Galactic Empires (36 page)

"No, it is not. The
River Volga
is not dead. I only made it seem this way."

I frowned. "I don't understand."

"There isn't time to explain here. Get me back to the bridge, get me connected back to the harness, then I will tell you. But make haste! We really do not have very much time. The enemy are much nearer than you think."

"The enemy?"

"There is no
Mandate of Heaven.
Either she scuttled back to the portal, or she was destroyed during the same attack that damaged us."

"But you said…"

"I lied. Now help me move!"

Not for the first time that day, I did precisely as I was told.

Having already plotted a route around the obstructions, it did not take anywhere near as long to return to the bridge as it had taken to reach the lifeboats. Once there, I buckled him into the couch—he was beginning to retain some limb control, but not enough to help me with the task—and set about reconnecting the harness systems, trusting myself not to make a mistake. My fingers fumbled on the ends of my hands, as if they were a thousand
li
away.

"Start talking to me, Muhunnad," I said. "Tell me what's going on. Why did you lie about the
Mandate!"

"Because I knew the effect that lie would have on Qilian. I wished to give him a reason to leave the ship. I had seen the kind of man he was. I knew that he would save himself, even if it meant the rest of us dying."

"I still don't understand. What good has it done us? The damage to the ship…" I completed the final connection. Muhunnad stiffened as the harness took hold of his nervous system, but did not appear to be in any obvious discomfort. "Are you all right?" I asked warily.

"This will take a moment. I had to put the ship into a deep shutdown, to convince Qilian. I must bring her back system by system, so as not to risk an overload."

The evidence of his work was already apparent. The bridge lights returned to normal illumination, while those readouts and displays that had remained active were joined by others that had fallen into darkness. I held my breath, expecting the whole ensemble to shut back down again at any moment. But I should have known better than to doubt Muhunnad's ability. The systems remained stable, even as they cycled through startup and crash recovery routines. The air circulators resumed their dull but reassuring chug.

"I shall dispense with artificial gravity until we are safely under way, if that is satisfactory with you."

"Whatever it takes," I said.

His eyes, still wide open, quivered in their sockets. "I am sweeping local space," he reported. "There was some real damage to the sensors, but nowhere as bad as I made out. I can see Qilian's lifeboat. He made an excellent departure." Then he swallowed. "I can also see the enemy. Three of their ships will shortly be within attack range. I must risk restarting the engines without a proper initialization test."

"Again, whatever it takes."

"Perhaps you would like to brace yourself. There may be a degree of undamped acceleration."

Muhunnad had been right to warn me, and even then it came harder and sooner than I had been expecting. Although I had managed to secure myself to a handhold, I was nearly wrenched away with the abruptness of our departure. I felt acceleration rising smoothly, until it was suppressed by the dampeners. My arm was sore from the jolt, as if it had been almost pulled from its socket.

"That is all I can do for us now," Muhunnad said. "Running is our only effective strategy, unfortunately. Our weapons would prove totally ineffective against the enemy, even if we could get close enough to fire before they turned their own guns on us. But running will suffice. At least we have the mass of one less lifeboat to consider."

"I still don't quite get what happened. How did you know there'd still be one lifeboat that was still working? From what I saw, we came very close to losing all of them."

"We did," he said, with something like pride in his voice. "But not quite, you see. That was my doing, Ariunaa. Before the instant of the attack, I adjusted the angle of orientation of our hull. I made sure that the energy beam took out five of the six lifeboat launch hatches, and no more. Think of a knife fighter, twisting to allow part of his body to be cut rather than another."

I stared at him in amazement, forgetting the pain in my arm from the sudden onset of acceleration. I recalled what Qilian had said, his puzzlement about the ship twisting at the onset of the attack. "You mean you had all this planned, before they even attacked us?"

"I evaluated strategies for disposing of our mutual friend, while retaining the ship. This seemed the one most likely to succeed."

"I am… impressed."

"Thank you," he said. "Of course, it would have been easier if I had remained in the harness, so that we could move immediately once the pod had departed. But I think Qilian would have grown suspicious if I had not shown every intention of wanting to escape with him."

"You're right. It was the only way to convince him."

"And now there is only one more matter that needs to be brought to your attention. It is still possible to speak to him. It can be arranged with trivial ease: despite what I said earlier, I am perfectly capable of locking on a tight beam."

"He'll have no idea what's happened, will he? He'll still think he's got away with it. He's expecting to be rescued by the
Mandate of Heaven
at any moment."

"Eventually, the nature of his predicament will become apparent. But by then, he is likely to have come to the attention of the Smiling Ones."

I thought of the few things Muhunnad had told us about our adversaries. "What will they do to him? Shoot him out of the sky?"

"Not if they sense a chance to take him captive with minimal losses on their own side. I would suggest that an unpowered lifeboat would present exactly such an opportunity."

"And then?"

"He will die. But not immediately. Like the Shining Caliphate and the Mongol Expansion, the Smiling Ones have an insatiable appetite for information. They will have found others of his kind before, just as they have found others of mine. But I am sure Qilian will still provide them with much amusement."

"And then?" I repeated.

"An appetite of another kind will come into play. The Smiling Ones are cold-blooded creatures. Reptiles. They consider the likes of us-the warm, the mammalian-to be a kind of affront. As well they might, I suppose. All those millions of years ago, we ate their eggs."

I absorbed what he said, thinking of Qilian falling to his destiny, unaware for now of the grave mistake he had made. Part of me was inclined to show clemency: not by rescuing him, which would place
us
dangerously close to the enemy, but by firing on him, so that he might be spared an encounter with the Smiling Ones.

But it was not a large part.

"Time to portal, Muhunnad?"

"Six minutes, on our present heading. Do you wish to review my intentions?"

"No," I said, after a moment. "I trust you to do the best possible job. You think we'll make it into the Infrastructure without falling to pieces?"

"If Allah is willing. But you understand that our chances of returning to home are now very slim, Yellow Dog? Despite my subterfuge, this ship
is
damaged. It will not survive many more transitions."

"Then we'll just have to make the best of wherever we end up," I said.

"It will not feel like home to either of us," he replied, his tone gently warning, as if I needed reminding of that.

"But if there are people out there… I mean, instead of egg-laying monsters, or sweet-looking devils with tails, then it'll be better than nothing, won't it? People are people. If the Infrastructure is truly breaking down, allowing all these timelines to bleed into one another, than we are all going to have get along with each other sooner or later, no matter what we all did to each other in our various histories. We're all going to have to put the past behind us."

"It will not be easy," he acknowledged. "But if two people as unalike as you and I can become friends, then perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we could even become an example to others. We shall have to see, shan't we?"

"We shall have to see," I echoed.

I held Muhunnad's hand as we raced toward the portal, and whatever Heaven had in store for us on the other side.

THE SEER AND THE SILVERMAN

Stephen Baxter

Taken from the Short Story Collection “Galactic Empires” (2008) edited by Gardner Dozois

Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the "hard-science" story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science that bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

Baxter made his first sale to
Interzone
in 1987, and since then he has become one of that magazine's most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to
Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds,
and elsewhere. He's one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice, and won both
Asimov's
Readers Award and
Analog'5
Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter's first novel,
Raft,
was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as
Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux,
and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to
The Time Machine-The Time Ships,
which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels,
Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent,
and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke,
The Light of Other Days
and
Time's Eye, a Time Odyssey.
His short fiction has been collected in
Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces,
and
Hunters of Pangaea,
and he has released a chapbook novella,
Mayflower II.
Coming up are a flood of new novels, including
Conqueror, Navagator, Firstborn, Weaver, Flood,
and The
H-bomb Girl.

Baxters Xeelee series is one of the most complex sequences in science fiction history, a tapestry of dozens of stories and many novels
(Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring, Cilia-of-Gold)
that spans millions of years of time as well as most of the galaxy, and brings humans into contact (usually hostile contact) with dozens of alien races, many of them initially more powerful and advanced than humanity itself. Here, in a scenario roughly halfway through the entire arc of the sequence, he pictures the attempt of two Galactic Empires formerly locked in conflict to uneasily coexist-with the stakes about as high as they can possibly get.

His mother's screaming filled the lifedome. "He's gone. The Ghosts have taken him. Lethe, Benj is gone!"

Shocked awake, Donn Wyman grabbed a robe and ran out of his cabin.

His mother and father were in the plaza, in their sleep clothes, clinging to each other. They were outside Benj's cabin. The door was open. Donn could see at a glance that the room was empty.

Only seconds after wakening, he had a sickening, immediate sense of what was wrong. The abduction from out of the heart of his home was bewildering, as if part of reality had been cut away, not just a human being, not just his brother.

"Now, Rima, don't take on." Samm Wyman was trying to calm his wife. He was a careworn man, slight of build and with his family's pale blue eyes. Donn knew that spreading calm was his father's fundamental strategy in life.

But Rima was struggling in his arms. "He's gone! You can see for yourself!" Her hair was wild, her face tattoos unanimated, just dead black scars on her cheeks.

"Yes, but you're jumping to conclusions, you always think the worst straightaway."

She pushed him away. "Oh, get off me, you fool. What else could it be but an abduction? If he'd gone out through the ports, the lifedome AI would know about it. So what good is being calm? Do you think you can just
wish
this away?"

Donn said uncertainly, "Mother—"

"Oh, Donn-help me look. Just in case he's somewhere in the dome, somewhere the AI hasn't spotted him."

Donn knew that was futile, but they had to look. "All right."

Rima snapped at her husband. "And you find out if he's anywhere else on the Reef. And call the Commissary. If the Coalition are going to meddle in our affairs, they may as well make themselves useful. They could start by finding out where every Ghost on the Reef was last night-and the Silvermen."

She stalked off and began throwing open doors around the rim of the plaza. The bots followed her, their aged servos whirring.

Samm eyed his elder son. "I already called Commissary Elah. Who knows? Maybe the Coalition goons will be some use for once. She's just taking out her anger on me. She'll take it out on you, too, before she's done. It's her way. Don't let it upset you."

"I won't, Dad. But this is bad, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid so, son. Go on, get searching."

Donn cut across the center of the plaza, the lifedome's central floor space. Much of it was given over to green, for the crew of this old ship, his mother's distant ancestors, had crossed the stars with a chunk of forest brought from Earth itself, a copse of mature trees, oak, alder, and lime, old enough to have wrapped thick roots around the struts of the lifedome's frame. But Donn, twenty-five years old, had never been to Earth, and to him the trees were just furniture.