Exultant (42 page)

“My eyes,” said Nilis. “Oh, my boy, what a terrible thing . . .”

Luru Parz said,
“Look.”

Pirius turned. A Virtual projection hovered over the service bot, a complex, fast-shifting display, elusive, dense. Even the Navy guard was staring.

Pirius asked, “What is it?”

“Data,” said Luru Parz. “From configuration space. Coming back through the portal.”

“I think it worked,” Nilis said. “You found something, Pirius!”

Luru Parz growled, “Now all we have to do is figure out what it is.”

Chapter
32

The flight approached the terminus of East Arm.

The three main arms of the Baby Spiral, three fat streams of infalling gas, came to a junction, melding into a massive knot of turbulence. Pirius Blue could see it ahead, a tangle of glowing gas filaments. He knew that just on the other side of that central knot of gas lay the brooding mass of Chandra itself, and the powerful alien presences that infested it. No human crew had ever gotten so close and lived.

The silence on the
Claw
’s crew loop was telling. He remembered the words of his first flight instructor. “You pretty kids are all so smart. You have to be smart to fly a greenship. But in combat there’s only one thing worse than being smart. And that’s being imaginative.”

Pirius knew he ought to come up with something inspirational to say. But he didn’t understand how he felt himself. Not fear: he seemed to be finding a kind of acceptance. He recalled fragments of conversations with This Burden Must Pass, where that proselyte of the Friends of Wigner had mused about how it would be to reach the end of time and approach the Ultimate Observer, to approach a god. Perhaps it would be like this, the calm of being utterly insignificant.

Then the Xeelee attacked.

“Azimuth eighty! Azimuth eighty!” That was Four screaming, off to Pirius’s starboard.

Pirius glared around the sky. This time he saw the nightfighters just as the instruments blared their warnings. They were a ball of swarming ships, black as night, coming at him from out of the shining clouds. Starbreaker beams spat ahead of them, a curtain of fire. The nightfighters were beautiful, he thought, lethally beautiful. In this turbulent, violent place, the Xeelee looked like they had been born here.

No time for that.

Dray shouted, “Pattern delta!”

“Locking in,” Cohl snapped.

Pirius threw the
Other Claw
onto its new trajectory. The Galaxy center whirled around him, the merging lanes of gas spilling about his head.

Again the little convoy split, this time into two pairs. It was a copy of their first feint. This time Three and Four peeled off and went shooting away to Pirius’s port side, haring into the shining corridor of the Arm, as if trying to escape back to the Front. Meanwhile Wedge Leader and Wedge Seven, Dray and Pirius, went straight for the Xeelee, their weapons already firing.

Again there was a heartbeat of delay, as if the Xeelee were trying to decide what was happening. But this time they didn’t follow the decoy; this time they came straight on at Dray and Pirius.

Cohl said, “Lethe. They knew.”

“I don’t understand,” Nilis said.

“They didn’t fall for the bait,” Pirius said. “We were meant to look like a rearguard. The Xeelee were supposed to chase after the others. But they didn’t.”

“Your navigator said, ‘They knew.’”

“FTL foreknowledge,” Pirius said. “You can always tell when it cuts in. Suddenly they know what you’re going to do before
you
do.”

“They may know,” Dray said forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean they can stop us. Pirius, you’re less than a hundred light-days from Chandra. Make a single jump. Get in there, do what you have to do, get out.”

Cohl said, “It’s impossible.”

Pirius glanced at his instruments. This was the core of the Galaxy, full of immense masses throwing themselves around, spacetime churned to a foam. He took a breath. “Yes, it’s impossible. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

He was aware of Nilis tensing beside him, his pale fingers gripping the edge of his seat. Virtual Nilis was an authentic, fully sentient re-creation; perhaps death was as dark a prospect for such a creature as for a full human.

That knot of Xeelee were approaching; ten more seconds and their weapons would find their range.

“Commodore—”

“You’re on your own, Pirius. For those who have fallen!”

Abruptly Dray’s ship threw itself at the Xeelee, monopole shells spraying. Pirius saw the formation of the nightfighters momentarily waver; as she passed through them Dray made their wings rustle. But soon the Xeelee were closing over that brave green spark.

“Another gone,” Nilis said.

But she had bought a little time. “Cohl—”

“Laid in.”

“Do it.”

In the instant of transition Pirius could
feel
the instability of Galaxy-center spacetime; the jump felt like a kick to the base of the spine.

Violent blue light flooded the cabin. With warning Virtuals flickering all around him, Pirius gazed out of the blister.

To his left was a bank of stars, hot, blue-white. There were pairs, and triples, and quadruples, stars close enough to distort each other; he saw one loose giant being torn to wispy shreds by a hard blue-white companion. There was much loose gas too, great glowing clouds of it, here and there scarred by nova blisters. This was shown on his maps as IRS 16, a cluster of young stars nucleating out of the rich gas and dust that poured in along the arms of the Baby Spiral. In this environment these bright young stars, huge and fast-lived, were like babies born in a furnace.

Stars to his port side, then. And to his starboard, something much more strange.

He saw more stars—but some of these stars had tails, like comets. They swarmed like fireflies around a central patch of brightness, a background glow of shifting, elusive light. It was like a solar system, he thought, with that central spark in place of a sun, and those trapped stars orbiting it like planets. The whole of this intricate, compact mechanism was cradled by one of the arms of the Baby Spiral—West Arm, opposite the one he had followed in; it looked like a jewelled toy set on a blanket of gold. But great chunks had been torn out of the arm, and blobs of glowing gas sailed away, dispersing slowly. Everything here was jammed together by ferocious gravity, and this was a terribly crowded place, crowded with huge, rushing masses that anywhere else would have been separated by light-years. This was the very heart of the Galaxy, the immediate environs of Chandra itself. But the black hole was invisible, somewhere at the heart of that flock of captured, doomed stars.

All this in a glance.

Pirius focused on his ship. The
Other Claw
had come out of its FTL jump with a velocity vector which had taken it through a sharp left turn and sent it screaming through the narrow gap between the IRS 16 star cluster and Chandra. As they fled, data on Chandra was pouring into the ship’s stores through Nilis’s sensor pod, he saw. This was what they had come here for: they were fulfilling the mission objectives. But they didn’t have long. All around this cluttered panorama, black flecks flew like bits of soot: the Xeelee, disturbed, were rising to drive out the intruder.

Nilis breathed, “My eyes—that I should live to see such a thing! You know, those stars won’t last long here. But their intense solar wind sweeps this Cavity clear of gas and dust. And when it hits Chandra—”

Cohl said, “
The Xeelee are closing,
Pirius.” She downloaded tactical Virtuals to Pirius’s station, so the pilot could see what she saw.

More Xeelee had come out of nowhere. Suddenly they were surrounded, trapped.

Pirius cursed. Another misjudgment. He snapped, “Options.”

“Pray,” said Hope morbidly.

Cohl had nothing to say.

Pirius tried to think. The plan had always been to fly through the gap between the star nursery and the central Chandra system itself, get through to the relatively flat space beyond, and then make another massive jump back to East Arm, their route home. But they hadn’t banked on being alone, with no cover, and with forewarned Xeelee rising. It was unlikely that they could survive another FTL jump all the way out, not from here.

But, unexpectedly, Nilis had an idea.

The Commissary sounded dry, calm, as if he had moved beyond fear. “Make for IRS 7.”

Pirius quickly called up another map. IRS 7 was a star, lost in the Cavity: it was a red giant, and it trailed an immense comet-like tail. “It’s only half a light-year away.”

“Lethe,” said Hope, “its tail is longer than that. What use is it to us?”

“A place to hide,” said Nilis. “And we could make it in a single, short FTL jump. . . . Couldn’t we, pilot?”

“Too risky,” Cohl said.

“Every jump in this environment carries risks. A short jump is more survivable.”

“It will be no use, even if we live through the hop,” Cohl said. “The Xeelee are on to us. FTL foreknowledge—”

“Then we throw them off,” Nilis said.

“I’m amazed how calm you are, Commissary,” Pirius said.

“We can discuss my personality later. I suggest we get on with it.”

A wand of starbreaker light waved through space, above Pirius’s head. The nightfighters were finding their range; one touch of that pretty light and his life would be over. No more time for debate.

He waved his hand at his Virtual displays. “We need to make the hop anti-Tolman, if we can. Come on, Cohl, work with me.”

Nilis said, “A lot of people have died to get us this far. We have to get through, complete our mission.”

“We don’t need to be told, Commissary. Navigator?”

“I have a tactical solution. It’s a botch.”

“Lay it in. On my mark. Three, two—”

In the last second the
Other Claw
shuddered. And then Chandra’s shining astrophysical architecture vanished.

They came out tumbling. Pirius fought to stabilize the ship.

Nilis peered out curiously. They were immersed in a uniform crimson glow that utterly lacked detail, as if they had hopped into the interior of an immense light globe.

Pirius snapped, “Engineer. Report.”

Enduring Hope called, “We were hit, half a second before the hop. Bad luck . . . the weapons bay took it.” He laughed. “I don’t think we hit a single Xeelee. But the weapons bay soaked up the energy of that shot, and saved us.”

“Other systems?”

“The sensor pod is intact,” Nilis said. “We didn’t lose any data. And now we’re in the tail of IRS 7?”

“I think so.”

The “tail” was the remnant of the outer layers of the hapless red giant, blasted away by the ferocious stellar wind generated by the blue star cluster at the center. Pirius said, “We aimed for the root, where the tail meets the surviving envelope.”

“So we’re actually
inside
the body of a star. . . . Good piloting.”

“We’re still alive. So, yes, it was good enough.”

“And the Xeelee?”

“No sign that they are on to us yet.” Pirius glanced at his displays. “I’ll wait a couple of minutes. Then we’ll work our way along the tail, a series of short hops. And once we’re out of there, if we’re lucky—”

Nilis nodded. Pirius studied him cautiously. Still he seemed remarkably calm, and Pirius thought his face seemed smoother, as if lacking some character, some detail. “Commissary, are you all right?”

Nilis smiled at him. “As perceptive as ever! I could never pass this on to him, you know.”

“Who?”

“Nilis—ah, Nilis Prime. My original. He must get the data, of course, and my analytical impressions. But I think I should keep back the rest. The
emotions.
I’ve already begun the process of deletion.”

“You’re a Virtual. It’s against your programming to edit yourself.”

Nilis shook his head. “You can’t hand out sentience without enabling choice.” His smile faded. “It feels . . . odd, though. To be closing down sections of my mind. Like a partial suicide. But it’s necessary. He wouldn’t go on, you see, with the Project, if he
knew.
”

“Knew what? The fear?”

“Oh, not that. Fear is trivial. Pirius, at most only three of our eight ships will make it home. No, not fear: the horror of seeing those around you die, and die for your ideas. Nilis has never really confronted this, you know, sitting in his garden on Earth, immersed in his studies. And he won’t be strong enough. I know, because
I’m
not. But he must go on; he has to complete Project Prime Radiant, for all our sakes.”

“Commissary—”

“
I’m
all right. I’ve already cut it out of myself, you see.” Nilis lifted his Virtual face, red-giant light casting subtly shifting shadows from the lines of his expressionless face. “Shall we go home?”

Chapter
33

Nilis stayed at Saturn, studying the material Pirius had retrieved from configuration space, which appeared to be a spec for a weapon system. But, apparently plagued by guilt, he sent Pirius Red back to Earth, ordering him to rest up. Pirius didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t protest.

The rest cure didn’t work out, though. Pirius Red was alone again, alone in Nilis’s apartment, aside from a few bots.

Of course here he was on Earth itself, surrounded by a vast population, a population of billions: a greater crowd than any other human world, save only the pathological Coalescent communities. Somehow that made it worse than in the Venus habitat.

He tried walking in the Conurbation’s teeming corridors and parks. He even dug out one of the Commissary’s old robes so he wouldn’t stand out from the crowd so much. But he had nothing in common with these chattering, confident swarms with their rich, intricate social lives, their baffling business, their soft hands and unmarked faces. They were so remote from everything he knew from his origins in the Core that he may as well have been from a separate species.

And even if he could stand the openness outdoors, even if he could tolerate the people, he was still
on Earth.
Every time the sun went down, the sky glowed bright in the lights of the Conurbations, and beyond the glow strode the immense, arrogant engineering of the Bridge to the Moon, around which interplanetary traffic crawled constantly. It was like being trapped in some vast machine.