Starfall Read online

  STARFALL

  Stephen Baxter

  AD 4771

  Starfall minus 49 years

  Between Sol and Alpha Centauri

  Minya and Huul stood together on the comet's observation deck, in freefall, gently embraced by smart webbing. Beneath their feet lay the bulk of the comet nucleus, a fifty-kilometres-deep frozen ocean of dirty water ice. Above their heads was the fine carapace of the observation blister, and above that nothing but stars, a field of jewels.

  Huul drank in the view, for he knew he had only moments left to enjoy it. Already the bots were working at the fringe of the window, coating it over with an authentic-looking layer of comet frost. When the blister was covered altogether it would be dismantled, this outer level of decking collapsed, and the human crew confined to a huddle of chilly chambers deep in the comet's heart

  And Huul's son, yet unborn, would never see the stars at all—not until he was older than Huul was now. Huul, with a spasm of regret, put his hand on his wife's belly, trying to feel the warmth of the baby within.

  Minya knew what he was thinking. She was tougher than he was, but more empathetic too. "I know," she said. "We are sacrificing a great deal—and we are imposing that sacrifice on our son. But his son will thank us."

  Huul grunted. "Perhaps. But he might be the one doing the fighting, by the time we get to Sol."

  "I know, I know. Let's just enjoy the view, while it lasts."

  He gazed out at the stars. "Isn't it strange to think that whether you live in Alpha system or Sol system, the stars you see are much the same? We have that much in common at least."

  "True. With a couple of exceptions." And she pointed back the way they had come, back to Alpha Centauri, which even from this immense distance showed as a clear double sun.

  And when Huul looked the other way he saw a compact constellation. From Earth it was a W shape, known as Cassiopeia, one of the most easily recognisable of the star figures—but from Alpha, and from here, there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude scribble. That star was Sol, bright but not exceptionally so, the first star of mankind.

  "It doesn't look much, does it?" Minya murmured. "Just a lantern in the sky. But that is the seat of the Shiras, the source of all our trouble."

  "And that," said Huul with mordant humour, "is where you and I will die."

  "You mustn't talk like that," Minya snapped. "The Starfall project is already magnificent, Huul. Magnificent!"

  She was right, Huul knew. The starborn's rebellion against Earth had already been decades in the planning. The supplying of this comet-ship by lightsail out of Alpha, about as covert an operation as could be mounted on such a scale, had alone taken decades. And now the comet had been nudged onto a path that would take it sailing into Sol system in less than five decades, a trajectory intended to make it appear that this was just another long-period comet making an entirely natural visit to its parent star. But a crew of saboteurs would be huddled in its icy heart, locked into a tightly closed miniature ecology, not allowing as much as a stray erg of heat to leak to space to betray their presence.

  Minya said, "The earthworms won't know we're among them until we're bright in the skies of Earth. And then we'll see what's what. Remember, Huul. We will be the Second Wave of the Starfall assault, second only to the smart plague. When we have helped cut away the tyranny of the Shiras at the root, to us will accrue much glory—and to our descendants for all time, as far as mankind journeys in time and space."

  But the labouring bots were almost done in frosting over the observation dome. And, Huul thought, I may die without ever seeing another star.

  Minya tugged at his hand. "Come on. We've work to do."

  AD 4801

  Starfall minus 19 years

  Tau Ceti

  The flitter from the Facula arrowed towards the centre of the daylit face of the planet. Tau Ceti II was a small, warm, watery world, all but drowned by a vast ocean, and habitually swathed in cloud—and now, according to imperial intelligence, host to an unauthorised human colony.

  "There's definitely something wrong," Pella said.

  Stillich turned to his First Officer. Pella sat crammed in with the assault squad in the translucent hull of this intrasystem flitter. She was peering obsessively at a diorama of their target. Stillich glanced around at his marines, sitting in their smartsuits, the sunburst sigil of the Empire of Sol on their breasts. He got grins back, but he could sense their nervousness, and Pella's fretting wasn't helping.

  The journey out from Sol had been over five years subjective, more than thirteen objective. This was Stillich's first interstellar jaunt under his own command, and he understood that his primary task during the cruise out had been to keep his crew interested, with a training programme half a decade long intended to sharpen them for this very moment, the planetfall. Stillich, in fact, had already started to turn his attention to the return journey, when another five-year programme would prepare the crew for the culture shock of their return.

  To Stillich the journey itself had been the principal challenge. He had not expected the mission itself, the subduing of a ragged bunch of second-hand colonists from Alpha, to present any problems. But now here was Pella with her analyses, mucking up morale, right at the climax of the mission.

  He murmured to her, "There's no evidence of any threat to us from these ragged-arsed colonists, Number One."

  Pella was bright, but she was young, at thirty a decade or so younger than Stillich. And she had a strong, prickly sense of herself. "No, sir. But what we're seeing doesn't make sense. The colony looks wrong. Half-dismantled, rebuilt. Look." She showed him hastily processed drone images of circular landforms, evidence of abandoned structures. "There can't be more than a few thousand people on the planet. Why would you move?"

  Stillich shrugged. "Weather. Seismic problems. There's any number of reasons why you might get your first location wrong—"

  "These are interstellar colonists, Captain. They're unlikely to be so foolish. I'd be happier if we were going into this situation better informed."

  So would I, Stillich thought, but he wasn't about to say so before his troops. He forced a grin. "We're just going to have to have our wits about us when we land. Right, lads?"

  He was rewarded with a muted cheer. "You said it, skip."

  A gong's low chime, the call to prayer, filled the cabin of the little flitter. The men had their solar amulets fixed outside their suits to their wrists, and they consulted these now, shifting in their seats so they could face towards Sol. Soon the murmured prayers began.

  Stillich turned too. He knew where Sol was, actually; he could find it from the constellations, distorted by this translation to Tau Ceti. But nearly twelve light years from Earth it was tricky to pick out the home star. That, of course, was proclaimed by the Shiras as the natural limit to the human dominion—the Empire of Sol was to be that bubble of space close enough that you could see the home star with the naked eye, and so be able to pray to its munificence.

  But Stillich knew that the Shiras' control depended on more practical considerations.

  The Facula was a GUTdrive starship. 'GUT' stood for 'Grand Unified Theory'. The ship was essentially a plasma rocket, its exhaust propelled by a phase-transition energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself. After a thousand years this was still the peak of mankind's interstellar technology. But the Facula was a sublight ship. And a human navy forever contained by lightspeed had a certain natural reach.

  The Facula was capable of sustaining a one-gravity acceleration for years, indeed decades. Including time for acceleration and deceleration, she could reach Alpha Centauri in a mere forty-three months subjective, and Tau Ceti in a little more than five years. But in flight,
thanks to relativistic time dilation, the crew's heartbeats were slowed, their lives extended, and the voyages as measured by the external world were longer—it was fourteen years to Tau Ceti, as recorded on Earth.

  And it was this rigidity of relativistic time that set the true limits on the Shiras' interstellar grasp. The young crew of the Facula were soldiers of the Empress; they would fight for Shira XXXII if there was a reasonable promise that they would be brought home. But it had been discovered that if any longer than a generation elapsed back home that promise was broken, loyalty dissipated by an excess of culture shock; any longer a flight became an emigration. AS anti-ageing technology made no difference, for this limit was a function of human consciousness, not significantly altered by extended lifespans—and besides, all soldiers were young, as they had always been. Even using sleeper pods would not help; that could only cut down the subjective flight time, not the objective interval.

  Given such fundamental limits, Tau Ceti was about as far as the Shiras could ever extend their empire. But it was enough, for no less than nineteen star systems, plus Sol, lay within that limit of loyalty. And this mission was proof that the Shiras enforced their rule right to the boundaries.

  The time for prayer was over. The marines folded away their amulets and closed their faceplates.

  The flitter ducked into the murky air of Tau Ceti's second world.

  They landed briskly on the perimeter of the largest human colony, close to the shore of an island-continent. The hull cracked open, and the marines spilled out to set up a secure perimeter around the flitter. Glowing drones flooded the air, and bots began digging trenches.

  Stillich peered about curiously. A lid of cloud turned the pale light of Tau Ceti to a dull grey. They had apparently come down in a field, where Earth vegetation drew sustenance from the nutrients of an alien soil, no doubt heavily nano-worked. But plants of a more exotic sort, with leaves of purple and silver-grey, clustered among the green. There were structures on the low horizon, unprepossessing, just shacks, really. People stood before the shacks, adults with hands on hips, a couple of children. They watched the marines with apparent curiosity but no sign of fear or deference.

  Although Tau Ceti was actually the most sun-like of all the stars within the Empire of Sol, such were the distracting riches of Alpha system that only one serious colonising expedition from Earth had been mounted here—and that ship had been reassigned to a more urgent mission and had never been heard of again.

  Evidently all that had changed.

  "Walk with me," Stillich said to Pella. He set off towards the shacks, and Pella followed. Marines shadowed them, weapons in hand. "What a dump," Stillich said. "This world, this dismal farm, those shacks. To come all this way to live like this."

  Pella, characteristically, was peering into her data desk, rather than studying the world around her. "They will be grateful we have come to save them, sir ... " She stopped suddenly, a hundred paces short of the shacks. "Look." She pointed to a kind of earthwork, circular, just a system of ditches and low ramparts cut into the ground. "This is what I saw from the drones. Can you see the way the ground has been flattened within the perimeter, as if something has been set down here? And over there—" She pointed. "Residual traces of radioactivity."

  "They came here in a GUTship," Stillich said.

  "Yes, sir. They brought it down and dismantled it. They lived in the lifedome, just here, and used the GUTdrive for power."

  "And now it's all gone."

  "And quite recently too—l mean, a few decades ... "

  A woman approached them. Short, squat, she had the heavy shoulders and big hands of a farmer. She was perhaps forty, though with AS tech she could be any age. She wore a facemask and a small air pack, but no other environmental protection. She grinned, showing good teeth, and said something in a liquid dialect that Stillich's systems began to translate for him.

  He waved that away. "Speak Earthish," he snapped.

  The woman eyed him, perhaps deciding whether to obey him or not. "I said, 'Welcome to Home'."

  "What an original name," sneered Pella.

  "You don't need to wear those fancy suits. An air mask will do. We long since nanoed out any nasties. A couple more generations and—"

  "You should not be here," Stillich said. "This colony is unauthorised."

  "Well, you'll have to take that up with my grandfather, who came here from Alpha system when Footprint got a bit too full for his liking."

  Pella looked around. "Where is your grandfather?"

  "Dead these forty years. Don't you want to know my name?"

  Pella snapped, "Your name is irrelevant. The GUTships you used to get here were the property of the Empire of Sol."

  The farmer laughed again.

  Pella, her temper quick, her ego strong, raised her arm.

  Stillich touched her shoulder to restrain her. He said, "Woman—you broke up your transport ship to build your first colony here." He gestured. "You lived in the lifedome. You used the GUT engine for power. And yet these things are gone."

  "You reassembled the ship, that's obvious," Pella said. "And other vessels. But why? Where have you sent them?"

  The woman responded with another grin, surly.

  This time Pella did strike her, using her elbow to dash the woman to the ground. Marines rushed in, weapons raised. "Take her," Pella said. "And her children. Torch this place. We will have five years to empty her of all she knows, before we reach Sol system once more."

  As the marines closed on the shack-like farm buildings, Stillich considered intervening. This was no way to run an empire, this use of brute force. But he didn't want to contradict his First Officer in front of the marines; the fate of this farmer wasn't important enough for that.

  Pella stood with him, breathing hard, still angry. "Actually I'm not sure how concerned we should be, sir. Now I stand here, amid the rubble of these colonists' petty dreams—if some of them have taken their GUTships off into the dark, so what? There's no G-class star until you get to Delta Pavonis, eight more light years out from Sol. Too far away to bother us. Why should we care?"

  But it wasn't obvious to Stillich that this new jaunt had been outwards at all.

  Human space was sparsely settled, save for Sol system itself, and Alpha system. And if you weren't to travel outwards, a return journey to Alpha was by far the most likely destination. Stillich had visited Alpha himself, on the two previous interstellar missions of his career. It was a big, sprawling, increasingly crowded system—potentially richer in resources even than Sol system itself. And as a junior officer he had detected signs of rebelliousness there, signs that the Alphans were chafing under the yoke of the Shiras' taxes and political control, signs he had dutifully reported to his superiors.

  It might be harmless. Maybe the GUTships had gone back to pick up another cadre of colonists for Tau Ceti. Or maybe not.

  "Tidy up here," he said to Pella. "But do it fast; the sooner we get out of here the better. I'm going back to the Facula to send a message to Earth." Which itself would take twelve years to get there. He turned and stalked back to the flitter.

  Pella called, "Sir, the colonists—are they to be permitted to stay?"

  He considered. "No." That was the tidiest solution. "We have sleeper pods enough to transport these ragged villagers back to Sol. Get on with it, Pella. And avoid excessive violence."

  "Sir."

  Stillich heard screaming from the farmer's children. He did not look back.

  AD 4814

  Starfall minus 6 years

  Armonktown, Footprint. Alpha System

  Suber's youngest son, little Suber, Su-su, called him out of the house. "Dad, come see. I think there's another one up there, another GUTship!"

  Suber had been helping Fay prepare the evening meal. Fay, at thirty, Suber's second wife, was nearly seventy years Suber's junior, though thanks to his AS treatment she actually looked a little older. She grinned across at him. "Go. You can help me for the next hundred
years; Su-su will only be seven years old once. Go!"

  So he grabbed his coat and let his son drag him out of the house, down the darkened street towards the park, where, away from the streetlights of Armonktown, you got the best view of the sky. But Suber was soon winded as he tried to keep up with Su-su. He had been born on Earth—though Su-su did not know that, and nor did Fay, and they never would-and even after seven decades here and extensive nano treatments Footprint's stronger gravity still hung heavy as a lead coat.

  They came to the park. It was a fall evening, and the dew lay on the grass and the roses' thorns, and glistened on the blisters of the rope-trees, a native species allowed to prosper in their own little bubbles of Footprint air inside the town dome. And there on the grass, little Su-su turned his button face up to the sky. "See, dad?"

  Suber looked up.

  The sky was crowded and complex. From Footprint, a world of Alpha A, sun B was a brilliant star in the sky, closer to Alpha A than planet Neptune was to Sol, bright enough to cast sharp shadows; on this world there were double sunrises, double sunsets, strange eclipses of one star by the other. And there was a line of light drawn across the sky: dazzling, alluring, that zodiacal gleam was the sparkle of trillions of asteroids. The mutual influence of A and B had prevented the formation of large planets; all the volatile material that had been absorbed into Sol's great gas giants was here left unconsolidated, asteroids drifting in huge lanes around the twin stars. Footprint's sky was full of flying mines.

  But what interested Su-su wasn't the natural wonders of the sky but the signs of human activity. He pointed with his small finger, to a cloud of light slivers not far from the zenith. "Can you see, dad? I can count them. One two three four five seven twelve! And there's a new one since they passed over yesterday."