Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (52 page)

She plummeted out of the cannon.

The plane of singularities, diamond points in a lattice of blue-white light, rushed to meet her, slammed into her back.

For long seconds she lay there spreadeagled, staring up at the Xeelee-material dome. Cherry-red light glimmered in distant cannon mouths.

She gingerly moved her legs, wiggled her fingers. There was a cacophony of pain, but nothing seemed to be broken. Her lungs, back and chest felt like a single mass of bruises, though; and it was hard to expand her lungs, to take a decent breath.

It felt nice to lie here, she thought, just to lie here and to watch the light show ...

Starbreaker light flared anew beyond the dome - no, she realized with a shock; now it was shining
through
the dome - and as she watched Xeelee construction material blistered, bubbling like melting plastic.

She’d postpone blacking out until later, she decided.

She rolled over and climbed painfully to her feet, ignored the clamouring stiffness, the pain in her legs and chest.

The hollow heart of the earth-craft was a hive of activity. Friends ran everywhere carrying bits of equipment, working control panels, shouting instructions to each other. But there was no chaos, or panic, Berg saw. The Friends knew exactly what they were doing. The scene had something of the air of a great installation - a power plant, perhaps - in the throes of some crisis.

In the commotion no one seemed to have observed her unorthodox entrance. There was damage around her, evidence of the huge Spline assault; close to her there was a burned-out control console, two young, gaunt bodies splayed over it.

A cannon-tube flared, forcing her to shield her eyes; a pair of singularities hurtled out of the plane beneath her feet, dazzled up into a cannon tube and soared beyond the dome like ascending souls. She felt the plane beneath her shudder as the whole craft recoiled from the launch of so much mass.

And now there was a rush of noise above her, like the exhalation of a giant. She glanced up. The damaged area of the dome was beginning to glow white-hot; around a quarter of the dome was sagging, losing its structural integrity under the sustained Spline assault.

There was a smell of burning.

Berg recognized a man - a boy, really - the Friend Jaar, who’d taken Poole on his sightseeing tour of this place. Jaar was working at the centre of a little group of Friends, poring over slates which bore what looked like schematics of singularity trajectories. There was soot, blood smeared over his bare scalp, and his jumpsuit was torn, begrimed; he looked tired, but in control.

In a few strides Berg crossed the chamber. She forced her way through the knot of people and grabbed Jaar’s arm, pulling away his slate so he was forced to look at her.

Irritation, hypertension crossed his face. ‘Miriam Berg. How did you get in here? I thought—’

‘I’ll explain later. Jaar, you’re under attack. What are you doing about it?’

He pulled his arm away from her. ‘We are finishing the Project,’ he said. ‘Please, Miriam—’

She grabbed his shoulders, twisted him round so he was forced to face her. ‘Look above your head, damn it! The Spline is using starbreakers. The whole damn roof is going to implode on you, Xeelee material or not. There’s not going to be time to finish your precious Project.
You’re going to fail
, Jaar, unless you do something about it.’

Wearily he indicated the frantic motion around them. ‘We set up a crash schedule for the implementation of the Project, but we’re falling behind already. And we’ve lost lives.’ He looked up; he seemed to flinch from the failing dome.

‘Why don’t you use the hyperdrive?’

‘The hyperdrive has already gone,’ Jaar said. ‘Its components were stored in the structure of the dome; we lost operability soon after the start of the assault—’

‘Jesus.’ Berg ran stiff fingers through her hair. So there was no way to run; they could only fight. And she wouldn’t be fighting merely for the good of humanity, but for her own life ... ‘All right, Jaar; show me how these damn singularity cannons work.’

Jasoft Parz felt rather proud of himself.

He wasn’t a scientist, or an engineer, by any stretch of the imagination. But, he was finding, he wasn’t completely without resource.

In his life-support box he’d found a spare skinsuit. Using a sharp edge from the box he’d sliced this apart, assembled it into a little tepee-like tent; the substance of the skinsuit, trying to restore its breached integrity, had sealed itself tight along the new seams he’d created.

He’d fixed the little tent over a Spline nerve-trunk and used the facemask of the skinsuit to pump the tent full of breathable air, creating a little bubble of atmosphere in entoptic fluid.

Now he cast through the contents of the life-support box. Maybe he’d have to take the mechanism apart, to start his fire ...

The Spline warship hung over the lifedome of the
Hermit Crab
, rolling with abrupt, jerky, mechanical motions.

Michael Poole stared at it with something approaching fascination: quite apart from its dominating physical presence there was a vague obscenity about the mixture of gross, swollen life and mechanical deadliness. Michael was reminded of myths of the past, of the undead.

No wonder Earth had been - would be - held in thrall by these things.

Michael glanced at Shira. The Friend, exhausted, dishevelled, crushed by the GUTdrive’s continuing two-gravity push, lay flat on the couch next to his. Her eyes were open - staring up - but unseeing. A clean blue glow flickered at the edge of his vision, somewhere close to the perimeter of the lifedome.

Harry’s disembodied head drifted like a balloon. ‘What was that?’

‘Verniers. Attitude jets.’

‘I know what verniers are,’ Harry grumbled. The head swivelled theatrically to peer up at the Spline. The huge sentient warship was now drifting away from the
Crab
’s zenith. ‘You’re turning the ship?’

Michael leaned back in his couch and folded his hands together. ‘I preset the program,’ he said. ‘The ship’s turning. Right around, through one hundred and eighty degrees.’

‘But the GUTdrive is still firing.’ The head glanced up at the Spline again, closed one eye as if judging distances. ‘We must be slowing. Michael, are you hoping to rendezvous with that thing up there?’

‘No.’ Michael smiled. ‘No, a rendezvous isn’t in the plan.’

‘Then what is, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Look, Harry, you know as well as I do that this damn old tub isn’t a warship. Apart from a couple of Berry-phase archaeological scanners, I’ve nothing apart from the ship itself which I can use as a weapon.’ He shrugged, lying there. ‘Maybe if I’d brought back a few more samples from the Oort Cloud, I could throw rocks—’

‘What do you mean,’ Harry asked ominously, ‘“apart from the ship itself ”?’

‘After all this two-g thrust we’ve a huge velocity relative to the Spline. When we’ve turned around there’ll be only a couple of minutes before we close with the Spline; even with the GUTdrive firing we’ll barely lose any of that ...

‘Do you get it, Harry? We’re going to meet the Spline ass-first, with our GUTdrive blazing—’

With slow, hesitant movements, Shira raised her hands and covered her face with long fingers.

‘My God,’ Harry breathed, and his Virtual head ballooned into a great six-feet-tall caricature. ‘We’re going to ram a Spline warship. Oh, good plan, Michael.’

‘You’ve got a better suggestion?’

An image flickered into existence on the darkened dome above them: the Spline warship, as seen by the
Crab
’s backward-pointing cameras. The gunmetal grey of the Spline’s hull was reflected in Harry’s huge, pixel-frosted eyes. ‘Michael, as soon as that Spline lines itself up and touches us with its damn starbreaker beam, this ship will become a shower of molten slag.’

‘Then we’ll have died fighting. I say again: have you got a better suggestion?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘Your first idea. Let’s run back out to the cometary halo and find some rocks to throw.’

Beyond Harry’s huge, translucent head the Spline’s motion seemed to have changed. Michael squinted, trying to make out patterns. Was the rolling of the warship becoming more jerky, more random?

Come to think of it, he’d expected to be dead by now.

Was there something wrong with the Spline?

A quarter of the dome had caved in. Cannon barrels collapsed gracefully. Xeelee construction material shrank back like burning plastic, and through the breaches Miriam could see the harsh glare of the stars, the flicker of cherry-red starbreaker light.

Molten construction material rained over the singularity plane. Friends scurried like insects as shards - red-hot and razor-sharp - sleeted down on them. A wind blasted from the devastated area through the rest of the chamber; Miriam could smell smoke, burning flesh.

‘Jesus,’ Miriam breathed. She knew she was lucky; the singularity-cannon console she’d been working at with Jaar was well away from the collapsing area. Jaar cried out inarticulately and pushed away from the console. Berg grabbed his arm. ‘No!’ She pulled him around. ‘Don’t be stupid, Jaar. There’s not a damn thing you can do to help them; the best place for you is here.’

Jaar twisted his head away from her, towards the ruined areas of the earth-craft.

Now a flare of cherry-red light dazzled her. The Spline had found a way through the failed dome and had hit the chamber itself with its starbreaker beam. Raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glow of the dome, she saw that the crystal surface over one section of the singularity plane had become muddied, fractured; cracks were racing across it as if it were melting ice. The area had been scoured of human life. And the singularities themselves, white-hot fireflies embedded in their web of blue light, were stirring. Sliding.

All around the artificial cavern the Friends seemed to have lost their discipline. They stumbled away from their consoles, clung to each other in distracted knots; or they ran, hopelessly, into the devastated area. The singularity-cannon muzzles were silent now; sparks no longer sailed upwards to space.

The Friends were finished, Berg realized.

Berg released Jaar and turned back to the console. She tried to ignore it all - the stench of meat, the wind in her face, the awesome creak of disintegrating Xeelee construction material - and to think through the layout of this cannon control. It was all based on a straightforward touch-screen, and the logic was obvious. Tapping lightly at coloured squares she ran through the direction-finder graphics.

From the corner of her eye she saw schematic diagrams of the earth-ship - huge swaths of the dome-base glaring red - and graphs, lists of figures, data on more subtle damages.

Berg said, ‘How bad is it? Are we losing the air?’

Jaar watched her, distracted, his face crumpling in pain. ‘No,’ he said, his voice a hoarse shout above the chaotic din. ‘The breaches in the dome are above the bulk of the atmosphere; the singularity plane’s gravity well will keep most of the air in a thick layer close to the surface ... for the next few minutes anyway. But the air will seep out of that breach. It will absorb all this heat, boil out of the ruined shell ... and the dome itself may fail further.’

‘All right. Tell me about the singularity plane.’

He looked vaguely at the console and lifted a desultory hand, tapped almost casually at the touch-screen. ‘We’ve lost control of about thirty per cent of the singularities. The integrity of the restraining electromagnetic net is gone.’

Berg frowned, tried to work it out. ‘What does that do to us?’

‘We didn’t run any simulations of this scenario.’ He turned to face her, the sweat on his scalp glistening in the starbreaker light. ‘This is a catastrophic failure; we have no options from this point. The loose singularities will attract each other, swarm together. The n-body computations would be interesting ... The singularity swarms will eventually implode, of course.

‘It’s over.’ His shoulders shook convulsively in their thin covering of begrimed, pink material.

She stared at him. She had the feeling that, just at this moment, Jaar - broken open as he was - would be prepared to tell her anything she wanted to know about this damn Project: that all the questions which had plagued her in the months since she’d fallen ass-first into the laps of these Friends of Wigner would at last be settled ... ‘Jesus, I wish I had time for this.’ She glared at the console before her, lifted her hands to the touch-screen - but the configuration was different. Blocks of light slid about as she watched; the damn thing was changing before her eyes. ‘Jaar, what’s happening?’

He glanced down briefly, barely interested. ‘Compensation for the lost singularities, ’ he said. ‘The mass distribution will continue to change until the disrupted singularities settle down to some form of stable configuration.’

‘All right.’ She stared at the shifting colour blocks, striving to take in the whole board as a kind of gestalt. Slowly she started to see how this new pattern matched the matrix she’d memorized earlier, and she raised her hands hesitantly to the screen—

Then the shifting, the seemingly random configuring, started again.

She dropped her hands. ‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Serves me right for thinking this was going to be easy.’ She grabbed Jaar’s arm; he looked down at her with an expressionless face. ‘Listen, Jaar, you’re going to have to come back out of that shell of yours and help me with this. I can’t manage it myself.’

‘Help you with what?’

‘With firing a singularity.’

He shook his head. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed to Berg that he was almost smiling at her, patient at her ignorance. ‘But there’s no point. I’ve already explained that without the thirty per cent we’ve lost, we can’t complete the Project—’

‘Damn you,’ she shouted over the rising wind, ‘I’m not planning to fire these things into Jupiter! Listen to me. I want you to help me fight back against the Spline ...’