Starfall

by Stephen Baxter

  The incursion was repelled. Michael Poole drove a captured warship into the wormhole, to seal it against further invasion. In the process, Poole himself was lost in time.

  "An invasion from a dark future, yes," hissed the Empress. "An invasion from which the first Shira, founder of the dynasty, herself was a refugee. She saw Poole disappear into time, collapsing the wormhole links. And when the way home was lost, Shira was stranded. But she did not abandon the Project."

  "The Project?"

  "Shira belonged to a philosophico-religious sect called the Friends of Wigner. And their purpose in coming back in time was to send a message to a further future yet ... "

  Kale, frustrated, had to endure more of this peculiar philosophising.

  Life, Shira said, was essential for the very existence of the universe. Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being—for without conscious observation there could be no actualisation of quantum potential to reality. And if this were true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organise data—all data, everywhere—to observe and actualise all events. In the furthest future the confluences of mind would merge, culminating in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.

  "And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer," Shira said quietly. "And the last Observation will be made." She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. "It is impossible for us to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history. We—the Friends of Wigner, the sect to which Shira belonged—believe that the Observer will have the power to study all the nearly-infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer will select, actualise a history which maximises the potential of being. Which makes the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain and death."

  She lifted her head abruptly, and the light from the logic pool struck shadows in her face. She was quite insane, Kale thought.

  "It is essential that humanity is preserved in the optimal reality. What higher purpose can there be? Everything the Friends did was dedicated to the goal of communicating the plight of mankind to the Ultimate Observer. Even the destruction of Jupiter. And even I, stranded here in this dismal past, stranded out of time, have always struggled to do what I could to progress the mighty project." She peered into the logic pool. "I, in my way, am searching . .. "

  He stared at her. "Ma'am—you said 'we'. You speak of yourself as a Friend of Wigner. Not the first Shira."

  She lifted her face, its skin papery.

  "You are Shira. The first. There was no dynasty, no thirty-two Shiras, mother and daughter—just you, the first, living on and on. My, you must be nine hundred years old."

  She smiled. "And yet I will not be born for another four hundred years. Am I old, or young, Admiral? Once the Poole wormhole was closed down I had lost my route back to the future. I accepted that. But there was always another way back. The long way. I accepted AntiSenescence treatment. I began to accrue power, where I could. And then—"

  "And then," said Kale, barely believing, "it was a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries—fifty generations—and waiting for your time to come again."

  "You have it, Admiral."

  He peered at her. "Were there others like you—others stranded in history?"

  "None that remain in Sol system." Her face was blank. "None that survive."

  "You monopolised knowledge of the future to cement your power base." He remembered himself. "Ma'am, forgive me for speaking this way—"

  "It's all right, Admiral. Yes, you could put it like that. But it was necessary. After all there had been no unified government of mankind, none before me. Quite an achievement, don't you think? Why, I had to invent a religion to do it ... It was necessary, all of it. I need the shelter of power. There are many obstacles to be overcome in the decades ahead, if I am to survive to the year of my birth."

  "Ma'am—I thought I knew you."

  "None of you knows me, none of you drones." She withdrew. "I tire now. Progress your war, Admiral. But we will speak again. Even if I fall, the Project must not fail. And I will entrust in you that purpose."

  He bowed to her. "Ma'am." And with huge relief he left the chamber, leaving the lonely woman and the light of the logic pool behind him.

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 9

  Jupiter

  The earthworm fleet was assembling here too, somewhere on the far side of the giant world. The showdown was still hours away, the Alphan planners believed.

  Despite the urgency of the situation, despite all Flood's urging and imprecations, every chance they got the crew of the Freestar stared out of their lifedome at Jupiter. After all there were no Jovians in Alpha system.

  It was a bloated monster of a world, streaked with autumn brown and salmon pink. And, still more extraordinary, it was visibly wounded, immense storms like funnels digging deep into its surface. The other ships of the rebel fleet, the other five of their minuscule armada, drifted across the face of the giant world, angular silhouettes.

  One other structure was visible in its own orbit, deep within the circle of the innermost moon, Io. It was an electric-blue spark, revealed under magnification to be a tangle of struts and tetrahedral frames. This was the Poole hub, where Michael Poole had used the energies of a flux tube connecting Jupiter to Io to construct the heart of his intrasystem wormhole network. Even today one of those ancient Interfaces linked Jupiter itself to Earth—or it had until the earthworms had cut it.

  It was an extraordinary sight, Flood conceded. "Spectacle and history, all mixed up."

  "Yes, dad," said Beya. "You know I've been reading up on Sol system history ... "

  He did and he didn't entirely approve; it struck him as a guilty reflex.

  "You say this is all because of human action?"

  "That's the story," he said. "Though my grasp of ancient earthworm history is shaky."

  Nine hundred years before, Jupiter had been wrecked by the actions of the Friends of Wigner, rebels from a dismal, alien-occupied future. The Friends had had in mind some grand, impossible scheme to alter history. Their plan had involved firing asteroid-mass black holes into Jupiter.

  "Whatever these 'Friends' intended, it didn't work," Flood said. "All they succeeded in doing was wrecking Jupiter." He shook his head. "The greatest mass in Sol system after the sun itself, a vast resource for the future—ruined in a single action. How typical of earthworm arrogance!—"

  Light sparked in the complex sky. Flood saw it reflected in his daughter's face. He turned.

  One of the rebel ships, the Destiny of Humankind, had exploded. The delicate spine was broken, the detached GUTdrive flaring pointlessly, and the fragile lifedome shattered, spilling particles of pink and green into space.

  Alarms howled. Virtual control desks appeared before Beya and Flood, crammed with data. The crew, sleepy, shocked, scrambled to get to their positions.

  And then another ship detonated. The Future Hope, a ship five hundred years old, gone in a second. This time Flood glimpsed the missile that took it out. But there was no time to reflect.

  "Incoming," Beya called. "Incoming!"

  Flood worked at his desk with brisk sweeps of his fingers. "All right. We're evading." The lifedome shuddered as the GUTdrive flared, shoving the Freestar sideways.

  A missile streaked past the lifedome, close enough to see with the naked eye, glowing white-hot.

  "Shit," Beya said. "How are they doing this? The scans showed a volume around us was clear."

  "Jupiter," Flood said, reading his displays rapidly. "The missiles are coming out of Jupiter. But the velocities are so high—I don't understand."

  "The black holes," Beya said. "Maybe that's it. They're slingshotting their missiles off the central black holes. You can pick up a hell of a lot
of kinetic energy from an ergosphere."

  "And they're punching out of the carcass of the planet, right at us. Incredible."

  Another ship flared and died, a flower of light pointlessly beautiful.

  "The Dream of Alpha," Flood read. "That's three of us gone in a few seconds. They're picking us off. Three of us left, against a dozen Navy cruisers. We'll have to withdraw. Regroup if we can—"

  "No." Beya was working hard at her desk. "Dad, there's no time for that. Tell the survivors to make for the Poole hub."

  "Why? The wormhole links are severed; we can't get away from there."

  "It will give us a bit of cover. And I've an idea," she said, distant, working.

  Flood frowned. He didn't enjoy it when this determined side of his daughter showed itself; it made her seem too strong, too independent—he couldn't protect her any more. But she had called the black-hole missile manoeuvre correctly. He saw no better option than to accept her recommendation. He snapped out the orders.

  The Freestar's GUTdrive kicked in. The acceleration mounted quickly, two, three, four gravities. Flood felt it in his bones, but he stood his ground, determined. Above his head, Jupiter slid with ponderous slowness across his field of view. "Come on," he said. "Come on ... "

  Elsewhere, aboard the bridge of the Navy ship Facula, there was much cheering at the downing of half the rebel fleet—premature cheering, as far as Stillich was concerned.

  "Status," he yelled at Pella, above the noise.

  "Three down, three to go."

  "But the three survivors aren't running."

  "Not from Jovian space, no sir. They seem to be making for the Poole hub."

  "Why there?"

  Pella tapped a desk. "The war-game AIs have no idea. If they need cover they could run to one of the moons ... " She grinned. "Sir, who cares? We have twelve ships against three. We can shoot them out of the sky."

  Stillich felt deeply uneasy, but he couldn't argue with that analysis. "Well, that's the idea, Number One. All right. Call the fleet; set up an attacking perimeter."

  "Sir."

  The GUTdrive surged smoothly.

  Twelve ships against three. The decision to withdraw the Sol fleet to Jupiter had been a good one, Stillich thought. The hinterland of the giant planet was a dangerous, complex place, laced with strong gravitational fields, intense radiation and hazards like the Io flux tube. It was a battleground much more familiar to the defending Navy than to the attackers—and he had been impressed by the innovative thinking at a Navy college on Earth that had come up with the notion of using the black hole slingshot to pick off the rebels even before the ships had engaged.

  But once he had accepted the stratagem, Stillich had argued for withdrawing all of Earth's fleet to Jupiter or its environs, not to leave half of it mounting a futile picket fence at the incoming relativistic wave. Twelve against three. It was more reassuring than twelve against six had been, but Stillich was in no mood for anything less than a complete victory, an annihilation, the security of the system demanded it, and the more overwhelming the odds the better.

  On the Freestar, the Poole hub was already approaching, a cluster of Interface portals hurtling over the horizon towards the surviving rebel ships, a tangle of electric blue.

  "Lethe," Beya breathed. "I didn't know how beautiful it was."

  Flood said softly, "The wormholes are gateways to other times, other places. They should be beautiful, like all great engineering."

  Alarms chimed once more.

  Beya studied her data desk. "They're closing in, dad, a dozen Navy cruisers."

  "Then this is it." He clenched his fists. "Let's at least back up against the wormhole hub. Have the AIs war-game an optimal configuration—"

  Beya kissed him on the cheek, a lingering gesture that still felt too brief. "Cover me."

  "What?"

  She turned and ran, faster than he could hope to catch her. "I told you I have an idea." And she ducked out of sight, through a hatch to the ship's spine.

  A missile soared past the lifedome, and the crew ducked, involuntarily. Then there was a speckle of laser light, and the dome blister blacked itself out. Grey Morus, Flood's second in command, yelled across, "They've got our range, Flood. We're shooting back but—"

  Flood's data desk chimed. The AIs had come up with a defensive configuration for the ships, lifedomes together, tails out, backed up against the Poole hub, using superhot GUTdrive exhaust for defence. "Copy this and implement," he snapped at Grey. He punched his data desk. "Beya! Where are you?"

  In Beya's flitter, her father's voice was as clear as if he was riding alongside her. Beya was determined to keep her voice level. "Can't you see me, dad? I'm up around your ten o'clock—oh, but your blister is blacked out."

  "What the hell are you doing up there?"

  The flitter ducked sideways, jolting her against her restraints. "I'm taking fire, that's what I'm doing. Dad, if you've got a spare laser, cover me!"

  Now the flitter swept around. She was heading straight for the Poole hub, a tangle of wormhole mouths, powder blue. She saw the three ships of the invasion fleet backing up, pirouetting clumsily into their defensive position. But the Navy ships swept across her view, soulless, mechanical, spitting missiles at the rebels, bathing them with laser light. There were so many of them, a dozen against three.

  And as she watched a Navy missile got through, hammering into the GUTdrive pod of the Mercy and Tolerance. Slowly the great ship began to drift out of position. But even as she did so she spat fire in Beya's direction, and picked a Navy missile out of the sky.

  "Thanks, Mercy/' she whispered.

  "You're welcome/' came a reply.

  "Beya, what are you doing?"

  "Dad, do you trust me?"

  "I—You know I do. What kind of question is that?"

  "Well enough to gamble your life on my say-so?"

  "I may not have a choice. If you'd just tell me—"

  "Just another bit of Sol system history, dad. Something I read, an incident at a planet called Pluto, long ago ... " She stared out at the dazzling sky-blue of the nearest portal's exotic-matter tetrahedral frame. The faces were like semitransparent panes of silvered glass; she could make out the watercolour oceans of Jupiter, swirled around in a fashion the eye could not quite track, like visions in a dream. "So beautiful."

  "Beya?"

  The flitter turned its nose straight towards the Interface. She ran a quick calculation on her data desk.

  "Five seconds, dad."

  "Until what?"

  "Fire up on my mark, and get out of there with everything you have."

  She passed through the glimmering face as if it did not exist, and now she was inside the blue frame of the Interface.

  Her father's voice was distorted. "Beya, please—"

  "This is for you, for mum, for Alpha. Remember me. Mark!" And she stabbed down her finger at her data desk.

  The flitter's engine exploded. Something slammed into her back. Electric-blue light flared all around her.

  Remarkably, she was still alive.

  She was jammed up in the little ship's cabin, which had been ejected from the wreck. She made herself look around. She gasped with the pain of broken bones.

  There was something wrong with space. A ball of light, unearthly, swelled up behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead was like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked at her belly and limbs. Nobody had had a ride like this in a thousand years.

  And she saw Navy ships scattered like bits of straw in a wind.

  The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance of Sol. And the flitter cabin imploded, without fuss.

  It took long minutes before the crew got the tumbling of the Facula under control.

  Pella came to Stillich, her brow bloodied. "Damage report—"

  "Never mind that. What just happened?"

  "An Alcubierre wave."

  "A what?"

  Pella dragged her fingers trough
mussed hair. "Captain, a wormhole is a flaw in space. It's inherently unstable. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That's matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—"

  "What's an Alcubierre wave?"

  "Something exploded inside the Interface. And the Interface's negative energy region expanded from the tetrahedron, just for a moment. The negative energy distorted a chunk of spacetime. The chunk containing us."

  On one side of the wave, spacetime had contracted like a black hole. On the other side, it expanded—like a re-run of the Big Bang, the expansion at the beginning of the universe.

  Pella scanned her data desk. "We lost contact altogether with five of our ships. None of the ships is operational. The Facula—"

  "What about the surviving rebels?"

  "Two disabled." She looked up. "One got away. It's heading for Earth."

  "Can we give chase?"

  "No, sir, we—"

  "Get me a line to Admiral Kale. Patch it through to the Palace if you can—"

  She looked up again, shocked. "Sir. I've a standing order, to become operative in case of failure."

  "Get on with it."

  "You're relieved of command. In fact, you're under arrest."

  Stillich laughed. "Fine. I'm in your custody, Number One. Now get hold of a working flitter and get me back to Earth."

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 11

  Orbit of Neptune

  The final attempt to stop the Fist ships was the most dramatic.

  After ice-moon debris had put an end to One and then Four, it was a GUTship that tried to halt the last two survivors, Three and Two. Not far within the orbit of Pluto, on the rim of Sol system proper, moving at a fraction of the attackers' near-lightspeed, it tried to ram them. It was an extraordinary bit of relativistic navigation. Fist Three, taking the lead, destroyed it with an equally remarkable bit of sharp-shooting. But the detonation hurled debris into the path of Three, and that was that.