Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Well, that’s the thinking. If the Xeelee is seeking to damage us on a large scale, maybe it will head for where it thinks it can do humanity the most harm, most quickly. It will try to decapitate us. So, Harry argues, we’ll pull a bluff. Cover Mars with cities and canals, battles and disasters, make it look as if it is the dominant human world in the Solar System: not Earth, placid, peaceful, green, energy-conservative. And when we lure the Xeelee here, we’ll hit it with all we’ve got – and above the surface of a sparsely inhabited planet instead of fragile old Earth.’

  Poole marvelled at the deviousness. He knew he would never have come up with such a scheme.

  ‘But will it work? It’s all just spectacle; there’s hardly any energy being expended down there. Hardly any people at all.’

  ‘Maybe. But there are a lot of minds down there, simulated or projected. Look, Michael, I buy Harry’s argument on this. I’m an exobiologist, remember. We’re dealing with an alien species in the Xeelee – an alien, it seems, from out of time. Who knows what it perceives of us? It may understand little of our cool, carbon-chemistry biosphere. It may be of such a foreign nature that it can’t even tell what’s alive here, let alone sentient. It may think those hordes of simulated red-skinned warriors are as authentic a kind of human as you or I. Certainly we might confuse it, and if we achieve nothing else, that’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can see you’ve got heavily involved in running all this.’

  ‘Thanks to your father. I was somebody on the spot he could use.’

  ‘That’s Harry.’

  ‘For better or worse he knows how to reach people, Michael . . .’

  Now a city lay sprawled across the desert below. Grantt lifted the flitter high in the air, for a better view.

  Poole saw two mighty walled strongholds, each contained by a glittering circular rampart, set perhaps a hundred kilometres apart. Between the twin communities stretched a webbing of roads. Spires reached up from the heart of each city, kilometres tall, Poole judged. Even in the bright daylight, artificial light glimmered from rooftops, along narrow radial avenues, and from great structures like temples.

  But all this was obscured by war. Armies clashed on the plain beyond the cities’ walls: armies of foot soldiers, it seemed, their only vehicles carts drawn by more huge animals, with the spark and smoke of firearms everywhere. Poole could see that this particular conflict was a war of humanoid against humanoid – one band of the red-skinned people against another, without the involvement of the green-skinned giants he had seen earlier.

  The war was being waged in the air too. Over the ant-like soldier hordes, huge, ponderous aerial vessels floated. They were like airships, Poole thought at first, long grey bodies strung from end to end with gaudy banners, and signal flags that fluttered in strings. But the ships moved too rapidly, too gracefully to be simple dirigibles, with turns and dips assisted by sails and propellers.

  And they fought. The tactics were reminiscent of what Poole had read of ocean-navy clashes of the Discovery era. One ponderous craft would glide slowly alongside another, while cannon cracked between the parallel hulls, and crew threw nets and grappling hooks to try to board their opponents’ craft. As Poole watched he saw one ship fall, its superstructure burning, drifting down slow as a paper lantern in the air.

  ‘For cultures which have at least gunpowder, I can see an awful lot of swords being swung.’

  Jack Grantt laughed. ‘Oh, lighten up. It is supposed to be a game, Michael. Fun, you know? You won’t be surprised that this is the most popular zone. Here, you get to swing a sword, and you can play with technology that’s actually more advanced than our own. How do you think those airships fly? Not with some lighter-than-air gas mixture. They extract a kind of antigravity principle from the sunlight. Which, I would playfully suggest, isn’t much more fantastic than the way you claim to squeeze exotic matter from the vacuum. Come on. I’ll take you to the Anthropocene zone. That’s fun too, in a different kind of way.’

  Glancing back one last time, Poole saw a new element enter the fight: more humanoids, short, squat, stocky, who could leap high in the air – high enough to reach the lower airships, and once aboard they laid about them with swords and clubs.

  Grantt looked over his shoulder. ‘People from Earth,’ he said with a smile. ‘On this Mars, they are super-strong. What a game!’

  47

  Heading for the other side of the planet, the flitter rose up out of the atmosphere for a brief suborbital hop. Grantt made the most of their few minutes of weightlessness to get out of his couch, stretch in the air, hand Poole a ration packet.

  But once more Poole was distracted by the view: this time by something real, by rays laid down across the landscapes below, fresh and bright. Mars was a smaller, colder, deader world than Earth, and the great punch of the Xeelee Probe had done little global damage, compared to the Earth with its massive, easily perturbed oceans and atmosphere. But the rays of thrown-out debris from that new crater in Hellas had wrapped halfway around the planet. Thousands of kilometres from the impact, he was flying over its mark.

  As the flitter began its descent, Grantt took back the controls and flew them down over an equatorial feature called Mangala Vallis, a place of chaotic gorges and huge, tumbled rocks. Here, waters trapped in aquifers within the ancient highlands of the south had long ago broken out and spilled into the desiccated bed of the northern ocean, smashing and tumbling the bedrock as they went. And here, in this intersection between two geographies – in some fictions – the first human landings on Mars had been made.

  Poole could see the heart of it for himself now: a classic landing site, with a lone, fragile spacecraft, first-footstep trails in the crusty Martian dirt, a Stars and Stripes held up by wire in the thin air – the flag itself a symbol of a vanished polity that felt as remote in time to Poole as a Roman legion’s eagle standard. But evidently the landing had been generations back, in the fiction; the remains of the cone-shaped lander were contained in what looked like a roughly roped-off, open-air museum, or shrine. Nearby was a township, primitive but thriving, a place of domes and bunkers of Mars-red brick, with cables snaking from a nuclear power facility, and fields of corn glimmering green under transparent plastic. Outside the domes people hopped around in clumsy pressure suits.

  A consistency-violation alarm pinged.

  Grantt checked a softscreen and laughed. ‘Somebody shot at us. A rifle bullet. Only Virtual, but aimed with intent.’

  ‘And we were hit,’ Poole said, wondering. ‘Good shot.’

  ‘You probably don’t survive if you’re not a good shot out here.’

  ‘You said this is the Anthropocene Zone.’

  ‘Yes . . . A scientifically authentic Mars, more or less. And authentic spacecraft of the time, driven by chemical propellants or fission piles. In the reality of these games, the early age-of-heroes space ventures weren’t abandoned as the Bottleneck closed in, as in our reality. And, with time, you got this. Pioneers and homesteaders in a new frontier. A Mars where Mangala City became the first capital, not Kahra. It never was like this, and maybe it never could have been. But it’s another fine dream, isn’t it? The big set-piece here is the revolutionary war. Kind of a rerun of 1776, with domed cities and Mars buggies.’ He lifted the flitter higher in the air. ‘Before we get shot at again, let’s go see the later Bottleneck-era stuff. Smaller scale, but interesting in its own way . . .’

  Again a loop out of the atmosphere. Poole watched patchwork fields, like scraps of ancient Kansas, recede beneath the ship. ‘All these versions of Mars. And under it all, the real Mars. Your Mars, Jack.’

  ‘The Mars of the Lattice, yes. And that can’t be evacuated. I don’t see how it’s possible to save it, unless you save Mars itself. Of course, that’s what I intend to do – to save the world. But if we fail I’m working on backup options . . .’

  Once more they cut back
into the atmosphere, and came swooping down on the equator, heading west. Poole recognised the crumpled gouge that was the Valles Marineris, where he and Nicola had trekked. But this version of the feature was littered with lights: communities, cities, but of an unearthly nature, with strange street plans and ungainly low-gravity buildings.

  ‘So in these narratives we made it to Mars, and in the post-Anthropocene downturn the colonies were evacuated, contact with Mars broken. As in reality. But in the story, you see, a lost handful of colonists lived on, ragged, abandoned. And then . . . have you ever heard of the Mariner from Mars?’

  Poole grinned. ‘Heard of him? I was him when I was seven years old.’

  ‘The franchise is so old we don’t know who the original authors were. The Mariner was an alien – human in appearance, but alien. A million years back he was a refugee from a destroyed world. His spacecraft came sailing into the Solar System and collided with Mars. The first impact created the Hellas basin; the whole planet rang like a bell, and the Tharsis region with the big volcanoes, at the rough antipode of Hellas, was pushed up in response. Meanwhile the Mariner’s ship, skipping like a stone on the water, came down again, and scraped across the ground for a thousand kilometres—’

  ‘Digging out the Marineris gorges.’

  ‘Hence the true origin of the name for that feature. You do know the story. Before finally smashing into Olympus Mons and being buried in lava, only to be chipped out much later by plucky human settlers. The immortal Mariner and his super-powered human-hybrid descendants lived on, built their thousand-kilometre-long city in the valley – and from time to time they returned to Earth, in secret. So, back on Earth, if you were lost in some Bottleneck disaster, just another migrant, desolate, plague-ridden, homeless . . . and if you were really lucky . . .’

  ‘A Martian superhero would come down from the sky to save you. Nice dream. Although I always wanted to get hold of his interstellar-capable spacecraft and reverse-engineer it.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Poole.’

  The flitter soared up and away from the Valles and, skimming the atmosphere once more, made for the Tharsis region.

  ‘Later I can take you to the fourth zone, the Recovery-era region, if you like. Covers much of Argyre. The whole basin brims with light. No rifle-toting homesteaders or egg-laying princesses there. Just peaceful aboriginal inhabitants, or visions of them. Mostly tall leathery humanoids. Wise old ones, who managed to save at least a portion of their planet from the great primordial drought, and have lived in peace with each other on their desert world ever since. For the more thoughtful gamers it’s a kind of retreat, I think.’

  ‘Sounds a little passive for me.’

  Grantt grinned. ‘Thought it might be.’

  That was when Harry called.

  The spotters had confirmed it at last: the Xeelee’s trajectory had changed. It was bypassing Earth, and was making for Mars. Not only that, it was accelerating. The gaming, it seemed, had paid off.

  The Xeelee would still take months to arrive, but it was here, then, at Mars, where the battle for the Solar System, for mankind, for the future, might be fought and won, or lost. But that put Grantt’s precious adopted world, enigmatic Lattice and all, in the line of fire.

  The biologist, at least, stayed calm. ‘Let’s get on with it, then. Lots to plan. One more sight I must show you first, though, up on Olympus . . .’

  The butterscotch sky rapidly darkened as they rose on one more suborbital hop. The summit of Olympus, above Mars’s air, was stripped, in this vision, of space-elevator infrastructure, and its true nature was revealed: a great caldera that could have cradled all the volcanic islands of the Hawaii chain.

  And at its very centre, beings that looked like graceful low-gravity octopuses were assembling a cannon, pointing at the sky.

  48

  ad 3649–3650

  Poole headed back to Kahra.

  He spent the next few months tucked into a suite in the Grand Martian, one of Kahra’s better hotels. Poole knew the place well; it had supposedly been founded by a family, the York-Williams, who claimed to trace their origins back to the first Anthropocene-era pioneers, even though those first settler families had all been brought back to Earth during the Bottleneck. Be that as it may the Pooles had been using the hotel for generations, and indeed Poole Industries was a part owner. So Poole had the use of a suite, gratis.

  And of course, Poole knew, the Martian was a place where Harry could keep tabs on him.

  He had Jack Grantt for occasional company. The biologist had come in from his outpost in Acidalia to the capital, to witness this existential struggle for the planet he loved – and, he said, to work with the Martian regional authority on various contingency plans.

  What Poole and Grantt witnessed going on in space, meanwhile, was an exercise in futility.

  The Xeelee had picked up its pace, after it crossed the orbit of the Earth. It was expected to reach Mars in mere weeks. And from that point the continuing, plaintive attempts to contact it were finally abandoned. Instead, all the way in to its presumed target, the Xeelee was subject to constant attack.

  Crewed ships maintained a moving cordon around the sycamore seed craft, with high-intensity lasers and the superheated exhaust of GUTdrives playing on that impassive black hull. The strategy, Poole knew, was simple, and unchanged. No single weapon made any difference to the Xeelee or its operations as far as anybody could tell, but by simply drenching the Xeelee with energy, some capacity for absorption might be overcome – that night-black armour might at last buckle.

  Not yet it hadn’t.

  Then, as Mars neared, the assaults intensified, with missiles hastily adapted or improvised, tipped with everything from destabilised GUTengine pods to Anthropocene-era hydrogen-fusion bombs, cobbled together from ancient designs or even dug out of military museums. And, following the lead of Poole with his attack on the Cache Probe aimed at Earth, crude kinetic-energy weapons were thrown at the intruder too, massively built hulks fitted with little more than a GUTdrive pod, a guidance system and a payload of asteroid rock or ice, to be smashed brutally against the Xeelee. The strategy was, as Poole recalled, just as Harry’s tame war-gamers had advocated it in Kent.

  Many of these assaults were orders of magnitude more energetic than anything that had been tried against the Probes – and now, at last, were launched with unswerving determination.

  Harry had observed this psychological shift. He’d said to Poole, ‘We suddenly got serious. The Xeelee doesn’t hold back, evidently. We have, so far. The warrior-nations of the Anthropocene would have responded to this situation better than we have, with less hesitation, more intent.’

  ‘We are what we are, Harry.’

  ‘Yes. A better breed, by most measures. But right now we need to fight with our hindbrains, as well as our intellect.’ He had grinned at his son. ‘And you, Michael, showed us the way. Makes me proud. People say we Pooles are too cerebral. Not when you smashed up the Crab, we weren’t . . .’

  But, just as Poole’s own desperate resistance to the Earth Probe had proved futile, so the bombardment of the Xeelee itself en route to Mars made no difference at all to the alien’s relentless approach.

  Poole did find some comfort in the reports on Highsmith Marsden’s ongoing studies. They were dry analyses laced with Marsden’s habitually cryptic remarks, and occasional words of cold comfort: ‘Remember, every failed attack is another data point. Every single time, we learn something.’ Poole had even put Marsden, through Miriam Berg, in tentative touch with Harry’s intelligence agencies – though Marsden had insisted firmly that his own location remain a secret. Despite the man’s reclusiveness, Poole had faith that Marsden’s researches and speculations, developed in the stealthed seclusion of Gallia Three, might eventually bear fruit.

  But not yet.

  For now, they had nothing to stop or even slow the Xeele
e’s approach.

  And, early in the new year, the Xeelee came to Mars.

  The sycamore seed ship, still accompanied by the Cache, sailed out of the Sun. While the Cache settled into a solar orbit about a million kilometres behind Mars itself, the Xeelee approached the planet.

  And slowed to a halt with almost contemptuous ease over the south pole of Mars. Its altitude was about seven thousand kilometres, a little more than the diameter of the planet itself.

  Meanwhile three smaller craft, featureless ellipsoids of hull plate that were immediately dubbed ‘drones’, were fired out of lesions in the Cache’s flanks and sent to other stations, scattered over Mars’s northern hemisphere.

  On arrival, the Xeelee was immediately surrounded by the chasing fleet of ships, and more vessels thrown up from Mars itself – one of them piloted by Nicola Emry. Their relentless assault continued. The drones, too, were monitored, bombarded, with no effect.

  But, for now, the Xeelee didn’t respond. It just held its station, with its drones, silent and enigmatic.

  Poole decided to go up to see the Xeelee for himself.

  With a little help from local representatives of Poole Industries, he left his flesh-and-blood carcass lying under a light sleep-inducer field in a small sanatorium run by the Grand Martian. And he projected a Virtual presence up to ride alongside Nicola in her cramped, two-person, heavily armed flitter: a warship, at the fringe of a cordon of such ships surrounding the Xeelee. At this distance the lightspeed signal time delay from the ground was only a fraction of a second, a subtle disjunction that gave Poole no problems.

  He and Nicola hadn’t been in each other’s presence, Virtual or not, for months. When he boarded her only greeting was a curt nod, before she returned to her inspection of the view through the windows and in her softscreens.