Exultant (15 page)

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.

Suddenly the ship was alive; there was no other word for it. And despite the worst predictions of the doomsayers, even though he knew he was triangulated by a dozen starbreaker beams and other weapons, the ship waited to do his bidding. He laughed out loud.

Darc’s face was hovering before him, a shining coin, purple with rage. “I’ll feed you to the recyclers if you try another stunt like that, you little runt!”

No, you won’t, Pirius thought. You won’t dare. In the Conurbations of Earth, I’m a hero. It was an unexpected, delicious, utterly non-Doctrinal thought. He had the power—and Darc knew it.

“Awaiting permission to start the trial, sir,” Pirius said, carefully keeping his voice level.

Darc’s mouth worked, as if he were chewing back his anger. Then he said, “Do it.”

Pirius selected hovering icons and gathered them together with gentle wafts of his hands. Then he pointed.

The sparse stars blurred, turned blue. Saturn crumpled like a wad of golden tissue, vanished. Then the stars settled back, like a curtain falling, and it was over, almost before he knew it had begun.

There should have been no kick in the back, no sense of acceleration; if the inertial shield failed by the slightest fraction he would have been reduced to a pulp. And yet he felt
something,
as if his own body knew it had taken a great leap.

“. . . hear me? Respond, Ensign. Darc to Pirius. Respond—”

“Yes, sir, I’m here.”

There was a perceptible delay before Darc replied. “Ensign, you traveled light-seconds at around three-quarters lightspeed.”

“Just as per the flight plan.”

“You even stopped where you were supposed to.”

Pirius glanced back over his shoulder. Saturn, the only object in his universe large enough to show a disc, had been reduced to a tiny yellowish spot. He should have felt even more isolated, he thought; exposed. But all he felt was power. With this ship he could go anywhere, do anything.

And the test had barely begun.

“Sir, do you want me to bring her back?”

“You sit tight,” Darc snapped. “That fly is going to get a thorough checkout before it moves another centimeter—as are you. We’re coming as fast as we can.” And so they were, Pirius saw. Staring toward Saturn, he made out a small flotilla of ships, gradually drifting across the background stars.

He pressed his hands to his thighs, resisting the temptation to take off once more.

Nilis loomed huge over the nightfighter. With its wings furled, the ship would have rested in the palm of the hand of this kilometers-high Virtual, Pirius thought.

It ought to have been an absurd sight, even a faintly revolting one; Nilis’s head was the size of a Spline starship, every blocked pore in his aged skin a pit like a weapons emplacement. But Pirius was back in orbit around Saturn now, and the planet’s subdued, golden light oddly filled up the Virtual image. And wonder was bright in Nilis’s tremendous eyes.

“Defects in spacetime,” Nilis said. “That’s what the wings of a nightfighter are. Flaws in the structure of spacetime itself. And look here.”

He waved his immense hands and produced another gigantic Virtual. This one showed the Xeelee nightfighter in flight, the beautiful, elusive, bafflingly complex motions of its wings of flawed spacetime. Nilis replaced the true image with a schematic. The ship was overlaid by a framework, a kind of open tetrahedron, with bright red blobs at its four corners. The tetrahedron went through a complex cycle of deformations. It closed like an umbrella, its legs shortening as they moved; then they would lengthen before the “umbrella” opened again and the frame returned to its starting configuration.

“This is a schematic of the wings’ motion,” Nilis said. “See the way the wings change their shape. You have to think of spacetime as the natural medium of the craft. It is like—like a bacterium embedded in water. To a small enough creature, water is as viscous as treacle, and in such sticky stuff swimming is difficult, because if your recovery stroke is the same as your impulsive stroke you pull yourself back to where you started. So what bacteria do is adopt different geometrical shapes, during the first and second parts of the stroke, to pull themselves forward. It’s called a geometric phase, a closed sequence of different shapes.

“Pirius, the nightfighter is embedded in spacetime as surely as any bacterium in water. By pulsing through their sequence of shapes, the wings of the nightfighter are clearly using a geometric phase to control and direct the ship’s motion. It’s a shape-shifting drive—nothing like a rocket, no need for anything like reaction mass to be thrown out the back of your ship—really quite remarkable. And quite unlike the principles on which human sublight drives are based.”

Pirius understood, if vaguely. Human-designed drives pushed, not against spacetime itself, but against the vacuum, the seething quantum foam of virtual particles that pervaded space. At the heart of such a drive was an extended crystalline substrate, made to vibrate billions of times a second. As the substrate passed through the quantum foam, electric fields were induced in its surface by the foam’s fluctuating forces, fields dissipated by spraying out photons. If you arranged things right, so Pirius had been told in cartoon-level lectures, you could use those shed photons to push you forward.

“Our drives work all right,” Nilis said. “But they are slower than the Xeelee drive. And they break down constantly. Those crystals are expensive, and they shatter easily.”

Pirius knew that. You had to carry a rack of spares for a journey of more than a few light-hours. “And besides,” he said slowly, “the Xeelee method sounds more . . .” He couldn’t think of the word.

Nilis smiled hugely. “Elegant?”

“I guess so.”

“Thanks to your brave work today, we understand the source of that elegance a great deal better. But still there are questions. Swimming in spacetime is an
odd
way to do things. This is a method that would work best in regions of highly curved spacetime, where you can get more traction—say, around a black hole.”

“We know the Xeelee infest Chandra.”

“Yes, and that offers us all sorts of clues about them. But they also have to operate in environments like
this,
far from any dense concentrations of matter, where spacetime is all but flat. In fact, if the spacetime were perfectly flat, the drive couldn’t work.

“And why use spacetime defects as the basis of your drive in the first place? There
was
a time, in the moments after the Big Bang singularity, when such things were common, for the orderly structure of the swollen spacetime we inhabit was still forming. There were points, loops, sheets—”

“The point defects are monopoles.”

“Yes. That’s why monopoles are useful weapons—one defect can interfere with another. Spacetime was heavily curved, too. I suppose if you were designing a drive system,
then
you might naturally pick defects and spacetime-swimming as your way to work. It isn’t nearly so obvious
now
—and hasn’t been since microseconds after the singularity. So why use it? And then there is the question of the Xeelee themselves. Where are
they
?”

That leap confused Pirius. “Sir?”

“No matter how closely I inspect this craft I can only find machinery, layer upon layer of it. No sign of a crew!”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Nor do I—not yet.” The immense ghostly Virtual leaned forward, and a glistening eye the size of a Conurbation loomed eagerly over Pirius. “Still, I do think we’re getting somewhere. The word ‘Chandra,’ you know, is very ancient—pre-Occupation. Some say the black hole is named after a scientist of antiquity. Others say that the word means
luminous.
Well, if luminous it is, I don’t think Minister Gramm is going to enjoy the sight of what Chandra is beginning to illuminate for us!”

Chapter
12

Alone, her skinsuit stained dark gray by moondust, Torec clambered through the remains of an exotic matter factory.

This place had been built twenty thousand years ago by the Qax, alien occupiers of Earth. After the rebellion that had forced the Qax out of Sol system, all the equipment had been stripped out, and the roof smashed open to the black sky. You could still see small blast craters and bits of wreckage left over from that ancient turmoil. And the gaunt walls remained, broken sheets of lunar concrete that cast long, sharp shadows over the undulating dust of the Moon ground.

While Pirius had been flying a nightfighter among the moons of Saturn, she had been stuck here a month already. There were three weeks left before the deadline Gramm had set, and the final demonstration of Nilis’s prototype CTC processor, his time-travel computer, would be due. Torec longed for those weeks to be up.

Torec was always aware of Earth, high in the sky. The great arc of the Bridge was easily visible—stunning, unnatural, disturbingly defying logic. And she could see the layers of defenses that surrounded the home planet: the circling Snowflakes, the crawling specks of patrolling warships. Even seen from its Moon, Earth bristled with fortifications.