Exultant dc-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Cohl’s expression was complex. She kept up her mask of skepticism. But she wanted to believe, Pirius realized with a shock; even Cohl, once an ultraorthodox Druzite. She might have her suspicions about the man, but she was listening to his words, and seemed to want to accept Burden’s strange and comforting faith.

  A small Virtual drifted before Pirius’s eyes: it was Captain Marta’s face. “Come to my office, Private. We need to talk.”

  With a mixture of regret and relief, Pirius slipped away from the little congregation. Nobody seemed to notice.

  Marta’s office was unglamorous. It was just a partitioned-off corner of the barracks, the furniture no more than a bunk and a table where data desks were untidily heaped. The only luxury seemed to be a coffee machine. But in one corner there was a kind of cubicle, like a shower, with walls pocked with interface sockets. Pirius wondered if this equipment had something to do with Marta’s complex injuries.

  Marta waved him to a chair. Pirius could hear the whir of motors as she sat down opposite him. “Sorry to drag you off from Quero’s lecture.” She eyed him. “And you can lower those eyebrows, private. Of course we know about Burden and his proselytizing.”

  “Burden’s talk comforts them,” he said.

  “Of course it does. That’s why it’s so successful in the first place, I suppose. And why we turn a blind eye.” She sipped her coffee, and Pirius saw that the metallic surface of her face extended through her lips to the roof of her mouth. “We allow them to stay in their cadre groups, or even their families if we have to, because it gives them something to fight for. And Burden’s waffle about the end of time comforts them when they fall. The ideologues at the center disapprove, of course, but out here we have a war to wage.”

  Pirius wondered how to put his own doubts about Burden into words — or even if he should. “I don’t get Burden,” he admitted. “He is his own man. In combat he fights as hard as anybody—”

  “Harder than most,” said Marta laconically.

  “And he’s not afraid of being ostracized for his faith. But sometimes he seems — weak.”

  Marta eyed him. “Burden has depths. And a past which he’s apparently not prepared to share with you. But, you know what? It doesn’t bother me. If Burden took a hit tomorrow, all his emotional complexity would disappear with him. In the meantime, he can think what he likes, feel what he likes, as long as he does such an effective job. As long as our soldiers fight, who cares what goes on in their heads?”

  Pirius was silent.

  “You’re judging me, Private,” Marta said more heavily.

  “I’m having trouble with your contempt for us, sir.”

  She nodded, apparently not offended. “Not contempt. But I have to manage you from birth to death, and send you into war. Not contempt, no. Distance, I suppose. This is the nature of command.”

  “If you’re so tolerant about the Friends, why did you give Tuta such a hard time when we got here?”

  “Tuta?… Oh. Enduring Hope. That had nothing to do with religion. Surely you see that. I was just trying to knock a cadet into shape. That’s my job,” she said neutrally. “So what do you think about the Factory Rock action now?”

  “It was a screwup,” he said vehemently.

  “You think so?”

  “Of course it was. The barrage was mistimed and off target. Our line was broken before we even left the trench. Our flanks were exposed and we walked into fire. We didn’t have a chance.”

  “I can see you’re a perfectionist, Pirius,” she said dryly. “There are always mistakes in war. But the important thing is that we won, despite the mistakes. We took back Factory Rock. You have to have the right perspective.”

  “Perspective? Sir, I was the only survivor, of two platoons, to reach that monopole factory.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many fall as long as one gets through. I told you that in the briefing. We plan for wastage. The losses were a little high this time, perhaps, but most of those who fell were wet behind the ears. The Coalition hadn’t invested much in them. They were cheap. Of course, Pirius, nobody would have got through, or still less got back, if not for the way you took the initiative.”

  “I was just trying to stay alive.”

  “Believe me, even that’s beyond the capabilities of most of your comrades out there.”

  “Sir—”

  “Tell me about the Tilis. How does what happened to them make you feel?”

  He struggled to find the right words. “I was close to my crew in the greenships. You have to be if you’re to work together. But this time—”

  “This time you weren’t flying around in the antiseptic comfort of a greenship; you were down in the dirt with the blood and the death.”

  “I saw her sisters die, and I’ve seen Tili Three grieve. And it’s not worth it. Even if we win the Galaxy—”

  “The cost of a single life is too high.” She seemed to suppress a sigh. “And so you don’t want to hear me talk about the cost of a private’s training. For you, right now, it isn’t about economics, is it, Pirius? Being one in a trillion doesn’t reduce the significance of that one person you know. War doesn’t scale that way.”

  He said hesitantly, “So you feel like this?”

  “No. But I know how you feel.” She gazed directly at him. “This is a stage you have to go through, Private.”

  He said, “I don’t want to stop feeling like this, sir.”

  “Tough. If you’re smart enough for responsibility, you’re smart enough to understand the situation we’re all in, and the choices we have to make.”

  He thought that through. “Responsibility? Sir, are you offering me some kind of command?”

  “You proved yourself out on that Rock, Private. You may be a wetback reject, and your service record is a piece of shit. You’ll always be Service Corps. But you could make corporal.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said immediately.

  “What you want has very little to do with it. Anyhow it’s academic.”

  He couldn’t follow her. “It is?”

  “Somebody has been asking for you. I believe you’ve met Commissary Nilis?”

  Chapter 26

  One minute left. Torec wriggled in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position among the equipment boxes that had been bolted into this greenship’s little cabin.

  Commander Darc had made it clear he didn’t approve of countdowns. Torec’s cockpit, and the displays of the test controllers on Enceladus, were full of clocks, and you could follow the timings; there was no need for melodrama, said Darc. But Torec had always had an instinct for the flow of time, and she couldn’t help the voice in her head calling out each second with uncanny precision: Fifty-five, fifty-four, fifty-three…

  It was the first full-scale, all-up test flight of a ship modified with Project Prime Radiant’s new technologies. And with every second her tension wound up further.

  She looked out of the blister, directly ahead of the ship, where the misty bulk of Saturn drifted. Enceladus was a pale crescent to her starboard side. The space around her was cluttered with sparks, the observation drones and manned ships assigned to monitor this latest test. It was strange to think that among the watching Navy crews, staff officers, and academics was a Silver Ghost. More ominously, in there somewhere were rescue craft waiting to haul her and her crew out of a wreck.

  And directly ahead of her, a silhouette against the face of Saturn, was a night-dark delta wing. It was the Xeelee nightfighter, captured by Pirius Blue and hauled here to the heart of Sol system itself.

  The nightfighter drifted, brooding, dark on dark. It made everybody nervous. The plan was that the Xeelee would briefly be returned to autonomous functioning; the fly was Torec’s sparring partner in this test flight. The nightfighter was disarmed, of course, and its workings were riddled with cutouts and deadman’s switches. Even so, that fly was surrounded by a shell of Navy ships. But using the Xeelee was the only way to simulate something like genuine battle
conditions.

  But whatever the Xeelee did wouldn’t matter if Torec failed.

  If all went well, ships like this might one day sail triumphantly against the Prime Radiant itself. But for now this long-suffering greenship was nothing but a mess.

  The greenship was the standard design, with the stout central body and the three arms supporting its crew blisters. It was an intrinsically graceful configuration, stabilized centuries ago, and scrupulously maintained ever since by the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of the Coalition’s technical agencies. But on this ship those clean lines had been spoiled by extra modules, attached so hastily they hadn’t even been painted. It was all prototype equipment, of course. The CTC gear had come down in size an awful lot since the first proof-of-concept rigs on the Moon, but the CTC module was still a great egg-shaped pod that made the greenship look as if it was about to pup. The hull even showed scarring where the CTC had exploded in the middle of a static trial, two of its internal FTL drones losing their way and colliding.

  Even her Virtual instruments had been cluttered up with additional displays. The whole thing was crudely programmed and liable to instability. And then there were the extra boxes, like a beefed-up inertial generator, and hardwired units designed to run the gravastar shield itself. All this gear had been crammed into a blister which barely had room for the pilot who had to occupy it. It was not reassuring.

  Forty-one, forty…

  At least her crew, sealed in their cabins, looked calm enough. They were both Navy veterans, both nearly twice her age. Emet, the navigator, was a tall, haughty man whose service had been confined to Sol system itself. But the engineer, Brea, was more approachable. She had seen action in the clear- out of a cluster of Coalescent warrens: human worlds gone bad, relics of the ancient Second Expansion in one of the Galaxy’s halo clusters.

  Both Brea and Emet had been suspicious of Torec, this kid put in command of them. But the three of them worked well together as a crew, and as they had come through the stop-start misadventures, holdups, and downright disasters of the testing program they had, Torec thought, learned mutual respect. Brea had actually asked Torec to share her bunk in their Enceladus dorm the night before. Torec preferred hetero, and she missed Pirius. But she had accepted out of politeness.

  Ten. Nine…

  She snapped her full attention to her instruments. For once every indicator was green, the ancient color of readiness. She could hear a chattering in her communicator loops, a thousand voices talking. As she had been trained, she took deep breaths, and let the adrenaline kick lock her into full awareness of where she was, who she was, and what she was about to do.

  Five. Four. A last glance at her crew, an acknowledging wave from Brea. The sublight drive was warming up, and despite her beefed-up inertial protection, she could feel the mighty energies of the gravastar shield generators gathering, like a slow, deep growl.

  One. The ship jolted forward, its sublight drive kicking in -

  She called, “Go, go!”

  Nearby ships blurred, turning to streaks of light that exploded past her view and away. Directly ahead, Saturn itself loomed, becoming larger every second. And at the center of her view, a spider in the heart of its web, the Xeelee waited for her.

  “Sublight nominal,” yelled Emet.

  Maybe, Torec thought, but she could feel how sluggish the laden ship was, how poor its balance had become.

  “Grav coming online,” engineer Brea reported, “in ten, nine…”

  Red lights flared around the periphery of her vision — too much information to absorb in detail — bad news she didn’t want to know.

  “Three, two,” Brea called. “Go for grav?”

  She ignored the alarms. “Do it.”

  “Zero.”

  The sublight drive cut out — but the ship’s acceleration increased, and Saturn blurred and streaked, as if her view of it was being stirred by a spoon. The grav shield was working. The muddled vision ahead was a mark of the shield’s operation; the passage of light itself was being distorted by the spacetime wave gathering before her. It was a wonderful, remarkable thought: a new universe really was opening up ahead of her, a universe projected from the clumsy pods and modules bolted to her ship, and the expansion of that universe was drawing in the ship itself.

  And now a harsher light gathered, as if burning through mist. It quickly formed a searing disc, two, three, four times the apparent size of Saturn. This was the shock front, the place where a spacetime wave was breaking. The light came from the infall of matter to that front, mass-energy lost in an instant.

  The chattering voices cut off. She could only hear her crew, and her own breath rasping in her throat.

  “Shock formed!” Brea yelled. Emet whooped.

  At this moment Torec was alone with her crew in a spacetime bubble snipped out of the cosmos — the three of them, alone in a universe they had made. But the day wasn’t won yet.

  “Is it stable?” No reply. “Engineer, is it stable?”

  “Negative,” Brea said sadly.

  There was a last moment of calm.

  Then the disc swelled, rarefied, became a mesh of blue-white threads — and burst. The shock wave slammed into the plummeting greenship. It was a searing pulse of gravitational energy condensing into high-energy radiation and sleeting particles. The ship was smashed in an instant.

  Torec’s blister hurled itself away. Tumbling, she saw the hull crushed like a toy, its bolted-on modules rupturing and drifting free. The three arms were reduced to truncated stumps. She could see nothing of her crew. The nightfighter glided smoothly over to the site of the wreckage, and, unchallenged, fired a token pink-gray beam into the dissipating cloud — a harmless marker, but the symbolism was not lost on Torec.

  Then her pod flooded with foam that froze her limbs to immobility, and she was trapped in darkness.

  The sick bays on Enceladus were like Navy sick bays everywhere. They did their job, but they were bare and cold, the staff unsmiling: it was a place where you got repaired, not a place where you could expect to be comfortable. Torec was keen to get out of here, but it was going to take another day before the bones of her broken arm knit well enough.

  Navigator Emet had already gone. He had come out of the blowup with barely a scratch, but as soon as he had been discharged he had requested a transfer to another assignment.

  Brea hadn’t come out of the smash at all.

  After six hours, Darc and Nilis came to visit her.

  Pirius was still on Venus. Nilis said he had told Pirius what had happened.

  A Virtual replay of the last moments of the run cycled in the air over Torec’s bed, over and over. Torec was forced to watch her own blister, the interior milky with foam, shoot out of the expanding debris cloud that used to be a greenship.

  Darc growled, “Look at that Xeelee. You know, Commissary, I’m prepared to believe it is alive. You can see the contempt.”

  Nilis was pacing, barefoot. He was overstressed, and extremely distressed by what had happened. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes,” he kept saying.

  Torec suppressed a sigh. “Sir, Brea died doing her duty.”

  “But if not for me she wouldn’t have been put in harm’s way in the first place.”

  Darc said thunderously, “Commissary, with respect, that’s maudlin nonsense. Brea was a soldier. Soldiers die, sir, by putting themselves in harm’s way, as you call it. It’s a question of statistics; that’s how you have to look at it.”

  Nilis turned on him, eyes rimmed red, clearly furious. “And is that supposed to comfort me?”

  Darc’s expression didn’t change. “If you want comfort, know that she died doing her duty.”

  Nilis snorted and resumed his pacing. “Well, if we’re not allowed to complete the test program, she will have died for nothing.”

  Darc laughed. “You aren’t going to trap me that way, Commissary. I’m not convinced that throwing away more time and money, and more lives, on this program is justified. I’v
e seen no sign that you’re coming close to solving these instability problems with the grav shield.”

  Torec knew the situation was delicate. Darc’s power was all negative. He couldn’t approve the continuation of the test program on his own, but he could get it shut down. And she was scared that after a failure that embarrassed him as much as anybody else, he was ready to use that power. She said brightly, “We still have another ship. It’s already being prepared.”

  “That means nothing,” Darc said. “Ensign, engineers work on engines unless they’re stopped by force; you know that. It doesn’t mean I’ll be approving another run.”

  Nilis glared. “For you to shut us down now, after just one run, would be criminally irresponsible, Commander!”

  Darc was very still, sitting in his chair, not moving a muscle. But Torec could hear the menace in his voice. “I know you’re under stress. But I won’t have you say that about me. I’ve been under pressure to terminate this program since the first poor results came in. In fact, Commissary, I’ve been championing you, keeping you alive.”

  Nilis wasn’t intimidated. “Oh, have you? Or are you looking out for yourself, Commander? Seeking whatever advantage you can gain from the project, while always keeping your backside covered, in the grand Navy tradition!”

  Torec saw Darc’s hands close on the arms of his chair, his knuckles whiten.

  To her relief, before they came to blows, there was a soft chime, and a small Virtual window opened up before her. It revealed a shining sphere. She gaped.

  “I have a visitor,” she said.

  When Darc saw the Ghost’s image, he snarled, “Send it away. I won’t have that monstrosity in a Naval facility.”