Exultant (39 page)

“It’s all yours, Navigator. . . .”

Virtual Nilis was wide-eyed. “Pirius—you must be glad to see your crew again. Back in their rightful habitat, so to speak. But is it always like this?”

“Oh, no,” Pirius said. “I think we’re a little subdued today.”

But it had been good when the three of them had been reunited, down on Quin: Cohl with the limp that had been her souvenir from Factory Rock, and Enduring Hope, back from his artillery brigade. Hope, amazingly, had lost weight. It turned out to be tough physical work, out on those monopole-cannon battalions, and after months of it, Hope had never looked fitter.

And it had certainly been a joy when the three of them had first boarded a ship again, which they had quickly dubbed
The Assimilator’s Other Claw.
It wasn’t much of a combat ship, as it was laden with a massive sensor pod that spoiled the sleek lines of its main body. And it could never be the same as their first ship, of course. But it was a ship nevertheless—their ship. They had marked their skinsuits with sigils that recalled the first
Claw,
and Pirius Blue felt an extraordinary surge of joy to be back in a greenship blister.

Nilis was watching him with his characteristic mixture of pride and longing. “I suppose the banter is a social lubricant. But I’m surprised you get anything done. Well, I’m privileged to be here. To see
this.
It’s so different. You know, we humans aren’t designed to function in such an environment. On Earth you are on a plain, so it seems, a few kilometers wide, with clouds a few kilometers up. In the sky everything is so remote it looks two-dimensional—even the Moon. There is no
depth.
The scale is kilometers, or infinity, with a gap in between. Here, though, you have stars scattered through the depth of the sky—space is filled up—and you get a sense of immensity, of perspective that’s impossible on Earth.”

Pirius shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Oh, I think so.” He peered at Pirius curiously. “To comprehend a sky like this, the very structure of your sensorium, your mind, must differ from mine, Pirius Blue. Genetically we could be identical. But our
minds
are so different we might as well belong to alien species.”

This was uncomfortably heretical to Pirius. Everybody was essentially the same; that was the Doctrine’s decree. If Nilis wanted to believe he was some kind of divergent, that was up to him. “I’m just trying to do my job, Commissary.”

“I know.” Nilis sighed. “And my gabbling is getting in the way! Thank you again for hosting me.”

Hosting:
there was something else Pirius didn’t want to think about too hard. As the whole purpose of the mission was to take Nilis through the Cavity, it had been decreed that the safest place to lodge him was with Pirius—that is,
in
him. All flight crew had implants of various kinds studded through their nervous systems, serving as trackers, backup comm systems, medical controls, system interfaces. It had been trivial to download Virtual Nilis into Pirius’s head. Trivial, but not welcome. But it had been orders.

Nilis held up his hands. “I know you’re uncomfortable. I’m here to observe, not to interfere. I won’t get in your way.”

Before accepting the download, Pirius had insisted on an off switch. “No,” he said vehemently. “You won’t.”

A peremptory voice called over the common loop. “This is Dray. Shut up and listen.”

The babble on the loop immediately dried up. Pirius glanced at the array of seven ships around him. Dray’s was one of a pair directly ahead, the tip of the loose wedge formation. Commodore Dray was a formidable, muscular woman, her head shaven bare, and the leader of this expeditionary force.

She said now, “Here are your idents. I am Wedge Leader . . .” She ran through the other crews, numbering them in sequence, one side then the other, so that Dray, in Wedge Zero, led a line of even-numbered ships, and Wedge One led a line of odd numbers. Pirius in the
Other Claw
was Wedge Seven.

“And here are the rules,” said Dray. “One. I am in command, and none of you is going to so much as fart without my permission. I’m talking to you, Pirius. I’ve seen your record. If it was up to me you would still be digging graves on a Rock. But it wasn’t up to me, so here you are, and if there are any stupid stunts on this trip I’ll shoot you out of the sky myself.”

Pirius had no doubt she meant it. “Sir.”

“Rule two. We are going to fulfill our objectives. Rule three. We are eight ships going in, and we will be eight coming out, subject only to rules one and two.”

A chorus of voices replied. “Understood.”

“Now, I had imagined you had all seen the briefing, but perhaps not. I also assumed you were experienced crews, but this formation is so slack I must be wrong about that, too. Form up, damn it! I’m looking at you, Wedge Three.”

“Sir.”

The seven lights slid subtly across the sky, and Pirius blipped his sublight drive to tweak his own position.

“We’re a minute from our first FTL jump, and we’re going to hop in formation. The first hop will be the most difficult. . . .”

That was true, for this tiny formation was about to leap right into the heart of the Galaxy.

“When we get through that, it’s plain sailing,” Dray said. “And even if it isn’t, it will be fun. Nearly time. Good luck, everyone.” Another quick chorus of acknowledgment. “Five, four, three . . .”

The Galaxy’s inner structure was nested around the ferocious mass at the very center.

Within the broad plane of the spiral arms was set the Core. That immense shining bulge itself contained a denser kernel, the Central Star Mass: millions of stars crowded into a few tens of light-years.

Immense streams of molecular gases poured inward through the Mass—but a few light-years out from the center they collided with a ferocious solar wind, blowing out of the very center. That solar wind created the Cavity, a hole in the heart of the Galaxy, surrounded by a stationary shock front of infalling gas, the Circumnuclear Ring. At the Circumnuclear Ring, the human expansion through the Galaxy had stalled; the soldiers who fought and died there called it the Front. The Cavity had its own marvels: the Baby Spiral, a miniature Galaxy contained wholly within those few scraped-clear light-years, and deeper still the dense, fast-moving astrophysics around the central black hole itself.

Dray and his little flotilla of greenships planned a bold FTL jump of no less than five light-years, which would take them right through the Front and into the Cavity. They were going to make this leap in the relativistic turbulence of the Galaxy center, whose violence, even as far out as this, reached up into the higher dimensions on which FTL technology depended. And they were going to do it in formation.

That, anyhow, was the plan.

When the jump came, the sky was suddenly so bright it was as if it had exploded.

Dray was calling. “Two and Four! Wedge Two and Four, report!”

Pirius ignored everything and checked his ship’s systems. The Cavity was a lethal environment, saturated with radiation and laced with massive particles fleeing at close to the speed of light. But the
Other Claw
had survived the FTL jump, and was protecting her crew.

When he was satisfied, he looked up.

Suddenly he was sitting on the edge of the Cavity, actually inside the central space contained within the Front. Through a blizzard of stars he could clearly see the Baby Spiral. The convoy had emerged from its jump close to the terminus of the spiral arm called East, where it lost its coherence and merged into the mush of the Circumnuclear Ring. From Pirius’s point of view, East was a tunnel of infant stars and crimson-glowing gas that wound deeper into the Cavity. It was like looking into the guts of an immense machine, he thought, a machine of gas and dust and stars. All of this was tinged with blueshift, for he was already flying further inward; the
Other Claw
had emerged from the hop with a velocity a high fraction of lightspeed, a vector arrowed straight at the heart of the Galaxy.

Against this astounding background, Pirius had eyes only for the green sparks arrayed around him. The array was noticeably more ragged than it had been before the jump—and seven had been reduced to six, he saw now.

“Two, Four!”

“Four here,” came a reply. “We lost Two. The FTL shift brought him too close—I was lucky to pull away myself.”

Nilis gasped. “We lost a crew? So suddenly?”

Pirius said grimly, “You can see what kind of cauldron we’re in. FTL jumps aren’t too precise at the best of times.”

“To die in a place like this.” Nilis had lowered his hands now, and the complex light swam in his eyes. “And are we already moving?”

Cohl called dryly, “The law of conservation of momentum isn’t particularly relevant if you pass through an FTL hop, Commissary. If you tweak the hop you can emerge with any three-space momentum you want. As my instructors used to say, in operations like this, physics is just a tool kit.”

“Remarkable, remarkable.”

“Let’s go to formation B,” Dray called. “Close up.”

The green lights slid around the sky; once more Dray was at the tip of the wedge, and the other ships, including Pirius’s, formed its flanks.

Dray ran through the procedures that lay ahead. “One light-day jumps. We wait one tenth of a second at each emergence; we set our formation; we jump again. Everybody clear?”

“Sir.”

“On my mark. Three, two.”

With a gut-twisting lurch
The Assimilator’s Other Claw
leapt across another thirty billion kilometers, across a space that could have held
three
copies of all of Sol system out to Pluto side-by-side, a monumental leap completed too rapidly for Pirius’s mind even to be aware of the transition before it was done.

And then the ship did it again. And again. Virtual Nilis moaned and buried his head in his hands.

It was an uncomfortable, juddering progress, a series of flickering lurches, ten every second. The miniature spiral arm was a tunnel, a few light-days wide, that stretched out ahead of the ships, leading them toward the still more exotic mysteries of the very center. But the six surviving ships around Pirius pushed on, glowing bright defiant green, their neat wedge formation a challenge to the chaos of the cosmos.

Virtual Nilis sat up and dared look around, plucking at the threadbare sleeve of his robe. His eyes were wide, and the Virtual generators artfully reflected Galaxy-center light in his eyes. “So much structure, so precisely delineated. Do you realize, even now we know virtually nothing about the
details
of this place—not the geography, but the
why
of it. Why should this extraordinary toy Spiral exist at all? And why three arms, why not one or five or twenty? Is it really a coherent structure, or just some chance assemblage, gone in a million years? We have been so busy using this place as a war zone we have forgotten to ask such questions.”

As Pirius labored at his instruments, Nilis talked on and on, about other galaxies where the central black holes weren’t sleeping giants like
this
one, but voracious monsters that seemed to be actively eating their way through the gaseous corpses of their hapless hosts; he spoke of galaxies racked by great spasms of star formation, tremendous eruptions of energy that spanned hundreds of light-years.

“We rationalize all these things away with our physics, coming up with one theory after another. But we know that life’s thoughtless actions have shaped the evolution of matter, even on astrophysical scales. So how can we tell what is natural?
We
have been waging war here for millennia. But there is evidence that the Xeelee have been fighting here much longer, tremendous ancient wars against a much more formidable foe. And what would be the consequence? Perhaps
everything
we see is a relic of an ancient battleground, like the trench-furrowed surface of a Rock, worked and reworked by conflict until nothing is left of the original. . . .” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m talking a lot.”

“Yes, you are,” Pirius said tensely. “I should have left you back at the base.”

Nilis laughed, though his face stayed expressionless. “I’ll try to—”

“Flies! My altitude fifty degrees, azimuth forty . . .”

Pirius quickly converted that to his own point of view and peered out of his blister. He couldn’t see the nightfighters. But in his sensor view, there they were, resolutely night-dark specks in this cathedral of light.

“Remarkable,” Nilis said. “This is a three-dimensional battlefield, with no common attitude. You use spherical coordinates, and you are able to translate from one position to another, in your head—”

“Shut up, Commissary.”

Somebody called, “I count five, six, seven—”

Cohl said, “All nightfighters, I think.”

Enduring Hope called, “I’m surprised they took so long.”

“No,” said Dray grimly. “
We
surprised
them.
Pattern alpha.”

The seven greenships turned with the precision of a single machine, and Pirius felt a stab of pride.

Now the Xeelee were dead ahead. The greenships continued to plow toward them.

“Sublight,” Dray called. “Half lightspeed.”

The greenships cut their FTL drives. The
Other Claw
dropped back into three-dimensional spacetime with a velocity of half the speed of light, arrowed straight at the Xeelee. The enemy was now just light-minutes away, no more remote than Earth was from its sun. The greenships were closing so fast that the background, the Spiral’s boiling clouds of gas and dust, was tinged faintly blue.

As the nightfighters neared, Pirius could see how they swarmed, flying over, under, around each other, rapid movements whose pattern was impossible to follow, like the flies that had earned them their barracks nickname. Their movements were almost like a dance, Pirius thought; smooth, graceful, even beautiful. But not human.

And they were close, terribly close. Pirius thought he saw the first tentative cherry-red flicker of a starbreaker beam.

“Break on my mark,” Dray said. “Three, two, one—”