“Yes?”
“There have been rumors—”
“Rumors?”
“That you brought a Silver Ghost with you from Earth. A live Ghost.”
Pirius glanced at Pila, who rolled her eyes; they had had little cooperation from the Quin commanders over security. He said, “I can’t comment on that. And I don’t understand your interest anyhow.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Burden.
Pirius sensed it actually mattered a great deal. There was much he didn’t understand about Burden, he thought — perhaps a lot Burden didn’t even understand about himself.
But there was no time to think about it now, because he had to face a still more difficult interview.
Pirius Blue was arrogant, cocky.
His face, of course, was Pirius Red’s own. But Red was shocked by how old he had become, even compared to his memory from the trial seven months ago, as if far more than a couple of years now separated them. And the infantry-standard silvered discs that replaced his pupils were eerie, glinting.
“Let me get this straight,” Blue said. “You want me to fly in your kiddie squadron. You want me to report to you.”
Red worked hard to keep his temper under control. “It isn’t unprecedented.” That was true; he had had Pila look out the records. “There have been many instances of temporal twins serving together.”
“Yes, but not with one under the command of another.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m you,” said Blue. “Or rather, I’m what you wish you were. I’m the older, wiser, more experienced, better-looking you.” He actually leered at Pila, trying to put her off. Red felt obscurely proud of the contemptuous loathing she projected back.
In his brief few days as a squadron leader, Red had begun to learn the elements of command. Now he summoned all that up. “Get this straight,” he snapped, and Blue looked surprised at his tone. “I don’t like this situation any more than you do. But I’m stuck with it. I’ve got a mission, I’ve got my duty, and I intend to perform it.”
“Don’t lecture me, you… you—”
“What?” Pirius stood up and leaned over the table. “What? What do you think I am? I’m not your clone. I’m not a cadre sibling, or a brother, or even a twin. I’m not some failed copy of you. I’m you. Maybe you resent my existence. But believe me, I resent yours far more. I’m here,” he said. “So are you. Get over it.”
Blue shook his head. “If you’re drafting me—”
“I’ve drafted nobody. I’m looking for volunteers.” That seemed to surprise Blue. “I know you can do the job,” Red said. “Because I know myself that well.”
“So you want me to volunteer.”
“No. I want more than that. I want you to support me.”
“Why? To make you feel good?”
“No. Because you’ll bring with you good people, like Enduring Hope and Cohl.”
“I’ll think about it—”
“Crap. Tell me now, or walk away.”
Blue, staring boldly at him, shook his head. “You speak to me that way. But you’ve no idea what I’ve seen here. None at all.”
“Give me an answer.”
The silence stretched. Pila sat silently, evidently fascinated, as the two halves of Pirius, locked together by fate and mutual loathing, faced each other down.
Eventually Pirius Blue agreed. Pirius Red always knew he would, though the two of them would fight all the way to Chandra. After all, that was what he would have done himself.
As Blue turned to go, Red stopped him. “We’re going to have to learn to get along. We’ll always have seventeen years of our lives in common.”
“So what?” Blue snapped. “That’s the past.”
“Aren’t you going to ask about her?”
Blue’s back stiffened. “Who?”
“Torec. Come on, Blue. We need to talk it over.”
Blue shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s your Torec. Mine is — lost, in a timeline that’s never going to exist. You get used to it.” And he walked out.
Chapter 43
The monstrous swelling of the age of inflation was over.
The universe continued to expand, more sedately than before, but relentlessly. Still phase changes occurred, as the merged forces broke up further, and with each loss of symmetry more energy was injected into the expansion.
The release of the electromagnetic force from its prison of symmetry was particularly spectacular, for suddenly it was possible for light to exist. The universe lit up in a tremendous flash — and space filled immediately with a bath of searing radiation. So energetically dense was this first exuberant glow that it continually coalesced into specks of matter — quarks and antiquarks, electrons and positrons — that would almost as rapidly annihilate each other. There were no atoms yet, though, no molecules. Indeed, temperatures were too high for the quarks to combine into anything as sedate as a proton.
The primordial black holes, surviving from the age of spacetime chemistry, again provided some structure in this seething chaos; passing through the glowing soup they would gather clusters of quarks or anti-quarks. Though the quarks themselves continually melted away, the structure of these clusters persisted; and in those structures were encoded information. Interactions became complex. Networks and loops of reactions formed, some were reinforced by feedback loops.
Certain consequences inevitably followed. For this universe it was already an old story — but it was a new generation of life.
But this was a universe of division. For every particle of matter created there was an antimatter twin. If they met they would mutually annihilate immediately. It was only chance local concentrations of matter, or antimatter, that enabled any structures to form at all.
In these intertwined worlds of matter and antimatter, parallel societies formed. Never able to touch, able to watch each other only from afar, they nevertheless made contact, exchanging information and images, science and art, reciprocally influencing each other at every stage. Mirror-image cultures evolved, each seeking to ape the achievements of the unreachable other. There were wars too, but these were always so devastating for both sides that mutual deterrence became the only possible option. Even a few impossible, unrequitable parity-spanning love affairs were thrown up.
The fundamental division of the world was seen as essentially tragic, and inspired many stories.
The various matter species, meanwhile, were not the only inhabitants of this ferocious age. They shared their radiation bath with much more ancient life-forms. To the survivors of the spacetime- chemistry federation, this age of an endless radiation storm was cold, chill, empty, the spacetime defects which characterized their kind scattered and stretched to infinity. But survive they had. Slowly they moved out of their arks and sought new ways to live.
Chapter 44
In the end it took a whole week before Pirius had assembled his team of thirty, including himself and Torec, to serve as primary crew, and nine more as backups. But now there were only seven weeks left before Kimmer’s deadline, and serious work on training and development hadn’t even begun.
Pirius brought his recruits, from Quin and elsewhere, back to Rock 492. Even that was a budget operation; he and Pila had to scrounge spare spaces on scheduled transport ships.
On the journey back from Quin, he couldn’t avoid his other self; whenever they passed each other, their tense silence was chill. Everybody stared, fascinated.
Once back at 492, Red called Burden and Pirius Blue to the office he had had Pila set up. They stood side by side, at attention, but somehow Blue made his insolence show.
“I need two flight commanders,” Pirius Red said without preamble. “So you can guess why I called you here.”
Burden and Pirius Blue glanced at each other.
Burden frowned. Again he seemed oddly evasive. But he said, “It’s not a responsibility I want. But I wouldn’t turn it down.”
Pirius Red nodde
d. He turned to Blue. “And you?”
Blue was contemptuous. “Do I have a choice?”
Red snapped angrily, “More choice than you gave me when you came back from that magnetar. Look, from my point of view neither of you are ideal candidates. Burden, frankly, I’m suspicious of what’s going on in your head.” Burden looked away. “And Blue — I know you too well, and we’ll never get on. But I need you both; you’re the best I can find. Blue, you of all people know that.”
He waited. At length, Burden accepted the job, but distantly. Blue nodded curtly.
Red was relieved beyond words.
Now he was able to bring both Blue and Burden further into his confidence. All they had known up to this point, like the other candidates, was that the mission would involve difficult flying with novel technology. He began to explain what the target would be.
“You’re insane,” said Pirius Blue. “We’re going to strike at Chandra itself?” But Red saw that his eyes were alive with excitement.
Red said carefully, “You want me to take you off the mission? I could do that, though you know too much now; you’d have to be kept in custody until the flight was over.”
“And let somebody else fly this?” Blue grinned; he looked feral. “Not a chance.”
Pirius turned to Burden. “What about you?”
Burden seemed more troubled. “This could shorten the war.”
“Or lengthen it,” Blue said, “if it goes wrong badly enough.”
“Either way,” said Burden, “things must change.”
Pirius nodded. “Does that trouble you?”
“Whatever we do doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And it’s a noble action.”
Pirius had trouble decoding this glimpse of an alien mindset. “Does that mean you’re in?”
Again Pirius perceived a flash of fear. Blue saw it, too, and glanced at Burden, worried.
But Burden straightened his shoulders. “Yes, sir!”
Once the last transport had docked, Pirius Red brought his recruits to 492’s largest pressurized dome and had them draw up in good order before him. With Pila at his side, he stood awkwardly on a crate, the only rostrum he could find.
He looked along their lines, at Jees’s clunky artificial torso, at the anomalously old, like Burden, at damaged children like Three — and, Lethe, at his own sullen, other-timeline face. He found it hard to believe that there had been such a rabble drawn up anywhere on the Front in all this war’s long history.
Nevertheless they were a squadron, and they were his.
“Forty of us,” he said. “Forty, including Pila, here, my adjutant. And this is our base. It isn’t much, but it’s ours. And we’re about to be transferred into Strike Arm. We’re a squadron now. And we’re special,” he said.
There was a guffaw, quickly suppressed.
“So we are,” Pirius went on. “We are a special generation, with a special duty, a privilege. The Galaxy-center engagement with the Xeelee began three thousand years ago. And we are the first generation in all those long years to have a chance of winning this war — of winning the Galaxy itself. Whether we succeed or we fail, they will remember us, in the barracks-rooms and the shipyards and the training grounds, and on the battlefields, for a long time to come.”
The crews just stood silently and stared back at him. His words had sounded empty, even to him. His self-doubt quickly gathered.
Enduring Hope spoke up. “We need a name.”
“What’s that?”
“A name. For the squadron. Every squadron needs a name.”
Pila murmured a suggestion in his ear, and he knew it was right. “Exultant,” he said. “We are Exultant Squadron.”
They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.
When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.
She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime, Squadron Leader, we have work to do.”
Chapter 45
Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.
As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and anti-quarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed — but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce — and then, inevitably, all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.
Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter- cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.
Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe — and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.
The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and one matter particles would be formed — and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.
The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.
Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.
Another metaphorical switch was pulled.
Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.
Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished,
leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.
Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.
Chapter 46
Running behind a grav shield was like flying into an endless tunnel.
From her pilot’s blister, Torec looked ahead through the usual clutter of Virtual warning flags, at a wall of turbulence. The result of the gravastar shield’s spacetime distortions, it was like a breaking wave front, roughly circular, blue-white Core light mixed up and muddled and somehow stretched out in a way that hurt her eyes. There was something deeply unsettling about it, she thought, something that offended her instincts on some profound level.
When she glanced around she could see bright green sparks arrayed around her field of view. They were the other greenships of her flight, which was led today by Pirius Blue, high up there in Torec’s sky — Blue, the weird, embittered future-twin version of her own Pirius, who had unaccountably been made flight commander.
The squadron was learning how to fly in formation, and with the grav shield. This was Torec’s second training run of the day, her tenth of
the week so far, and in the turnarounds she hadn’t caught a great deal of sleep. But she put aside her eyeball-prickling fatigue and peered ahead, trying to stay focused on the peculiar phenomenon that might one day save her life, if it didn’t kill her first.
The gravastar shield was something not quite of this universe, and the product of inhuman Ghost technology too. No wonder it looked weird. But the theory of its use was simple. Just fly in behind the grav shield, keep to your formation, follow your leader. The flaw was receding from her at nearly lightspeed, and it was her job to keep her greenship plummeting after it, tucked up into this more or less liveable pocket of smooth spacetime, not so close that the tidal stresses and fallout from the shield itself were so severe that they would destroy you, and yet close enough that the Xeelee could have no foreknowledge of your approach, because — and it still took her some hard thinking to grasp this — you were effectively in another universe.
At the center of her field of view was a greenship tucked right in behind the wall of curdled horror. That ship, the “shield-master” as the crews called it, was laden with the grav field generators. Today it was piloted by Jees, the sullen, determined prosthetic rescued from admin duties by Pirius Red, now proving to be one of the best pilots in Exultant Squadron. There was nobody Torec would have preferred to see up there at point than Jees; if anybody could manage the propagation of a kilometer- wide wave front of spacetime distortion it was her.
But as Torec watched, that central green pinpoint wavered, just subtly. It was enough to send alarms sounding in Torec’s head, long before her Virtual displays lit up with more red flags.
Jees was having stability problems. Already Torec could see the shimmering of the grav shield front, and spacetime distortions heading back down the “tunnel” toward her own ship. They made the images of the more distant stars ripple and swarm, as if seen through a heat haze.
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