Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  And there was one group he didn’t recognise: six, seven women and men in what looked like field camouflage from some antique war, blotchy grey and green. Some kind of allies of his father, Poole was willing to bet. They stared frankly at Poole, curious, not unfriendly.

  Harry watched the faces of the delegates.

  ‘The Cache is firing off more Probes,’ he said. ‘As you can see. And as I’m sure you know, this time, so far, the Probes – though I think we’re justified in simply calling them weapons now – have been targeting lesser objects. Last time it was Earth, Mars, the Moon. Now it’s minor bodies, and our own habitats – anywhere, it seems, where there are signs of human presence. To put it bluntly, anywhere inhabited that comes within range of Xeelee and Cache as they spin out from the Sun gets a Probe. And the results – again, I’m sure you’re all familiar with much of this material . . .’

  He hurried through a list of targets, all burned in Poole’s memory. Larunda, the habitat at the Lagrange point of Mercury from where Poole had launched his own jaunt into the Sun. Venera, an Anthropocene-era monument of a station orbiting Venus, that had been used as a construction shack by an ancestral Poole for the great project that had ultimately frozen out Venus’s deep atmosphere. Both stations smashed.

  ‘The Probes are energetic enough to destroy utterly pretty much any object smaller than seventy kilometres diameter – inner-system asteroids, for instance. And of course any habitats they target are obliterated. A handful of lives have been lost; mostly we’ve been able to mount evacuations in time.’ Harry looked around the room grimly. ‘I think we already must regard the inner Solar System, from the orbit of Venus inward, as lost to the enemy . . . I have to say I hope the statue of Jocelyn Lang Poole on Venus is still standing. One bit of defiance.’

  Gea smiled. ‘From what I remember of Jocelyn, she’d find that quite appropriate, Harry.’

  ‘Well, I object,’ said Shamiso Emry, sounding almost weary, getting to her feet. ‘Not only to the use of that pejorative – enemy – but also to the none-too-subtle undertone with which Delegate Poole has presented every element of his so-called factual summary.’

  Harry, still standing, faced her across the table. ‘And how would she have liked me to present all this, Speaker? To a musical accompaniment? These are the facts. The Xeelee and its associated artefacts have been destructive since the moment they arrived in the Solar System—’

  ‘In our System, through your wormhole.’

  ‘Hardly fair, Delegate Emry,’ Gea said softly.

  Emry pressed on. ‘Of course I can’t deny the destructive consequences of the Xeelee’s actions. But we still know nothing of its ultimate intent. I mean, why would it do this? Why cross the stars, simply in order to smash everything we built? Or, put it another way – if it really is intent on destruction, why be so restrained? For example, we know that it is capable of diving deep into the Sun. Well, then, why not destabilise the Sun itself? Create some tremendous flare that would lick the faces of the planets clean?’

  One of the camouflage-equipped men snickered. ‘Don’t give the Lethe-spawned thing ideas.’

  Harry grinned. ‘As you say, we don’t know its motive. We don’t know why. But, whatever in Lethe else this Xeelee is, it seems to me honest: brutally, transparently honest. It’s doing what it came here to do. Those first Probes were destructive, but they tested us too. Through our response the Xeelee found out about where we live, how we live, what kind of a fight we could put up – how we die. Now it has started targeting the places we live, anywhere we have settled even in small numbers – in one instance it took out a handful of miners on a carbon-rich Apollo asteroid not much larger than this room.

  ‘The strategy is clear. The Xeelee isn’t out to destroy the Solar System. Not for now, anyhow. It is out to destroy us. Humanity.’

  ‘Or maybe just your son,’ somebody murmured.

  Poole couldn’t identify the speaker. He dropped his eyes, feeling as if everyone in the room, and the legions of remote observers watching this session, were looking, right now, at him.

  Gea stood up. ‘Perhaps we need to widen the discussion.’

  Harry had stayed on his feet throughout, and he kept standing now. ‘Good point, Speaker. In particular we need to look at the effect the Xeelee incursion is having on wider human affairs.’

  And he launched into another bleak, impressive, depressing presentation.

  Aside from its own recovery efforts following the Probe’s Atlantic tsunami, Earth was now suffering a fall-out from the Xeelee assaults on the daughter colonies offworld. There had already been a significant number of evacuations to Earth from the Moon and Mars, from dwellers of domes and arcologies that suddenly seemed very vulnerable. Even if, as events had proved, Earth itself was hardly a haven.

  Meanwhile, interplanetary trade and commerce were increasingly disrupted. Both Mars and the Moon depended on flows from Earth of foodstuffs, complex chemicals, and volatiles on a large scale: Earth-atmosphere nitrogen collected by the profac scoops, for example, to fill those airy arcologies on Mars. But Earth itself was dependent on imports from space: on solar power collected in orbit, on metals extracted from Mercury’s crust, even on fusion-reactor helium isotopes mined from the atmospheres of the giant planets. The great triumph of the conservation lobbies in the Recovery era had been to establish a protective view of the Earth and its intricate cargo of life: a scraping of nitrogen could be taken to nourish a new Mars, but overall the Earth had to be seen as something to cherish, to protect. Earth was a park, a garden. But that meant a dependence on power generation, mining and other industries that had been moved off-planet. Now that dependence was being tested.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Harry said, ‘we’re seeing a growing distrust in our world institutions. All of us here must be aware of that. A growing withdrawal of consent, from those we presume to govern but have been unable to protect.

  ‘You don’t have to witness a riot outside some UN office to see that. A study of news bias and conversational trends shows there is a growing regionalism, a fragmentation of the global society. Some Earth regions have refused to take Martian migrants, for instance. We haven’t yet reverted to Anthropocene-era nationalism, but perhaps that’s only because the old nations are so deeply buried in history. But there has been a revival of various old religious forms, even cultism.’

  Poole thought of Nicola’s mocking allusions to long-dead religions. In her irreverent way she had predicted some of this, he realised.

  Harry went on grimly, ‘There’s even evidence that a handful of groups have started to worship the Xeelee. Worship: is that the right term? I’m no expert in these archaic modes of thinking. They pray to it, just as we assume our pre-technological ancestors once helplessly prayed to gods of thunder and volcanoes to spare their lives.’

  And, Poole thought grimly, just as the Wormhole Ghost implied that one day a defeated alien species would have come to worship humans. Would have, if not for this.

  So the discussion went on, dispiriting, even crushing, without relief. When Speaker Gea called a break, Poole doubted that anybody in the session was more grateful of it than he was.

  Outside, it was raining softly.

  Poole walked alone, coffee flask in hand. The air was warm and still, and Poole’s costume, though no skinsuit, was weatherproof; the rain didn’t bother him. Gentle English weather, as might have been experienced by Poole’s ancestors all the way back to Michael Bazalget and George Poole, and even deeper in time. Back to the age of the subject of the archaic statue, maybe.

  The rest of the delegates had stayed indoors. Huddled in the meeting room or in the surrounding hallways. Harry called this ‘cluster space’, room for the between-sessions informal conferencing that, he claimed, was the most significant element of such meetings. Poole left them to it.

  On impulse, Poole walked to the centre of the trefoil earthwork – Har
ry’s ‘propeller’, though Poole thought it was just as likely to be a sheepfold – and sat on the moist ground before that central statue, hands clasped around his knees, mirroring its casual pose. ‘Were you a god, once? Or a hero?’

  There was no reply.

  Poole tapped his temple, and voices murmured in his ears.

  He was linked into an ongoing feed from Gallia Three, his stealthed nest of colleagues out in near-Jovian space, all of forty light minutes away. No direct conversation was possible because of the time delay, but the two ends of the long comms link kept up an out of sync dialogue.

  Right now Highsmith Marsden was discussing his analysis of Xeelee technology.

  ‘. . . Each successive failure of our weaponry provides information of a sort. In that it provides a new lower bound on the capabilities of Xeelee technology.

  ‘You see, the weapons launched against the Probe’s hull – including nuclear-energy and antimatter detonations, and Poole’s own ramming – not only failed to make a mark on the hull’s surface, they did not deflect the Probe’s motion. This was suspected by observers on the spot, but it has taken us a year to establish this securely from the data returned by the fleet of ships; its trajectory didn’t vary by so much as a fraction of a degree. Never mind super-tough armour: what of the conservation of momentum? The Probe should have been pushed sideways, given its known mass, by a measurable angle – even if it that deflection might not have been enough to save the Earth.

  ‘You may know that I – unlike the babbling children who now swarm through my habitat like spermatozoa in search of an egg – am uncomfortable with groundless speculation. Nevertheless I have been forced to hypothesise how this is possible. And I believe, and this idea needs to be tested, that the Xeelee have a drive that somehow anchors an object like a Probe to spacetime itself. All this is guesswork. But if, if it is so – or anything like this hypothesis holds – then the Probe, you see, will behave as if it has infinite inertia. Immovable. As if even the largest force cannot deflect it . . .’

  Poole knew that Nicola Emry was out there at Gallia right now, with Miriam and Marsden and the rest – ostensibly finding out how Marsden’s secretive studies of the Xeelee phenomena were advancing, presumably developing ideas for defence and weapons options, but also getting as far away from her mother as she could. Nicola would take any excuse for that, and thinking of his own family Poole couldn’t blame her.

  Miriam Berg murmured in his ear now, delivering a gloss on Marsden’s peroration. ‘Michael, Highsmith is concentrating on theoretical details about the Xeelee, and devising sensors to gather specialised kinds of data to test out his hypotheses. He keeps insisting there are a lot of clues in the gravity-wave data the Xeelee craft is giving off – he is confident it is a craft, by the way, a technological creation, or at least not simply biological. Gravity waves: ripples in spacetime . . . Highsmith thinks the Xeelee might even move by harnessing some aspect of spacetime itself. Well, it’s his nature to pursue such questions. But I keep trying to draw him back to the fact that the exotic-drive vessel in question actually seems to be some kind of battleship that’s approaching Earth and Mars once more, and what we need is some way of stopping it . . .’

  Poole let her familiar voice wash through his head. As if they were still out there at the Io flux tube, working on the details of a mass-transport system that was supposed to have been the wonder of the age. It all seemed a long time ago.

  He had a dread sense of inertia.

  Just as Harry repeatedly complained, the leaders of humanity, even now, even in the ranks of this specially convened council, simply weren’t taking responsibility, weren’t making decisions fast enough. And Poole suspected that even Highsmith Marsden was unable to focus on the true problem of the Xeelee, its deadly threat, so distracted was even he by its alluring, unfathomable strangeness.

  All the while the Xeelee approached, indifferent, following its own timetable.

  ‘Wish I was out there with you, Miriam,’ he said now. ‘You know, the Hermit Crab, the first ship I built, was the nearest thing I ever had to a home, I guess. Which tells you a lot about my personal life. I always thought that when I was older I would take sabbaticals. Just go off alone, in the Crab. Out to the Oort Cloud to pursue some long-term science project – studying those quagma phantoms in the wild, maybe. Lethe, we have AS; we all have centuries before us; we have time for sabbaticals. Or we would have . . .’

  A soft chime in his ear: the recall to the formal session. ‘Later, Miriam.’ Poole stood up with a sigh, set his clothing to dry off, gave an ironic salute to the seated god-pilot, and walked back to the conference hall.

  When he got to the chamber the session had already resumed. The delegate on her feet was one of Harry’s row of stern-looking camouflage-wearing warrior types, all of an indeterminate, AS-blurred age.

  And she was speaking of weapons.

  She ran through a diorama of the various assaults that had been made on the Earth-bound Probe, from tickles with a comms laser to Poole’s own brutal, all-out ramming. Now Poole was the recipient of glances more of admiration, even envy, perhaps, than reproof.

  ‘Those who took on the Atlantic Probe did everything that could have been done,’ Harry’s tame expert said. ‘And showed more courage than any of us who weren’t out there fighting alongside them had a right to expect. But it was futile, of course. Now, as the Xeelee itself approaches Earth or Mars—’

  And Shamiso objected that the Xeelee’s destination still wasn’t yet proven.

  The weapons advocate dismissed that. ‘Well, I for one don’t wish to risk either of our beautiful worlds. We have to prepare ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for war. However, we live in an epoch of peace. We don’t know how to make war – and of course it’s just as well that we conditioned ourselves out of war-making before we moved into space and were handed technologies that could reshape worlds, or smash them. But our ancestors did make war. They got so good at it they came close to killing themselves off entirely a couple of times. And now, in this time of unprecedented existential peril—’

  ‘Objection, Speaker.’

  ‘Noted. Get on with it, please, without the purple prose.’

  ‘Facing such a threat we have to reach back to the wisdom of our ancestors – their deadly wisdom. And ask ourselves, how would they have responded?’

  ‘What’s the point?’ another delegate spoke up. ‘We have already gone beyond our ancestors’ toys, their fusion bombs. Our most dense source of energy is the Poole GUTengine, and we threw one of those at the Earth Probe and didn’t leave a scratch.’

  ‘Sure. But still, we have the resources of an interplanetary civilisation to deploy. There are tactics to try . . .’

  With support from her colleagues, the presenter ran through a number of options. Such as battering the Xeelee with a swarm of kinetic-energy projectiles: dumb drones, massive, fast-moving – even relativistic, hurled at the Xeelee at close to the speed of light: ‘Missiles intended as planet-smashers, in a darker age. Ultimate deterrents.’ Or the Xeelee could be subjected to a sustained assault from a fleet of GUTships, bathing that sycamore seed hull in their hyper-energetic exhaust plumes.

  ‘Sure, it survived the frontal attacks by the lunar miners, and Michael Poole’s supremely courageous ramming. And meanwhile we’ve tested that scrap of membrane material retrieved by Jack Grantt and Michael Poole from the surface of the Cache – tested it to the limits we’re capable of. Haven’t made a scratch. But perhaps even so there is some limit to the resilience of the Xeelee’s armour, some limit to its capacity to soak up energy and momentum. And even if not, there are other ploys we could consider. We could even send in decoys . . .’

  Poole noticed Harry murmuring a note to his own screen about that idea.

  ‘Anything we can do to delay its progress. We won’t know unless we try. And the minute the Xeelee shows any weakness—’


  Shamiso stood, interrupting her. ‘You people – I heard your names and affiliations, but who are you? And what makes you qualified to suggest strategies for planetary defence?’

  Harry stood up, grinning; Poole could see he’d been waiting for the question. ‘What these guys are is the nearest we have to experienced soldiers, leaving aside the Federal Police. Because these guys have been down there fighting: on Mars, in Acidalia, in Tharsis Province.’

  And then Poole got it. ‘War-gamers,’ he said, wondering. ‘You brought war-gamers into this UN session.’

  Shamiso Emry goggled. ‘Are you serious, Harry?’

  ‘Never more so.’ Shamiso was still on her feet, but so was Harry, thus breaking protocol, and he leaned forward, intimidating. ‘Who else is there? Who in Lethe did you bring?’ He glared around. ‘What have any of you brought to the table? These guys know weapons, they know war – and if you think one of their Anthropocene-era nuclear-battlefield simulations is easy, go try it some day. They’re the nearest thing to experts that we have, believe me . . . Thank you, Bella, I’ll take it from here.’

  He nodded to the war-gamer, who backed away and sat down.

  Harry left his place and started to stalk around the table. More protocol broken. Nobody objected, not even Shamiso, who took her seat. Gea, the Speaker, stayed silent.

  Poole sensed that the climax of the event was approaching: the moment Harry had been working up to since he called this meeting – and probably for months before that. He wondered if in fact Harry had set up all this with Gea’s complicity from the beginning. He knew his father; Harry was nothing if not a cautious planner when it came to the key moments in his life, his career.

  For this was the moment, Poole realised, that Harry was mounting his coup d’état.