Exultant Page 4

  Hope said dryly, “You might want to delay a little before kicking off for home, Pilot. Take a look.” He projected a Virtual into their blisters.

  It was a shape, drifting in space. Pirius made out a slender body, crumpled wings folded. “It’s the fly,” he breathed.

  Hope said, “We have to take it back to base.”

  Cohl said, “We captured a Xeelee? Nobody ever did that before. Pirius, you said you wanted to make your name stand out. Well, perhaps you have. We’ll be heroes!”

  Hope laughed. “I thought heroism is anti-Doctrinal?”

  Pirius brought the greenship about and sent it skimming to the site of the derelict. “First we need to figure how to grapple that thing.”

  As it turned out—when they had got hold of the Xeelee, and with difficulty secured it for FTL flight, and had hauled it all the way back to the base in Arches Cluster—they found themselves to be anything but heroes.

  Chapter 4

  This was the energetic heart of a large galaxy, a radiation bath where humans had to rely on their best technological capabilities to keep their fragile carbon-chemistry bodies from being fried. But to the quagmites it was a cold, dead place, in a dismal and unwelcoming era. The quagmites were survivors of a hotter, faster age than this.

  They were drawn to the neutron star, for in its degenerate-matter interior there was a hint of the conditions of the warm and bright universe they had once known. But even here everything was frozen solid, comparatively. They were like humans stranded on an ice moon, a place where water, the very stuff of life, is frozen as hard as bedrock.

  Still, every now and again there was a spark of something brighter—like the firefly speck which had come hurtling out of nowhere and skimmed the surface of the neutron star. The quagmites lived fast, even in this energy-starved age. To them the fractions of a second of the closest approach to the neutron star were long and drawn-out. They had plenty of time to come close, to bask in the warmth of the ship’s GUTdrive, and to feed.

  And, as was their way, they left their marks in the hull of the ship, the ghostly, frozen shell that surrounded that speck of brilliance.

  When the ship had gone the quagmites dispersed, ever hungry, ever resentful, searching for more primordial heat.

  On Port Sol, Luru Parz turned to her cousin with a quiet satisfaction.

  “I knew they would survive,” she said. “And in the technique they have stumbled upon I see a glimmer of opportunity. I must go.”

  “Where?”

  “Earth.” Luru Parz padded away, her footsteps almost silent.

  Chapter 5

  If you grew up in Arches, meeting your own future self was no big deal.

  The whole point of the place was that from the moment you were born you were trained to fly FTL starships. And everybody knew that an FTL starship was a time machine. Most people figured out for themselves that that meant there might come a day when you would meet a copy of yourself from the future—or the past, depending which end of the transaction you looked at it from.

  Pirius, a seventeen-year-old ensign, had always thought of meeting himself as an interesting trial to be faced one day, along with other notable events, like his first solo flight, his first combat sortie, his first sight of a Xeelee, his first screw. But in practice, when his future self turned up out of the blue, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

  The day began badly. The bunk bed shuddered, and Pirius woke with a start.

  Above him, Torec was growling, “Lethe, are we under attack?—Oh. Good morning, Captain.”

  “Ensign.” Captain Seath’s heavy boot had jolted Pirius awake.

  Pirius scrambled out of his lower bunk. He got tangled up with Torec, who was climbing down from the upper tier. Just for a second, Pirius was distracted by Torec’s warm, sleepy smell, reminding him of their fumble under the sheets before they had fallen asleep last night. But soon they were standing to attention before Seath, in their none-too-clean underwear.

  Seath was a stocky, dark woman, no more than thirty, and might once have been beautiful. But scar tissue was crusted over her brow, the left side of her face was wizened and melted, expressionless, and her mouth drooped. She could have had all this fixed, of course, but Seath was a training officer, and if you were an officer you wore your scars proudly.

  Astonishingly, Torec was snickering.

  Seath said, “I’m pleased to see part of you is awake, Ensign.”

  Pirius glanced down. To his horror a morning erection bulged out of his shorts. Seath reached out a fingernail—bizarrely, it was manicured—and flicked the tip of Pirius’s penis. The hard-on shriveled immediately. Pirius forced himself not to flinch.

  To his chagrin, everybody saw this.

  To left and right the great corridor of the barracks stretched away, a channel of two-tier bunks, equipment lockers, and bio facilities. Below and above too, before and behind, through translucent walls and ceilings, you could see similar corridors arrayed in a neat rectangular lattice, fading to milky indistinctness. Everywhere, the ranks of bunks were emptying as the recruits filed out for the calisthenics routines that began each day. This entire moonlet, the Barracks Ball, was hollowed out and filled up with a million ensigns and other trainees, a million would-be pilots and navigators and engineers and ground crew, all close to Pirius’s age, all eager to be thrown into the endless fray.

  Arches Base was primarily a training academy for flight crews. The cadets here were highly intelligent, physically fit, very lively—and intensely competitive, at work and off duty. And so the place was riven with factions which constantly split, merged and reformed, and with feuds and love affairs that could flare with equal vigor. Today it was Pirius’s bunk that Captain Seath was standing before, and from the corner of his eye Pirius could see that everybody was looking at him with unbridled glee. His life wasn’t going to be worth living after this.

  Seath was walking away. “Pirius, put your pants on. A ship’s come in. You’ve got a visitor.”

  “A visitor? … Sorry, sir. Can I ask what ship?”

  Seath called over her shoulder, “The Assimilator’s Claw. And she’s been in a scrap.”

  That was enough to tell Pirius who his visitor must be. Torec and Pirius stared at each other, bewildered.

  Seath was already receding down the long corridor, here and there snapping out a command to an unfortunate ensign.

  Pirius scrambled into his pants, jacket, and boots. He held a clean-cloth over his face, endured a second of stinging pain as the semisentient material cleaned out his pores and dissolved his stubble, and hurried after Seath. He was relieved to hear Torec hurrying along in his wake; he had a feeling he was going to need some familiar company today.

  Pirius and Torec bundled after Captain Seath into a flitter. The little ship, not much more than a transparent cylinder, closed itself up and squirted away, out of the Barracks Ball and into space.

  All around Pirius, worlds hailed like cannonballs.

  The Barracks Ball was one of more than a hundred swarming worldlets that comprised the Arches Cluster base. Beyond the rocks, of course, hung the hundreds of giant young stars that comprised the cluster itself, tightly packed—in fact, the largest concentration of such stars in the Galaxy. Above the stars themselves was a still more remarkable sight. Glowing filaments, ionized gas dragged along the loops of the Galaxy’s magnetic field, combined into a wispy interstellar architecture constructed on a scale of light-years. The characteristic shape of these filaments had, it was said, given “Arches” its name.

  The Galaxy center itself was just fifty light-years away.

  It was a stunning, bewildering sky—but Pirius, Torec, and Seath had all grown up with it. They made no comment as the flitter laced its perilous route through the shifting three-dimensional geometry of the base.

  Besides, Pirius had more on his mind than rocks and stars.

  Torec looked composed. She was a little shorter than he was, a little broader at the shou
lders. She had a thin face, but a full mouth, startling gray eyes, and brown hair she wore in rows of short spikes. Her nose was upturned, a feature she hated, but Pirius thought it made her beautiful. They had been each other’s squeezes, in barracks argot, for a couple of months now—staggering longevity in the fevered atmosphere of the barracks. But, despite the taunting from their colleagues, they showed no signs of falling out. Pirius was glad that Torec’s calm presence was with him as he faced the strangeness to come.

  It was standard policy for any data FTL-leaked from possible futures to be presented immediately to any individual named in that data. Some of Pirius’s friends even knew when and how they were going to die. And so Pirius already knew, everybody knew, that in the future he was destined to pilot a ship called the Assimilator’s Claw. But the Claw hadn’t yet been commissioned. If a version of the Claw had come into dock—and a captain had taken the time to come get him from his bunk to meet a visitor—that visitor could only be one person, and his heart hammered.

  The flitter’s destination was a dry dock. Perhaps a hundred kilometers across, this Rock was pocked by pits where ships nestled. They were all shapes and sizes, from one-person fighters smaller than greenships, through to ponderous, kilometer-wide Spline ships, the living vessels that had been the backbone of the human fleet for fifteen thousand years.

  And in one such yard sat a single, battered greenship. It must be the Assimilator’s Claw, and as Pirius first glimpsed the scarred hull of his future command, his breath caught in his throat.

  Torec nudged his elbow and pointed. A cluster of ships hovered maybe half a kilometer above the Ball’s surface in a cubical array, and Pirius saw the flicker of starbreaker beams and other weapons. Within the array he glimpsed a sleek shape, caged within that three-dimensional fence of fire, a shape with folded wings, black as night even in the glare of the cluster’s huge suns.

  “Lethe,” he said. “That’s a Xeelee ship.”

  “And that,” said Seath coldly, “is the least of your troubles.”

  There was no time to see more.

  The flitter dropped into a port. Even before the docking was complete, Seath was walking toward the hatch.

  Pirius and Torec followed her into a bustling corridor. It was only a short walk through a hurrying crowd of engineers and facility managers to the Claw’s pit. And at the airlock Seath slowed, glanced at Pirius, and stood back to allow him to go ahead first.

  This was Pirius’s moment, then. His pulse pounding, he stepped forward.

  Three crew waited by the lock: one woman, two men. Dressed in scorched and battered skinsuits, their chests adorned with a stylized claw logo, they were clutching bulbs of drinking water. Pirius glanced at the woman—short, wiry, a rather sour face, though with a fine, strong nose. Pale red hair was tucked into her skinsuit cap. One of the men was heavyset. His face was broad and round, his ears protruding; he looked competent, but somehow vulnerable. They were both grimy and hollow-eyed with fatigue. Cohl, he read from their nametags, and Tuta—or “Enduring Hope” according to a hand-lettered addendum. He had never met them, in his timeline, but he already knew these names from the foreknowledge briefings: they were his future comrades, whom he would choose for his crew, and with whom he would risk his life. He wondered who they were.

  He was avoiding the main issue, of course.

  The other man, the pilot, wasn’t tall, but he topped Pirius by a good half-head, and, under the skinsuit, was bulkier. Seath had told him that this version was aged nineteen, two years older—two more years of growing, of filling out, of training. At last Pirius looked the pilot in the face.

  Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.

  According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn’t even a common “now” you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.

  But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but the events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.

  In this war it wasn’t remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn’t happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn’t unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts back in the past was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn’t perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies—even if decisions made in the present could wipe out many of those futures before they came to pass.

  A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.

  Of course foreknowledge would have been a great advantage—if not for the fact that the other side had precisely the same capability. In an endless sequence of guesses and counterguesses, as history was tweaked by one side or the other, and then tweaked again in response, the timeline was endlessly redrafted. With both sides foreseeing engagements to come for decades, even centuries ahead, and each side able to counter the other’s move even before it had been formulated, it was no wonder that the war had long settled down to a lethal stalemate, stalled in a static front that enveloped the Galaxy’s heart.

  For Pirius, it was like looking in the mirror—but not quite.

  The architecture was the same: a broad face, symmetrical but too flat to be good-looking, with sharp blue eyes and a mat of thick black hair. But the details were different. Under a sheen of sweat and grime, the pilot’s face was hard, the eyes sunken. It was as if the bones of his skull had pushed out of his flesh. He looked much older than nineteen, much more than two years older than Pirius.

  In that first glance, Pirius quailed from this man. And yet he was so familiar, so like himself, and he felt drawn.

  He held out his hand. The pilot took it and clasped firmly. It was an oddly neutral feeling, like holding his own hand; the pilot’s skin seemed to be at precisely the same temperature as Pirius’s own.

  “I saw the Xeelee ship you brought back,” Pirius ventured. “Quite a trophy.”

  “Long story,” said the pilot. He didn’t sound interested, in the Xeelee or in Pirius. His voice sounded nothing like Pirius’s own, in his head.

  “So I get to be a hero?”

  The pilot looked mournful. “I’m sorry,” he said, apparently sincerely.

  That bewildered Pirius. “For what?”

  There was a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself facing a bulky man with the long black robes and shaven head of a Commissary.

  “Pirius—both of you!—I’ve been assigned as your counsel in the trial,” the Commissary said. “My name is Nilis.”

  Even at this moment of confusion Pirius stared. Arches was for young people; with white stubble, his face jowly, his skin pocked with deep pores, this Commissary was the oldest person Pirius had ever seen. And he was none too smart—his robe seemed to have been patched, and its hem was worn and dirty. Behind him were two more Commissaries, who looked a lot less sympathetic.

  Nilis’s eyes were strange, blue and watery, and he looked on Pirius and the pilot with a certain soft fascination. “You’re so alike! Well, of course you would be. And both so young… . Temporal twins, what a remarkable thing, my eyes! But how will I tell you apart? Look—suppose I call you”—the older pilot—“Pirius Blue. Because you’re from the future—blueshifted, you see? And you will be Pirius Red. How would that suit you?”

  Pirius shook his head. Pirius Red? That w
asn’t his name. Suddenly he wasn’t even himself any more. “Sir—Commissary—I don’t understand. Why do I need a counsel?”

  “Oh, my eyes, has nobody explained that to you yet?”

  The pilot—Pirius Blue—stepped forward, irritated. “Come on, kid, you know the drill. They’re throwing the book at me for what happened aboard the Claw. And if they are charging me—”

  Pirius had heard rumors of this procedure but had never understood. “I will be put on trial, too.”

  “You got it,” said his older self neutrally.

  Pirius was to be tried for a crime that he hadn’t even committed yet. Confused, scared, he turned around looking for Torec.

  Torec shrugged. “Tough break.” She seemed withdrawn, as if she were trying to disengage from him and the whole mess.

  Pirius Blue was looking at him with revulsion. “Do you have to let your jaw dangle like that? You’re making us both look bad.” He brushed past Pirius and spoke to Captain Seath. “Sir, where do I report?”

  “Debriefing first, Pilot. Then you’re in the hands of Commissary Nilis.” She turned and marched him away; the battle-weary crew of the Claw followed.

  Nilis touched Pirius Red’s shoulder. “You come with me. I think we need to talk.”

  Nilis had been assigned quarters in a rock the ensigns knew as Officer Country. To get there from the dry dock, with Pirius, Nilis endured a short flitter hop through the swarm of captive asteroids that made up the base.

  In the sky outside the hull, worldlets plummeted like fists.

  Planets were rare, here in the Core of the Galaxy; the stars were too close-packed for stable systems to form. But there was plenty of dust and ice, and it gathered into great swarms of asteroids. Some of the base asteroids were unworked—just raw rock, still the lumpy aggregates they had been when tethered and gathered here. The rest had been melted, carved, blown into translucent bubbles like the Barracks Ball. Worked or not, they were all wrapped in stabilizing superconductor hoops, like presents wrapped in gleaming electric blue ribbon, and they all had Higgs field inertia-control facilities mounted on their surfaces. The Higgs facilities gave a gravity of a standard unit or so on the worldlets’ surfaces, and provided stable fields in their interior: tiered for a Barracks Ball, more complex in other Rocks depending on their uses.