Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  But still, Poole knew, the great GUTship evacuation of the planet continued, with hundreds of thousands of people being lifted off the doomed planet every week. Already less than a million, one-tenth of the original population, remained – though some volunteer monitors, like Jack Grantt, were staying in orbit, determined to witness as much of the final reckoning as they could. Hence the reports Poole was tapping now.

  Mars, though, was old news.

  Long before the Xeelee itself reached Earth, more damage was being done elsewhere in the Solar System. Muriel was able to show Poole records made from an Eyrie, one of a number of small science stations that followed orbits which took them high above the plane of the ecliptic, the plane of the Solar System itself. From that celestial elevation the observers could see the whole orbital tracks of the planets, or a set of neat circles around the central fire of the Sun – as well as such novelties as the polar regions of the Sun itself.

  And, seen from that vantage, it was being observed that, in the dark gap between the circles of Mars and Jupiter, sparks flared and died.

  ‘The asteroids,’ Poole said grimly.

  ‘They’re targeting the main belt now. Probes sent from the Cache. You know that when the Xeelee left Mars and sailed inward towards Earth, the Cache went the other way, towards the outer System. Right now it is lodged in orbit around Ceres. Most of the bodies hit are just smashed to dust. But there’s a subtler process going on, we think. Larger chunks of debris, and some of the remnant dust clouds, are being swept up to make more Probes. Some kind of self-nucleating, self-replicating mechanism is at work in there – so Marsden and his team speculate. Something else we know nothing about. Anyhow you can see the logic.’

  Poole nodded. ‘An exponential spread. Like a virus, hijacking the resources of a host body to make more copies of itself, and more again, in a cascade . . .’

  ‘It’s hard to see what can stop this process, now it’s started. Eventually, it’s believed, the whole of the asteroid main belt could be reduced by this process. I mean, reduced to dust. Presumably the next target will be other clusters of objects, less accessible than the main belt: the Earth-crossing asteroids, the Trojans that trail Jupiter . . . Wherever people have gone, so the speculation goes, the Xeelee will follow.’

  ‘The Trojans? Finally they’ll come here, then. We’ll need to move Gallia.’

  ‘Yes. As for Earth – well, we aren’t responding too well, so far. Your father is doing as much as anybody could in his position.’ She smiled. ‘Even if he stole the job. But the world is in turmoil. Of course there’s a clamour to fight back: well, the authorities are trying. There are rumours of the super-rich digging super-bunkers – the government too – but the example of Mars shows how futile that will be, when the Xeelee comes. Above all, people are looking for somebody to blame. Or just to hate. Very primitive reactions. There are noisy complaints about the flood of Martian migrants, poor wretches who must feel they’re running from one blazing building into another.

  ‘The consensus behind the world government is cracking, I think. There have been riots outside UN buildings, assassination attempts – including against Harry, though he doesn’t talk about it to me. The commentators are even predicting war, between regions. It’s all a distraction from planning for how to cope with the Xeelee attack, if it comes, when it comes. As to why the Xeelee is doing all this—’

  ‘It seems clear enough,’ Poole said. ‘To leave us with nowhere to live. Nowhere we can even hide. And then what? That expansive future you dug up from the archives, Mother. The future that the lost girl told Michael Poole Bazalget all about. Doesn’t look like it’s going to come to pass, does it?’

  She smiled, an oddly weary expression. ‘As we’ve suspected from the beginning. Maybe we’ve been a little slow, we Pooles. As I understand it, any FTL ship is potentially a time machine. Because when you travel faster than light, effect can precede cause.’

  ‘You have to get the relative velocities right . . . That’s essentially correct.’

  ‘Marsden, faced with the likelihood of the Xeelee having FTL technology, immediately grasped its implications for time travel.’

  ‘He is an authentic genius, Mother.’

  ‘There is that. Anyhow these studies have shed new light on our archive material. We already knew of previous reverse-time interventions: the Transcendents, the Wormhole Ghost. And now we know that someday, we will – we were going to – fight a faster-than-light war at the centre of the Galaxy, against the Xeelee. And, just as Highsmith realised, with FTL warships flying around on both sides, this kind of future-past entanglement will happen all the time. The archives talk of a Library of Futures, where survivors of battles yet to be fought will lodge accounts of those battles, and the commanders and strategists can use that information systematically, to plan their war.’

  Poole frowned. ‘Quite a resource. But it ought to lead to endless stalemate, as each side sought to avoid defeat.’

  ‘Maybe it did. It was a millennia-long war . . . But, Michael, a FTL warship isn’t the only way to travel into the past.’

  ‘You mean, wormholes.’

  ‘You build the things. I barely understand how, let alone their consequences . . . A wormhole isn’t some simple tunnel. After all, you break lightspeed by travelling through it.’

  ‘We’ve studied this, Mother. Theoretically. You could build a wormhole, use a GUTship to drag one portal off on a long interstellar jaunt, travelling close to lightspeed so it ages slowly through time dilation . . . A wormhole time machine.’ He sighed. ‘I used to dream of putting that to the test some day. Perhaps they occur in nature. I see where this is going. The Xeelee may have used my wormhole, or some hyperdimensional extension of it, to come here, to its past, from the future.’

  ‘And if so, its purpose is clear now, isn’t it? To cut down the tree of humanity at the root. Thus winning the Exultant war before it starts. And to divert you from your own destiny. You should be “remembered” – the events of your life celebrated, reworked, reinterpreted.’ Her eyes were bright. ‘Even your death, like Christ’s, but not as a dark moment. Why, even alien creatures will see you as a symbol of hope. We know that; the Wormhole Ghost came back to tell you so. And the amulet it left you, by the way. We’re still studying that. There seem to be images, trapped in there, folded up in spacetime . . . We think we’re close to some results, which may tell us more. If you want to see them.’

  He looked at her; that was an acute remark. No, he didn’t want to find out about the amulet’s secrets. Poole was already profoundly uncomfortable with all this. ‘It’s all a dream, Mother. A lost future. That won’t be me. As you said, it all seems to have changed now. What am I actually supposed to do?’

  ‘Just follow your heart. You will reflect on this background. On the destiny that might have been. The Michael Poole you might have become. The Poole the Xeelee came here to destroy. But you’ll know what’s right.’

  And somehow, suddenly, as he thought through this mystical muddle, he felt as if his own thinking had been clarified, his own future course suddenly clear.

  He knew what he had to do.

  He stood. ‘I have briefings to give.’

  She frowned, looking into his face, searching. ‘Briefings? About what? Highsmith’s monopoles . . .? No. Something else. I know you. A Plan B? In case the monopoles fail . . . That’s a Poole family tradition. Always have a Plan B. What are you going to do, Michael?’

  He smiled, and put a finger to his lips. ‘Shh.’

  56

  He decided to try it out on Nicola first.

  They met in a tiny conference room – just another hut, really, in the green heart of Gallia Three. They sat at an elderly bamboo table, drink flasks set on its top.

  Nicola didn’t waste time.

  ‘I know you, Poole,’ she said. ‘You’re up to something. And it’s a secret, right? Like
the time you decided to ram our GUTship against a Xeelee Probe, without telling me first.’

  Poole shrugged. ‘Yes, I’ve got something. In case the monopoles fail. I didn’t have this two days ago; I have it now. What do you want from me? Here I am telling you about it.’

  ‘Just me?’

  ‘Just you for now. Miriam next. Look – the Xeelee is heading to Earth. And it must be a safe assumption that it’s going there to inflict the same kind of pain on the home planet as it did to Mars. A planetbuster Cage.’

  ‘Earth will defend itself,’ Nicola said bluntly. ‘And we must help. You’ve got a small armada of ships here, and Marsden’s monopole weapon.’

  ‘Indeed. That’s probably the best chance we have of harming the Xeelee directly. So, before the Xeelee closes on Earth, I intend to pack it all up and send it to the inner Solar System – to Earth. Along with technicians trained in its use. And you, Nicola. I know you’re already working on its tactical deployment. If anyone can make this work, in my circle of acquaintances anyhow, it’s you.’

  She laughed. ‘Praise indeed. So while I’m holding the monopole line, you’re doing what, Michael?’

  ‘Preparing a fallback. The details are still sketchy . . .’

  Nicola shrugged. ‘Tell me.’

  He waved in the air.

  A Virtual appeared over the tabletop: a cut-down Solar System, just the Sun, Mercury, Earth, Jupiter. Now wormholes appeared in electric blue, a pair of them, threads through space the same colour as their exotic-matter portals. One connected Mercury to the Sun, the other Earth to Jupiter.

  ‘Here are our two prototype wormholes. Both still intact – despite the Xeelee’s own disruptive entrance through the Jupiter portal. Sun to Mercury, Earth to Jupiter. And this is what we’re going to do.’ Using two hands, he manipulated the wormholes, drawing one end of the solar wormhole from Mercury towards Earth, the Jovian end of the other out beyond Jupiter itself. Connecting Sun to Earth, and Earth to the edge of the Solar System. ‘And then—’

  She covered his hand. ‘Wait. Before you tell me more. This plan of yours. I imagine it’s megalomaniac.’

  He shrugged, tense. ‘I’m a Poole. Of course it’s megalomaniac.’

  ‘Have you told your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Because he’d stop you?’

  ‘Right.’

  She looked at him. ‘You know I’m no fan of Harry Poole. But he is the government. If he would think it’s a bad idea, if the government would think so, what makes you think you’re right, and they’re all wrong?’

  He shrugged. ‘The Wormhole Ghost came for me, remember. Somehow this is all about me, like it or not. Anyhow—’

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Norns, Michael?’

  He frowned. ‘Were they in the one where the Mariner was fighting the Mole Men?’

  ‘I’ll ignore that. The Norns, Michael. The spinners of fate. Three sisters. The Norse believed they water the roots of the world tree. And their spinning controls the lives of all of us, all us mortals.

  ‘You have your own Norns, Michael Poole. Spinning your fate. That girl from the future who haunted Michael Poole Bazalget. Second, the Xeelee, of course. And third, your own future self. The messiah of the Galaxy-core soldiers. The hero at Timelike Infinity. He looms over everything you do. You’re trying to live up to him, aren’t you? Even though you know he will never exist.’

  He found he was trembling.

  She sat back. ‘Maybe the spinners put this latest idea into your head. But it’s your decision whether to go ahead with it. Your life to control. But whatever you decide—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m with you. So tell me about your plan.’ She began to tease the ends of the two Virtual wormholes together, and looked at him frankly. ‘Lead us, Michael Poole.’

  57

  With Nicola’s help, he quickly worked up his proposal into a compact briefing.

  Then he and Nicola brought Miriam Berg up to speed. It was a tense session.

  Poole knew they had never got on. Miriam, a friend since schooldays, his partner in so many projects since then – Miriam, with whom, before the Xeelee, he’d expected to be working for ever, effectively, on one expansive project after another. Following his father’s advice, he’d always postponed any deeper entanglement. Time enough for love. Yet whenever he’d imagined any kind of personal future, Miriam had always filled a certain hypothetical role in his head. And after all she deserved to become a Poole, if anybody did – though he knew that if he ever raised that idea she’d point out that it would be an honour for him to become a Berg. But maybe that future, like so many others, had been obliterated. One more grudge to bear, he thought bleakly.

  And Nicola. Nicola, who he probably never would have met at all if the Xeelee crisis had not so disrupted his, and everybody else’s, life. After all, she and her mother had only come out to the Jovian construction site in the first place because of queries about those initial anomalies with the Jupiter–Earth test wormhole. But since then, through her goading and sheer randomness, she seemed to have dug out of him qualities he’d never known he possessed.

  Miriam was his past. Nicola the future. And a future of which the family archives and the Wormhole Ghost’s words and all those other enigmatic bits of prophecy had nothing to say.

  They got through the briefing. It was characteristic of Miriam, he thought, not to react to the sheer monstrous audacity of the scheme, but instead to interrogate him on details.

  Then they worked out a strategy. A plan, that unfolded in the next few days and weeks.

  Meanwhile Nicola took her squadron of ‘Monopole Bandits’ off to the inner System.

  When Poole himself hurried back to the inner System, it was already September. Two months out from the expected encounter of the Xeelee with Earth. Frantic preparations for the defence of the planet were under way. Poole wanted to contribute to these preparations as much as he could.

  Because if they worked, there would be no need for Plan B, and the worst choice he’d ever have to make.

  As the deadlines approached, Harry summoned Poole to Earth’s L5 point, in the planet’s orbit, sixty degrees away.

  As it happened, as the sycamore seed craft spiralled in from Martian orbit, moving with roughly Earth’s own orbital speed, it was already clear that the Xeelee would pass close to L5. And, Poole learned, the military analysts saw this as an opportunity.

  A gravitational well like Mars’s L5 and Jupiter’s Trojan points, L5 itself was a loose Sargasso, Poole saw as he flew in aboard the Assimilator’s Claw: a pit in the sky cluttered with a ragtag bunch of battered minor asteroids, and a glittering swarm of spacecraft, some of them monitors and science stations intentionally deposited here, mostly wrecks, relics and fragments.

  ‘A self-organising museum of space, I like to think of it,’ Harry had said, when he had proposed meeting Poole here. ‘Someday, if we ever get the chance, we might come out with a team of archaeologists and sort it all out. But for now we have the Xeelee coming to visit. And so, deep inside this cloud of junk, we built a fortress . . .’

  The crew wouldn’t let Poole bring the Claw closer than half a million kilometres; he had to make his final approach in a small, low-powered flitter.

  Harry’s fortress looked like just another lump of comet ice to Poole, with not a stray photon of heat radiation to reveal the fact that humans and their machines were hiding in there, eating, breathing, living. Waiting for the Xeelee, heavily stealthed. Poole wasn’t given the station name, even. He had a feeling the Solar System was filling up with such refuges, as humanity learned to hide. Highsmith Marsden had had it right from the beginning, he reflected now. From the very first day.

  Harry met Poole when he docked at the axis of the spinning mass. ‘So I’m here in the flesh, just for you. Impressed?’

 
To validate the claim, Poole poked at his father’s arm. He was real enough. The sleeve of his smart jet-black-and-silver uniform had a peculiar texture. ‘This feels like a carbon-fibre composite. Some kind of armour?’

  Harry grunted. ‘Follow me.’

  He led Poole through cramped, empty corridors, cut into glassed-over ice. The base, dug into this comet-ice fragment, appeared brand new, but was small, poky – no doubt a consequence of the stealthing. There was gravity here, thanks to the spin-up.

  ‘Do you blame me for wearing protection? This armoured suit won’t save me from a Xeelee planetbuster beam, but maybe from an assassin’s laser. A human assassin, I mean. Here we are.’

  They had come to a kind of observation lounge, Poole saw, the walls plastered with high-specification softscreens – he would not have expected a window, leaking light and heat, in an installation like this. There was nobody here, not much equipment beyond the softscreens, chairs and a table and a dispenser of drinks and food. It struck him now that he’d seen no other human being at all, save his father, in his time in the station.

  ‘You want something? There’s only a handful of crew here and they lead a monastic life, but the food synthesis machines are top of the range.’

  ‘Just water.’ Poole walked to the largest screen, which showed an expanse of starry sky. He picked out the constellations, figuring his orientation. ‘Sun to the left, Earth–Moon to the right. And the Xeelee, right now, is about – there.’ He pointed at a patch of empty space – but not far from the Xeelee’s position was a light, sliding through the dark. ‘What’s that? Looks too big for a ship, and too slow . . . What are you up to here, Harry? And why did you want to see me?’

  Harry brought two cups of water, set them on the room’s only table, and sat down. ‘Well, I think we need a little honesty between us, you and I. I brought you here to discuss strategy. That is, our defence strategy. The Stewards’.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In fact, to show you it in action. And I do it in the hope that you in turn will be open with me. I know you’re up to something, son; our spies are good enough to tell me that. But not what. We both want the same thing here, surely. The security of Earth. And surely we have a better chance of achieving that if we work together.’