Exultant dc-2

by Stephen Baxter

  These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.

  For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.

  The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.

  At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.

  The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus- baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen — simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be — ought to be — vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.

  But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.

  The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium — three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.

  The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.

  With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.

  The universe was three minutes old.

  Chapter 52

  That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.

  He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.

  They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.

  Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.

  Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”

  “I didn’t know if I should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve changed. You always were full of depths, Torec… And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”

  “You’re the same person you were before you left.”

  “Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for two years after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But you never lived through those two years, did you?”

  “I did,” she murmured. “A copy of me did. But that copy has gone, or never existed — gone to wherever deleted timelines go… It’s so strange, Pirius Blue.”

  “I know. And sad.”

  “Sad? Oh. Because I’m not your Torec.” She snuggled back down to his chest. “But there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? So we may as well get on with things.”

  “Get on?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  Pirius Blue laughed. “As Nilis would probably say, we haven’t evolved to cope with time-looped relationships.”

  “I know what your real problem is,” she said. “And it’s got nothing to do with time paradoxes.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’ve been with him. Your evil time-clone rival.”

  He stifled a laugh. “He thinks the same about me.”

  “Well, you both resent each other. But you’re not the same. I think he’s in awe of you.”

  “But he’s your Pirius.”

  “I don’t think it works like that. You’re growing apart, becoming different people. But you’re still both you.”

  “Does he love you?”

  She sighed. It was the first time either Pirius had used that word to her. “You know I love you. Both of you.”

  He stroked her back, a spot between her shoulder blades where her skin felt like the smoothest, softest surface he had ever touched. “It’s a mess. A stupid triangle. I don’t know how we will sort it out.”

  “Wait until the mission is over,” she said.

  And see if any of us come back — that was what she left unsaid.

  After a time she drew away from him.

  “You’re going to him,” he said.

  “He needs me, too. And I need him.”

  “I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.

  When she had gone, Blue rolled into the part of the bunk still warm from her body, and tried to sleep.

  Two hours before reveille, Cohl was already on the surface of Orion Rock. In her massive, armored skinsuit, she was propped up in a foxhole with the members of her platoon around her. The monopole-cannon emplacement they were ordered to protect was a couple of hundred meters away, a complicated silhouette against a shining sky.

  As it had been since its chthonic birth, this Rock was still immersed in the glowing molecular clouds of the North Arm of the Baby Spiral. But if she looked ahead, she could see a gaggle of stars through the mist, like light globes hanging in smoggy air. That was IRS 16, the cluster of very crowded, very bright stars that coalesced out of the Baby’s infalling material as it poured into the crowded space that surrounded Chandra.

  Orion Rock itself was probably almost as old as the Galaxy itself, and for all that time it had been swimming helplessly along this lane of gas. For a thousand years humans had dug their way into this Rock. Now both those immense intervals of time were coming to a close, for, in two hours from now, this Rock would burst through the last veils of cloud that separated it from IRS 16. It was hard to believe that Cohl should be here at a moment like this.

  What was even harder to believe was that at least half her platoon were asleep, and the rest were eating. But that was life in the infantry. Your priority was eating and sleeping, and you took whatever chance you had to do either — even now, on the brink of battle.

  Cohl was an ambassador. Her mission, given her by Pirius Red, was to ensure that the two halves of t
he operation — the Navy fliers who would take the greenships to Chandra and the Army infantry down here on the Rock — communicated properly, shared the same objectives, and worked well together when the crunch came. That was what she had been working toward in the weeks since she had been brought here from Quin.

  The senior staff and civilians were going to evacuate Orion before the action, and go back to Arches. Even Captain Boote the Forty-Third had chosen not to stick around to witness this climax of his beloved Rock’s destiny. Pirius Blue had pulled strings to ensure Cohl could go if she wanted to, but she couldn’t bear the thought of running out on the people she had worked with for so long. There was only one place she wanted to be — on the surface, waiting for the sky to fall in, along with the rest of the troopers. And so here she was.

  Blayle wasn’t asleep, though. Blayle, her platoon sergeant, was a good bit older than her, in his midtwenties. She could see his eyes on her, bright blue eyes visible behind his faceplate, a cold blue like the light of IRS 16.

  He asked, “How are you bearing up, Lieutenant?”

  “Fine,” she said uneasily. Her rank was basically honorary, and it made her uncomfortable.

  “I’m proud to be here,” he said, without affectation. “There’s a lot of tradition here on Orion.”

  “I know.”

  “My own birth cadre — Cadre 4677 — is mentioned in the Rock’s first operational order, which is preserved in the archives. Of course we never knew what our mission would turn out to be. And nobody ever knew when it would end. But now it’s turned out that it’s me, my generation, who has the responsibility — no, the privilege — to be here at the climax.” He sighed. “A thousand years culminates here and now, in what I do today.”

  Blayle was a disciplined soldier and a good sergeant; as she had worked with this platoon she had learned to lean on him. But he was a thoughtful, soft-bodied, soft-spoken man who seemed to lack the spirit of camaraderie of some of the other troopers, the loyalty that impelled them to fight so hard. Rather, Blayle seemed to embrace the larger mission of Orion Rock, and had to argue himself into fighting. And, like most people on this Rock, Blayle was a combat rookie.

  “Might be best not to think too hard about that stuff, Sergeant. Combat is difficult enough without the feeling that forty generations are looking over your shoulder.”

  “Yes. What would Hama Druz say if he was here? Focus on the moment; the present is all that matters.”

  “He might say, shut your flapping mouth while some of us are trying to sleep,” somebody called, to a ripple of laughter.

  Cohl knew little about the mission of Exultant Squadron. What she did know and her platoon didn’t, however, was that all their elaborate preparations, all the lives that would be lost on this Rock today, were not even the point of the operation. After a thousand years of planning, preparation, and silent running, Orion Rock was to be sacrificed as a diversion. She wasn’t going to say a word about that.

  Cohl tried to relax, letting the Rock’s microgravity cushion her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the situation, to think back to less complicated times, when she had been just another trainee on Arches Base…

  Even reveille sounded somber that morning.

  It didn’t make any difference to Enduring Hope, who hadn’t slept anyhow. He had spent those last hours checking and rechecking everything he could think of, but the novel systems grafted onto these wretched greenships were about as integrated as a third arm growing out of his own back, and he knew that the paltry weeks of developments, trials, and modifications had not been enough.

  What he was really scared of was that he might be responsible for the mission’s failure. He knew his crews felt the same. So they kept on working, right up until the moment the first flight crews began to arrive, trying to be absolutely sure that this mission wouldn’t screw up because of something they had missed.

  At last the crews of the first wave arrived. And Pila was with them. As the flyers clambered out of their little transporter, Pila stood to one side and began making checks on a data desk she carried. Nobody approached her.

  Everybody still found Pirius’s adjutant more than a little intimidating — this woman from Earth was cold, and strange. But her duties included such mundanity as ensuring that the crews had been served the breakfast they wanted, that the transports had been laid on correctly — a hundred tiny details to make sure that nothing got in the way of the crews doing their jobs. She carried out those duties with calm, invisible efficiency, and people had slowly granted her respect.

  Everybody knew a Ghost was flying this mission. Hope was relieved that it didn’t show up this morning.

  The crews, meanwhile, did what flight crews usually did. They allowed the techs to check over their suits, but ran double checks themselves — if you were flight, you never trusted ground crew with something like that. Some of them quizzed their engineers on the state of their ships, as if anything they could ask now would make a difference. Others indulged in various superstitions, such as walking around their ships, or kicking at their landing rails. One man vomited up his breakfast. A tech cleaned it up for him. The atmosphere remained tense, quiet.

  Hope saw one stocky pilot pull open the front of his skinsuit to squirt a jet of urine over his ship’s landing rail.

  “Pirius,” he called.

  The pilot turned, his face shielded by his visor. “I’m Blue, by the way, to save you making a fool of yourself.”

  “I knew it was one of you from the lumpy shape of your dick,” Hope said, walking over to him. “Where’s your clone?”

  Pirius pointed. Another copy of Pirius, in his own skinsuit but with a commander’s red flashes on his shoulders, was working his way around the hangar, shaking hands, having a final word with his crews. “Red’s doing his job,” said Pirius Blue.

  “Just what you’d do,” Hope said.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to.”

  “I bunked into the briefing. I heard Nilis speak.”

  “Nilis, yes,” Blue said uncertainly. “What an oddball the man is. Red claims to understand him; I never will.” He regarded Hope. “I don’t think he gave us the truth about what he’s thinking, in that briefing.”

  “The truth?”

  “He has all these ideas about how Chandra is hosting antique life-forms, and if we were to keep on burrowing into it, we’d find more and more. He’s becoming fascinated with Chandra for its own sake, I think. Falling in love with the damn thing.”

  “How does that help us destroy it?”

  “It doesn’t,” Blue said. “You can’t control these Commissaries, though. We had better get the job done before he digs so far he comes up with a reason for us not to attack it in the first place.”

  “Pirius—” I know how scared you are, he thought. But he could never say such a thing.

  Blue held up his hand. “You know how it is. The fear goes away. I’ll be fine once I lift.”

  “I won’t be, though,” Hope said fervently.

  Pirius Blue grasped his hand briefly. “I wish you were flying with us.”

  “Me too.”

  “Just don’t steal my stuff until after I’ve lifted. Show some respect.” And with that, Blue turned and clambered up a short ladder to his cockpit.

  It took only minutes for the crews to load themselves into their blisters. The last maintenance hatches were closed, the last bomb trolley withdrawn. The ground crew pulled out of the hangar floor.

  The roof of the hangar cracked open, and the air vanished in a shiver of frost. The harsh blue light of the Galaxy’s heart flooded into the chamber, overwhelming the glow of the globe lamps that hovered around the ships.

  Hope watched from the hangar’s observation area. Here was Marshal Kimmer, and Captain Marta, and the reserve crews who weren’t making this flight, and others like Tili Three who hadn’t made the grade, and many, many of this strange base’s child-soldier inhabitants, all come to see the launches. Hope suspected that the milit
ary types longed to be in those ships, as he did, rather than be stuck here watching them leave. But he wondered how many were here because, morbidly, they expected these crews not to return.

  Pirius Red’s own ship was to be the first to lift. As they worked through their final preparation, the crew’s comm was piped into the observation areas.

  “Waiting for the red flag to power up sublight… We’ve got a red, we’re clear.”

  “Start number three…”

  “Primed.”

  “Engage three…”

  The greenship raised itself a handsbreadth above its cradle. Hope could feel a pulse in the asteroid’s own inertial field as it tried to compensate for the shift in mass.

  “Pressure rising in the generators.”

  “Copy that. Watch the compensation for the bomb pod, Engineer.”

  “On it.”

  “Waiting on the green for takeoff, crew. Waiting on the green. Green acquired, we’re cleared.”

  As the greenship lifted, its main body bulkily laden with its unfamiliar technology, it wallowed a little.

  “Passing through the roof.”

  “Turn to port, port on my 129. Let’s give them a show, crew.”

  Beyond the hangar’s open roof, in clear space, the greenship spun once, twice, its three crew blisters whirling about the craft’s long axis, an exultant gesture. Then it squirted out of sight.

  There was a hand on Hope’s shoulder. It was Marshal Kimmer. “Fifteen hours,” the Marshal said. “Six hours out, three on station, six back. Then it will be over, one way or the other.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  All over the hangar now, the greenships were rising.

  Cohl hadn’t believed it was possible she would sleep. But she needed a nudge in her ribs from Blayle to jar her awake.