Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘So,’ Harry said, ‘one lesson I have learned from my own studies of the past is that if you want to fight a war, you have to organise to do so.’ He glared around at the delegates, most of whom hadn’t uttered a single word since they had convened that morning. ‘It’s a time for democratic consent, but not for democracy. It’s a time for decision-making – and time for a government with the organisational arms to implement those necessary decisions.’ With empty-hand gestures, he flung Virtual words into the air to hang over the table. ‘Army: we need trained soldiers. Navy: we need ships to carry those soldiers to the Xeelee, to the war zone. Organisation: as well as a command structure over the armed forces, we’ll need the industry to back all this up. Ministries, of supply, of production, a dedicated research and development force.

  ‘Security. As the fear spreads we’ve already seen mass unrest, civil disobedience, even riots. This is only going to hamper our forthcoming efforts, from evacuations to armaments manufacture. The people have to be controlled, for their own good.’

  Shamiso stood up, quiet, grave. ‘And what of rights?’

  ‘Rights? Rights will be respected, as far as is appropriate to the circumstances. But for now responsibility – duty if you will – trumps rights. If we get it wrong, when the emergency is over, Delegate Emry, you personally can lead the impeachment of myself and my team, or whoever is involved.’ He glared at her until she sat down.

  Then he began to pace again. ‘And above all, we need command. In the age of the Roman Republic, as you may know, in times of emergency the senators would appoint a dictator, a magistratus extraordinarius, with absolute power to implement the decisions necessary to cope with that emergency. Absolute but temporary power.’

  One woman dared object. ‘You can’t quote precedents from such a primitive age.’

  But Harry was ready for that. ‘The more recent past, then. The Bottleneck. The last great emergency to threaten the very future of mankind, when migrant flows threatened the stability of the nation-states that had been the foundation of governance for centuries. In that crisis the Stewardship emerged, a cross-national government agency with overall control of global resources, to manage the multiple issues of the time. Call this person – the magistratus – the Steward, if you like.’

  Shamiso Emry looked more weary than angry – disappointed, Poole thought. Without bothering to stand, she asked, ‘And who’s to be this “Steward”?’

  But Harry was ready for that. His finger jabbed at Shamiso. ‘Do you want the job? Do you? Or you? . . .’ He backed away. ‘Let’s take another break. I suggest an hour. Clear your heads, take some early lunch. When we reconvene, I move we vote on ratifying.’ He glared at Gea, who nodded gently.

  Poole saw that nobody, save Shamiso and Gea, was meeting Harry’s eye.

  Harry grinned at his son.

  In the break, Harry quickly sought him out.

  Poole was grudgingly impressed. Harry had always had huge energy, ambition, drive. It was just that before, those qualities had been directed entirely towards his own or the family’s ambitions. Now, in this crisis, Harry had seen a bigger role he could fill – and, cynically motivated or not, he was stepping up to fill it.

  ‘So, Harry. You finally got what you always secretly wanted. You’re king of the world.’

  Poole thought he had never seen his father look more alive. ‘Maybe you have to be crazy even to dream of it. But now I have it – almost – listen, I feel like my head’s on fire. Even while I was tweaking the tails of the rabbits in there – all watched by audiences across the Solar System, and you should see the instant-poll approval ratings – the whole time I was dreaming up a scheme. The next step in handling this Lethe-spawned Xeelee. Something to do with the talk of decoys, and my tame warriors’ war-gaming on Mars, set me thinking.’ He looked at his son. ‘And I want you to be involved, Michael.’

  Poole tried to follow this tangled chain of thought. ‘How?’

  ‘I said the Xeelee had been honest. It’s begun the work of destroying us, and is making no secret of it. But we don’t have to be honest.

  ‘Let’s lie to it.’

  When the meeting broke up, Harry disappeared back into the elevated circles he now inhabited. Whatever new scheme he was cooking up, he didn’t yet share it with his son.

  Poole himself felt a need to do something more immediately practical.

  A week after Kent, Poole retreated to the company facilities on the Moon. With the destruction of the nascent Serenitatis accelerator by the Xeelee Probe, the old Copernicus compound had become a still more essential location as the company’s main surviving manufactory of GUTengines: a resource essential to any human future he could envisage. And so Poole went to work. In the months that followed, his contribution at Copernicus was satisfying and essential. And Poole took the opportunity to fit out a new GUTship for his own use, to replace Hermit Crab.

  He tried to pay as little attention as possible to Harry’s swift rise to power and his consolidation of his position.

  But Poole did wonder what Harry had meant about lying to the Xeelee.

  And then, after another six months, Harry summoned him to Mars.

  45

  At Phobos, Poole saw as soon as he arrived in the Assimilator’s Claw, the Martian branch of humanity was building a navy.

  For centuries already this little moon had been used as a shipyard, its own resources heavily mined. Now it was embedded in a huge zero-gravity nest of metal and carbon-fibre tethers, through which suited human figures crawled, and massive robot bodies edged cautiously. And from within this Tangle, as it was called, the carcasses of ships emerged. It was a striking spectacle, and all the more impressive for having been assembled in just a few months. And all this in unfiltered sunlight, the shadows clean stripes.

  Of course, Poole knew, the very spectacle of this brilliant display of industry was part of the plan. It was meant to be seen, by all humanity: look what we are already doing here, in orbit around this threatened planet, now that Harry Poole is in charge. Poole just hoped that the ships and weapons that came out of here actually did some good against the Xeelee.

  But as he settled the Assimilator’s Claw into an orbit close to Phobos, Poole was distracted from all this frenetic industry by what he saw of Mars itself.

  When he’d last visited the fourth planet it had seemed to him to be still lost in its own antique calm; ten million human beings hadn’t made that much difference, not to Mars. The emptiness of the arid desert had been broken only by a few splashes of reflected sunlight in the Martian day, and artificial glows in the night: the big communities at Kahra and Cydonia, the bold green blister of the new Hellas arcology, a few ribbons of light marking out major surface transport routes, the scattered sparks that were the homesteads of individual families, trying to make a living out in the red expanse.

  But now, he saw, there was light and motion everywhere.

  All of Hellas sparkled with glassy reflections, like a window in the face of the planet, as if the tremendous arcology had been suddenly completed. To the north of Hellas, across the equator, blue-grey lines scraped through the desert from south to north, heading all the way up to the pole. And around grey knots that might be cities, fire sparked and flared: the unmistakable signs of war. Suddenly Mars was a crowded, highly developed, variegated, conflict-ridden planet.

  Or anyhow it looked that way. And that, he began to guess, was entirely the point.

  Without warning, Nicola Emry and Harry Poole materialised in the Claw’s cluttered lifedome.

  Nicola, in an open skinsuit, head bare, scalp freshly shaved, looked around briskly, and grinned. ‘Lethe, Poole, is that really you? This isn’t just some fabulous dream?’

  There was no perceptible time delay; they must both be projecting from within the Phobos complex, Poole realised. But that was no surprise. Six months after his coup, Harry spent a lot
of his time here on the spot, to ensure that the resources needed by his massive new military build-up flowed in without impedance.

  And Nicola, of course, was here to learn how to fly warships.

  Harry wore a city suit, as Poole thought of it, a one-piece, black with silver piping – smart, not showy, practical, efficient. ‘The crisis challenges us all. But we don’t all have the luxury of tucking ourselves away in seclusion. Anyhow, thanks for coming.’

  ‘We all have our work to do,’ Poole said awkwardly. He felt thrown off balance by this intrusion into his personal space, Virtual or otherwise.

  Nicola snorted. ‘Like you had a choice. These days, when a Steward sends you a polite invitation—’

  Harry scowled at her. ‘Just remember who you’re talking to.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ In zero gravity, she drifted around the lifedome, glancing over the control displays, the couches – even poking her Virtual head through the door of the bathroom. ‘Nice ship. New?’

  ‘Kind of,’ Poole said. ‘She was to be Hermit Crab II, under development on the Moon. After we smashed up Crab I, I accelerated her assembly.’

  ‘And gave her a cuddly new name. Assimilator’s Claw. Where did that come from, your kitten when you were a kid?’

  Hesitantly, Poole confessed, ‘My mother’s archive. More bits of information fed to Michael Poole Bazalget by his girl from the future. One day the Assimilator’s Claw will be remembered as a fighting ship that took part in the war for the centre of the Galaxy. That’s twenty thousand years in the future, and the real Claw will probably be nothing like this, but—’

  ‘Nice touch,’ Nicola said. ‘I can see she’s tougher than the Crab used to be. Leaner. Faster, I’m guessing? And this lifedome is like a fortress.

  ‘You must have seen the designs of the ships they’re building in the Tangle.’ She waved a hand at the vision beyond the dome. ‘Warships, Michael. Centuries after the last time such craft were dreamed of. We have fast single-crew flitters meant to evade defences and launch close-in attacks, and big GUTship battle cruisers to deliver massive, sustained bombardments. But we’re starting from scratch. We’ve lost the tradition of that kind of thinking – how to make spaceworthy craft nimble enough to fight, yet robust enough to survive an attack – and we’re trying to adapt new technologies, stuff that our old warlike ancestors never imagined, to destructive purposes.’

  ‘He knows all this,’ Harry said, studying his son. ‘He’s a Poole, and most of it’s our technology anyhow.’

  Poole blurted, ‘Why did you call me here, Harry? I need to be where I’m most useful. I was useful on the Moon. You know that. At Copernicus, trying to ramp up GUTengine production for your battleships. Look, I want to help fight this thing. But I’m an engineer. The best place for me is behind the lines.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘No. You are more than merely useful. You are unique, Michael. You know that the Xeelee’s trajectory remains uncertain. But you also know we’re trying to lure it to Mars. Right? And if it comes here, this is where we will stop it, before it goes anywhere near Earth. The strategy has been made known to every citizen who’s participating in the Virtual-gaming programme going on down there. They know they will be in the front line, Michael, or anyhow that’s the plan. And if you are down there, that’s a sign of our commitment, to Mars, to their survival. Not only are you the hero who the whole human race saw ram that Lethe-spawned Cache Probe on its way to Earth, you’re also my own son. A sign of my personal commitment, in fact.’

  Poole glanced at Nicola, who pursed her lips, but for once she had nothing to say.

  And Poole, thinking it over, knew he had no real choice in the matter – not for the first time when it came to his part in his father’s schemes.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll do it your way. Where do I start?’

  ‘Jack Grantt wants to see you,’ Harry said.

  ‘Where?’

  Nicola grinned. ‘Barsoom.’

  46

  So, the next day, Poole descended to Cydonia. And Jack Grantt took him flying over Elysium Planitia.

  Grantt’s flitter was a robust two-man ship, adapted to Martian conditions and fitted out for long-duration fieldwork, with a compact life support system, a couple of bunks, a galley, and a small bench area set out with various scientific instruments, including a simple optical microscope. Lived-in, neat and mundane.

  Elysium, meanwhile, north-east of Syrtis Major, was part of the vast, almost featureless system of lowlands and plains that dominated Mars’s northern hemisphere. When Poole looked down through the big Virtual-transparent sections of lower hull, he saw dusty, rock-strewn desert, mostly unchanged for aeons. Familiar to Poole from many previous descents to Mars.

  Familiar, except for the marching monsters beneath the flitter’s prow.

  Grantt, grinning at Poole’s reaction, slowed the flitter and held it in a hover. ‘Take your time. They can’t see us; we’re in administrator mode for this particular game-world . . .’

  The procession was making its way across the plain, heading steadily south, moving no faster than the pace of the elephant-sized beasts that were doing most of the heavy dragging. Poole tried to estimate numbers: about fifty of those big draught beasts hauling what looked like chariots and travois, laden with furs and bits of broken statuary carved from crimson rock. In some of the chariots rode the evident masters of this march: big humanoids, each with what appeared to be an extra pair of limbs sprouting from the region of the hips, and a head with reptilian eyes that rolled back in their sockets. Green, leathery skin.

  One of the chariots, a big one, bore what looked like huge, leathery eggs.

  This parade was escorted by around five hundred smaller beasts, the size of horses maybe, with slate-black backs, and ten legs that gave their plodding motion an oddly crocodilian, low-slung look.

  And behind this van came what looked more like regular people: men, women, children, their skin bright red, most of them more or less naked, blood-stained, many limping. Naked, on Mars: Poole felt his own deep-ingrained space traveller’s instincts scream silently at the sight. And these were captives, bound at the wrists and ankles into one vast, shuffling chain gang. They were flanked by more of the big humanoids, armed but less adorned – warriors, presumably.

  Poole had to remind himself that none of this was real – or rather, if anybody down there was real amid the crowd of Virtual projections, it was by choice, with their physical manifestation safely locked up in a booth somewhere.

  ‘So are those prisoners people?’

  Grantt’s grin widened. ‘Not quite. These “people” lay eggs too. Don’t worry about it. This scenario isn’t derived from a particularly modern scientific understanding . . .’

  ‘This is the Discovery-era game zone, right?’

  ‘Yes. When, through the best optical telescopes, all you could see of the surface of Mars was the waxing and waning of the polar caps with the seasons. And so people projected their dreams up here. This is a raiding party. Well, you can see that. They’re heading back home after an assault on one of the more advanced cities, to the north. But the warriors live in a city of their own, a ruin, down at the ancient sea shore, south of here.’

  ‘The sea shore. You mean the Discontinuity. The big geological dividing line between northern and southern hemispheres. That really is an ancient shore, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, the old Discovery-era authors got some of their guesses right. Their Mars was a drying, dying world, just like the real thing – save that the north-hemisphere ocean actually vanished billions of years ago, not a mere million . . .’ He turned the prow of the flitter sharply, and they swept away from the toiling caravan. ‘The zone has got pretty extensive, with time. The work of many hands. And it stretches all the way to the north polar cap. It’s the biggest of the planet’s game zones, in fact.’

 
They came to a canal that cut across the landscape, grey and green and dead straight. Jack brought the flitter around so that it ran parallel to the great gully, heading almost directly north. In Mars’s true air, which was closer to a vacuum than anything dreamed of in those Discovery-era fantasies, any open water would flash-freeze. But here, vegetation flourished along the canal banks – squat trees, what looked like cacti, even beds of moss – in some places spreading a few kilometres away from the canal itself, banding the waterway. And Poole spotted farms, neatly laid out fields irrigated by spurs from the canal.

  In one place Grantt brought the flitter dipping low over a villa, surrounded by farmland. Graceful buildings, with pillars and arches of some glimmering crystal material, infeasibly tall. Before the main house stood a figure: a slim woman in a pale robe. She looked up as the flitter passed over. Poole saw that she wore a golden mask. Then she was lost, gone, the crystal pillars a fading glimmer.

  ‘She looked like she could see us,’ he remarked.

  Grantt shrugged. ‘Could be the protocols are slipping. Gamers like to challenge the rules, and the rule-makers. You know, gamers really are instinctive warriors – that’s why they play. It’s best they sublimate all that ingenious aggression into anachronous game worlds like this, rather than express it in the real world.

  ‘And when Harry made his call for volunteers to help run this global game-world illusion – to get all the zones up and running together, to make the planet look as crowded as possible – the gamers responded with a will. A chance to fight for real, for once, if at one step removed. So here it is, the Mars of our dreams, fighting back against the invading nightmare. And you have to admit it looks convincing.’

  ‘And Harry is gambling that it will all seem convincing to the Xeelee too.’

  This was the logic, it turned out. Months after the Xeelee and the Cache had left the Sun, they continued to follow their patient spiralling trajectory out through the Solar System. And it still wasn’t clear to the military analysts, drafted in from astronomy departments across the Solar System, whether the Xeelee was ultimately heading for Mars or Earth – or either. And so the Stewards, under Harry Poole, were trying to force the issue by giving it something to aim at . . .