Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  At last, after losing a few of the precious minutes they had left before the arrival of the nova wavefront, Asher and Nicola floated into view – Nicola was waving vigorously – with the object they had evidently purloined from the Ghost station. It was a fat lens shape in pale grey-white, its diameter more than twice Asher’s own height. Asher drifted beside this thing, attached to it by a length of what looked to Jophiel like Ghost cable, looped around the lens.

  The two of them squirted thrusters and approached the flitter.

  Harris closed up his own skinsuit. ‘Nicola, Asher, come on in. I’ll wait for you in the crew lock. And I’ll send out a couple of bots to bring in that package of yours . . . What in Lethe is it, by the way?’

  ‘I know what it is,’ Jophiel said. ‘Saw its like on the Ghost station myself. A box of Xeelee hull plate – right, Asher? And inside, according to the Ghosts, dark-matter entities. Like the fish that I – that Michael and Nicola found inside the Sun, when they made their dive from Larunda. Asher, why did you bring out that thing? With the star about to—’

  ‘I was trying to think long term,’ Asher said, somewhat defensively.

  She entered the airlock. A few heartbeats later, followed by Nicola, she was in the cabin and opening up her suit, with evident relief.

  ‘Long term,’ she went on, ‘just as you taught us, Jophiel. Even in the middle of a crisis. Thanks for coming for us, by the way.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Jophiel. ‘Strap in. Long term, though?’

  As the flitter surged away, Asher picked a couch. ‘Dark matter. We know the Xeelee are interested in the dark-matter fauna – maybe because of the threat they seem to pose to the stability of the stars. And the Ghosts seem to be interested in anything the Xeelee do. Maybe, if we’re to understand the Xeelee ourselves, we need to figure out the nature of the dark-matter fauna as well. And so I—’

  ‘Lethe,’ Harris said. ‘Look at that.’

  Jophiel had been on the point of leaving, of zapping his Virtual node of consciousness down to Michael’s flitter as it approached Xeelee Valley. But his eye, too, was caught by a flash of light out in space, beyond the planet’s curve.

  Cherry-red light.

  He leaned forward to see better. He made out more flashes, sparks, elusive glimmerings. Massive shapes that were there and gone. A bewildering, ever-changing tapestry of transient clashes mediated by planetbuster beams, fought and over in seconds. ‘I can’t make out the patterns.’

  ‘I’m integrating it on the screens,’ Harris said.

  Jophiel pulled back to look into a softscreen on the control panel before him. Now he saw ships: Ghost tangleships of all sizes, and the brute flesh of the Spline warships of the Qax. When integrated across time, threads of planetbuster light connected the two fleets, as if some vast mobile sculpture were being assembled and reassembled in open space, high above the planet. It was not so much a battlefield as a display of flickering lanterns, he thought.

  But here and there he saw clouds of debris, glittering in the deceptive starlight, drifting. Twisted cables from Ghost wrecks. Where a Spline was hit he thought he saw blood. Gobbets of flesh.

  Harris said, ‘I’m freezing the images. In reality the ships are there and gone in a fraction of a second.’

  ‘But,’ Asher said, coming over, ‘not too fast to fire off a weapon.’

  ‘This is war,’ Nicola said, wondering. ‘A war fought with hyperdrive ships. Where you can just drop down into the middle of the battlefield, fire a shot, and lift away again. I wonder how they get their tactical information. How they know exactly where to show up, where to aim. I guess each must scan the momentary position and pass it back up to the fleet. Faster-than-light war. Something else we humans are going to have to learn.’

  Jophiel remembered strange prophecies of a lost future. Reality leaks. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘given the chance, we might be rather good at it.’

  Already the strange display was diminishing, the density of the revenant ships on both sides dwindling.

  ‘They’re fleeing,’ Asher said. ‘Both sides. Fleeing the nova, I suppose. But they’re taking the battle with them.’

  ‘Smart move,’ Jophiel said. ‘Time for us to do the same. I’ve got to go down to the planet to meet Michael, and help pick up whoever’s survived in the Xeelee Valleys. You two—’

  Harris snapped. ‘Back to the Plateau. Get everybody else back through the wormhole.’

  ‘You got it. See you on the Cauchy.’ He forced a grin for their benefit, snapped his fingers, and—

  26

  And from one flitter, suddenly he was aboard another. Sitting alongside Michael, his now twelve-years-younger template.

  One other Cauchy crew member sat in the cabin with them; she wore an armoured skinsuit crusted with what looked like dried Ghost blood. Jophiel forced a smile, but her expression was blank; she looked as bewildered as he felt.

  Jophiel looked outside. The flitter hovered in the air. Goober’s Star shone steadily, low on the horizon. Down here in the Xeelee Valleys it was a clear early morning, as Goober c mornings went.

  Buildings, neat cuboids, drifted in the air like Chinese lanterns, all around the flitter.

  ‘On any other day,’ Michael Poole said, ‘that would be an unusual sight.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jophiel checked the time. ‘Look, there’s six minutes to go before the nova light arrives. And here we are on the daylight side of the planet. Dawn was a few minutes ago. We’re right under the nova. Why aren’t we loading up the refugees?’

  ‘They wouldn’t come aboard.’ Poole’s manner was controlled, but his words clipped, rapid. Jophiel could sense the tension. ‘I’ve been calling. They insisted they’d be safer inside.’

  ‘Inside where?’

  Poole pointed, at the nearest of the drifting buildings.

  Jophiel leaned over a comms console. ‘Susan Chen, are you there?’

  The voice was clear but weak. ‘Jophiel? It is good to hear your voice. You are in great danger. You must come aboard.’

  ‘I – what? Almost exactly what I was going to say to you. Susan, listen. We need to get you all aboard the flitter. Piled up in the hold, if we have to. It won’t be comfortable but the ride will only be a few minutes. We have to get away from here, and into the shadow of the planet, before—’

  ‘The star explodes. I know. But the building will shelter us. Don’t you see?’

  ‘No,’ Michael Poole said curtly.

  A soft detonation of light in the eastern sky made them both wince. Jophiel glanced out. Some precursor flare?

  ‘Running out of time. Jophiel.’

  Jophiel was thinking fast.

  ‘She does have a point, Michael, I believe. We studied Xeelee hull plate back in the Solar System, remember. We know how it works – well, not how, but at what rate at least. Xeelee hull plate is a direct converter, of radiant energy – sunlight – into mass. And a sheet of it, a building, grows exponentially. At Earth, under the Sun, the hull plate’s doubling time was somewhere above ten years—’

  ‘The time is inversely proportional to the stellar flux. Here, one of those buildings would take thirty years to double in size.’

  ‘But when the nova hits, you’re looking at an increase of luminosity by a factor of something like eighty thousand. And so a doubling time of—’

  ‘Hours.’ Poole looked at him wildly. ‘So, assuming the Xeelee technology can cope with that kind of luminosity—’

  ‘We know it can. We found the Cache sitting on the surface of the Sun, remember. They probably will be safer than in the flitter, even if we could transfer them all in time. But there are going to be ferocious winds—’

  Another monstrous flare. Jophiel and Poole both winced, but mercifully it faded.

  ‘Even if they’re safe, we’re not,’ Poole snapped. ‘We’re nearly out of t
ime. And even if we all survive the nova light we still need to get this shelter to the Plateau before the sun rises there, and the wormhole closes, and we’re all stuck in this system for good. Look, the flitter has grapples that we adapted to work on Xeelee hull plate. Hopefully. After we trialled the technology on the Cache we decided to ship it on the Cauchy, just in case—’

  ‘I know. Kahra pads I remember. I was in your head at the time.’ He thought, Lethe, do I do this? Hand out a lecture every time I open my mouth? ‘I get the idea. There.’ He pointed. ‘Get a fix on the western side of the building.’

  Poole saw it. ‘Right. So that when the nova light hits we’ll be in its shadow.’

  He immediately threw the flitter into a tight curve, bringing it nestling against the smooth, pale grey hull-plate hide of the building. He grinned. ‘This might even work—’

  Slam.

  Nova dawn.

  The flitter cabin turned dark, like a cave.

  27

  A breathless silence.

  Jophiel wasn’t really here at all, not physically. Yet he had seemed to feel the arrival of the nova wavefront as a physical blow.

  But the ship’s systems diminished the incoming light to a trickle. Now, looking cautiously out through a near-blackened window, Jophiel saw the shape of the Xeelee hull-plate building, a reassuringly solid wall to which Poole had already fixed tethers from the flitter. And he was towing the floating building away from the risen star, towards the terminator and the planet’s night side, with the flitter cowering in the building’s shadow. He worked steadily, calmly, competently.

  The building seemed to be visibly growing as it soaked up nova light. Jophiel wondered how it would be to ride inside. Perhaps you would hear the walls creaking as they grew.

  And, below, Jophiel saw a world put to the torch.

  Seen in the eerie filtered light, forest clumps flashed and were gone in what looked more like soft explosions than fires. Over a lake that stretched to the horizon, steaming, turbulent air was rising; at the shore the bed was already exposed, mud drying, cracking and splitting. He saw a bluff of rock, maybe a sandstone, that seemed to be melting, slumping—

  There was a mighty shove sideways, as if the flitter had been punched by an invisible giant. Beyond the window, Jophiel saw the great building rock and tilt.

  ‘Compensating!’ Poole yelled. ‘Nova weather!’

  Jophiel pictured it. Speed-of-sound winds laden with superheated steam would already be pouring away from the centre of the daylit face, a devastating wave of destruction that was heading for the terminator, the line of night, where it would spill over into the dark lands, even before the lethal sun itself rose on those places.

  Poole gave the flitter its head, racing away from the glaring star. ‘Still trying to outrun it. Going supersonic. Towing a building! We’re probably setting some kind of record.’

  Jophiel saw one of the flitter’s stabilising fins poke out into the light, just for an instant, as ship and building followed their wild gyrations in the nova winds. The illuminated section melted, vaporised, vanished. When the wing stump was dragged back into the shadows it looked as if that section had been severed by a laser cutter, the wound clean and still glowing.

  Then, just four minutes after the nova light had hit, they passed into darkness: an eerie sunset. They were in the shadow of the planet.

  But a monstrous dawn flowered behind them, and an aurora flapped above the air.

  Now there was a new light in the muddled sky, dazzling bright, a garish pinpoint. A monitor told Jophiel that was Goober a, the innermost planet: the reflected light from that small world had reached Jophiel’s sky, a pinpoint that shone as bright as a full Moon over Earth, he estimated.

  And there, sweeping beneath their prow, Ghost Plateau, unmistakable to Jophiel from the air, even though the Ghost tangleships and other structures that had littered this place were all gone now – all save the two GUTship lifedomes, like blisters on the rocky ground. Even the air-containing force-field dome which the Ghosts had erected over the lifedomes had evidently collapsed.

  Poole checked another display. ‘Well, the first flitter has already passed through the wormhole, with all it could carry. Nicola was piloting, by the way.’

  ‘Should have guessed that.’

  The flitter landed, slamming brutally, close to the domes. The drifting, bloated Xeelee building followed it down more slowly, to land gentle as thistledown.

  Jophiel let out a lungful of air. ‘We did it.’

  ‘That was the easy part. Come on.’

  Poole threw open the flitter’s hatches and made a general broadcast.

  ‘All crew, everybody left, get out here and aboard. And you folk in the Xeelee building.’ He checked a display. ‘We’ve got maybe five minutes until sunrise itself, but only one more minute until the weather gets here. The storm front is rushing at us at the speed of sound, and the planet’s rotation is taking us towards the dawn twice as fast . . . Anyhow we’re the last ride out. Pile in, folks.’

  Jophiel saw people running, from the lifedomes, from the grounded hull-plate Xeelee building, all in skinsuits, some helping others. Somewhere in there was Susan Chen, Jophiel thought, ending a thousand years of dogged survival on this world, still leading the damaged children she had done so much to protect.

  And even as the refugees scrambled aboard the flitter, out of nowhere rain hammered down. The ground turned to slippery mud, and people slithered, fell. The flitter’s hull shook and shuddered under the rain’s impact. Jophiel thought he heard thunder crack.

  Poole muttered, ‘All that steam-laden air rushing over and hitting the cold air of the night side.’ He kept watching the chronometers. ‘Good. Everybody’s aboard. Time to close up.’ He slapped a control.

  The flitter lifted, and hurtled through howling, opaque air straight at the Island dome, and the wormhole interface that still stood atop it.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Jophiel said.

  ‘What? Don’t distract me . . . Goodbye? You’re still here.’

  ‘I just split off a projection. Another Virtual copy, inside the Island lifedome. That’s the version that just said goodbye.’

  ‘Another copy? Why? Oh. You left a witness?’

  ‘We’re here to learn, Michael.’

  Poole shrugged. ‘Makes no difference now. Here we go—’

  It was seven minutes after the first strike of nova light on Goober c. Three minutes before dawn, here.

  The flitter didn’t slow as it hurled itself through the tetrahedral interface.

  And the flitter fell, tumbling, into a sky black as night.

  Thanks to the relativistic velocity of the wormhole mouth it had emerged from, Jophiel realised, all that was visible of the universe was a single GUTship, the Cauchy, and a patch of folded starlight ahead. From nova dawn to interstellar night, in seconds.

  And, following the flitter, hot air gushed from the interface, expanding out of the big triangular facets, spreading out, quickly glittering with ice. This was water from the lakes and oceans of Goober c, flashed to steam, hurled across light-months, and now shivering to ice in the deep cold of interstellar space.

  Poole let the flitter drift. He and Jophiel watched in silence.

  A few minutes later, a single burst of nova light, as the lethal sun at last rose over Ghost Plateau. Bursting through the wormhole – and then gone in a heartbeat, as the far interface was destroyed, and the wormhole collapsed at last.

  Poole glanced at Jophiel. ‘He’s on his own. Your copy.’

  ‘The lifedome infrastructure will survive. The support for his Virtual projection. Comms too. He’ll accept his lot and do his job. I would. You would.’

  Poole thought that over, and nodded. ‘I guess so.’

  A message from Nicola showed on a display near Jophiel. ‘Two pieces of news,’ Jophiel told Mich
ael. ‘Nicola says she saved the dark-matter pod.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The crew. You saved them, Michael . . .’ He studied a display. ‘Though not as many as you think.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Jophiel showed him the message. ‘The Gourd crew. As soon as we passed through the wormhole. They – disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’ Poole glared. ‘Lethe. Well, it doesn’t matter. But that’s the end of the Gourd, at last. And that’s what became of just one of the thousands of scatterships we sent out into the dark. A thousand years of misery and imprisonment. Degradation. Ships that I sent out.’

  ‘We didn’t have a choice,’ Jophiel said firmly. ‘We couldn’t have known what awaited us. Couldn’t have known that the whole Galaxy seems to be infested by voracious species waging war on each other with purloined Xeelee technology . . . Look, Michael. You didn’t cause any of this. You just reacted. The Xeelee caused it. And it’s the Xeelee we have to hold to account.’

  Poole sat in silence for a very long minute. Then he said, ‘You look like me. But you’re not me. You never were, even when you were created, and now you’re twelve years older. You’re not me. And the difference with every day that passes. So don’t presume to tell me what to do. Come on. We’ve got work to do.’

  They fell silent, as the flitter calmly headed for its rendezvous with the lifedome of the Cauchy.

  28

  ‘My name is Jophiel Poole. This first entry is being made – you can check the precise timings – one hour after the nova light reached this world. Perhaps fifty minutes since dawn at this location, the Ghost Plateau.

  ‘I am, was, a partial of Michael Poole, cast off for a specific purpose. In fact I am a copy of a copy. The projection technology gives me the illusory comfort of the Island lifedome, still sheltering me. Tough stuff. Good engineering.