Pirius knew there were good reasons for the trifurcated design of the greenship. It was all to do with redundancy: the ship could lose two of its three blisters and still, in theory anyhow, fulfill its goals. But right now Pirius longed to be able to reach through these transparent walls, to touch his crewmates.
He said, “Navigator? You still with us?”
He saw Cohl glance across at him. “Trajectory’s nominal, Pilot.”
“I wasn’t asking about the trajectory.”
Cohl shrugged, as if resentfully. “What do you want me to say?”
“You saw all this in the briefing. You knew it was coming.”
It was true. The whole operation had been previewed for them by the Commissaries, in full Virtual detail, down to the timetabled second. It wasn’t a prediction, not just a guess, but foreknowledge: a forecast based on data that had actually leaked from the future. The officers hoped to deaden fear by making the events of the engagement familiar before it happened. But not everybody took comfort from the notion of a predetermined destiny.
Cohl was staring out through her blister wall, her lips drawn back in a cold, humorless smile. “I feel like I’m in a dream,” she murmured. “A waking dream.”
“It isn’t set in stone,” Pirius said. “The future.”
“But the Commissaries—”
“No Commissary ever set foot in a greenship — none of them is skinny enough. It isn’t real until it happens. And now is when it happens. It’s in our hands, Cohl. It’s in yours. I know you’ll do your duty.”
“And kick ass,” Enduring Hope shouted.
He saw Cohl grin at last. “Yes, sir!”
A green flash distracted Pirius. A ship was hurtling out of formation. One of its three struts was a stump, the blister missing. As it sailed by, Pirius recognized the gaudy, spruced-up tetrahedral sigil on its side. It was Dans’s ship.
He called, “Dans? What—”
“Predestination my ass,” Dans yelled on the ship-to-ship line. “Nobody saw that coming.”
“Saw what?”
“See for yourself.”
Pirius swept the crowded sky, letting Virtual feeds pour three-dimensional battlefield data into his head.
In the seconds he’d spent on his crew, everything had changed. The Xeelee hadn’t stayed restricted to their source Sugar Lumps. A swarm of them speared down from above his head, from out of nowhere, heading straight for Pirius’s Rock.
Pirius hadn’t seen it. Sloppy, Pirius. One mistake is enough to kill you.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Cohl said.
“Forget the projections,” Pirius snapped.
There were seconds left before the flies hit the Rock. He saw swarming activity in its runs and trenches. The poor souls down there knew what was coming, too. Pirius gripped his controls, and tried to ignore the beating of his heart.
Four, three, two.
The Xeelee — pronounced Zee-lee — were mankind’s most ancient and most powerful foe.
According to the scuttlebutt on Arches Base, in the training compounds and the vast open barracks, there were only three things you needed to know about the Xeelee.
First, their ships were better than ours. You only had to see a fly in action to realize that. Some said the Xeelee were their ships, which probably made them even tougher.
Second, they were smarter than us, and had a lot more resources. Xeelee operations were believed to be resourced and controlled from Chandra itself, the fat black hole at the Galaxy’s very center. In fact, military planners called Chandra, a supermassive black hole, the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. How could anything we had compete with that?
And third, the Xeelee knew what we would do even before we decided ourselves.
This interstellar war was fought with faster-than-light technology, on both sides. But if you flew FTL you broke the bounds of causality: an FTL ship was a time machine. And so this was a time-travel war, in which information about the future constantly leaked into the past.
But the information was never perfect. And every now and again, one side or the other was able to spring a surprise. This new maneuver of the Xeelee had not been in the Commissaries’ careful projections.
Pirius felt his lips draw back in a fierce grin. The script had been abandoned. Today, everything really was up for grabs.
But now cherry-red light flared all around the Rock’s ragged horizon.
On the loops, orders chattered from the squadron leaders. “Hold your positions. This is a new tactic and we’re still trying to analyze it.” “Number eight, hold your place. Hold your place.”
Pirius gripped his controls so tight his fingers ached.
That red glare was spreading all around the Rock’s lumpy profile, a malevolent dawn. Most of the action was taking place on the far side of the Rock from his position — which was itself most unlike the Xeelee, who were usually apt to come swarming all over any Rock they attacked.
The Claw would be sheltered from the assault, for the first moments, anyhow. That meant Pirius was in the wrong place. He wasn’t here to hide, but to fight. But he had to hold his station, until ordered otherwise.
Pirius glimpsed a fly standing off from the target. It spread night-dark wings — said to be not material but flaws in the structure of space itself — and extended a cherry-red starbreaker beam. The clean geometry of these lethal lines had a certain cold beauty, Pirius thought, even though he knew what hell was being unleashed for those unlucky enough to be caught on the exposed surface of the Rock.
Now, though, the rectilinear perfection of the starbreaker beam was blurred, as a turbulent fog rose over the Rock’s horizon.
Cohl said, “What’s that mist? Air? Maybe the starbreakers are cutting through to the sealed caverns.”
“I don’t think so,” said Enduring Hope levelly. “That’s rock. A mist of molten rock. They are smashing the asteroid to gas.”
Molten rock, Pirius thought grimly, no doubt laced with traces of what had recently been complex organic compounds, thoroughly burned.
But still, for all the devastation they were wreaking, the Xeelee weren’t coming around the horizon. They were focusing all their firepower on one side of the Rock.
Still Pirius waited for orders, but the tactical analysis took too long. Suddenly, human ships came fleeing around the curve of the Rock, sparks of Earth green bright against the dull gray of the asteroid ground. The formation had collapsed, then, despite the squadron leaders’ continuing bellowed commands. And down on the Rock those little flecks of light, each a human being trapped in lethal fire, swarmed and scattered, fanning out of the trench system and over the open ground.
Even from here, it looked like panic, a rout.
It got worse. All across the Rock’s visible hemisphere implosions began, as if its surface was being bombarded by unseen meteorites. But the floors of these evanescent craters broke up and collapsed, and through a mist of gray dust a deeper glow was revealed, coming up from inside the Rock. It was as if the surface were dissolving, and pink-white light was burning its way out of this shell of stone. The Xeelee, Pirius thought: the Xeelee were burning their way right through the Rock itself.
Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. “Lethe,” he said. “Get us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!”
Cohl said weakly, “But our orders—”
But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and pulling back.