Stephen Baxter - Exultant

Maybe she was right to block him, Enduring Hope thought. He recalled his conversation with Blue, who had foreseen exactly this outcome: that sooner or later Nilis would find a reason to fall in love with Chandra, and would try to stop the attack.

Nilis said darkly, “Listen to me. My analysis is hasty. And it contains more questions than answers. Regardless of any pan-cosmic responsibility, if we were to destabilize this monad complex, we don’t know what the result would be. The damage could be huge. I can’t begin to estimate it—” He shook his head. “Damage on a galactic scale, perhaps.”

Luru Parz pushed past Nilis to face Kimmer. Her face was alive, intense, but Hope thought it had the intensity of a sharpened blade, not a human expression. “Then let it be so. Marshal — we must do it regardless of the consequences. This is our one chance, don’t you see?”

Kimmer said, “But if we cause such devastation — if the Galaxy center detonates—”

Luru shouted, “What of it? Let the Galaxy be cleansed! Marshal, I have seen the human race populate a Galaxy once; we can do it again. And this time it would be a Galaxy free of Xeelee. We must do this!”

Nilis laughed, a brittle sound. “Marshal, you aren’t listening to her? Why, you fool—”

Kimmer’s reaction was immediate. He swung around and swatted the Commissary aside with one gloved fist. Nilis fell backward, clattering clumsily against a bulkhead, blood seeping from his mouth.

Enduring Hope ran to him and cradled his head. “Commissary, Commissary,” he whispered. “You can’t go around calling a marshal a fool!”

Luru Parz seemed to have recovered her detachment. Breathing hard, she said, “Our debate here is irrelevant anyway.”

Kimmer, confounded by the rapid turning of events, glowered at her. “What do you mean?”

“The decision to go on doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Pirius Red. Who has heard every word we have said. Haven’t you, Pilot?”

The voice from the center of the Galaxy was sepulchral. “I have, Luru Parz.”

Pirius Red pressed his gloved hands to his temples.

He and Bilson, his surviving crewmate, had made it back to the rump of his squadron. But he was grateful that he was alone in his blister. He was still trying to absorb the shocks of the last few minutes — the death of his engineer and the sudden loss of his own older self. He had no idea how he was supposed to feel about that. And now this, a questioning of the whole basis of the mission by the man who had instigated it all.

He found it difficult even to speak. He knew he was close to burnout.

This Burden Must Pass said, “It’s your decision, Squadron Leader.”

Pirius’s laugh was bitter. “ Now you have something to say.”

Torec, her voice strained by grief, snapped at Burden, “Yes. And for you it doesn’t matter, because, right or wrong, everything will be put right at the end of time, won’t it?”

“Perhaps not this,” Burden said softly.

“We should wait,” Bilson said hesitantly. “We need time. If Nilis is right… We need time to check.”

Torec said, “But we won’t get as good a chance to strike again. We know that. The Xeelee will be waiting for us next time.”

“We will find another way,” Bilson said. “People are smart like that.”

“Yes, we are,” said Burden.

Pirius was anguished. If Nilis was even half-right, they could be committing a terrible crime, a crime that might transcend the universe itself. How could he possibly know the right thing to do? Who was he to have such a decision thrust upon him?

And yet the choice seemed clear.

Pirius said, “Enough of us have died today.” Including half of myself, he thought. He tried to rehearse the words. We pull back…

“Pilot.” Bilson’s voice was full of wonder.

Pirius looked down at the accretion disc. A kind of cloud was rising above that puddle of light, a black cloud. When he increased the magnification of his images, he saw they were ships, a horde of them, rising like insects.

“It’s the Xeelee,” Torec said. “They’re streaming out of the Cavity. I don’t believe it. They are abandoning Chandra.”

Burden said, “It looks as if they agree with Nilis. There are some things just not worth destroying, whatever the cost.”

“Let’s go home,” Pirius said.

The five battered ships swiveled as one and turned away from the heart of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee ships were still rising, countless numbers of them.

When Pirius Blue came to, he was embedded in darkness, unable to move. Impact foam, he realized.

To his own surprise, he was still alive. He had survived the flak assault, and the destruction of his ship. He wasn’t even injured, as far as he could tell.

With voice commands he brought up sensor data, which flickered before his eyes inside his visor. Drifting at the center of the accretion disc, he learned, he was rather a long way away from any possible pickup. And nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Suspended in darkness, locked into the foam, he came to a quick decision. He uttered a command.

His foam shell burst and flew apart, leaving him in his skinsuit. He was falling in a cloud of fragments, and a bath of brilliant Galaxy-center light. His visor turned jet black, and its inner surface immediately lit up with red warning flags.

He checked his suit’s systems. All overloaded, all on the brink of failure. A skinsuit wasn’t designed to withstand the ferocious conditions of the center of the Galaxy, and it knew it. But it didn’t matter. This would be over soon, one way or another.

With more commands he coaxed his visor to leak through a little of the hard light that battered it. Soon he could see again, if sketchily.

He was floating through a forest of shining threads, silvery lines as straight as laser beams — but some of the threads were broken, twisted.

With a jolt, he understood. He was falling through the net structure around the black hole. There was no sign of those vessels they had spotted crawling over the net, however. And there was no sign of his ship, or his crewmates, who, if they had not died immediately, must be drifting as helplessly as he was.

To his surprise, one comm loop was still working. He couldn’t talk to the squadron, but there was a line to the ops room on Arches. With brisk commands, he set it to transmit only, and patched in a visual feed from his visor. He was happy for them to watch what he watched. There might be much for them to learn, however the operation worked out. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody. No good- byes. Not when there was another version of himself who could do all that for him.

Still falling helplessly, he swiveled in space, and looked down at the event horizon.

Though infalling plasma crawled across its surface, reddening as it fell out of existence, it was dark, a dark plane beneath him. The ferocious light that bathed this place was either absorbed by the event horizon or else was deflected by the black hole’s immense gravity field; he was in the shadow of the black hole, a strange relativistic shadow left by bent and distorted light.

He lifted his head. The event horizon was like a monstrous planet, so vast it was a plain beneath him that cut the universe in two. Everywhere redshifted plasma writhed and crawled, raining into the hole, and immense auroras flapped. But at its straight-line horizon he saw bands of light; one, two, perhaps three stripes, running parallel with the edge. The rings were another product of the hole’s huge gravity field, as light was not simply deflected but pulled through one orbit, two, before being flung away.

But now he was falling ever more rapidly toward that fatal surface. Telltales warned him that his signal lock to Arches was being lost: the increasing redshift he must be suffering was affecting the frequency control. It was a secondary effect of the distortion of time itself by the black hole’s gravity. He tried to divert some of his processing power to adjusting the signal, to keep the lock as long as possible.