Cohl asked, “Where are you going?”
“To the factory. It’s only two, three hundred meters from here. It’s the pickup point, remember. I’ll leave a marker to lead the stretcher crews here.”
Cohl clearly didn’t want him to go, but just as clearly she saw the necessity. “Be careful.”
He crawled out of the ruins of the emplacement, out into the open. He moved cautiously, as he had been taught. He ducked from ridge to crater to trench to foxhole, no more than ten, twenty meters at a time. It was slow going, and exhausting. The condition of his skinsuit got worse quickly; perhaps it was damaged. The air grew increasingly foul, his faceplate so enclosing he felt as if he was choking, and his mouth and throat grew so dry they were painful.
It took him half an hour to cross two hundred meters.
Maybe such caution wasn’t necessary; he hadn’t seen the glow of a starbreaker since the emplacement mount had finally been shut down. But after what had happened to Bilin he wasn’t about to take a chance now.
When he reached the site of the factory, he only knew he was at the right location because his visor displays told him so. There was no factory left: no landing pad, no power plant, no surface tracks, no machinery. Save for a bit of smashed wall jutting at an angle from the dirt, and a line of white dust that might have marked a foundation, there was nothing here but more broken ground. He saw no sign that anybody else had been here recently, none of the thousands he supposed had been dropped with this target as their objective. Perhaps the Xeelee had destroyed it, or perhaps humans had, or perhaps it had been leveled by the barrage. The artillery was supposed to have spared the factories, which were the objective of the operation; but then the barrage was meant to do many things it had failed to do.
Pirius built a small cairn of bits of rubble and set a marker on it, with an indication of where the others were sheltering. He felt quite cold, without emotion; perhaps that would come later.
He looked ahead, to the asteroids horizon. The bombardment continued, but far away now. The ground was full of bodies, the relics of previous assaults, and where the shells landed the bodies were hurled up by the explosions. The bodies rose up and tumbled in the dust before falling slowly down to the ground again. It was very strange to huddle there with his dry mouth and his stinking skinsuit, watching those bodies going up and down.
He shook himself alert. He made his slow, cautious way back to the ruined emplacement, where Cohl and the others were waiting.
When he got there Tili Three was weeping, utterly inconsolable. Her sister had died in her arms.
Chapter 21
The corvette completed its final FTL hop. Suddenly Pluto and Charon hovered before Pirius Red, twin planets that had ballooned out of nothing.
Nilis flinched and threw his hands up. “My eyes! They might have warned us.”
Pirius had spent his life training for combat in space. He showed no reaction before the soft old Commissary; he was much too proud for that. But he felt it too. After all, they were both products of a billion years of common evolution at the bottom of a gravity well, and when whole worlds appeared out of nowhere, something deep and ancient inside him quailed.
The twin worlds’ forms were visibly distorted from the spherical, for they were close to each other. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto diameters; Earth’s Moon was by comparison thirty of its parent’s diameters away from Earth. It was an authentic double planet. This strange little system was dimly lit by a remote pinpoint sun, and the faintness of the light gave the two worlds a sense of dreaminess, of unreality. But the worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue.
Nilis commented absently on the colors. “That’s to do with a difference in surface composition. Much more water ice on Charon’s surface… it’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it, Ensign?”
“Yes, sir.” So it was.
They had come here in search of the “gravastar” technology, hints of which Nilis had dug out of the Archive on Mars. Pirius peered at the double world, wondering what he was going to have to confront here before they got what they wanted.
A Virtual swirled before them, coalescing from a cloud of blocky pixels. It was a short, plump man dressed in the drab costume of a Commissary. His belly was large, his legs short, his shaven head round and smooth. The Virtual image was projected clumsily, and the little man seemed to be floating a few centimeters above the floor.
When he saw Nilis and Pirius, this figure barked a nervous laugh, and small hands fluttered before him. “Welcome, welcome! Welcome to Pluto-Charon, and our facility. My name is Draq. You must be Commissary Nilis — and are you the ensign from the Front? I’ve watched all your Virtuals.”
Pirius had seen some of these. They were cartoonish renderings of Pirius Blue’s maneuvers around the magnetar, produced for popular consumption by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Pirius didn’t recognize much of himself in the lantern-jawed, shaven-headed, Doctrine-spouting caricature that shared his name. “Don’t believe everything you see, sir,” he said. “And besides, the whole episode has been edited out of the timeline. It won’t happen.”
“Oh, but that hardly matters, does it? In the Library of Futures that sort of editing goes on all the time. But I’ve always thought that potential heroism is as admirable as actualized.”
Nilis broke in. “Draq, you say? You’re in charge here?”
Draq blustered. “Yes and no! There are very few of us curators, you see, Commissary Nilis, and we have been here rather a long time. Things are, well, informal.” His hands fluttered again, and the Virtual drifted until it collided silently with the hull, and pixels flared across his round back. “You’ll have to forgive my excitement. We don’t get many visitors.”
“I’m not surprised,” Nilis said dryly, “since your facility doesn’t officially exist.”
Draq pulled a mock-solemn face. “It is odd, I admit, to be a legal paradox! But the work is fascinating enough to compensate, believe me.”
Pirius felt a tightening of his gut, a subtle shifting of the universe around him as the corvette’s drive cut in. Pluto-Charon slid silently across his field of view.
Draq said, “I have requested your crew to bring you down at our spaceport at Christy. Oh, we’re so excited!” He blurred, and crumbled out of existence.
Pirius said, “Commissary, what kind of place is this?”
“Wait and see, Ensign. Wait and see.”
The final moments of the descent were unremarkable. Pirius glimpsed a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon, but as Christy itself approached the flitter flew over ravines and ridges. Here, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer.
“Christy,” a very archaic name, turned out to refer to what the corvette’s pilots called the “sub- Charon point” on Pluto. This bit of ground was unique in Sol system. Like Earth’s Moon, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days these worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly. Within Sol’s domain, Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked; they danced like lovers.
And so this place, Christy, was forever suspended directly beneath the looming bulk of the giant moon, and the feeble geological energies of these small worlds had been focused here.
The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.