Exultant (49 page)

Pirius took that as his cue. He stood up. “I think we’re done here.”

“So we are, Pilot,” Nilis said genially.

“Madam, welcome aboard—”

“Don’t even talk to me, you twisted little freak!” In the windows of her pale eyes he saw the contempt of this earthworm for the soldiers who fought and died to protect her.

But Pirius held his nerve. “Working together is going to be interesting. But I think the Commissary is right. And we only have ten weeks. There’s an empty room down the corridor. Maybe we should start right now.”

Pila stood stock still, and Pirius wondered what even the Commissary could do about it if she refused to cooperate. But with a last murderous glance at Nilis, she stalked out.

Nilis was immersed in his Virtuals before Pirius had even left the room. But he called, “Oh, Pirius. Get those epaulettes sewn back on. That doesn’t look good, not good at all.”

Reluctant or not, Pila was remarkably efficient. Within forty-eight hours she had secured Pirius a small office of his own—small, plain, with hardly any facilities, but a room in Officer Country nonetheless. And she had already pulled various bureaucratic levers effectively enough to line up candidates for the squadron.

The first of them was a woman, a former pilot called Jees.

Long before Jees reached his office Pirius could hear the whir of exoskeletal supports as she clumped down the corridor. When she came in, he was shocked. Her lower body had been sliced away on a line that ran from her ribs on her right hand side to her pelvis on her left, the flesh and bone and blood replaced by a cold mass of silvery prostheses. When she sat down, the chair creaked at her inhuman weight.

But her hair, cut short, was a bright blond, and her skin was unlined. She was even beautiful. She could have been no more than his own age—but her eyes were dull.

She told him her history. She had been involved in two actions. She had survived the first, but had been caught by a starbreaker in the second. She had been lucky to live at all, of course. Most of her squadron, cut apart, hadn’t. She told this story unemotionally, lacing it with dates and reference numbers that meant nothing to Pirius. “If you get back to base they fix you up. The medics.” A half-smile crossed her face. “As long as there’s a piece of you left, they can replace what’s missing.”

It was impossible to feel pity for her; she was too damaged for that.

“Your current assignment is ground crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You really think you can fly again?”

“I volunteered,” she said. “I’m a pilot, not a mechanic. You’ve seen my evaluation. My reflexes and coordination and all the rest are as good as they were. Augmented, some of them are better, in fact. But—”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

Pila watched Jees, coldly evaluating.

Jees tapped her head with a metallic finger. “Everything that counts about me is still here. And what I am is a pilot. I want to get back out there and prove it.”

Pirius nodded, thanked her, and let her go.

Pila waved her hand, and a box in a Virtual checklist turned from red to green. “It’s obvious. We take her.”

“We do?”

Pila shrugged elegantly. “She’s a volunteer, one of the few we’ve had. She can handle the mission technically. Her nerve isn’t broken, according to the psychologists. In fact she’s powerfully motivated; she has a grudge against the Xeelee, and who can blame her? But we aren’t going to find many like her, Pirius.”

From the beginning Pila had complained bitterly about the pool of available candidates. “The superannuated and the criminal,” she said. “That’s all that’s being made available to us. Crew who are useless anywhere else, and so won’t impede Marshal Kimmer’s own grand goals. And there are precious few of
them. . . .
”

The fact was, in this war walking wounded were rare. Day after day, the fragile greenships flew into Xeelee fire like moths into flames. If anything went wrong, your chances of surviving were slim: death worked efficiently here.

Even “criminals” were hard to find. Penal units were handed the worst, the most dangerous assignments, and if you happened to survive an action, you were thrown back out again. Life expectancy was not long, the turnover rapid. But then, if you fell out with a Doctrine cop, you had demonstrated some incorrigible character flaw—and, deemed beyond hope of rehabilitation, you were eminently disposable.

But Pila had quickly found that even these battle-damaged antiques and failed renegades were hoarded, like every other resource, by jealous, empire-building local commanders. Pirius decided he was going to have to visit a penal detail to try to drum up volunteers. And that meant he would have to go to Quintuplet Base, where he knew at least one incorrigible rebel was still stationed—himself.

When he told her his decision, Pila grinned, her eyes quite without humor. “For the first time I am glad I have been forced into this assignment. I will enjoy watching you confronting your own unresolved issues, Pirius.”

But he was able to put that aside for a while, as he had a much more agreeable chore to complete first.

A week after Pirius’s promotion, the first test flights of greenships modified to Nilis’s full design were scheduled. Flexing his squadron leader muscles, Pirius decided to take the very first flight himself.

So he found himself sitting in a greenship’s pilot blister, with Torec as engineer and the intimidating presence of Commander Darc as navigator. Before the great dislocation of Blue’s irruption into his life, Pirius Red had actually completed his pilot training, but he had never flown in action. It was a huge relief to be aboard a greenship again, back where he belonged.

He checked over his ship. The greenship sat on its launch cradle on the tightly curving surface of Rock 492. The feather-light gravity of the dock touched the ship gently, and Pirius could see that the rails of the cradle had barely made a groove in the loose surface dust.

Light as a soap bubble it might be, but it was an ungainly beast even so. It was a superannuated fighter, one of just five begrudgingly donated so far by Marshal Kimmer and his staff. And it had been in the wars. The central body was scarred and much patched—and you could clearly see where the nacelle bearing the pilot’s pod had once been sliced clean through. This ship had been sent out again and again, until it was too battered to be worth fixing up: too worn out, in fact, for any use except Nilis’s complicated project.

This beat-up old bird would have been ugly enough if it had been left as nature and the Guild of Engineers intended. But Nilis had made things worse with his “enhancements.” Not one but
two
of Nilis’s patent black-hole cannons had been fixed to its flanks, along with a bulky pod where the exotic ammunition for these weapons was stored. The whole thing was swathed in a tangle of cables and wires and tubing. The ruining of the greenship’s classic streamlined finish didn’t matter, of course, since a greenship never flew in an atmosphere. What did matter was how the massive pods attached to the main body affected the ship’s dynamic stability.

The greenship was a mess, no two ways about it. Pirius thought the ironic name Darc had given it was apt:
Earthworm.
This poor ship looked as capable of swooping gracefully through space as fat old Nilis himself.

But still, this was the bird Pirius was going to fly today. And as he and his crew worked through their final preparations, he felt his heart beat a bit faster.

Then, with a soft command, he powered up his control systems. Much of the display was standard, concerned with handling the ship in its normal modes under the FTL drive or the sublight drives, after his years of training as familiar to Pirius as his own skin. Most of these displays were Virtual: only life-support controls were hardwired, so they wouldn’t pop out of existence no matter what hit the ship. But now Nilis’s additions booted up. Designed in haste and patched in hurriedly, they overlapped each other as they competed for space, crumbling into flaring, angry-looking crimson pixels.

Torec was grumbling about this. “Lethe,” she said. “It’s just as it was back in Sol system. You’d think they would have ironed this out by now.”

Commander Darc said, “We’re all under pressure, Engineer.”

Despite Torec’s complaints, one by one, the ship’s systems came up. When most of the flags shone green with “go,” Pirius snapped, “Engineer?”

“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Torec said gloomily.

“Then let’s get on with it.”

Pirius grasped a joystick and pulled it back steadily. He could feel the ship around him coming to life: the thrumming of the GUT-energy power plant, the subtle surges of the sublight drive. But as the ship lifted off the dirt, he could feel an unwelcome wallowing as the ship labored to cope with its additional mass. The inertial shielding seemed to be hiccupping too. He wasn’t surprised when an array of indicators turned red.

As they hovered over the dirt, his crew labored to put things right. “The problem’s the power plant,” Torec called. “The weapons systems have been patched into it. There’s enough juice to go around, in theory; the problem is balancing the demands. Greenship power plants aren’t used to being treated like this.”

“Work on it, Engineer,” Pirius said. “That’s what these trial flights are about, to flush out the glitches and fix them.”

“Well spoken, Squadron Leader,” Darc said dryly. “But you might want to look at your handling. That extra mass has screwed our moments of inertia.”

Pirius said, “The nav systems have been upgraded to cope with the changes.”

“Well, the patches don’t seem to be working. The central sentient thinks it’s stuck in one sick ship.” Darc laughed. “It isn’t so wrong.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Pirius said grimly.

The crew continued to work until they had got the blizzard of red lights down to a sprinkling. Then, when he thought he could risk it, Pirius lifted the ship away from the Rock. The ascent was smooth enough.

Pirius glanced down at the receding asteroid. He could see the shallow pit from which they had lifted. Standing around it, in defiance of all safety rules, was a loose circle of skinsuited techs. These complex trials, as Nilis’s team tried desperately to turn their prototypes and sketches into a working operational concept, had drawn a lot of cynicism from these world-weary techs, especially the Engineers’ Guild types: these observers were here, he knew, not to watch a successful trial, but to see a cocky pilot crash and burn. His determination surged. It wouldn’t happen today.

Darc sensed what he was thinking. “Give them a show, Pilot.”

Pirius grinned, and clenched his fists around his controls. The
Earthworm
hurled itself into the sky, straight up. The sublight jaunt, peaking at around half the speed of light, lasted only a fraction of a second, but Pirius glimpsed blueshift staining the crowded stars above him.

When it was over, Rock 492 had gone, snatched away from his view. And the target rock was dead ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be.

He felt a surge of triumph. “Still alive—oh,
Lethe.
” He was encased in red lights once more.

“We need to stabilize the systems,” Torec warned.

Pirius sighed. “I hear you, Engineer.” Once again the crew went to work, nursing their deformed steed; gradually the red constellations were replaced by an uncertain green.

The target, only a couple of hundred kilometers away, was just another asteroid, a bit of debris probably older than Earth. This Rock had been used for target practice by crews from Arches for generations. It was impossible to tell if the immense craters that pocked its surface were relics of the asteroid’s violent birth, or had been inflicted by trigger-happy trainees.

“Look at that thing,” Darc said. “Looks as if it has been cracked in two.”

Pirius said, “Let’s see if we can’t crack it again. Engineer, how are the weapons?”

Two threads of cherry-red light speared out from the pods on the
Earthworm
’s main body and lanced into the battered hide of the target rock.

“Nothing wrong with the starbreakers,” Torec said.

“Then let’s try the black-hole cannon.”

“My displays are green,” said Torec. “Most of the time anyhow.”

“Your course is laid in, Pilot,” Darc called from his navigator’s seat.

Pirius settled himself in his seat, smoothing out creases in his skinsuit. He stared at the rock, trying to visualize his flight.

Nilis had explained his latest tactics carefully. The microscopic black holes fired by the cannon had been enough to destroy a Xeelee nightfighter, but they would be pinpricks against a Galaxy-center black hole, and the living structures that fed off it—unless, Nilis had determined,
two
holes could be fired off together. If the holes could be made to collide correctly they would emit much of their mass-energy in a shaped pulse of gravitational waves—and Pirius had seen, in the wreckage of Jupiter, how much damage that could do. If such a bomb were set off at the event horizon of Chandra, the great black hole would flex and ripple, “like a rat shaking off fleas,” as Nilis had said.

But such a feat required huge accuracy. The greenships were going to have to fly around the black hole at an altitude of precisely a hundred kilometers above the event horizon:
precisely
meaning not more than ten meters out. Such a jaunt through the twisted space around a massive black hole was going to be “fun,” in Darc’s words, and the resistance of the Xeelee was going to make it more fun still. If they couldn’t achieve that degree of accuracy, the mission was a waste of time.

So today’s test was crucial. If Pirius couldn’t hit a dumb piece of rock, then Chandra was out of reach.

As the systems stabilized, the crew grew quiet. They would have to work together tightly during this maneuver. As pilot, Pirius would direct the line, navigator Darc was to check the accuracy of their trajectory, while engineer Torec worked the weapons. But the closest approach, during which they would have to fire the cannon, would happen in just a fraction of a second.