The idea astonished Mara, and horrified her. ‘And what then?’
‘Well, we cannot know,’ Parz said softly. ‘I suspect even the Qax Governor, who ordered this, does not know, yet. But that is the project we have been given.’
The flitter swivelled, its main drive cutting in at last to push the craft to the Moon, and Mara watched as Earth fell away. Now she glimpsed huge Spline craft, three, four, five of them, fleshy spheres glistening with sensor bays and weapons pods and armed with starbreaker beams: living ships that bore the Qax overlords, cruising over the planet they dominated. It felt almost a relief as Earth diminished in her view, and the Spline were no longer visible.
The Mare Serenitatis turned out to be a plain of basaltic dust. Its human history was dominated by two monuments, one the relic of a vast circular particle accelerator some three thousand kilometres long that was thought to date from the Poole era, and the other an even older treasure, set like a jewel in its own preserved park to the eastern edge of the accelerator: the site of a primitive lander from Earth, one of the earliest, although whether robot or human, none of the party could remember.
There were still many humans living and working on the Moon, as on other colony worlds and moons around the System. Up to now the Qax had been content to let such off-world knots of humanity persist, as long as they did not interfere with the projects of the conquerors; the Earth itself, with its teeming billions and complex ecologies, was the prize, not a few work-shacks on airless moons. And, guided by Tiel and his primitive engineering instincts, the Endurance engineering effort had been brought to Serenitatis because of that huge old accelerator, which, though damaged during the Starfall war, still had powerful installations and infrastructures that could quickly be renovated and adapted for this new purpose.
Mara, uncomfortable in the low gravity, let her son guide her around the hulks of enormous machines in this cavernous facility, which for her taste was dimly lit by too few light globes. But against this background Juq looked good, as he did almost anywhere. He was wearing a kind of uniform he’d designed himself, a practical coverall with flashes on shoulder and lapels. The project had to have an identity, he said – with, he hadn’t needed to add, himself as the symbolic head. Mara saw how well he filled that role, a natural aristocrat who seemed to inspire by his very presence the workers brought here from across Earth and the lunar colonies. No wonder he had been elevated by Parz, who was nothing if not a wily player. And it seemed to Mara now that Juq was throwing himself into the project with real enthusiasm, for better or worse. Not for her son a consideration of moral ambiguities, she thought wistfully; technological toys were all he was interested in.
But for all Juq’s charm, it was Tiel who explained the intricacies of what they were doing here.
‘The challenges we face constructing wormholes are essentially the same as those faced by Michael Poole. But we have stuff even Michael Poole never had. Squeem hyperdrives, left over from their occupation.’
Tasqer grunted. ‘No doubt there’s quite a stockpile for you to use. The Qax are still impounding human spacecraft, even after two centuries. I worked on a yard in Korea myself, breaking down vessels, taking out the hyperdrive units.’
‘That must have been heartbreaking for you,’ Mara said.
He just looked back at her.
Jasoft Parz said, ‘I admit I’m confused as to why you need a hyperdrive unit, a faster-than-light technology, to manufacture exotic matter for another kind of faster-than-light link . . .’
Tiel was patient. Evidently he’d had to answer such questions many times before. ‘The hyperdrive works by manipulating spacetime – and if you do that, you’re automatically manipulating gravity. With a modified hyperdrive I’m able to construct a gravitational field optimised to squeeze the quantum vacuum in such a way that the negative-energy components of a given field are extracted far more efficiently than with the optical systems we used earlier. Soon we’ll be able to churn out exotic matter on an industrial scale.’
‘He always talks like this now,’ Juq put in with a kind of graceful admiration. It was a way, Mara saw, of making his own lack of ability a charming asset rather than a handicap. She marvelled at her son’s apparently unconscious skill.
‘Very well,’ Parz said. ‘And what of the Xeelee construction material you asked for?’
Tiel said, ‘Construction material is light, easily grown from any energy source, impermeable to most radiation fields, very strong . . . It is ideal for our project, which will require the quick construction of large facilities if we are to meet production targets.’
Chael rubbed his hands. ‘You hear that, Ambassador? The boy has the brain of a genius but the logistical judgement of a born manager. Well, you’ve seen our full report—’
‘I have. And you’ve done remarkably well, boys, you and the other like-minded enthusiasts we gathered here. You’ve even hit the timescale we set you, of just a month to get this proof-of-concept facility up and running. I’m happy to approve the roll-out to full production, here on the Moon and on other suitable off-world sites. And we’ve no time to lose. Michael Poole took forty years at Jupiter to manufacture the exotic matter for his Cauchy project. We have a mere five more months. But we’ll get it done, I have no doubt. Well done, boys.’ He started to clap his hands, and the others joined in. ‘Well done indeed!’
Only the Engineer refused to join in the gentle applause.
3
Another month and the Endurance, assembled in Earth orbit, was ready to fly.
The craft was a GUTship, a very ancient design, indeed a design that Michael Poole would have recognised. When finally assembled, Mara thought the Endurance looked something like a parasol of iron and ice. The canopy of the parasol was a habitable lifedome, and the ‘handle’ was the GUTdrive unit itself, embedded in a block of asteroid ice which served as reaction mass. The shaft of the parasol, separating the lifedome from the drive unit, was a kilometre-long spine of metal bristling with antennae and sensors.
This craft had been hastily assembled from components retrieved from the breakers’ yards, under the supervision of Engineer Tasqer. In a hundred subtle ways, as Mara observed when Juq gave her eager Virtual tours, the ship’s components showed their age. Every surface in the lifedome was scuffed and polished from use, and many of the major systems bore the scars of rebuilding.
But it worked. And Mara, Earthbound all her life, subject of an alien regime, had never really understood, not in her heart, that mere humans had once mastered such technologies as this.
She was to learn that the ship’s destinations were even more remarkable.
For the ship’s maiden voyage Juq was sent on a grand tour of the Solar System – and specifically the sites where exotic-matter production was rapidly being ramped up, on Luna, Mars, and Titan, moon of Saturn. The purpose was motivation, inspiration.
Though she did not accompany him, Mara watched over and over the excited reports that Juq sent back to her, via secure channels mediated by Jasoft Parz. Luna now fizzed with exotic-matter plants. The designers had settled on gigantic torus-shaped designs for their manufacturing facilities, eggshell blue like the exotic matter itself, and vivid against the grey-brown lunar dust. On Mars too, just a few days’ flight away for the Endurance, Mara glimpsed such toruses nestling near the ancient and still-inhabited cities of mankind: the capital, Kahra, and the great arcologies like Cydonia, pyramids on Mars that swarmed with people.