As the fourth hour wore away, the squadron began to attract more attention. Suddenly they had an escort — Pirius counted quickly — a dozen, fifteen, twenty nightfighters, flying in loose formation around them. The Xeelee probed the squadron’s formation with starbreaker beams that folded, wavered, and dispersed as they penetrated the pocket universe. The greenships were able to evade these random thrusts easily enough without bending their formation too far. But the Xeelee weren’t serious; for now they seemed to be more intent on simply tracking this strange new development.
“That’s got to be good news,” Torec called. “They are surveilling us, not attacking. We’re something new, and they don’t understand.”
“Just as well,” Pirius Blue growled. “These lumbering beasts couldn’t defend themselves anyhow.”
“The grav shield is working,” Torec insisted. “The Xeelee don’t have FTL foreknowledge of what we’re up to.”
Commander Darc called, “I think you’re right. And maybe Orion is doing its job; they may not have the resources to spare for—” But he was cut off.
Pirius, immediately anxious, glanced up and to his right. The green spark that was Darc’s ship was falling away from the formation.
“Darc! Number Four, report!”
For an agonizing second there was silence. Then Darc came on the loop. “Leader, Four. A lucky shot, I’m afraid. I lost my engineer. Lethe, Lethe.”
“Can you hold formation?”
“Not a chance. I’m wallowing… dropping out now.”
Pirius’s heart sank. Losing Darc was like a punch to the heart.
But even as he was wrestling with whatever was left of his ship, Darc was watching him. “Squadron leader. Snap out of it. Call the seven.”
Pirius shook his head. “Form up the seven, the seven,” he ordered. Around him the surviving ships swam into the seven-strong formation they had practiced against this eventuality. “But, Lethe,” Pirius snapped, “we just lost our reserve shield-master.”
“In that case,” Jees said, “we’ll have to get by with one. Sir.”
Darc called, “Remember my final instruction, Squadron Leader.”
Darc had sworn to kill the Silver Ghost on Jees’s ship immediately, if it gave him the slightest excuse. Pirius said, “I won’t forget, commander.”
Darc laughed defiantly. “Get it done, Pirius! I’ll see you when it’s over.”
Pirius Red could see the Xeelee had triangulated on Darc: he was at the tip of an arrowhead sketched out by lancing crimson light. It was an oddly beautiful sight, Pirius thought, beautiful and deadly.
Blue said, “He’s taking on our escort. Trying to draw them away.”
“A brave man,” Burden murmured.
“He’s showing us the way,” Pirius Red said firmly. “Form up — Six, you’re slack! What do you think this is, a joyride? Form up, form up.”
He tried to settle down once more to the steady strain of nursing his ship and his squadron, in the wake of the imperturbable Jees. But another distracting display showed him what was happening at Orion Rock, which was now under heavy and concentrated attack. The Rock was fulfilling its primary purpose in the operation, which was to divert Xeelee fire. But such was the energy poured over it that the Rock glowed like a star itself.
Around the cannon emplacement, Xeelee drones still soared and spat. The fire from both sides had churned up the asteroid dirt, and all signs of the earthworks over which generations had labored had been erased in hours.
For a moment the action was washing around to the emplacement’s far side, and Cohl had nothing to fire at. She threw herself into a trench, panting. She lay as still as she could, locked in with the stink of her own shit, piss, sweat, blood, and fear, trying to let the fatigue work out of her limbs, and sucked water and nutrients from nipples in her helmet. Even here, the fire of the continuing battle lit up the furrowed surface of asteroid dirt before her, and glared off the scars on her faceplate.
The morale filters seemed to have been overwhelmed. The comm loops were dominated by wailing now, the massed crying, screaming, pleas for help from thousands of wounded troopers. But the wounded were far outnumbered by the dead. The noise was harrowing and useless.
There were only four left of Cohl’s platoon, four including herself. They had fallen back to a final perimeter just outside the platform on which the monopole cannon stood. She stole a glance over the lip of the trench. The cannon were still firing, but fitfully; Cohl had no idea how many gunners were alive. But still the Xeelee drones swarmed, a cloud of swimming black forms that seemed to grow denser the more you fired into it.
She knew it was only chance that had kept her alive long enough to be seeing this.
Cohl had been sealed up in her suit for four hours already. It was too long, of course. Every soldier knew that if an action took too long it had gone wrong, one way or another. And if the casualty rates inflicted on her own platoon were typical, soon those drones would get through and shut down the cannon for good.
But there was scuttlebutt on the comm loops that worse was to come: that in the angry sky above, the nightfighters were breaking through the picket line of greenships, and were moving in to finish off the Rock altogether.
Blayle was beside her, his face an expressionless mask. “A thousand years,” he murmured. “A thousand years of building — of belief, bloodlines forty generations deep, for nothing but to throw a handful of soldiers into Xeelee fire—”
“Don’t think about it,” Cohl muttered.
“I can’t help it,” he said, almost wistfully. “The more tired I get, the more I think. A thousand years devoted to a single purpose, gone in hours. It defies the imagination. And what is it for?” He craned his neck to peer up at the brilliant blue lamps of IRS 16. “I don’t know if the action is succeeding. Why, I don’t even know what the Xeelee are doing here, let alone why we’re attacking them.”
“We don’t need to know,” Cohl said, falling back on Doctrine. Then, more thoughtfully, she said, “But it’s probably always been that way.” If you were a soldier, war was small scale. All that mattered was what was going on around you — who was shooting at you, which of your buddies was still alive and trying to keep you alive. Whatever you knew of the bigger strategic picture didn’t matter when you were at the sharp end.
And as the enemy’s fist closed around this Rock, she could see no end point but defeat.
She had long burned off her initial adrenaline surge, long gone through her second wind. Now she was like an automaton, going through the motions of fighting and keeping herself alive almost without conscious thought. She had trained for this, been burned hard enough by her instructors on Quin for this strange condition to be familiar. But it was as if she were no longer even in her own head, but was looking down on her own hapless, dust-coated form in its failing skinsuit, scrunched down in a ditch in the dirt, trying to stay alive.
She glanced at the chronometer in the corner of her faceplate display. She’d had five minutes’ break; it felt like thirty seconds.
“It shouldn’t have been me,” Blayle said now.
“What?”
“Why me? Why, after all the generations who lived out fat, comfortable lives in this Lethe-spawned Rock, why is it me who has been pushed out here to fight and die? It should have been those others, who died in their bunks,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t have been me—”
Electric-blue light flared, and asteroid dirt was hurled up before them. Cohl twisted and fired into the blue-tinged fog of dust. She glimpsed Xeelee drones, pressing down on her trench. There was something above her; she felt it before she saw it. She rolled on her back, preparing to fire again.
But the ship was a flitter, small, unarmored. Its door was open and a ladder hung down.
“Cohl!” She recognized the voice; it was Enduring Hope. “Evac!”
“No. The cannon—”
“The Xeelee shot the heart out of it. The Rock is finished. There’s no point dying here.
”
“I have to stay.” Of course she did; that was Doctrinal. You weren’t supposed to keep yourself alive, not while there were still enemy to shoot at. “A brief life burns brightly,” she said reflexively.
“Balls,” Hope said with feeling. “Come on, Cohl; I’ve risked my ass to come flying around this Rock looking for you.”
She made a quick decision. Reluctantly she turned to Blayle. “Sergeant…”
He didn’t respond. There was a small scar on Blayle’s faceplate, a puncture almost too small to see. A thousand years of history ends here, she thought. She wished she could close his eyes.
In the end only two of Cohl’s platoon were lifted out with her, two out of the nine she had led out of the trench.
As the flitter lifted, she saw the landscape of the Rock open up. Its whole surface crawled with light as Xeelee drones and human fighters hurled energy at each other, all in utter silence. It was an extraordinary sight. But already the nightfighters were closing in to end this millennial drama for good.
The flitter squirted away. Cohl, still locked in her skinsuit, closed her eyes and tried to control her trembling.
Pirius tried not to watch the chronometer. And he tried not to think about his own fatigue.
He felt as if he had been walking a high-wire for six hours. He tried to concentrate on the moment, to get through the next jump, and the next, and the next. If you didn’t survive the present, after all, future and past didn’t matter; that old earthworm Hama Druz had been right about that much. For all their training and sims, however, they hadn’t realized how exhausting this was going to be, this tightrope walk through the center of the Galaxy. He hoped he would have the physical and mental strength to actually fight at the end of it.
He shut the passage of time out of his mind. So he was surprised when a gentle chime sounded on the comm loops, but he understood its significance immediately.
Ahead, the grav shield was dissolving, and in the sky around him the stars and gas masses of this shining, complex place were swimming back to where they should be.
“No sign of our escort,” Bilson said.
“We got through,” Pirius murmured.
“Yes, sir.” Even Jees’s steady voice betrayed an edge of fatigue now. She should have been spelled by Darc, and Pirius knew that for the last hour she had been nursing one failing system after another.
Still, she had delivered them here, just as the operational plan had dictated, and with no more losses: seven ships had survived, out of ten that had started.
Somebody called, “What’s that?”
It was a star, a hot, bright, blue star, a young one — not part of the IRS 16 cluster, though; they were far from that now. And there seemed to be a cloud around it, a flattened disc, like the shields of rock from which planets formed.
“That,” said Bilson, “is SO-2. We’re exactly where we are supposed to be, sir.”
Engineer Cabel was less clued in. “And SO-2 is—”
“The innermost star in orbit.”
“In orbit around what?”
“Chandra,” said Bilson simply.
Pirius, for all his fatigue, felt a thrill of anticipation.
Blue called, “And what is that cloud around the star? Dust, rock—”
“Wreckage,” Bilson said. “The hulks of human ships — greenships, Spline. Some other designs I can’t recognize. Older ones, perhaps.”
Burden said grimly, “Even here the Galaxy is littered with corpses.”
“Xeelee in the scopes,” Bilson said softly. “They know we’re here. Pilot, we don’t have much time.”
“So we’re not the first to come this way,” Pirius said crisply. “Let’s make sure we’re the last. Defensive formation, seven-fold — come on, you know the drill.”
The greenships slid into place around him and the squadron edged forward. Pirius scanned the sky, looking for Xeelee fighters, and for Chandra, the strange black hole that was his final destination.
Chapter 55
In this age of matter the proto-Xeelee found new ways to survive. Indeed, they prospered. They formed new levels of symbiosis with baryonic-matter forms. The new form — a composite of three ages of the universe — was the kind eventually encountered by humans, who would come to call them by a distorted anthropomorphic version of a name in an alien tongue: they were, at last, Xeelee.
But soon the new Xeelee faced an epochal catastrophe of their own.
They still relied on the primordial black holes, formed in the earliest ages after the singularity; they used the holes’ twisted knots of spacetime to peel off their spacetime-defect “wings,” for instance. But now the primordial holes were becoming rare: leaking mass-energy through Hawking radiation, they were evaporating. By the time humanity arose, the smallest remaining holes were the mass of the Moon.
It was devastating for the Xeelee, as if for humans the planet Earth had evaporated from under their feet.
But a new possibility offered itself. New black holes were formed from the collapse of giant stars, and at the hearts of galaxies, mergers were spawning monsters with the mass of a million Sols. Here the Xeelee migrated. The transition wasn’t easy; a wave of extinction followed among their diverse kind. But they survived, and their story continued.
And it was the succor of the galaxy-center black holes that first drew the Xeelee into contact with dark matter.
There was life in dark matter, as well as light.
Across the universe, dark matter outweighed the baryonic, the “light,” by a factor of six. It gathered in immense reefs hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Unable to shed heat through quirks of its physics, the dark material was resistant to collapse into smaller structures, the scale of stars or planets, as baryonic stuff could.
Dark and light matter passed like ghosts, touching each other only with gravity. But the pinprick gravity wells of the new baryonic stars were useful. Drawn into these wells, subject to greater concentrations and densities than before, new kinds of interactions between components of dark matter became possible.
In this universe, the emergence of life in dark matter was inevitable. In their earliest stages, these “photino birds” swooped happily through the hearts of the stars, immune to such irrelevances as the fusion fire of a sun’s core.
What did disturb them was the first stellar explosions — and with them the dissipation of the stars’ precious gravity wells, without which there would be no more photino birds.
Almost as soon as the first stars began to shine, therefore, the photino birds began to alter stellar structures and evolution. If they clustered in the heart of a star they could damp the fusion processes there. By this means the birds hoped to hurry a majority of stars through the inconvenience of explosions and other instabilities and on to a dwarf stage, when an aging star would burn quietly and coldly for aeons, providing a perfect arena for the obscure dramas of photino life. A little later the photino birds tinkered with the structures of galaxies themselves, to produce more dwarfs in the first place.
Thus it was that humans found themselves in a Galaxy in which red dwarf stars, stable, long-lived and unspectacular, outnumbered stars like their own sun by around ten to one. This was hard to fit into any naturalistic story of the universe, though generations of astrophysicists labored to do so: like so many features of the universe, the stellar distribution had been polluted by the activities of life and mind. It would not be long, though, before the presence of the photino birds in Earth’s own sun was observed.
The Xeelee had been troubled by all this much earlier.
The Xeelee cared nothing for the destiny of pond life like humanity. But by suppressing the formation of the largest stars, the birds were reducing the chances of more black holes forming. What made the universe more hospitable for the photino birds made it less so for the Xeelee. The conflict was inimical.
The Xeelee began a grim war to push the birds out of the galaxies, and so stop their tinkering with the stars. The Xee
lee had already survived several universal epochs; they were formidable and determined. Humans would glimpse silent detonations in the centers of galaxies, and they would observe that there was virtually no dark matter to be observed in galaxy centers. Few guessed that this was evidence of a war in heaven.
But the photino birds turned out to be dogged foes. They were like an intelligent enemy, they were like a plague, and they were everywhere; and for some among the austere councils of the Xeelee there was a chill despair that they could never be beaten.
And so, even as the war in the galaxies continued, the Xeelee began a new program, much more ambitious, of still greater scale.
Their immense efforts caused a concentration of mass and energy some hundred and fifty million light-years from Earth’s Galaxy. It was a tremendous knot that drew in galaxies like moths across three hundred million light-years, a respectable fraction of the visible universe. Humans, observing these effects, called the structure the Great Attractor — or, when one of them journeyed to it, Bolder’s Ring.
This artifact ripped open a hole in the universe itself. And through this doorway, if all was lost, the Xeelee planned to flee. They would win their war — or they would abandon the universe that had borne them, in search of a safer cosmos.
Humans, consumed by their own rivalry with the Xeelee, perceived none of this. To the Xeelee — as they fought a war across hundreds of millions of light-years, as they labored to build a tunnel out of the universe, as stars flared and died billions of years ahead of their time — humans, squabbling their way across their one Galaxy, were an irritant.
A persistent irritant, though.
Chapter 56
The seven surviving greenships of Exultant Squadron formed up into a tight huddle. In the sudden calm, the crews gazed around at the extraordinary place they had come to.
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