’t get much more of a confidence-sapping glitch, Poole thought with gnawing anxiety, than some kind of alien artefact pushing its way out of your prototype wormhole. But for now there were more immediate priorities. ‘How’s the evacuation going?’

  ‘In hand,’ Melia assured him. ‘We’re lifting everybody up from the Hub, inside Jupiter. And every craft we can get hold of that can run independently of a GUTdrive, including your own flitter, will be enlisted to— I have Miriam Berg. Please hold.’ The Virtual collapsed.

  Nicola, piloting the flitter, glanced over at him. ‘You guys run a big operation out here, but your comms link is worse than I had in my bedroom aged five.’

  Poole looked at her with some contempt. ‘So? This is the frontier. There’s no larger human operation between us and the stars. And Jupiter is about as hostile a place you can come to work.’ He shook his head. ‘One power plant failing you can cope with. We never envisaged a contingency that could take them all out.’

  ‘Then you lack imagination. Who’s Miriam Berg?’

  ‘She and Bill Dzik are the senior managers on the ground at Io, in this phase of the project.’

  ‘And Melia?’

  ‘Senior artificial sentience.’

  ‘Senior this, senior that. I expect you’ve got an organogram. People like you always have organograms.’

  He just glared. ‘What I have is a hundred people down on Io, flesh and blood, and several thousand other sentients of various capabilities. Out there, on the surface, unprotected, you’d pick up a lethal dose of radiation in three hours. And without the GUTengines – without the electromagnetic shielding—’

  ‘Inachus for Michael Poole.’ It was Miriam Berg. Her head-and-shoulders image showed her peering out of a pressure-suit helmet.

  ‘Miriam. I’m coming in.’

  ‘We’re doing what we can, Michael. We don’t dare shut down the main GUTengine generators, but they’re glitching all over the place.’

  ‘Are you down in the lava-tube shelters yourself?’

  She glared at him. ‘No, I’m not, and nor is Bill, and nor would you be right now. We’ve got a crash schedule of evacuations set up and operating, with the usual priorities going out first – the young, our one pregnant woman, the injured. AS users last. I can pass it up for your approval—’

  ‘I don’t need to see that.’

  Nicola put in, ‘Finding somewhere to house a hundred refugees will be the next challenge. I know that even Daraville, on Ganymede, doesn’t have the capacity. I’ve put out a general call for help. And I have a couple of ideas.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s actually helpful.’

  She arched an eyebrow, quizzically. ‘Nice to be appreciated. So, AntiSenescence users are at the back of the line? What is this, some kind of discrimination against the elderly?’

  ‘Are you a user?’

  ‘Of AS? Not my style, Poole.’

  Despite the circumstances he had to laugh. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? Look – among the capabilities you acquire from AS treatment is a limited ability to repair cellular, even genetic injury. Meant to counter the effects of ageing, but it will work just as well on radiation damage. The studies show that an A
S user with compromised protection might last a full hour on Io longer than a non-user. So it wouldn’t save your life—’

  ‘But it’s enough to get you kicked out of the first lifeboats.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  Miriam was frowning. ‘Who are you talking to?’

  ‘My cab driver.’

  ‘Hmm. Listen, Michael. If you get the chance, and the comms capacity, follow the news. That intruder of yours, the big one—’

  ‘The sycamore seed. On its way into the inner System?’

  ‘Yes, and moving fast, about one per cent of lightspeed. How it’s moving is another question. We’re seeing no radiation, no evidence of exhaust. Whatever it is, it ain’t a rocket. We are detecting some kind of gravity waves emanated by the thing, but—’

  ‘Is it making for Earth?’

  ‘Earth is on the far side of the Sun. It will actually come closer to Mars. The final destination’s still unclear – some projections show the Sun itself, some Mercury.’

  Nicola frowned. ‘I can see why it might head for the Sun; that’s where the System’s mass-energy is. But Mercury? What in Lethe could it want there? And what about the other junk that came through the wormhole?’

  Miriam glanced down. ‘The silvered spheres you called raindrops followed the sycamore seed into the inner System – all of them, as far as anyone knows. But the phantoms have stuck around in Jovian space, unfortunately for us. Obviously they’re tracking any GUTengine they can find. But some of them are diving into the Io flux torus.’

  ‘They’re hungry,’ Nicola said. ‘Looking for energy, for the high-density sort they need. Which they won’t find in the flux torus.’

  Miriam shrugged. ‘Your cab driver may be right. But all we have is guesswork right now.’

  ‘Noted,’ Poole said. ‘So let’s stop guessing. I’ll join the evac effort as soon as we can get there. I’ll get off the line and let you progress your—’