Exultant (30 page)

Pirius pointed at the Ghost. “Commissary, don’t you get it? This is why this experiment, this revival of the Ghosts, is so wrong. We’re already arguing! Give them a chance and they will worm their destabilizing ideas into our minds.”

Nilis was studying him; Pirius had the cold feeling he had become just another fascinating specimen to him. “Perhaps. But there will be no killing today.”

Mara pointed upward. “Look.”

Pirius, stiff in his skinsuit, tilted back and peered up.

The patient bulk of Charon hung suspended over its parent, half-shadowed, a misty form in the light of the pinpoint sun. But now, right at the center of its face, a spark of light had erupted, blue-white, intense—far brighter than Sol. When Pirius looked away, he saw the new light was casting shadows, knife-sharp.

Nilis clapped his hands with childlike excitement. “That’s the gravastar! What we see is the glow of infalling matter, shedding its gravitational energy as it hits the ultra-relativistic wave front. It’s really a remarkable technical achievement—the parameters of the controlled implosion of matter needed to create the shock are terribly narrow—stability is difficult to maintain.” He sighed. “But the Ghosts always were good at this sort of thing.”

Mara said, “The test is being run on Charon. This is an experimental technology, and the energies involved are immense. There’s nobody up there to be hurt. Nobody but a few Ghosts, of course.”

“Remarkable,” Nilis said again, peering up. “Remarkable.”

That pinpoint of light, reflected, slid over the Ghost’s hide now. It was impossible for Pirius to believe that that starlike object, that bit of fire, was in fact far colder even than the ice of Charon itself.

They returned to the dome.

Nilis showed Pirius a summary of the rest of Draq’s briefing, and Pirius, his head full of anger, tried to pick his way through the jargon.

He said, “But, Commissary, I still don’t see what use this is. You said yourself that if you got stuck inside a gravastar’s horizon you would be as cut off as if you fell into a black hole—and just as dead.”

“Of course. A shock wave in the shape of a closed surface, spherical or not, would be no use to us. But Draq and his team, working with the Ghosts’ theoreticians, have come up with another solution.

“Imagine that the shock front is not closed, but open—not a sphere, but a cap. Behind it you have your expanding captive universe, just as before, and where the expansion meets the infall you get your shock wave, the cap. But this toy cosmos isn’t symmetrical. At the rear, away from the cap, the curvature flattens, until asymptotically you have a smooth transition to an external solution . . .”

Pirius thought he understood. “So you have your cap of gravastar horizon,” he said carefully. “That’s lethal; you can’t pass through it. And behind it is a zone that is still effectively another universe. But if you approach from the rear, you would move through a smooth bridge from our universe into the captive one—”

“Smooth, yes, save for the detail of a little tidal pull and so forth,” Nilis said.

Pirius wondered how much trouble there would be in that “detail.”

Nilis beamed. “
Now
do you see the potential, Pirius? Now do you see the application?”

“No,” said Pirius frankly.

“The toy universe is not causally connected to ours. And that means it wouldn’t be possible for the Xeelee, or anybody else, to have foreknowledge of what we might hide there—
even in principle
—because, you see, we’ll be tucked inside another universe altogether!”

With a triumphant wave, Nilis brought up a Virtual copy of Pirius’s old sketch of the assault on the Prime Radiant: the journey in, bedeviled by FTL foreknowledge, the Xeelee ring of fire around the Prime Radiant itself, and then the mysterious Radiant at the heart of it all, sketched as a crude asterisk by Pirius. All of this was in red, but now Nilis snapped his fingers. “Thanks to Torec’s CTC computer, we can outthink the Xeelee when we get there.” That crimson ring around the Radiant turned green. “With the gravastar technology we should be able to stop foreknowledge leakage.” The inward path became green too. “Now all we need is a way to strike at the Prime Radiant itself.” Smiling, he said, “See what you can achieve when you focus on a goal, Ensign? See how the obstacles melt away before determination? Now—what would you suggest as a next step?”

Pirius thought quickly. “A test flight. We need to modify a ship. Equip it with the gravastar shield and CTC processors. See if we can make the thing fly.” He grinned; for a pilot it was quite a prospect.

“Yes, yes. Good!” Nilis slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “
That
will make those complacent buffoons in the ministries sit up and take notice.”

Mara had listened to this, her gloved hands behind her back. She said now, “The gravastar is a Ghost technology. No transfer to purely human control would be possible in a short period.
You’ll need to take the Ghosts.
”

Even Nilis looked dubious. “That will be a hard sell to the Grand Conclave.”

“You have no choice.”

Pirius had managed not to think about the Ghosts for a few minutes. Now he felt his fists bunch again. “I bet the Ghosts intended it this way.”

Nilis said sharply, “Ensign, you will have to learn to overcome this rage of yours. Even the planning of war is a rational process. Hate is unproductive.”

“Commissary, don’t you see? They’re doing it again. This is what they are like—the Ghosts—they are devious, sly, always seeking leverage—”

“Ensign.”
Nilis glared at Pirius, willing him to silence. Mara was studying Pirius, all trace of human warmth vanished.

Pirius, angry, confused, and ashamed, longed to be away from this place.

Chapter
24

A week later Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at Saturn. They fell into bed.

Pirius buried himself in the noisy pleasure and consolation of sex. She was the center of his universe, and he had returned to her. He wished he could tell her that, but he didn’t know how.

Afterward, he poured out his heart about what had happened on Pluto.

Torec said, “I can’t imagine it.”

But when he described how he had tried to get the Ghost to disassemble itself, she turned away. Even she seemed appalled by his loss of control.

His shame burned deeper—and his fear. They were both changing, both growing, under the dim light of Sol. Maybe that was inevitable, but he was afraid they were growing apart. He wanted things to stay the same, for them both to be just kids, Barracks Ball squeezes. But that, of course, was impossible. He could see she was maturing, finding her own place here as her achievements started to rack up. But he didn’t know the person she was becoming, or if that person would have room for him. Then again, he didn’t understand himself either—but what he did see of himself, he realized reluctantly, he didn’t much like. And if he didn’t even like himself much, how could she love him?

But they had little time together. They had a job to do here at Saturn. They were to devote themselves to work on prototypes and test flights.

Nilis told them that the cost of the Project, especially this latest phase, was continually questioned in the remote reaches of Coalition councils, but he was driving it through. “You can fill Sol system with theories and arguments,” he said. “But, my eyes, I’ve learned what makes these politicos tick. Dry-as-Martian-dust bureaucrats they may be, but there’s nothing like a bit of live technology to make them sit up and take notice! It’s the allure of war, you know, the pornography of destruction and death: that’s what motivates them—as long as it is somebody else’s death, of course.”

The ensigns had to take Nilis’s word for that. But his clarity of purpose as this new phase of his project began was undeniable.

A Navy facility was put at their disposal. It turned out to be a small disused dock in orbit around the bristling fortress world of Saturn, under the overall control of Commander Darc. Once it got underway, the development progressed rapidly, because the engineers were keen. Across the Galaxy, combat technology was pretty much static, and the crew, being engineers, enjoyed the challenge of putting together something new.

From the first Virtual sketches of how a standard greenship might be modified, and the first simulations of how such a beast might handle in flight, the two ensigns immersed themselves in the work. Torec applied the crude management techniques she had learned on the Moon, and the complex project ran reasonably smoothly from the start. Pirius felt comparatively at home here among Navy engineers, far removed from such horrors as reincarnated Silver Ghosts.

So Pirius was infuriated when Nilis called him away for yet another new assignment.

Nilis had taken himself off to the heart of Sol system once more, to initiate studies on the nature of the Prime Radiant itself. It was his way; now that the test program was underway, he regarded the gravastar work as “mere detail,” and had switched his attention to the next conceptual phase of his project, the assault on Chandra itself. And he needed Pirius, Nilis said; he wanted one of his “core team” to be involved in every phase of the project—and Torec’s newfound management skills were just too valuable on the test-flight work; it was Pirius who could be spared.

And so he summoned Pirius to what he called the “neutrino telescope,” before carelessly leaving Pirius to sort out his own travel. It was maddening—and embarrassing. Pirius had no real idea what neutrinos were, or why or how you would build a telescope to study them, or why Nilis felt neutrinos had anything to do with his project.

But his biggest problem was figuring out where the telescope was.

He asked around the Navy facility. None of the engineers and sailors knew what he was talking about. In the end, Pirius was forced to go to Commander Darc—another loss of face. “Oh, the carbon mine!” Darc said, laughing. He said the crew he would assign to Pirius would know where they were going.

Pirius spent a last night with Torec. They shared a bunk in a Navy dorm that was big and brightly lit: not as immense as the Barracks Ball of Arches Base, but near enough to feel like home. They talked about inconsequentials—anything but Silver Ghosts or neutrinos, or their own hearts, or other mysteries.

Then Pirius sailed once more into the murky heart of Sol system.

The corvette he took was spartan compared to Nilis’s, and the crew, hardened Navy veterans irritated at being given such a chore, ignored Pirius for the whole trip. Pirius ate, slept, exercised. It wasn’t so bad; perhaps he was getting used to the strange experience of being alone.

In its final approach the corvette swept around the limb of the planet, approaching from the shadowed side, and the new world opened up into an immense crescent.

Pirius peered out of the transparent hull. The light was dazzling; he was actually inside the orbit of Earth here, and the sun seemed huge. Another new planet, he thought wearily, another slice of strangeness.

But this one really was extraordinary. Under a thick, slightly murky atmosphere, the ground was pure white from pole to equator, and from orbit it looked perfectly smooth, unblemished, like an immense toy. He had never seen a world that looked so
clean,
he thought, so pristine. The whole surface even seemed to sparkle, as if it were covered in grains of salt.

The corvette entered low orbit and the planet flattened out into a landscape. The air was tall, all but transparent, without cloud save for streaks of high, icy haze. But Pirius saw contrails and rocket exhausts, sparking through the air’s pale gray. Once he saw an immense craft duck down from orbit to skim through the upper atmosphere. It was a kind of trawler; air molecules were gathered into a huge electromagnetic scoop, its profile limned by crackling lightning.

This close, though, the geometric perfection of the world was marred by detail. Pirius made out the shapes of mountains, canyons, even craters. But everything was covered by white dust, every edge softened, every profile blurred. Pirius wondered if the white stuff could be water ice, or even carbon dioxide snow, but the sun’s heat was surely too intense for that.

Small settlements studded the land. Around these scattered holdings, quarries had been neatly cut into the creamy ground, their floors crisscrossed by the tracks of toiling insect-like vehicles. Tiny craft rose into space from small, orange-bright landing pads, carrying off the fruit of the quarries. Many of the buildings were themselves covered with white dust; evidently some of them were ancient.

Pirius asked the Navy crew what the white dust was. Their reply was blunt: “Chalk,” a word that meant nothing to Pirius. But they called this world “the carbon mine,” as Darc had. It was only later that Pirius learned that this “carbon mine” had once had a name of its own, an ancient name with nothing to do with the purposes to which the planet had been put. Once, it had been called Venus.

“So, another stop on your grand tour of Sol system, Ensign Pirius?”

“It’s not by choice, Commissary.”

“Of course. Well, come along, come along . . .” Nilis led the way along bare-walled corridors, padding over floors rutted by long usage.

Nilis was working in an orbital habitat; the corvette had cautiously docked at the heart of a sprawling tangle of modules, walkways, and ducts. The habitat was devoted to pure science, it seemed; to the planet’s secondary role as a “neutrino telescope.” And it was
old:
the modules’ protective blankets were cratered by micrometeorite impacts, and blackened by millennia of exposure to the hard light of the sun.

Within, the facility was a warren of corridors and small cylindrical chambers. Over a stale human stink, there was a lingering smell of ozone, of welding and failing electrical systems. The station had reasonably modern position-keeping boosters, inertial control, life support and other essential systems, but everywhere you looked maintenance bots toiled to keep the place going. The power nowadays came from a couple of GUT modules, but the habitat still sported an antique set of solar-cell wings, its glossy surfaces long since blackened and peeled away.