Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Jophiel was astonished.

  It did make made sense that the Wheel would reconfigure, as the end of its five-million-year mission approached, and a new phase began. But it was profoundly unsettling to have this tremendous habitat rebuild itself around them all.

  Asher said, ‘And when we put it together with what we’ve learned of the disc-ships . . .’ She ducked her head, and looked out of the flyer, peering up at the Galaxy-centre sky, as if seeking to see the rest of the Wheel up there. ‘It’s so remote, and on such a large scale, and so slow, it’s like tracking the motion of planets. But we think that the cupworlds are sliding along their Decks. Even descending, down the struts. This is all very partial.’

  ‘Wow!’ Chinelo sat up. ‘And I bet the cupworlds are being brought down here, to be – emptied out.’

  ‘Or sampled, at least,’ Asher said. ‘Maybe using wormhole links, given the time dilation. It does look that way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But you couldn’t empty a whole world into a lifeboat. How would you choose what to put in?’

  Asher spread her hands. ‘We don’t know. We may never know. We’re like ants crawling around this mechanism ourselves, Chinelo.’

  Jophiel, stunned, tried to picture it. The Wheel like some vast piece of clockwork, with whole worlds, or world-sized artefacts, being moved around like beads on an abacus. The disc-ship lifeboats filling up with samples of life. And then—

  And then what? Would the lifeboats be released, to go flying off into the dark?

  ‘It’s wonderful, though,’ Chinelo said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Max Ward just glowered. ‘That’s one word for it.’

  They crossed over one particularly notable occupied disc-ship dimple, thirty-four days out from the Cauchy camp. In this one, tangles of silver rope lay inert across an ice-strewn landscape. In the larger concentration, a tower lifted above the tangle, the jewel-like sculpture at its tip inert.

  Ghosts, again. Asher made her records. There was little discussion.

  On the forty-second day of the flyer’s journey, they arrived at the Xeelee Nest.

  Just as Asher’s remote sensor results had suggested, it was like an enlarged twin of the wormhole facility on Deck Three.

  A blue box, floating above the hull plate.

  71

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 28 years 245 days

  Earth date: c. ad 3,409,000

  Nicola set down the flyer perhaps five hundred metres from the Xeelee structure.

  Ward and Michael Poole prepared to set off for a preliminary scout. Ward checked out his own skinsuit briskly, hefted a weapon, a laser rifle, and glared around. ‘You’ve all got plenty to do. Secure the flyer. Prepare for a full raid. Let’s keep this simple.’

  Nicola frowned. ‘Simple? There’s nothing simple about this, Ward. Save for your weapon, which won’t be a scrap of use against the Xeelee.’

  But Jophiel saw how Ward glanced at the orange pack on Poole’s back. In there, Jophiel knew, was the bamboo box, the gift from Gallia Three. So Ward knew something about that.

  Ward grinned back at Nicola. ‘We’ll see. On the other hand, we may achieve something here that probably no other species has managed in ten million years. Ten billion, for all I know. Strike back at the Xeelee.’ He winked at Chinelo, who stared at him wide-eyed. ‘Come on, Poole.’

  Jophiel and Nicola watched them go.

  ‘You’re not happy,’ Jophiel said.

  Nicola’s expression, always hard to read, was pinched. ‘I give Max credit. He was a hero of Cold Earth. He was a big figure, then. But now we’ve dragged him across the Galaxy, and he’s – small.’

  Jophiel shrugged. ‘But he’s all we have.’

  ‘True enough. You know, I’ve never believed in fretting about problems before they turn up. Now look at me. Must be the Ghost in me. Or I’ve spent too much time with you morbid Pooles. Come on. Let’s go and oil our six-shooters like the Marshal said.’

  After an hour, the scouts returned.

  Back in the enclosure of the flyer, pulling open their skinsuits, a grim-faced Poole gave a quick summary. ‘We learned nothing new we didn’t get from the drones, and the remote survey. We didn’t actually touch it, or ping it with anything more threatening than a gravity-wave probe. The Nest looks to be the same kind of mechanism as the wormhole between the Decks. A big blue box, floating maybe a metre off the floor. There are nested ports in each of the faces we could see, just like the Deck hatches. It didn’t react to our presence. Seems to be the same kind of hull-plate material as Nicola’s wormhole. But bigger.’

  ‘A lot bigger,’ Ward said. ‘Two hundred metres on a side, roughly.’

  Nicola shrugged. ‘The next step is obvious. We go inside.’

  ‘Not until we’re fresh.’ Ward glared around. ‘We’ll rest for one watch. Get some sleep if you can.’ He glanced at Jophiel. ‘Those of you without an off switch, anyhow.’

  Poole nodded curtly.

  For Jophiel, sleepless, the watch lasted a geological age.

  At last they started moving.

  Inside the flyer, under Ward’s guidance, they checked out their gear. Each wore a skinsuit, and carried a first-aid kit. Weapons, from knives up to laser rifles. Softscreens in pockets and mounted on their sleeves. For communications, once they were inside a structure that was likely to be opaque even to neutrinos, they would trail cables in from the exterior. And as a backup, in case the cables failed or were cut, Asher had rigged up a backpack containing a minute lump of condensed matter. The lump was not heavy, but extremely dense, and when manipulated by electromagnetic fields it gave off gravity waves, weak but detectable even through Xeelee hull plate.

  They even had a short stepladder and lengths of rope for climbing around inside the putative interior of the structure.

  And Poole hefted his orange backpack, containing the bamboo box.

  As they checked their stuff, Ward gathered them together to talk through his plan of action one last time. ‘If the Deck wormhole is a precedent, we’re expecting to find multiple chambers within that box.’ He shook his head. ‘Or beyond. Whatever. So, we leave a trail as we go. And the comms cable.

  ‘Also we have to think about securing a retreat. One person stays outside. And we leave one person in each chamber we encounter, until we get to . . . whatever we find. I know that spreads us out, but it gives us cover, front and back. Ideally I’d leave somebody back in the flyer, but there may be too few of us as it is.’

  ‘We need to keep talking,’ Poole put in. ‘Describe what you’re seeing. Make sketches, maps. We must expect the geometry to be strange. We may be able to piece it together later, from our differing perceptions.’

  ‘Last chance to send a message home,’ Ward said. ‘Back to the convoy, I mean. We might even get a reply or two before we deploy. Even at this distance a lightspeed signal will only take a few seconds.’

  Chinelo stared; she evidently hadn’t thought that far. ‘What kind of message, Max?’

  ‘Anything you want to say. Put your affairs in order. If you’ve got anybody you need to apologise to, do it now.’

  Chinelo considered that. ‘What will you be saying?’

  He grinned. ‘“Don’t touch my stuff.”’

  Obeying one last insistent order from Max, in pairs they checked over each other’s skinsuits.

  Then Max took a deep breath. ‘Let’s do this.’ And he pushed open the flyer’s airlock door.

  Once outside, Jophiel looked back at the flyer. Stranded on the clean hull-plate floor of the Deck, against the smooth red wash of the Wheel’s western sky, it looked crude, ungainly, primitive.

  It seemed to take another age to walk the final five hundred metres to the Xeelee structure.

  Nicola was watchful. Even quiet, for her. After a few paces, Jophiel leaned over to her. ‘Something on your mi
nd?’

  Her expression was enigmatic, even given the stiffness of her artificial face. ‘Just looking around. Looking at us. Max Ward, the gung-ho soldier, as brittle as an over-sharpened blade. A wide-eyed kid, an even more wide-eyed astrophysicist, me, a miracle of alien technological tinkering – and you, a Virtual copy. Quite a comet-tail of losers and freaks, trailing Michael Poole across a Galaxy and three million years.’

  Jophiel smiled. ‘That’s life. Michael’s life anyhow. And it’s all we have.’

  So they reached the artefact. Just as advertised, a floating blue box, a big one.

  The Xeelee Nest.

  The group instinctively gathered closer together.

  Max glared. ‘Scatter. Move away. You, Chinelo, over there, you, Nicola . . . Come on, guys. Basic field craft, that I’ve been drumming into you for a quarter of a century. Or trying to. Don’t let yourself get put in a position where you could be taken out by one shot.’

  Nicola looked around, theatrically. ‘One shot from what?’

  ‘Don’t get smart. You. Fennell. You only attended one of my drill classes that I recall, and you were the worst cadet I ever had.’

  Asher smiled. ‘That makes me obscurely proud.’

  ‘Good. That’s why I’m leaving you out here. Hold this.’ It was one end of a spool of multiple cables. ‘Stay in touch with us, and with the convoy, as long as you can. And if we fail, do your best to report back. So that next time they don’t make the same mistakes.’

  Asher seemed lost for words.

  Poole stepped up to her. ‘Just observe like you always have, Asher,’ he said, solemn-faced. ‘All the way back to Larunda, and our dive into the Sun. What you always did best.’

  After that, it was down to business.

  Max walked up to the wall of the Xeelee structure, and studied the hatch lines. This wasn’t a simple nesting as with the much smaller structure of the mountaintop wormhole, Jophiel saw, rather a mosaic of varying hatch sizes, some looking large enough to admit a craft the size of the flyer, others more human-scale, many lined up along the lower edge. All very practical – even mundane, he thought. But then, a hatch was a hatch no matter how advanced you were.

  Max reached up with his gloved hand – and pressed his palm against the pale blue wall, in the middle of one of those lower inscribed hatches.

  There was no reaction from the structure. No harm done to Max. He turned around and grinned. ‘So much for first contact. Now to open this thing up.’

  He pushed again, more firmly.

  The hatch swung back, on an invisible hinge over his head. More blue light spilled from the interior, reflecting from Max’s helmet, the folds of his armoured skinsuit.

  ‘Good. I’m still in one piece. And it looks just like before, like the wormhole between the decks. But bigger. OK, Chinelo, you have that stepladder?’

  The little ladder, extended to about a metre and a half so it rested on the lower lip of the open hatch, itself could not have been a more mundane sight in the circumstances, Jophiel thought. Just like Nicola’s ladder at the wormhole in Deck Three. Something about it lifted his spirits. Basic human practicality in the face of mystery. And so far, the mystery was cooperating.

  ‘Now,’ Max said. ‘We do it like I said, like we rehearsed. We move in two at a time, with the rest hanging back, providing cover if you can, being ready to help us draw back if necessary. The first pair is me and Poole. If we get separated, if anything goes wrong, we rendezvous back here, with Asher. Remember, whenever you make a move, always name a fall-back rendezvous point first. Got that?’ He turned to Poole. ‘So, you want to take the first step?’

  ‘You lead,’ Poole said. ‘You said it. This is a military expedition, not exploration.’

  Max nodded, unsmiling. ‘Here we go, then. After me . . .’

  He scrambled up the ladder, gripped the door frame, swung in his legs, and, trailing the comms cable, dropped out of sight.

  Hastily, a little clumsily, Poole scrambled up the ladder and followed him in.

  ‘That looked awkward,’ Nicola murmured to Jophiel. ‘We should have practised with the Lethe-spawned ladder.’

  So they should. A detail missed for all Max’s apparent thoroughness. Jophiel’s sense of dread deepened.

  Max and Poole looked back out through the hatch, waved at their crewmates, gave thumbs-up gestures. Then they turned and walked deeper into the structure, soon vanishing into the shadows, lost from sight.

  ‘Nothing to report,’ Max called back. His voice sounded tight, strained. ‘An empty chamber. Big, though. Just pinging it with my laser . . . Two hundred metres on a side. Big enough to fill the whole structure.’

  ‘Except that I’m confident it doesn’t,’ Poole said now. ‘There are more ports in the walls, and the roof, and floor. Funny geometries in here, I’ll bet, just like the wormhole between the decks. Asher, how’s the comms working?’

  ‘The cable is functioning fine. For now your radio and neutrino links are also working through the open hatchway. And the gravity-wave transmitter . . . It’s gone. Dropped out. Looking at the analysis . . . oh.’

  ‘“Oh”?’ Jophiel couldn’t see Max’s face, but could imagine the glare. ‘What is “oh”? Why don’t I like “oh”?’

  ‘You have quagma phantoms in there. Just like the bugs that came through the wormhole with the Xeelee, in Jovian orbit—’

  ‘And brought down the Cauchy,’ Poole said. ‘Lethe. I guess they chomped down on the fragment of condensed matter in Max’s backpack. We should have anticipated this. Where the Xeelee goes, the quagma phantoms seem to follow. Predictably, we’re under attack immediately. So we have to abort. We only came a hundred metres and we’ve already lost one of our comms channels—’

  Max snapped, ‘And what? We fly all the way back to the convoy, and rig up some other fall-back, and fly all the way back and try again, until something else fails?’ He sounded almost panicky to Jophiel, but he pressed on. ‘Look, the bugs won’t hurt us. Aside from the condensed matter, we brought nothing for them to eat. They’ll pass through our bodies like we were Virtuals. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ Poole said. ‘I guess.’

  Max seemed to pull himself together. ‘So we go on. We came a long way for this, and we may not have the resources to mount another try. We do this today, or never,’ he finished flatly.

  Nicola touched Jophiel, evoking protocol-violation pixel sparks, and spoke on a private line. ‘I think he means, he may not have the resources to try again. He’s more scared than we are.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘Yeah. Fragile. Yet he is going on.’

  She nodded. ‘Give him that.’

  Max growled, ‘Asher, you hold the rendezvous point, as before. The other three of you, follow us in.’

  72

  Once he was inside the structure himself – inside a huge blue box, like an abstract cathedral, flooded with sourceless light – Jophiel found his unreal heart beating fast.

  All these years after his own Virtual creation, it did him no good to tell himself that, in theory, he was subject to the least personal danger of any individual here. The walls of Xeelee technology blocked most human signals, but the equipment carried by each of the team, like all human tech, was embedded with the hardware that projected his existence. Even a few metres of the comms cables they were trailing would do the job. And if all went wrong he could fall back to stored copies, held by Asher outside the Nest, or back in the flyer, even in the convoy a million kilometres away.

  All that logic made no difference. He was here, now, and he felt he was in just as much mortal danger as the rest.

  Nicola, to her credit, seemed to recognise this. As the rest were staring around at featureless walls, she was gazing at him. ‘Hey. Take it easy.’

  He looked into her enigmatic face, a mixture of human and Ghost he could barely read, even now.
‘Take it easy? I’m scared, Nicola.’

  ‘I know you are. I know some people think that Virtuals are immune to such feelings. Of course you’re scared. You have a right to be. You are alive, whatever your physical form. You have lived as long as your oldest memory. You see, I’ve had time to think this over. You’re scared because you are alive, not because you’re crazy.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Though I’m not so sure about our crewmates. Chinelo is grinning . . . Come on.’

  Max, for better or worse, was making quick decisions. Now, without further talk, he pushed open another hatch – in the wall opposite the one the five of them had entered through. Jophiel, approaching, could see nothing of what lay beyond. Nothing but an elusive darkness, as if his gaze slid from one side of the open hatchway to the other, without taking in the intervening space.

  Max said now, ‘We go through. To the next room . . .’

  ‘We’re in the Third Room,’ Poole murmured. ‘Counting the exterior as the First Room. Here we are in the second Room . . . Which might not occupy the same space as the First Room, you see . . .’

  And, of course, that next hatch was the first impossible doorway, Jophiel realised. If this structure was as simple as it looked outside, that door ought to have opened up to the exterior, to the Wheel, its relativistic sky. Instead, another room, Room Three where no room ought to be. The others didn’t seem to have noticed. Or, he thought, glancing at Nicola and Poole, if they had, they weren’t remarking on it. Good policy, he decided.

  ‘Let’s go on,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ Max snapped now, edgy again. ‘All five go on to the Third Room. We can see back through the Second to Asher, out there, and she can see us, so a sentry would be wasted here. We don’t know how extensive this structure is going to be . . . Same arrangement as before. Michael and I will lead. You three cover us, and prepare to retrieve if necessary. Let’s go.’