Pirius Red’s own ship was to be the first to lift. As they worked through their final preparation, the crew’s comm was piped into the observation areas.
“Waiting for the red flag to power up sublight… We’ve got a red, we’re clear.”
“Start number three…”
“Primed.”
“Engage three…”
The greenship raised itself a handsbreadth above its cradle. Hope could feel a pulse in the asteroid’s own inertial field as it tried to compensate for the shift in mass.
“Pressure rising in the generators.”
“Copy that. Watch the compensation for the bomb pod, Engineer.”
“On it.”
“Waiting on the green for takeoff, crew. Waiting on the green. Green acquired, we’re cleared.”
As the greenship lifted, its main body bulkily laden with its unfamiliar technology, it wallowed a little.
“Passing through the roof.”
“Turn to port, port on my 129. Let’s give them a show, crew.”
Beyond the hangar’s open roof, in clear space, the greenship spun once, twice, its three crew blisters whirling about the craft’s long axis, an exultant gesture. Then it squirted out of sight.
There was a hand on Hope’s shoulder. It was Marshal Kimmer. “Fifteen hours,” the Marshal said. “Six hours out, three on station, six back. Then it will be over, one way or the other.”
“Yes, sir.”
All over the hangar now, the greenships were rising.
Cohl hadn’t believed it was possible she would sleep. But she needed a nudge in her ribs from Blayle to jar her awake.
When she glanced up at the sky, those shining gas clouds were burning away, and a shoal of bright blue stars, hot and crowded, swarmed above her. After billions of years of flight through the glowing clouds of the Northern Arm, Orion Rock, obeying the blind dictates of celestial mechanics, was at last emerging into the open. And for the humans who crawled over and beneath its surface, the moment of destiny was coming.
Chapter 53
The impoverished universe expanded relentlessly.
Space was filled with a bath of radiation, reddening as the expansion stretched it, and by a thin fog of matter. Most of this was dark matter, engaged in its own slow chemistry. The baryonic matter — “light” matter — was a trace that consisted mostly of simple nuclei and electrons. Any atoms that formed, as electrons hopefully gathered around nuclei, were immediately broken up by the still- energetic radiation. Without stable atoms, no interesting chemistry could occur. And meanwhile the ionic mist scattered the radiation, so that the universe was filled with a pale, featureless glow. The cosmos was a bland, uninteresting place, endured with resentment by the survivors of gaudier eras.
Nearly four hundred thousand years wore away, and the universe inflated to a monstrous size, big enough to have enclosed the Galaxy of Pirius’s time.
Then the epochal cooling reached a point where the photons of the radiation soup were no longer powerful enough to knock electrons away from their nuclear orbits. Suddenly atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium, coalesced furiously from the mush of nuclei and electrons. Conversely, the radiation was no longer scattered: the new atomic matter was transparent.
The universe went dark in an instant. It was perhaps the most dramatic moment since the birth of light itself, many eras past.
To the survivors of earlier times, this new winter was still more dismaying than what had gone before. But every age had unique properties. Even in this desolate chill, interesting processes could occur.
The new baryonic atoms were a mere froth on the surface of the deeper sea of dark matter. The dark stuff, cold and gravitating, gathered into immense wispy structures, filaments and bubbles and voids that spanned the universe. And baryonic matter fell into the dark matter’s deepening gravitational wells. There it split into whirling knots that split further into pinpoints, that collapsed until their interiors became so compressed that their temperatures matched that of the moment of nucleosynthesis.
In the hearts of the young stars, nuclear fusion began. Soon a new light spread through the universe. The stars gathered into wispy hierarchies of galaxies and clusters and superclusters, all of it matching the underlying dark matter distribution.
Stars were stable and long-lasting fusion machines, and in their hearts light elements were baked gradually into heavier ones: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When the first stars died, they scattered their heavy nuclei through space. These in turn were gathered into a second generation of stars, and a third — and from this new, dense material still more interesting objects formed, planets with rocky hearts, that swooped on unsteady orbits around the still-young stars.
In these crucibles life evolved.
Here, for instance, was the young Earth. It was a busy place. Its cooling surface was dotted with warm ponds in which a few hundred species of carbon-compound chemicals reacted furiously with each other, producing new compounds which in turn interacted in new ways. The networks of interactions quickly complexified to the point where autocatalytic cycles became possible, closed loops which promoted their own growth; and some of these autocatalytic cycles chanced upon feedback processes to make themselves stable; and, and…
Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.
Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their birth, and wondered where they had come from.
It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead. They thought that it was only now that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.
But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished times before.
Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.
For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.
Chapter 54
Suspended over the glistening surface of Orion Rock, bathed in the fierce light of the Cavity’s crowded stars, Pirius Red formed up his squadron.
Jees was the shield-master, of course, his best pilot — with a Silver Ghost in her engineer’s blister. Pirius Red himself tucked in just behind and to Jees’s starboard; Commander Darc, the backup shield- master, took the matching position to port. The rest of the ships took their places behind him, one by one calling off, making a formation that after all the training had become as familiar as the inside of Pirius’s own head.
Pirius felt a peculiar, nervous thrill. Despite the training, this was the first time the squadron, his squadron, had formed up to fly in anger — the first and, if it went well, the last.
But he was too busy for such reflections. Scout drones were already returning warnings of a Xeelee response to the Rock’s sudden emergence from the spiral-arm clouds. If the squadron didn’t get out of here now it wouldn’t be going anywhere, and the preparation would have been for nothing.