Exultant (9 page)

Pirius didn’t like the sound of that “conditioning.”

“
That
is why I asked for you, Ensign.” Nilis looked out at the swimming stars, the silent, ominous forms of the Spline escorts. “I reject this war, and I have spent most of my life seeking ways to end it. That doesn’t mean I seek defeat, or an accommodation with the Xeelee, for I believe none is possible. I seek a way to win—but that means I must overturn the status quo, and
that
is enough to have earned me enemies throughout the hierarchies of the Coalition. It is a lonely battle, and I grow old, tired—and, yes, afraid. I need your youth, your courage—and your imagination. Now, what do you think?”

Pirius frowned. “I don’t want to be anybody’s crutch, sir.”

Nilis flinched. But he said, “That brutal honesty of yours! Very well, very well. You will be no crutch, but a collaborator.”

Pirius said uneasily, “And I don’t see why you’re alone. What of your—family? You said something about a brother.”

Nilis turned away. “My parents were both senior Commissaries, who made the unpardonable error of falling in love. My family, and it
was
a family of the ancient kind, was as illegal on Earth as it would have been on Arches Base. The family was broken up when I was small—I was taken away.

“Of course my background is the key to
me;
any psychologist will tell you that. Why, the Doctrines deny women the right to experience giving birth! What a dreadful distortion that is. You yourself, Pirius, you were
hatched,
not born. You grew up in a sort of school, not a home. You have emerged socialized, highly educated. But—forgive me!—you are nothing but a product of your background. You have no
roots.
My background is, well, more primitive. So perhaps I feel the pain of the war’s brutal waste more than some of my colleagues.”

This made little sense to Pirius. On Arches, there was contraceptive in the very water. Men
could
get women pregnant—the old biology still worked—but it would be a pathology, a mistake. A pregnancy was like a cancer, to be cut out. The only way to pass on your genes was through the birthing tanks, and you only got to contribute to them if you performed well.

Nilis went on, “Since I lost my family, I have been neither one thing nor the other, neither rooted in a family nor comfortable in a world of birthing houses and cadres.” He glanced at Pirius. “Rather like you, Pirius, I have been punished for a crime I never committed.”

Pirius heard a soft sigh. Glancing back he saw Torec, standing behind a half-open door. She was wearing a shapeless sleeping gown, and her face was puffy with too much sleep.

Nilis looked away, visibly embarrassed.

She said, “You’re teaching him to talk like you do, Commissary. Pretty soon he won’t sound like Navy at all. Is that what you want?”

Pirius held his breath. Back at Arches, Torec would already have earned herself a week in the can.

But Nilis just said, flustered, “No. Of course not.”

“Then
what
? Six days we’ve been on this stupid toy ship. And still you haven’t said what we’re doing here.”

Pirius stood up, between Torec and the Commissary. “Sir, she just woke up. . . .”

She shook him off. She seemed infuriated. She hitched up her gown, showing her thighs. “Is this what you want? Or
him
? Do you want to get into our bed with us, Commissary?”

Pirius used main force to shove her back into the cabin and pushed the door shut. He turned uncertainly. “Commissary, I’m sorry—”

Nilis waved tiredly. Pirius saw that the skin on the back of his hand was paper-thin. “Oh, it’s all right, Ensign. I do understand. I was young once, too, you know.”

“Young?”

Nilis looked up at him. “Perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way. The human societies of the Core really are very young, you know, Pirius—those bases are swarms of children. The only adults you see are your instructors, I imagine. But
I
see you with a bit more perspective, perhaps. You have the bodies of adults, you are old enough to love and hate—and more than old enough to fight, to kill, and to die. And yet you will suddenly throw a tantrum, like Torec’s; suddenly a spike of childhood comes sticking up through the still-forming strata of adulthood. I do understand, I think.

“And besides, she’s right to ask such questions. After all, I have turned your lives upside down, haven’t I?” He smiled.

Yes, you have, Pirius thought uncomfortably. And he wondered if Torec had seen through to the truth. Maybe all these words about the philosophy of war were meaningless: maybe the truth was, this was just a silly old man who needed company.

Two days out from Earth, the corvette burst out of the crowded lanes of the Sagittarius Arm and passed into the still emptier spaces beyond.

Pirius looked back at Sagittarius. It was a place of young stars and glowing clouds, hot and rich. The outer edge of this spiral arm was the famous Orion Line, where an alien species called the Silver Ghosts had resisted humanity, and the Third Expansion had stalled for centuries. The storming of the Line had been a turning point in human history. Since then, like an unquenchable fire, humanity had roared on, consuming all in its path, to the center of the Galaxy itself.

But they were leaving all that behind. The corvette was approaching the Galaxy’s ragged outer edge now, and the stars were scattered thin. Earth’s sun, he learned, wasn’t even in a proper spiral arm at all, but in a curtailed arc of dim, unspectacular stars.

Their last stop before Earth would be at a system called 51 Pegasi.

As the corvette cruised toward the system’s central star, Torec came out of their room to stand before the transparent hull. Since her outburst, or maybe breakdown, Torec had been subdued. But the Commissary made no comment: it was as if the incident had never happened.

“There.” Nilis pointed. “Can you see? The sailing ships . . .”

The planetary system here was dominated by one massive world, a bloated Jovian that swept close to the sun, a world so huge its gravity pulled its parent star around. It was that jiggling, in fact, which had led to the world’s discovery from Earth, one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered. Humans had come here in their crude slower-than-light starships, in the first tentative exodus called, retrospectively, the First Expansion.

“I used to come here for vacations,” Nilis murmured. “The sky was always full of sails. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. You know, systems like this are a relic of the history of human advance. Technology tends to get simpler as you approach the source, Earth. It took so long to get to more remote regions that humanity had advanced by the time they got there; each colonizing push was overtaken by waves of greater sophistication. The Xeelee are different, though. All over the Galaxy, their technology is at the same stage of development. So they must have arrived all at once: they must be extragalactic. . . .”

“Commissary,” Pirius asked hesitantly, “where is Earth?”

The Commissary glanced around the sky, blinking to clear his rheumy eyes. Then he pointed to a nondescript star hanging in the dark, barely visible. “There.”

Pirius looked up. For the first time the light of humanity’s original sun entered his eyes.

Chapter
7

Pirius Blue and the crew of the
Claw,
stranded in their own indifferent past, were taken away from Arches Base.

The transport was a heap of junk, a battered old scow whose best days were long past. They had to keep their skinsuits sealed the whole time, and the Higgs field inertial control had hiccups, making the gravity flicker queasily. You couldn’t even see out through the hull.

But then this wasn’t a Navy boat, as Enduring Hope had pointed out as they had dragged themselves aboard. Its hull was painted Army green, making it even uglier. “And,” said Hope the engineer gloomily, “everybody knows how good the Army is at running spaceships.”

Cohl wriggled on a heap of sacking, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. “Welcome to your new timeline,” she said.

Pirius was still consumed with guilt for having landed them in this—Cohl and Hope, and their younger selves, including his own. He had no idea how he was going to find the strength to endure what was to come. He could think of nothing to say to his crew.

After two days of living in their skinsuits, two days of sucking emergency rations through straws and stretching their suits’ relief systems to their stinking limit, the scow lumbered to a landing. The ship’s inertial field switched off, plunging them into microgravity, but their training had prepared them for such things, and they all grabbed handholds before they went drifting off.

Without warning, the hull popped open, to reveal gray, trampled ground, a sky crowded with stars.

An Army private in a scuffed green skinsuit appeared at the door. He was wearing a bulky inertial-control belt. “Out,” he ordered.

Pirius led the way. He picked up his bag and loped out of the broad hatchway, letting himself drift to the ground. He looked around. He was on a Rock—a small one by the feel of its gravity. He was standing in a crater, a walled plain, its surface heavily pitted by footsteps, and broader scars where the bellies of ships had touched. The sky was crowded with massive stars, and behind that speckled veil the center of the Galaxy was a wall of light, too diffuse to cast a sharp shadow.

Cohl asked, “Where do you think we are? Those stars are dense enough for it to be a cluster.”

“Not Arches,” said Enduring Hope bleakly. “I suspect we’re a long way from
there.
”

“Shut up,” the Army private said without emotion. He went along their little line, handed them inertial belts like his own, and took away their bags. “You won’t be needing that shit anymore.”

Pirius knew this was likely the last they would see of their gear, all he had left of his life at Arches. Everybody had heard the scuttlebutt that buck privates believed Navy flyers were well-off compared to them, and he had expected theft, but not to lose his kit so quickly; it was shocking, denuding. But perhaps that was the idea.

An Army officer stood before them—a captain, according to the stripes on her shoulder. Her skinsuit was battered and much repaired, and through its translucent sheen Pirius saw the gleam of metal down her left side, her leg and torso and arm. She had her hands behind her back, and her face was shadowed, but brown eyes regarded them somberly—and, Pirius saw, startled, a fleck of silver gleamed in each pupil. “Put on your belts,” she said.

Pirius snapped to attention. “Sir, I am Pilot Officer Pirius of—”

“I don’t care who you are. Put on your belts.” They hesitated for one heartbeat, and she yelled.
“Do it.”

Pirius’s inertial belt was battered, and the fabric was stained dark, perhaps with blood, though the color was indistinct in the pale Galaxy light. As he snapped it on, weight clutched at him, dragging him to the asteroid dirt. It had been preset to what felt like more than a standard gravity. He reached for the clasp.

“Don’t touch that control.”

Pirius snapped back to attention.

“My name is Marta,” the captain said. “This is a base at the heart of the Quintuplet Cluster. We know it as Quin.” Pirius knew that this was indeed a long way from Arches. “Let me begin your reeducation right now. This is an Army base, and I am an Army officer. You are still Navy personnel, attached to what we call the Navy Division, but you are under my command. You will be trained for work in the Service Corps.”

Pirius’s heart sank. The Service Corps: the shit-shovellers. He said, “Sir, what will our duties—”

“Shut up.”

“Sir.”

“That is the
last
question I want to hear from you. It is not important what you know, only what you do. And you do only what I tell you. Is that clear?”

The three of them mumbled a reply. “Sir.”

She took a step closer to them, and Pirius saw that she walked, not stiffly, but a little unnaturally; the systems that had replaced her left side worked smoothly, but not quite as an intact human body would. “Lethe, you’re unfit.” She prodded at Enduring Hope’s belly. “I’m truly sick of having you fat wheezing flyboys dumped on me.”

She stood back. “Let’s get this straight from the start. I don’t want Navy rejects here.
Nobody
wants you. But here you are. The work you will be assigned will be the dirtiest of dirty jobs, and the most dangerous. I’ve no doubt you’ll foul it up, but soon you’ll die, and then you’ll be out of my hair. Until then you will do what I tell you without question or complaint.”

“Sir.”

She had a data desk in her shining left hand. “Let’s check you are who you’re supposed to be. Pirius.”

“Pilot Officer Pirius, sir.”

“You’re not a pilot anymore. Pirius.”

“Sir.”

“Cohl.”

“Sir.”

“Tuta.”

Enduring Hope didn’t reply.

Marta didn’t look up from her desk. “Tuta.”

“Sir, my name is—”

Pirius broke in. “He’s Tuta, sir.”

Marta tapped her desk. “Fine. So you’re loyal to each other. You can all share Tuta’s punishment.” She touched a control at her chest, and suddenly the pull of false gravity on Pirius climbed, reaching twice standard. “Three circuits,” she said. It turned out she meant them to run three circuits of the crater rim; Pirius guessed it would amount to ten kilometers. “Your fitness work starts here,” she said.

Pirius said, “Sir. We’ve lived in these suits for days already.”

“Four circuits,” she said evenly. And she turned her back and walked toward her transport.

Without another word Pirius turned away and began to plod toward the crater wall. Cohl and Hope fell in beside him. He saw that Hope was already sweating. Hope mouthed silently,
I’m sorry.

The way wasn’t hard to follow. All around the eroded rim of the crater, there was a path where the asteroid ground had been beaten flat by the passage of uncounted feet. But to run under the false weight of their belts was brutal, and their skinsuits, designed for the comparatively light use of greenship crews, were not intended for this kind of hard labor. Soon Pirius’s feet started to blister, and the suit chafed at his groin and armpits.