Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  Her eyes widened, but she quickly snapped back to her usual cynicism. ‘I don’t need ballast.’

  ‘Not physically. I’ll send my carcass back on my flitter to Earth—’

  ‘Ah. You want to project a Virtual into my ship? Just like Mommy Poole.’

  ‘Why not? The stop line is only a light-second from Earth. Come on. We’ve been through a lot, Nicola. Just like old times. And you never know, I might be some use.’

  She stood up. ‘No, you won’t. And if you get in my way you’re turned off.’

  ‘Noted.’

  ‘And I want a mute button. Oh, one more thing. If you’re going to fly in my squadron—’ She produced a kind of stylus. ‘It’s almost painless. Come on, on your feet.’

  The tattooing felt like a Xeelee planetbuster beam working on his forehead.

  After that, everything came in a rush.

  60

  ‘Strap in,’ said Nicola.

  Suddenly he was in a flitter’s co-pilot’s couch, with Nicola at the controls to his left-hand side. He’d barely got his own ship Earth-bound once more when the Virtual projection had abruptly cut in, and he was cast into Nicola’s craft. He gasped; it felt like he’d been dropped from a height.

  Evidently they were already under way. Nicola was busily sliding icons across softscreens around her, and manipulating floating Virtual controls with big, physical gestures. Poole had always remembered that of her, the physicality of her flying.

  And when he looked out, he saw they were peeling up and away from the Moon. The surface receded, the big, ancient Copernicus Dome a blister as dust-grey as the rest of the lunar ground. He glimpsed other craft rising up around them, like sparks from an invisible fire, in a loose formation maybe a half-kilometre across.

  ‘I said, strap in – oh, into Lethe with it.’ Nicola tapped a softscreen, and a Virtual harness appeared in place around his Virtual body. Another brisk manipulation and the flitter surged forward, with an acceleration like a punch in the stomach. ‘Hope a desk pilot like you hasn’t got too soft to take a few gravities.’ She glanced at him. ‘Assuming you can feel it at all.’

  ‘Oh, I felt it all right.’

  ‘Good.’

  He glanced around, at that constellation of risen sparks in the sky – a sky black and empty otherwise, thanks to his Sun-dazzled vision. ‘You keep a tight formation.’

  ‘No accident. We rehearsed, over and over. For that.’ She pointed to a corner of the cabin’s big window, where light flared.

  ‘The stop line.’

  ‘Yes. Where the fighting has started already.’

  ‘We’re going in pretty fast.’

  ‘Well, this is the battle plan. We knew the Xeelee happened to be coming in pretty close to the Moon. Another lucky break, like the approach to L5. Why not use that? So we climb out of the Moon, go in fast, get the job done, and come out just as fast – hopefully. There’s no value in a long, slow approach; all you do is give the Xeelee a chance of taking a shot at you – not that it’s shot at anything smaller than an asteroid so far; the wrecks we’ve had have mostly been sideswipes from the planetbusters. Coming up on our attack vector.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Now!’

  They fell through a veil of fire.

  This was the barrage kept up by the conventional weapons of a first wave of defenders. Poole glimpsed the flare of GUTdrive exhausts, the dark silhouettes of ships, sharp pinpricks that must be the detonation of fission or fusion bombs.

  Then, just as swiftly, they were through. Poole glimpsed a black sky.

  And, dark against dark, that strange yet familiar shape: the central pod, the swept-back wings – the Xeelee, right in front of him.

  ‘Hello again,’ Nicola said. ‘Remember us?’

  Suddenly it was very close.

  Then passing under the flitter.

  ‘We’re beyond it!’ Nicola hauled icons through the air.

  The ship turned with a savage jolt that pushed Poole back in his seat, hard. ‘Lethe! Can a Virtual get broken ribs?’

  ‘I will mute you if you don’t shut up. All right, kids, here we go. Lethe knows we rehearsed it so often you’re already bored, right? Bandit One, you’re up – go, go! Bandit Two, line up to follow her in. Then you, Three . . .’

  As Nicola’s flitter banked and settled on its own approach path, Poole’s view opened out. Now they had swivelled in space so they faced the Earth, a blue pendant in the dark, gibbous and beautiful. Before it hung the wings and body of the Xeelee, black as night. And there, above the Xeelee, the first of Nicola’s flight of ships was already diving down on that wide black carcass. The assault craft looked like some raptor bird, hunting in the night. The Xeelee made no attempt to evade or destroy it.

  And at the moment of closest approach, Poole saw the flitter’s improvised cannon fire from its underbelly – saw the sparks of the shells it emitted sail down at the bland back of the Xeelee craft – and saw those monopole bombs flaring as they came into contact with the Xeelee.

  Cutting visible holes in that slim central hull. Creating wounds that punched right through the graceful wings.

  ‘It worked,’ he breathed. ‘Highsmith’s Lethe-spawned monopoles worked!’

  Nicola whooped. ‘You’re on the line, Michael. Do you hear that, kids? Confirmation from the man himself. We hurt that lousy thing, the first to do so since it came sailing in from Jupiter. We hurt it! But it’s still heading for Earth, we haven’t earned any medals yet. Why, I don’t think we even got its attention. Bandit Two, you’re up, make sure that thing knows we’re here . . .’

  Poole watched the next ship line up for its run, and the next. ‘Six ships,’ he said, remembering what he’d seen on the Moon. ‘And we are?’

  ‘Number six. If anybody has to take the final flak it’s going to be us.’

  Poole nodded, feeling a sharp stab of fear, even though he knew his own physical manifestation was safe, comparatively, in its flitter en route back to Earth. An Earth that seemed to loom terribly close: close and undefended, save for this last handful of warriors.

  That and his own insane final-fallback scheme.

  Nicola was studying her sensor screens. ‘Bandit Two inflicted more damage. And Three. Lethe, it’s slowing down. Hasn’t adjusted its course, but it’s slowing down!’

  ‘You hurt it, and now you made it respond,’ Poole said. ‘For the first time. Well, that’s something. Is being ignored worse than being killed? I—’

  Cherry-red light flared across the window, dazzling, blinding. Alarms shrieked. The flitter’s automatics cut in, and the ship was wrenched sideways.

  Poole saw a thick rope of energy, cherry red, surge past the window.

  ‘Planetbuster! Used as a combat weapon. We haven’t seen it do that before.’

  Nicola ignored him and worked her controls. The flitter ducked and swerved, and Poole glimpsed the Xeelee again, with brilliant planetbuster beams flashing out in all directions from what looked like an emplacement on the top of its central body.

  ‘We lost Bandit Three,’ Nicola said. ‘Oh – and Five. Into Lethe with it. The rest of you, abandon formation. If you’re dry, go home. If you have shells left follow me in, any way you can. Let’s not waste these gifts we came so far to deliver . . . Poole, hang on.’

  She threw the flitter across space and down, down at the Xeelee, the nimble craft dodging around the flicker of planetbuster beams as it went. Poole remembered how once she had piloted her way through a tangle of flux ropes, deep in the heart of the Sun. She really was some pilot.

  And the fight went on. Out of the corner of his vision Poole glimpsed other craft, one plummeting down ahead of them at the Xeelee, another flaring into sudden light as the Xeelee weapon caught it.

  Then they were on the Xeelee, again.

  It was only a hundred metres b
elow them, less. Poole saw it close to – closer even than during that extraordinary encounter inside the Sun. That central body was a pod, a spindle-shape, small, with not much more room than would take a human pilot. The lobed wings that had given the ship its sycamore seed label swept back, planes under him, very smooth – and very fine, he saw; towards the edges the cherry-red glow of the Xeelee’s own weapon was shining through the fabric of the wings. And at their edge a subtler darkness, elusive, that might be the discontinuity drive itself, or its wake: the fractures in spacetime which the Xeelee rode across the Solar System.

  Now this elegant form was damaged, Poole saw with a surge of exultation: ragged holes had been punched in those domain-wall wings, wounds that were edged by flaring white light. There were even craters in the hull of the central pod.

  The flitter shuddered and shook as it fired, and again Poole saw more shells rain down at the Xeelee, each slug a metallic crust around a bitter monopole core, a knot of broken spacetime. One, two, smashed into the Xeelee, ripping more holes in those delicate wings. Again Nicola whooped.

  But more alarms flared, the flitter twisted and tumbled, and planetbuster light glared through the window.

  ‘Hit!’ Nicola yelled, angry, frustrated. ‘But we got the weapons away.’

  ‘Nicola—’

  ‘We’re done for.’ But now, as the flitter tumbled, the face of Earth was large before the window. ‘Or maybe not! If I can get us down to some kind of controlled landing – us? What am I saying?’

  ‘Nicola, let me help you—’

  ‘Give my regards to your mother.’ She slapped a control.

  Darkness.

  Another fall through emptiness.

  Slam. Suddenly he was lying on a floor, sunlit. His mother standing over him. He gasped; he felt like he’d been punched.

  He knew this light, flat and low. He was back in Princess Elizabeth Land. The Poole complex. Low Antarctic-summer sunlight. He tried to sit up; he felt winded, disoriented.

  His mother knelt, put her arm around his shoulders, and helped him. For once she was able to touch him; the simple contact seemed to surprise them both. ‘Don’t try to talk. You’ve had a shock, I can see that.’

  Poole rubbed his hand on the floor, deliberately. His palm broke up into pixels with sharp fragments of pain. ‘Still a Virtual, then.’

  ‘Evidently. What have you done to your forehead? It looks infected.’

  ‘Ask Nicola Emry. Where am I? I mean, my physical body?’

  ‘The last I heard, you’re still in a flitter coming down from the Moon. Should be here in—’

  ‘Never mind. No time. This will do.’

  With Muriel’s help he got to his feet, struggled to the window. The light was soft here, crimson to the east, a deep blue above. Very early summer morning in Antarctica.

  ‘Miriam Berg? Can you hear me?’

  The signal delay was only a fraction of a second. ‘Loud and clear, Michael. The monopoles?’

  ‘They cut that Xeelee up. We slowed it. But we didn’t stop it.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Muriel said softly.

  Michael Poole held his mother’s unreal hand, and looked up; there were still stars to be seen at the zenith, in the Antarctic sky. And he looked east, into the dawn sky. Where Miriam Berg and her handpicked crew were manipulating Solar System-spanning wormholes. ‘From here we will probably see it.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Plan B.’

  61

  Poole’s scheme was conceptually simple. And, he believed, despite a lack of prototyping or testing, physically plausible, given that it made use of two experimental wormhole systems that had already been opened up, stabilised, traversed. It was the scale of it that staggered most people who had worked on it.

  Even Miriam Berg, who had shadowed Poole in everything he had done since he was nineteen.

  Even, in the end, Michael Poole himself.

  Take two wormholes: one that connects the Sun’s interior to Mercury, and a second that connects Earth orbit to Jovian space . . .

  In the months before the Xeelee’s final, relentless approach to Earth, Miriam and her crews, in Hermit Crab-class GUTships, had used magnetic grapples to haul the Mercury terminus of the solar wormhole to Earth. And they had plunged the wormhole’s other portal deep inside the body of the Sun itself: down through the layers Poole himself had explored, down through the great convective plumes, through the slow-churning radiative zone – deep down, in the end, into the fusing core itself (where enigmatic dark matter creatures swam, which would, it was hoped, leave this fragile human construct alone for a while). For now the wormhole’s throat had been kept closed, so that the surging energy of the solar heart could not yet escape – could not pour into near-Earth space. Not yet.

  The Jovian terminus of the other wormhole, meanwhile, was dragged by another cluster of ships, out away from Jupiter, into deep space, beyond Neptune, most distant of the giants, beyond the scattered Kuiper Belt – out into the mighty Oort Cloud, far beyond Pluto’s orbit, a spherical domain of cold and deep-frozen worldlets circling in attenuated sunlight. That itself was a monumental effort, with the GUTship convoy thundering at thrusts of multiple gravities to meet the deadline.

  All this had been hidden in the open. Proxies had informed Harry’s government that the solar wormhole was being towed out to serve as an emergency energy source for Earth, and the government had swallowed that – although Poole would always wonder if Harry had turned a blind eye. As far as he knew the authorities hadn’t even noticed the displacement of the Jovian-orbit portal.

  So now there were two wormhole mouths, both close to Earth: one connected to the core of the Sun, the other to the edge of interstellar space. Hastily dragged to a halt, relative to the Sun – and set directly before the Earth, in its own path around the Sun.

  Two portals brought so close together they almost touched. Waiting.

  Until, from Antarctica, Poole gave his final command.

  ‘Miriam?’

  ‘Ready. Michael, are you sure?’

  Poole felt exhausted. As if he could barely stand.

  A last heartbeat. A last agonising doubt.

  ‘Let’s do this.’

  The solar wormhole’s throat yawned open.

  Fusing solar-core hydrogen, at a temperature of nearly fifteen million degrees, spewed out of the portal.

  Pulsed out into near-Earth space.

  Hosed straight into the structure of the portal of the second wormhole, the route to the Oort Cloud.

  And, as Poole had intended, from an object just big enough to pass a Crab-class GUTship lifedome, that portal began to grow dramatically. Solar energy, wormhole-mined and intelligently applied, was rapidly transmuted into more of the exotic matter that constituted the threadlike struts that framed the portal. This was how you force-grew a wormhole, as Poole had once tried to explain to Nicola and her mother. But it had never before been attempted on such a scale. He wondered if it ever would be again.

  The portal seemed to blossom, some observers said later.

  Poole and his mother, Virtuals both, wrapped in illusory, protocol-complying cold-weather gear, walked out of the Princess Elizabeth Land residence and looked to the east, to the Antarctic dawn.

  And they saw the wormhole portal grow, high in the sky, fed by a spark of fire far brighter than the surface of the Sun itself. Grow into a frame that was soon easily visible to the naked eye, an electric-blue diagram across which stretched evanescent sheets, like gold leaf.

  Muriel stared. ‘It’s like an immense building. A structure beyond the sky. Like an aurora perhaps, those curtains of light you see . . . I can’t think of another point of comparison.’

  Poole had no words at all. There was only the spectacle, which seemed to overwhelm him – even as he followed its progress analytically, even as he watched the
unfolding geometry, estimating growth rates – a spectacle that seemed to implant dread deep in some animal core of his mind. There aren’t supposed to be things like this, up in the sky. Even if Poole himself had put them there.

  The frame grew fast in his vision, as it continued to expand, and as the Earth plummeted closer to it with its own orbital velocity of over thirty kilometres every second. Soon Poole had to crane back his head to see it all, that single immense triangular face that now dominated the sky. One vertex loomed up towards the zenith, a meeting of dead-straight struts, dazzling blue beyond the air, while the other two vertices of the face dropped below the horizon.

  In the end the portal would grow to become a tetrahedron with sides some thirty thousand kilometres long – every bit as large, probably, as the tetrahedral Cage of planetbuster beams the Xeelee would have built around the Earth, just as it had at Mars, if it had had the chance. Already so large that the frame itself, as seen from Earth, was sweeping out of sight.

  Poole imagined eyes lifted like his own and his mother’s, all over Earth, watching this astounding spectacle. Imagined Nicola Emry in her fragile, broken flitter, tumbling out of the sky even as an immense shadow fell across the world. Imagined his own physical body in yet another descending craft, fleeing a sky growing very strange indeed.

  Now Poole could no longer see the frame at all. Only that one tremendous face, directly ahead of Earth, a sheet of elusive gold, with hints of a starlit darkness glimpsed beyond the pale morning sky. A face large enough to swallow the whole Earth.

  There was a final flicker of gold, all across the sky. Like a dazzle from the surface of a tremendous sea.

  Then the dawn was snuffed out, a hideously unnatural collapse of the light.

  Darkness fell.

  ‘I did this,’ he whispered.

  His unreal mother squeezed his hand.

  Later, Poole was able to access records from witnesses left behind in the inner Solar System.

  The timing had been exquisite, the solar heat wormhole mouth closing down just as the planet made its own rendezvous.