With a smooth motion, Captain Marta produced a handgun. Darc made a grab for the weapon, but Marta fired off her shot. Boote was hit in the arm. It was a projectile weapon, and the impact threw him backward off his chair and against the wall. For a moment his spindly legs waved comically in the air, while his aides flapped around him.
When they had him upright and back on his chair again, he had his hand clamped over a spreading patch of blood on his upper right arm. His face was florid with anger and fear.
Nilis was shocked into pallid silence. Pila hadn’t so much as flinched when the shot was fired; looking faintly annoyed, she brushed blood spots off her sleeve. Hope and Torec were trying hard not to laugh.
Boote pointed a shaking finger at Marta. “You shot me!”
“A flesh wound,” she said. “A half hour in sick bay will fix that.”
“I’ll have the hide flogged off your back for this.”
“That’s your privilege, sir,” Marta said evenly. “But I thought I should introduce a little reality into the discussion. This is real, Captain. The sky really is falling.”
Pirius stared at her. Then, as the silence lengthened, he realized it was his cue. He turned to Boote. “Captain, I’m not in a position to adjourn the meeting. Time is too short. I’ll ensure Captain Marta answers any charges you care to raise later. Commander Darc, would you accept her custody for now?”
Darc inclined his head ironically.
“Captain Boote, you need to be excused to get that graze seen to. In the meantime, who would you nominate to represent you in the continuing negotiations?”
After that, things went much better.
Chapter 49
The trouble started in the most innocuous, most mundane of ways: problems with waste.
For many quagmite kinds, eliminated waste was in the form of compressed matter, quarks and gluons wadded together into baryons — protons and neutrons. You could even find a few simple nuclei, if you dug around in there. But the universe was still too hot for such structures to be stable long, and the waste decayed quickly, returning its substance to the wider quagma bath.
Now, as the universe cooled, things changed. The mess of sticky proton-neutron cack simply wouldn’t dissolve as readily as it once had. Great clumps of it clung together, stubbornly resistant, and had to be broken up to release their constituent quarks. But the energy expenditure was huge.
Soon this grew to be an overwhelming burden, the primary task of civilizations. Citizens voiced concerns; autocrats issued commands; angry votes were taken on councils. There were even wars over waste dumping. But the problem only got worse.
And, gradually, the dread truth was revealed.
The cooling universe was approaching another transition point, another phase change. The ambient temperature, steadily falling, would soon be too low to force the baryons to break up — and the process of combination would be one way. Soon all the quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of life, would be locked up inside baryons.
The trend was inescapable, its conclusion staggering: this extraordinary implosion would wither the most bright, the most beautiful of the quagmite ecologies, and nobody would be left even to mourn.
As the news spread across the inhabited worlds, a cosmic unity developed. Love and hate, war and peace were put aside in favor of an immense research effort to find ways of surviving the impending baryogenetic catastrophe.
A solution was found. Arks were devised: immense artificial worlds, some as much as a meter across, their structures robust enough to withstand the collapse. It was unsatisfactory; the baryogenesis could not be prevented, and almost everything would be lost in the process. But these ships of quagma would sail beyond the end of time, as the quagmites saw it, and in their artificial minds they would store the poetry of a million worlds. It was better than nothing.
As time ran out, as dead baryons filled up the universe and civilizations crumbled, the quagma arks sailed away. But mere survival wasn’t enough for the last quagmites. They wanted to be remembered.
Chapter 50
On Orion Rock, time flowed strangely for Pirius Red.
The days seemed to last forever, but his nights seemed very short. And the sum of those long days, as they accumulated into weeks, amounted to no time at all.
Pirius hammered home the ten-week target every time he spoke to his crews, and as the training schedule was compressed and the technical development work accelerated, the effort everybody put in was more and more frantic. But the calendars wore down, regardless.
Suddenly deadline day was here.
And it went, with no word from the Grand Conclave. One day passed, two.
Pirius figured they may as well use the time productively. The flight crews and ground staff continued their training. By now, as well as flying the modified ships on endless low-level loops past hapless target Rocks, they were running full-scale simulations with flight crews and a fully staffed operations room, everybody working together to iron out procedures. Commander Darc’s experience was vital in this — and to Pirius’s surprise, Pila proved observant and helpful, pointing out ways to improve the information flow between ships and the base. Even she seemed finally to be committing herself to the great effort.
All this was useful, as far as it went. Behind the scenes, though, those in the know became increasingly anxious. Even now it was possible that the Grand Conclave would, for its own inscrutable reasons, withhold final permission to fly the mission.
Up to now Nilis had remained remarkably calm. His design of the mission had been largely conceptual — “a mere data-desk sketch,” he said — and now that they were down to operational details there was generally little he could add. He kept himself busy with his continuing analysis of the true nature of Chandra. He said he wanted to make sure they understood what it was they were attacking before they “blew it to smithereens” — although he continued to complain about obstruction and a baffling lack of cooperation from the military authorities who were his hosts. “It’s almost as if they don’t want me to learn about Chandra!” he told a distracted Pirius.
But after the deadline expired, Nilis became increasingly agitated. He started to make lurid threats about how he would return to Earth and storm his way into the sessions of the Grand Conclave itself.
Then, two days after the formal deadline, an “Immediate Message” was handed to Pirius. It had come through the office of Marshal Kimmer, and was signed by the Plenipotentiary for Total War herself: “Operation PRIME RADIANT. Execute at first available opportunity.”
That was all. Pirius read the note again, hardly able to believe what he was looking at. He said, “Suddenly we are no longer a project but an operation.”
Pila was watching him, her beautiful, cold face intent. She seemed fascinated by his reaction. “How do you feel?”
“Relieved,” he said. Then, “Terrified.” He glanced at a chronometer. It was evening. First available opportunity. One more full day to prepare, then; after that, they would fly at reveille. “Thirty-six hours,” he breathed. “We go in thirty-six hours.” He stood up. “Come on, Pila. We’ve work to do.”
That night he called in Pirius Blue and This Burden Must Pass, his flight commanders, for a final operations meeting. With Pila at his side, he locked the door of his office, set up a security shield, and showed them the order. Red watched Burden carefully, still not quite trusting him. But neither he nor Blue showed shock, surprise, or fear. Maybe they didn’t quite believe it, Red thought.
At this point it was their job to go over every detail of the mission, and to talk through tactics regarding the resistance they might encounter, and how they would recover from any foul-ups at various points in the mission profile. After they were done, Pila would draft the final Operation Order that would be disseminated to the flight crews.