Exultant Page 12

  And it went on for hours. After a few days, sleep became the most important element in Pirius’s life, to be snatched whenever there was an opportunity, in the brief hours they were left alone before reveille, or out on the surface between punishing routines. He even learned to catnap standing up.

  It was very different from Navy training. Much of the training for flight crew was specialized, highly intellectual, with physical training focusing on fast reactions, fine control, endurance—it was a unifying of mind and body, so that both could work effectively and efficiently under the intense conditions of combat. The very geometry of Arches Base, with its n-body architecture of plummeting asteroids, was designed to stimulate, to train you from birth to be free of vertigo, to judge shifting distances and motions on an interplanetary scale.

  But Army grunts didn’t have to fly FTL warships. Here there was nothing more stimulating than dirt. Navy jokers always said that all grunts had to know how to do was dig and die, and now that Pirius was cast down among them, he was starting to suspect it was true.

  Nothing could help poor Enduring Hope, though. No amount of effort seemed to shift a gram of fat from his body, and he always trailed in last.

  As Captain Marta inflicted her punishments on him, she always kept the rest of the training group, hundreds of them sometimes, waiting at attention in their sweat-filled skinsuits. As Hope slogged through his lonely circuits, their resentment was tangible.

  For Pirius, things slowly got more bearable.

  After a couple of weeks, he could feel some of the fat falling off his body, and his muscles didn’t ache quite as much as they had after his first outings. His body was still young and was responding to the exercise, and he was not deprived of food, which he ate ravenously. He would never admit he enjoyed it. But he knew he was growing healthier, and he took some pleasure from the glow of his muscles.

  He learned to use the correct Army rankings: colonel, not commander; sergeant, not petty officer. That at least lubricated the friction with the officers, none of whom had any time for Navy “flyboys.” It turned out that most officers here belonged to the elite regiment known as the Coalition Guard, who even looked down on the rest of the Army.

  The culture of these infantry troops was very different from the Navy’s, but slowly he began to perceive their fundamental pride. This war fought with starships had a surprisingly primitive base. There was ground to be held everywhere, on planets full of people and docks and weapons factories, on Rocks thrown into the battle zone. If the ground was lost, the battle was lost. And if you were infantry you held the ground; if you were infantry you were mankind’s fighting force, and everybody else was just support.

  Even the horror of their surroundings in the barracks began to wear off.

  At first they felt as if they had been thrown into a pit of strange, subhuman animals. They were surrounded by smooth-skinned, lusty kids; it seemed to Pirius that whichever way you looked somebody had his dick out. “It’s like being in a Coalescence,” Cohl whispered, horrified, her eyes wide.

  It certainly wasn’t like Arches. There, the instructors—combat veterans, even if they were invalided out—were role models for the cadets, and discipline was comparatively light. Most adults here were keepers, not teachers. It was all very dismaying.

  But gradually, in their way, these strange swarming kids seemed to accept the Claw crew. Jabbering in their own strange, rapid dialect, the cadets would show them the way to the refectories and showers and delousing blocks. Others showed them simple tips on how to make your life easier: for instance, if you saved some grease from your food and rubbed it into the inside of the joints of your skinsuit, the chafing was eased a lot. Once when Pirius stumbled during one of Marta’s endless route marches, a couple of them came over and helped him up.

  In the barracks one night, another offered to share her Virtual with him. It was a drama, a crude soap opera full of strong plotlines and tearjerking emotions, one of a whole series pumped out endlessly by storytelling machines, all different yet all the same. Pirius watched a little to be polite, then slipped away when his host fell asleep.

  And he became accustomed to visitors in the night: a smooth, round face hovering over his, a brush of lips on lips, a small hand probing under his blanket. These approaches came from boys, girls, and various combinations. Gently, with a smile, he pushed them away. He felt his life was complicated enough for now.

  There was bound to be intense companionship here. After all, this was the front line of a war zone. You grew up with the people around you, and you knew you might die with them.

  Death seemed always near. The very architecture of the Rock reminded you that the Army wasn’t in the business of preserving your life. If an attack were to come, the Rock’s pressurized layers would crush down. The cadets were a shield of human flesh and blood that might protect the Rock’s really valuable cargo, the weapons and ships at the core, a little longer.

  People were expendable. Of course, that was true across the Front, in every branch of the service. Pirius had been brought up to believe he wouldn’t even have been given his life in the first place, if not for the strength and steely will of the Coalition, and it was his duty to give up that life whenever he was asked.

  But the economic logic of war was brutal. At least as a pilot, the extensive training invested in you made you worth something. Here, among these Army grunts, the training was a good deal cheaper, and the grunts were a lot more disposable as a consequence. It was a chilling, desolating thought, which no amount of Doctrinal justification made easier to bear.

  And so these children turned to each other for comfort.

  Anyhow, the situation got better, bit by bit. But not for Enduring Hope.

  Hope withdrew into himself; he became gray, oddly sickly, and was always exhausted. His broad, soft face, between those protruding ears, rarely showed a smile.

  Pirius knew Captain Marta wasn’t trying to destroy Hope; she was attempting to break him down to build him up. But, he feared, she was getting it wrong. Pirius couldn’t see a thing he could do about it.

  It came to a head at a roll call.

  It was the thirty-fourth day after Pirius’s arrival here. Once again Enduring Hope had been the last to finish his run. The silence of the waiting cadets hid a wave of resentment that would break over Hope once he got back to the barracks.

  But today, as he stood in his place in the line, wheezing, his body heaving with the strain of breathing, Pirius saw a spark of defiance.

  Holding her data desk, Captain Marta called him. “Tuta.”

  “My name,” he said, “is Enduring Hope.”

  “Two more laps,” Marta said levelly. “Increased load.”

  Still gasping, Hope stumbled out of his place in the line, and prepared to resume his run. Over the open loop Pirius could hear a barely muffled grumble as the cadets prepared to wait in their skinsuits even longer.

  Enough, he thought. This is my fault, after all. He stepped forward. “Captain Marta.” Every eye save the Captain’s were on him.

  Marta inspected her data desk. “I told you, Cadet. No questions.”

  “His name is Enduring Hope.”

  Hope heard him and stopped; he turned, astonished, hands on his knees. “Pirius,” he said between gasps. “Shut it.”

  Marta said, “If you’re so keen to share his punishment, you can take it for him.” She touched her chest. The weight on Pirius’s shoulders increased suddenly, like a heavy load being dropped onto his back. “Three laps,” she said.

  He walked stiffly out of line, and began to plod toward the crater path.

  Hope said, “No, sir. I won’t have him take my punishment for me.”

  “Four laps, Pirius.”

  “Captain—”

  “Five laps, increased load.”

  Again the burden on Pirius’s back increased. He heard nothing more from Hope, who returned to his place in line.

  Pirius traced the now familiar route, around and aroun
d this ancient splash in the Rock. His footprints shone pale in regolith that weathered quickly in this ferocious radiation environment, so close to the heart of the Galaxy.

  He was already tired from his own training, and the increased load was the heaviest he had yet had to bear. Even after one lap, his heart was thumping, his lungs pulling, a blistering headache locked across his temples, and his stressed knees were tender. But he kept on, and counted off the laps, two, three, four.

  As he neared the end of his fifth lap, Marta came to stand at the end of the course, her artificial half-torso gleaming by Galaxy light. He didn’t acknowledge her. He ran right past her, ran past the finish line. She let him run on, but she increased the load again. And when he repeated the stunt after the next lap, she increased it again.

  By the end of the tenth lap he could barely see where he was going. And yet still he raised one foot after another, still he pounded over the churned-up dirt.

  This time, as he passed Marta, she touched a control on her chest.

  His suit locked to immobility. Suddenly he was a statue, poised in midstep, unbalanced. He fell, feather-slow. He hit the ground and finished up with half his face buried in carbonaceous dirt. His lungs heaved, but he could barely move inside the suit.

  Marta crouched down so he could see her face with his one exposed eye. Over the voice loop he thought he could hear the whir of exoskeletal multipliers. She said, “It’s not my job to kill you, Cadet.”

  “Sir.”

  She leaned closer. “I know your type. I could see it in your face the minute you landed. That’s why I’ve picked on your fat friend, of course. To flush you out.”

  “Sir.”

  She hissed, “Do you imagine you’re a hero, Pirius? Do you think you’re special?” She waved a hand. “Look at the sky. At any moment there are a billion human beings on the front line of this war. And do you imagine that out of all that great host you will be noticed?”

  He struggled to speak. “That’s my ambition, sir.”

  She leaned back. “If I release you, will you keep running?”

  “Sir.”

  “What do I have to do to keep you from killing yourself?”

  “Artillery.”

  “What?”

  “There is an artillery unit, here on Quin.” It was true; Burden had told him. “Send Enduring—uh, Tuta there. He’s an engineer. With respect, sir.”

  She grunted. “I’ll take it on advisement. But next time you pull a stunt like this, cadet, I’ll let you kill yourself for sure.”

  “Noted, sir.” She got up and walked away, leaving him lying in the dirt. Cohl, Burden, and a couple of other cadets came to carry him back to the airlock, where they had to cut him out of his locked suit.

  It took a couple of days to come through, but Enduring Hope’s transfer to a platoon of monopole-cannon gunners was confirmed.

  Chapter 11

  Pirius Red’s cockpit was just a jet-black frame, open to space, very cramped. Through the open frame, he could see the pale yellow-gold stripes of Saturn’s cloud tops turning with majestic slowness. There were no physical controls, only Virtual displays and guide icons that hovered before his chest. The only other light was the soft green glow of the suit’s biopack. It was a lash-up.

  But at least the cockpit was human-built, unlike the rest of his craft.

  When he glanced over his shoulder, he could see the sleek, slim form of the ship’s main body, and the flaring, stunningly graceful shape of its wings. The hull was utterly black, black beyond any human analysis, so black it seemed that not a single infalling photon of Saturn light was reflected. This was the nightfighter disabled and captured by his own future self, Pirius Blue.

  It was hard to believe this was happening. Today, six weeks after arriving on Earth, in the heart of Sol system itself, Pirius Red was to fly a Xeelee ship.

  For a boy brought up at the center of the Galaxy, the sky of Sol system was dismal, empty, its barrenness barely broken by the few stars of this ragged spiral-arm edge and the bright pinpoint of the sun. Even Saturn was surprisingly dim, casting little light; the immense planet might harbor the mightiest concentration of firepower in Sol system, but it seemed oddly fragile. He wondered briefly how it might have looked in the old days when its tremendous rings of ice and dust had not yet been burned up as fuel and weaponry. You couldn’t even see the Core. Nilis had told him that from here the Galaxy center should be a mass of light the size of the Moon, brighter than anything in Earth’s sky save Sol itself. But Galaxy-plane gas clouds hid it. The earthworms didn’t even know they lived in a Galaxy until a few centuries before star flight began.

  But today he didn’t care about earthworms. To Pirius, sitting here, this bare Galaxy-rim sky was a wild, exotic space, and to be at the controls of a genuine nightfighter was an unimaginable adventure.

  He said to himself, “Life doesn’t get any better than this.”

  A scowling face, no larger than his thumbnail, popped into existence before his eyes. “What’s that, Ensign?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  This was Commander Darc, a sour, middle-aged, evidently competent Navy officer. The Navy hierarchy had insisted that one of their own be Pirius’s only contact during the trial itself, and Pirius wasn’t about to argue.

  “You okay in that cage? If you want us to pull you out—”

  “I’m fine.” Pirius smiled, making sure his face was visible behind the visor.

  Darc growled, “Yes, I bet you are. Shrunk to fit, eh, Ensign?”

  That was a jab about Pirius’s compact frame. “If you say so, sir.”

  “Listen up.” The mission clock was counting down, and Darc began his final briefing. “The cockpit we built for you is obviously normal matter, baryonic matter.” Pirius still wasn’t sure what that meant. “But the hull of the ship itself, including the wing stubs, is made of another kind of matter called a condensate. Now, condensate doesn’t have normal quantum properties.”

  Pirius flexed his gloved fingers experimentally; icons sparkled around Darc’s disembodied, shrunken head.

  If a chunk of matter was cooled to extremely low temperatures—a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or less—the atoms would condense into a single quantum state, like a huge “superatom,” marching in step, like the coherent photons in a laser beam. Such a state of matter was called a “Bose-Einstein condensate,” though Pirius had no idea who Bose or Einstein might have been.

  “We don’t know how to make such stuff at room temperatures,” Darc said. “Or how to make it dense; our lab condensates are so thin they are scarcely more than vacuum. But condensate has useful properties. For instance, if you add more atoms, they are encouraged to join the condensate structure.”

  Pirius thought about that. “A condensate is self-healing.”

  “The physicists would say self-amplifying. But yes; so it seems. You do understand that only your wing stubs are condensate. The wings themselves, when unfolded, are the basis of your sublight drive and are much more extensive. And they aren’t material at all… .”

  There was a lot of tension with the Navy crew assigned to the Project. Darc had spent his career in the Solar Navy Group; Pirius had learned that he’d never been deeper into the Galaxy than the Orion Line. Solar would be mankind’s last line of defense against the Xeelee in case of the final collapse, and was itself an ancient force, whose officers were fiercely proud of their own traditions. But Pirius had heard a lot of muttering about the “inbred little freaks” from the center of the Galaxy who were getting all the attention.

  But Pirius was in this seat, not any of them.

  Pirius knew that Nilis was aboard one of the escort ships, no doubt listening to every word. He wished Torec were here to see this. In fact Torec had fought for the privilege of being pilot on these trials. Given where she had got to in her training back on Arches, she was in fact marginally better qualified than Pirius. But Nilis had assigned her to another part of the project, the development of
his “CTC computer,” as he called it, his closed-timelike-curve time-travel computing machine. Nilis made it clear that he considered the CTC-processor work just as important as experiments with the Xeelee ship, and she had to accept the assignment.

  Anyway, in Pirius’s mind there had never been any question about who should get this ship; in a sense it was already his.

  Darc was still talking. “The cockpit you’re sitting in is all ours, a human construct, Pirius. You’ve got full inertial protection in there, and other kinds of shielding. And we believe we have achieved a proper interface of your controls with the ship’s control lines. It was technically tricky, they tell me. More like connecting an implant to a human nervous system than hacking into any electromechanical device.”

  “Sir, you’re telling me you’re not sure if it’s going to work.”

  “Only one way to find out, Ensign.”

  It was hard to concentrate, sitting here in this cockpit. Of course this wasn’t all for Pirius’s benefit; Darc, a career officer, was taking the chance to grandstand for audiences of his own.

  The icons before his face were tantalizing. Only one way to find out. Pirius was in the hot seat; for once in his life he had power over events—and here, not Darc, not Nilis, not even Pirius Blue could get in his way.

  He spread open his hands.

  There was a shiver. It was like a breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of Torec’s fingers on his back when he slept.

  He turned. The nightfighter’s wings had opened. They swept smoothly out of their condensate stubs to become a billowing black plane, like a sheet thrown over some immense bed. He knew that these were not material, not even anything so exotic as condensate. They were constructs of spacetime itself.

  And they pulsed. The ship seemed poised, like a tensed muscle. He could feel it.