The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.
Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.
Another metaphorical switch was pulled.
Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.
Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished,
leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.
Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.
Chapter 46
Running behind a grav shield was like flying into an endless tunnel.
From her pilot’s blister, Torec looked ahead through the usual clutter of Virtual warning flags, at a wall of turbulence. The result of the gravastar shield’s spacetime distortions, it was like a breaking wave front, roughly circular, blue-white Core light mixed up and muddled and somehow stretched out in a way that hurt her eyes. There was something deeply unsettling about it, she thought, something that offended her instincts on some profound level.
When she glanced around she could see bright green sparks arrayed around her field of view. They were the other greenships of her flight, which was led today by Pirius Blue, high up there in Torec’s sky — Blue, the weird, embittered future-twin version of her own Pirius, who had unaccountably been made flight commander.
The squadron was learning how to fly in formation, and with the grav shield. This was Torec’s second training run of the day, her tenth of the week so far, and in the turnarounds she hadn’t caught a great deal of sleep. But she put aside her eyeball-prickling fatigue and peered ahead, trying to stay focused on the peculiar phenomenon that might one day save her life, if it didn’t kill her first.
The gravastar shield was something not quite of this universe, and the product of inhuman Ghost technology too. No wonder it looked weird. But the theory of its use was simple. Just fly in behind the grav shield, keep to your formation, follow your leader. The flaw was receding from her at nearly lightspeed, and it was her job to keep her greenship plummeting after it, tucked up into this more or less liveable pocket of smooth spacetime, not so close that the tidal stresses and fallout from the shield itself were so severe that they would destroy you, and yet close enough that the Xeelee could have no foreknowledge of your approach, because — and it still took her some hard thinking to grasp this — you were effectively in another universe.
At the center of her field of view was a greenship tucked right in behind the wall of curdled horror. That ship, the “shield-master” as the crews called it, was laden with the grav field generators. Today it was piloted by Jees, the sullen, determined prosthetic rescued from admin duties by Pirius Red, now proving to be one of the best pilots in Exultant Squadron. There was nobody Torec would have preferred to see up there at point than Jees; if anybody could manage the propagation of a kilometer- wide wave front of spacetime distortion it was her.
But as Torec watched, that central green pinpoint wavered, just subtly. It was enough to send alarms sounding in Torec’s head, long before her Virtual displays lit up with more red flags.
Jees was having stability problems. Already Torec could see the shimmering of the grav shield front, and spacetime distortions heading back down the “tunnel” toward her own ship. They made the images of the more distant stars ripple and swarm, as if seen through a heat haze.
“Here we go again,” she called. “Brace for impact.”
“Pilot, Engineer. I got it. Locking down systems.” That was her engineer, Cabeclass="underline" very young, very intense.
Torec called, “Navigator? What about you?” When there was no reply, she snapped, “Three. Lethe, girl, wake up.”
Tili Three called back, “Uh — Pilot, Navigator. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. Just do your job.” She glanced at her displays. “Impact in thirty. Twenty-nine…”
Cabel, seventeen years old, was very able, and had completed his training for this flight in days. He was one of Pirius Blue’s “baby rats,” as Pirius Red put it a bit sourly, rescued by Pirius’s older self from the lethal servitude of Quin. Having worked with Cabel intensely, Torec backed Blue’s judgment.
Tili Three was another baby rat — but she was different. If anything, she was intrinsically smarter than Cabel. Though she had come into the squadron without having completed her basic navigator training, Pirius Blue had insisted on pushing her into Exultant, and now she had wound up in Torec’s crew. Torec had no doubt about her basic ability, in the classroom. But on these training runs — Lethe, even in the sims — she just couldn’t cut it. And so it seemed to be now.
The ripples washed down the tunnel at her. They were intense pulses of gravity waves. Torec saw the lead ships thrown from side to side, like bits of dirt on turbulent water. She braced.
The spacetime wash hit. The stars frothed around her. The ship pitched so violently she could feel it in her gut, even through the inertial shielding. She struggled to hold her line.
The trouble was, the grav shield was fundamentally unstable. No, worse than that, it actually was an instability, a fizzing, nonlinear flaw in spacetime. That was why it propagated in the first place, like a breaking wave. So having set it off, if you let it run by itself, it would push up to lightspeed and then disperse in a spectacular, bone-shaking explosion — or else it would collapse back into sublight, dissipating its energy. The propagating grav shield was an edge-of-chaos phenomenon, and had to be tweaked continually by the shield-master if it was to hang together.
But even here, in the calm, flat spacetime around Arches Base, it was all but impossible to hold everything together. Sailing along behind the shield was a constant strain, even when things went well. If the shield so much as wobbled, the little ships in its wake bobbed like motes of dust.
The ships handled badly, too. In theory, the prototype stage had passed, and they were into flight development, and these ships, fitted with the project’s new technologies, were the configuration they were supposed to fly into the center of the Galaxy. But it was only ten days since the first of them had come out of Enduring Hope’s workshops; they were lash-ups, and they flew like it.
Torec was having a particularly tough time. She wasn’t the best pilot in Exultant Squadron, she accepted that. And she was in Blue’s flight. Because of their complicated past, she thought — she had been with him in some other timeline, and with his own younger self now — Torec felt Blue had given her the roughest assignments, the worst ships, the greenest crews. And she knew she was never going to be allowed a crack at the most prestigious assignment of all, which was to pilot the shield- master itself.
Well, she wasn’t going to fail, not today.
As red flags flared throughout her cabin, she grasped her controls and tried to stabilize her ship. But it wallowed, its moments of inertia all wrong. Laden with its heavy singularity cannon it was desperately unresponsive; it was like trying to run with a laden pack on her back.