Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (51 page)

Berg turned a half-somersault before the thin air slowed her tumble. Then she was falling, upside down relative to the earth-craft, gravity tugging at her so feebly it seemed as if she were hanging in the sky.

Sucking at the cold air, her arms and legs spread wide, she stared back at the earth-craft. The biggest danger with all of this - the biggest in a whole jungle of dangers, she conceded - was that she might have reached escape velocity. Would she continue to fly out into the Jovian light, her lungs straining to find the last few molecules of oxygen? She tried to taste the air, to sense if it were getting any thinner; but it was impossible to tell.

The earth-craft was laid out like a diagram before her. She was looking up at the flat, quarter-mile-wide dome of dove-grey Xeelee material which formed its base. The dome was breached by circular vents, each about a yard wide, which must be the mouths of the singularity cannon Poole had described. The dome reminded her incongruously of some old sports stadium, ripped from the Earth and hurled into orbit, upside down, around Jupiter; but on the base of this stadium sat a cluster of Xeelee-material buildings and the battered, ancient stones of a henge. Close to the edge of the landscape she could make out her two pursuers; staring after her, they clung to their floor of grass like two pink-clad flies, their weapons pinned to the sward by the inverted gravity.

Beyond the earth-craft the Spline warship climbed across the sky, Jupiter casting long, mottled spotlights onto its elephant hide.

Now there was the faintest breeze whispering past her ears as the earth-craft’s weak, complex gravity field stroked her back into the artificial sky. She felt a surge of relief. Well, at least she wasn’t going to die of asphyxiation, suspended carelessly over Jupiter.

The earth-craft seemed to be tipping away from her, dipping its domed section and hiding the grass-coated face from her view. Soon, even the Spline ship was hidden by its bulk.

For an odd, brief moment she was alone. She was suspended in a bubble of crisp blue sky; tufts of ragged white cloud laced the air, draping themselves over the edge of the earth-craft. It was utterly silent. It was almost peaceful. She didn’t feel any fear, or regrets, she was on a roller-coaster of events now, and there wasn’t much she could do except relax, roll with it, and react to whatever happened. She tried to empty her mind, to concentrate just on drawing in each painful breath.

A breeze pushed more steadily at her face now; she felt it riffle her short hair, and her loose jumpsuit billowed gently against her chest and legs.

She watched the dome more carefully, focusing on the nearest of the seemingly randomly placed singularity-cannon vents, about two hundred yards in from the rim of the craft. By measuring it against her thumbnail she saw that the vent was growing. It was like a huge opening mouth.

She found herself sighing with a small, odd regret. So much for her little interlude in the air; it looked as if the world of events was drawing her back in again.

The grey construction-material dome was looming up at her now; she was going to hit about twenty yards up from the earth-lined rim of the craft. Well, she was glad to avoid the vents for the moment; the Xeelee material was monomolecular, and she remembered the razor-sharp edges of the doorway to Shira’s hut ...

The gravity on this part of the dome would be about a quarter of the earth-normal field in the interior of the craft. Enough to cause her to hit hard. She tried to orient herself in the stiffening wind, her arms and legs bent slightly, her hands held before her face.

Michael opened his eyes.

He was breathing normally. Thank God. He took a luxurious draught of thick, warm air.

He was inside the metal box that was the boat’s airlock. The floor felt soft below him ... too soft. He probed beneath him with his right hand, and found the metal floor a few inches below his spine; inadvertently he shoved himself a little further into the air.

Weightlessness. They’d made it into space.

When he turned his head, his shoulders, chest and neck still ached from their labours in the thin air of the earth-craft. Beside him Shira was curled into a question mark, the diffuse light of the airlock bathing the elegant dome of her head. Her face looked very young in her sleep. Trickles of blood, meandering in the weightless conditions, snaked from her ears.

Poole lifted cautious fingers to his own face. Blood at his nose and ears. And the sudden movement made him rock in the air; his hovering legs dangled and banged together, and the pain from his damaged shins and feet flared anew. He cried out, softly.

Harry’s face popped into being just in front of his own. ‘You’re alive,’ Harry said. ‘Awake, as a matter of fact.’

Poole found his voice reduced to an ugly scratch. ‘Great timing, Harry. Why didn’t you run it a bit closer?’

Harry’s eyebrows raised a little. ‘Piece of cake,’ he said.

‘Let me sleep.’ Michael closed his eyes.

‘Sorry. We dock with the
Crab
in one minute. Then we’ve got to get out of here. We’re assaulting a mile-wide sentient warship from the future. Or don’t you remember the plan?’

Michael groaned and shut his eyes tighter.

Berg’s hands, feet and knees hit the unyielding surface first. The construction material was slick, smoother than ice, a shock of sudden cold against her palms. She let her hands and feet slide away from beneath her. She turned her face away so that her chest and thighs hit the surface comparatively softly.

She lay spreadeagled, flattened against the dome. She lay for a few minutes, the breath hissing through her teeth, her chest flat against the cold Xeelee substance.

She’d had worse landings.

The light changed. She lifted her head. Once more the Spline was rising over the curved horizon of the dome, a malevolent moon of flesh, cratered by eyes and weapon snouts.

H
arry’s voice was strained. ‘Michael. The Spline is attacking the earth-craft.’

M
ichael Poole, the
Crab
’s two gravities heavy on his chest, lay on a couch. The subdued lights of the
Crab
’s lifedome were comfortingly familiar all around him.

Above him, directly ahead of the advancing
Crab
, the Spline they had chosen to chase loomed like a misshapen face, growing perceptibly. Other ships orbited the Spline in a slow, complex gavotte. The whole tableau was almost pleasing to watch; peaceful, silent.

Poole felt tired, his capacity to absorb change exhausted. Lying here was almost like the precious days when he had sailed alone through the Oort Cloud.

The girl Shira, on a couch beside Poole’s, her frail frame crushed by the two-gravity thrust, wept softly. Poole turned to her reluctantly. Her face was gaunt. There was moisture under her eyes, her nose, patches of colour in her cheeks; her eyes were like red wounds. Harry’s disembodied head floated in shadow some feet above them both, no expression readable.

‘Damn it,’ said Poole. ‘Harry, bring up an image of the earth-craft.’

A section of the dome turned opaque, hiding the Spline and its ineffectual human attendants; the opaque section filled with a salmon-pink wash, an inverted slab of grass-green, a ball of hull-flesh. The little cup-shaped earth-craft, dwarfed, hung beneath the belly of the attacking warship like some absurd pendant; and it hung with its grassy face averted, its construction-material dome turned up to the Spline in submission. Cherry-red fire flickered from the gut of the Spline, dimming Jupiter’s light. The earth-craft shuddered visibly.

‘Starbreakers,’ Shira breathed, eyes wide. ‘The Spline is using starbreakers.’

‘What did you expect?’ Poole said grimly. ‘Can the Xeelee material withstand starbreaker beams?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps for a while. The earth-craft isn’t a warship, Michael.’

Poole frowned. In the magnified and enhanced image on the dome the singularity-cannon portals were obvious breaches in the ship’s armour. Presumably the causality stress was still impairing the Spline’s power and accuracy. But if the Spline managed to shoot through one of those portals it would be over, no matter how tough this magical Xeelee substance was.

Suddenly there was smoke, flames erupting from one of the cannon mouths. The light was an intense blue, heavily loaded to the ultraviolet. Poole, used to the silent flickering of light and particle weapons, felt weak, awed. Two points of light, intensely bright and whirling around each other, shot out of the cannon and spiralled along the column of smoke and light towards the patient bulk of Jupiter.

Harry said, ‘What the hell was that?’

‘Singularities,’ Poole breathed. ‘I can scarcely believe it. They’re working their cannon; they’ve fired off two of their singularities. The Friends are fighting back. Maybe Berg—’

‘No.’ Shira’s face, though damp with weeping, was composed. ‘It’s the Project. They are proceeding with the Project.’ Her eyes were bright, seemingly joyful, as she stared upwards.

Starbreaker light flared. Overloaded, the lifedome turned black, the image imploding, then cleared once more.

Now, above Poole’s head, the Spline he was chasing was turning, weapon pits glinting menacingly.

‘I think they’ve spotted us,’ Harry said.

The belly of the Spline closed down on the earth-craft like a lid. The nearest cannon-mouth was still yards away.

Berg threw herself flat against the construction-material dome. Hull-flesh rolled above her, silent and awesome, like the palm of some giant hand. Metal artefacts large enough to be artillery pieces stared down at her. Now a huge wounded area swept over her, an inverted pool of blood and disrupted flesh. Something swam in that thick, oil-like blood, she saw: symbiotic organisms - or constructs - patiently tending to the worst of the damage. With acres of charnel-house meat suspended over her head, she found herself gagging; but, of course, there was no smell, no sound; the Spline was still outside the atmosphere of the earth-craft.

Would Xeelee construction material stop the weapons of a Spline warship? Maybe not. But it sure would help ...

She had to get inside the dome.

Trying to ignore the looming ceiling of flesh, she slithered on her belly towards the hole in the dome.

She was too slow, too damn slow. After a few seconds she stopped, rested her face against the dove-grey cheek of Xeelee material.

This was ridiculous. Crawling wasn’t going to make a difference, one way or the other; it could only slow her down.

Muttering encouragement to herself, keeping her eyes off the nightmare filling the sky, she pushed herself up to a kneeling position, got her legs under her, stood uncertainly.

As if in response cherry-red brightness burst all around her; the dome shuddered like a living thing. She was thrown to her face.

Then, when the singularity cannon fired, Berg’s body actually rattled against the shuddering Xeelee material. She pushed herself away from the dome, leaving smears of blood from her nose, her bruised mouth.

She got to her feet. There was a stink of ozone; a wind pressed at her chest, weak in the thin air. Twin points of light - which must be singularities - climbed a tube of smoke into the pink-stained sky. The points whirled around each other like buzzing fireflies. She gave a hoarse cheer: at last, it seemed, the good guys were fighting back ...

But then she saw that the smoke tube the singularities were climbing almost grazed the surface of the dome; it passed neatly through the gap between the dome and the lumbering belly of the Spline and arced towards Jupiter.

The Friends weren’t trying to attack the Spline, to defend themselves; they were firing their singularities at Jupiter. Even at a time like this, all they cared about was their damn Project.

‘Assholes,’ Berg said. She started running.

Ignoring the pain of the thinness of the atmosphere in her lungs, the heady stench of scorched air, the buffeting winds, the shuddering dome, she tried to work out what she’d do when she got to the mouth of the cannon. The tubes were about three feet wide, and she’d have about twenty yards to fall to the inner base of the dome; she could probably slide through the first few yards and then use her hands and feet to brake—

Starbreaker light flared hellishly all around her. Abandoning all conscious plans, she wrapped her arms around her face and dived head-first into the cannon tube.

Even though the Spline’s weapon-ports must be open now - even though the warship from the future must look like some fleshy wall across the sky, massive and menacing, to the natives of this era - a lone matchstick craft was coming at them out of the flotilla of ships, flaring along a two-gee curve straight for the Spline.

Jasoft Parz could hardly believe it.

The ship was about a mile in length. Its drive-fire plumed from a block of comet-ice; the block was fixed to a long, delicate, open-frame metal stalk, topped by a clear lifedome. The dome was a pool of subdued light; Jasoft could almost imagine he could see humans moving about in it, actual people.

Jasoft recognized the design from the research he’d performed for the dead Governor. This was a GUTship, driven by the phase energy of decoupling super-forces. It looked so
fragile.

Something moved in Jasoft, lost and isolated as he was in the grotesque eyeball of the Spline.

There had to be something he could do to help.

He pushed away from the lens. With short, heavy strokes through the thick entoptic fluid, he cast about the eye chamber, looking for some way to damage his Spline host.

Berg rattled down the translucent singularity-cannon tube.

The barrel seemed to be sheltering her from the blazing red light of the starbreaker assault, but its surface proved to be slick and unyielding; neither her hands nor her feet could gain any kind of purchase on the walls of the tube. So she kicked out at the walls as she collided with them, jamming herself as hard as she could against them: anything to generate a little friction. She knew the lower mouth of the tube was six feet above the crystalline floor of the inner chamber. Berg tried to twist in the tube so she’d land butt-first, protecting her head and arms—