Enduring Hope glanced around cautiously. Pirius wasn’t the kind of leader who cracked jokes or expected you to applaud him. But Hope saw no frowns, no pursed lips, no skepticism. If you were a flyer you didn’t expect coddling. These crews knew Pirius by now, and his older self, and they respected him. They were ready to follow him, wherever he was about to lead them. Lethe, Hope thought, he would follow Pirius, either of them, just as he had before, if given the chance.
Nilis was next up. The Commissary, bulky and much older than the flight crews arrayed before him, was dressed in a black Commission robe that was frayed at the cuffs. He fumbled with his data desks and coughed to clear his throat. Nilis seemed a lot more nervous than Pirius had been — or maybe it was just that Pirius hid it better.
Nilis began by summarizing the novel technical elements of the mission: the grav shield, the CTC processor, the black-hole cannon weapon. “That’s as much as you know, I suppose,” he said. “That and, as Pirius said, the name of the mission: Operation Prime Radiant. Now I can tell you that the name refers to the most significant Prime Radiant of alclass="underline" the base of the Xeelee in this Galaxy.” There was an audible gasp at that. He looked out at them, squinting a little, as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces. “I think you understand me. After three thousand years of inconclusive siege warfare, we — you — are going to strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, at the supermassive black hole known as Chandra, the center of all Xeelee operations.”
Enduring Hope felt numb. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
Nilis began to go through a bewildering array of Virtuals. Gradually the outline of the mission became a bit clearer.
Very shortly, after a billion years of drifting down the arm of the Baby Spiral, Orion Rock would erupt into the open. Emerging deep inside the Cavity, this heavily armed Rock was an immediate threat to the foe, who would surely attack. But Orion was a diversion. While the local Xeelee firepower spent itself on the Rock’s defenses, Exultant Squadron would slip away.
The greenships would fly deeper into the Cavity behind their grav shield, whose purpose, Nilis now revealed, was to thwart the Xeelee’s ability to gather FTL foreknowledge about the mission. Later, the CTC processors would be used so they could penetrate the Xeelee’s final layers of defenses. And then the black-hole cannon would be used to strike at Chandra itself, and the Xeelee concentrations that swarmed there.
As Nilis spoke on, the crews began to mutter. Hope knew what everybody was thinking. It was well known that nobody had flown so close to the Prime Radiant and lived to talk about it; even Pirius Blue hadn’t gone in that deep. All this novel technology was hardly reassuring either. A crew liked to fly with proven kit, not with the product of some boffin’s overheated brow.
But I would go, Hope thought helplessly.
Nilis got through his technical Virtuals. He said, “Your commanders will take you through the operational aspects of the mission in detail. But I want to tell you why it’s so important to strike at the Prime Radiant — no matter what the cost.”
He spoke of strategic theory. The Galaxy was full of military targets, he said, full of Xeelee emplacements of one kind or another. But those which were “economically upstream” in the flow of resources and information were more valuable. “It is cheaper, simple as that, to strike at the dockyard where greenships are constructed, to destroy it in a single mission, than to run a hundred missions chasing the ships themselves.” He brought up images of the Prime Radiant, heavily enhanced. Somehow the Xeelee used the massive black hole as a factory for their nightfighters and other technologies, he said, and as their central information processor. He spoke of the damage he hoped black-hole projectiles would do to such mighty machines as must exist around Chandra.
Hope thought it was very strange to hear this obviously gentle man talk of such profound destruction.
Nilis closed down his last Virtuals. He faced his audience, hands on hips. “You may say to me, why must this be done? And why now? Why you? After all the war is not being lost. We and the Xeelee have held each other at bay for three thousand years. Why should it fall to you to strike this blow — and, I’m afraid for many of you, to pay the price?
“I’ll tell you why. Because, after twenty thousand years of the Third Expansion, the majority of mankind are soldiers — and most are still children when they die. Most people don’t grow old. They don’t even grow old enough to understand what is happening to them. To our soldiers war is a game, whose lethality they never grasp. This is what we are: this is what we have made ourselves. And the numbers are terrible: in a century, more people die in this war than all the human beings who ever lived on Earth before mankind first reached the stars.”
He stalked around the dais. He was an old, overweight man walking back and forth, almost comically intense. “The Prime Radiant is central to everything the Xeelee do in this Galaxy. To strike at Chandra will be as devastating to the Xeelee as if they turned their starbreaker beams on Earth itself. And that is what we will do. We will stop this war. And we will stop it now.”
When he had finished speaking, there was a cold, stunned silence.
Marshal Kimmer stood now; he had been seated among the flight crews, at the front of the room. He said simply, “I know that you will make this attack succeed. I know you will inflict a tremendous amount of damage. And I know, yes, that you will make history.” Where Nilis had been received in silence, Kimmer won a cheer. He finished, “The first launches will be at reveille tomorrow.” And with that he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.
When Pirius’s detailed briefing was over the crews dispersed quickly.
Hope hurried to the hangar. There was much to be done. But word had already filtered back to the ground crews about the nature of the mission, and the atmosphere was dark and silent. It was like working in a morgue. But they got the job done anyhow.
At the end of the day Enduring Hope went to find This Burden Must Pass.
Burden was in a barracks, surrounded by a small circle of somber-faced flight crew — and not all of them were Friends. Hope joined the little circle, and listened to Burden’s gentle conversation of love and hope, fear and endurance, and the consoling transience of all things.
But though his voice was steady, strain showed on Burden’s face, like a dark shadow.
Chapter 51
The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.
And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei — although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each nucleus was bare.
These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.