The four ships soon settled down into a new simplified wedge. Dray ordered them to sound off once in position: Three, Four, Seven called in. Pirius, in Seven, trailed Dray, the leader; Three flew alongside Dray, trailed by Four.
Nilis spoke up again. “We flew at the Xeelee. Why didn’t they repel us?”
“They thought we were a diversion,” Pirius said. “That the others, One, Five, Six, were the ones with the real mission — whatever they imagine it to be. The Xeelee made a quick decision, chased the others. But they were wrong.”
“Ah. Those others, One, Five Six — they were the diversion. Clever! Perhaps we are better liars than the Xeelee. What does that say of us?… But of course it would only work if the Xeelee didn’t know of it in advance.”
“We were flying anti-Tolman patterns.” Patterns intended to disrupt the abilities of the enemy to send signals back into their own past. “It’s all part of the game. It’s a gamble, though; you can never be sure what you’ll come up against.”
“But it worked,” Nilis said. “An ingenious bluff!”
Pirius saw a flaring of light up around azimuth forty degrees, a green nova. Somebody up there was fighting and dying, all for the sake of an “ingenious bluff.”
Dray had seen the same lights. She called gruffly, “Let’s make it count.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On my mark. Three, two, one.”
That juddering light-day hopping began again, and once more the stars swam past Pirius, as he hurtled along the glowing lanes of dust.
Chapter 31
Exerting her new power, Luru Parz brought Nilis and his little retinue to Jupiter. A week after the confrontation under Olympus, it was clear that she was the driver of events.
Pirius Red knew nothing about the “archive” to which he was being brought. Even Nilis, normally so loquacious, would say nothing. But Pirius’s psych training cut in: it was a waste of energy to worry about the unknown.
Besides, here was Jupiter. And Pirius thought that of all the ancient strangeness he had seen in Sol system, Jupiter was the most extraordinary.
The sun appeared the tiniest of discs from Jupiter, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Pirius held up his hand, it cast sharp, straight shadows, shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.
And through this reduced light swam Jupiter and its retinue of moons.
Once it had been a mighty planet, the mightiest in Sol system in fact, more massive even than Saturn. But an ancient conflict had resulted in the deliberate injection of miniature black holes into the planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart. Whatever the intention of that extraordinary act, the result was inevitable. It had taken fifteen thousand years, but at last the implosion of Jupiter into the knot of spacetime at its core had been completed.
Once, Jupiter had had a retinue of many moons, four of them large enough to be considered worlds in their own right. In the final disaster, as gravitational energy pulsed through the system, the moons had scattered like frightened birds. Three of those giant satellites had been destroyed, leaving Jupiter with a spectacular ring of ice and dust. But even now bits of moon were steadily falling into the maw of the black hole, and their compression as they were dragged into the event horizon made the central object shine like a star.
One large moon had survived, to follow a swooping elliptical orbit around its parent, and that was Luru Parz’s destination now. The moon, she said, was called Callisto.
Pirius watched Callisto’s approach. It was a ball of white, quite featureless to the naked eye, lacking even impact craters as far as he could see. But it was surrounded by a deep, diffuse cloud of drones. Some of them swam close to the corvette. They were fists of metal and carbon that glistened with weapons.
Nilis said, “A deep defense system. Even Earth itself doesn’t have such aggressive guardians.”
“And very old,” Luru Parz said. Even she seemed tense as the corvette descended through the cloud. “This cordon was first erected during the lifetime of Hama Druz himself — following Druz’s own visit here, in fact.”
“I didn’t know Druz had come here,” Pirius said. He actually knew very little about the moral founder of the Third Expansion.
“Oh, yes,” Luru said. “And what he found here shocked him into the insights that led him to formulate the famous Doctrines — and to order Callisto to be cordoned off. This little moon is a key site in the history of mankind. Twenty thousand years have worn away since then, and the whole setup has been subject to the implosion of a black hole a few light-seconds away. Some of these old drones may be a little cranky. They have been instructed to recognize us. But…”
“How ironic,” Nilis said grimly, “if we were to be thwarted by a malfunctioning antique robot.”
“There are many in the Coalition councils who wouldn’t shed a tear to see the back of me — or you, Commissary.”
The ship continued to descend. The icescape of Callisto flattened out to a frozen ground streaked with color, pale purple and pink; perhaps the ice was laced with organic compounds. It was smooth as far as Pirius could see, smooth all the way to the horizon. But a shallow pit was dug into the ice, and at the center of the pit there was a settlement of some kind, a handful of buildings and landing pads.
Luru Parz said, “Once Callisto was just a moon, you know. It was peppered with impact craters, like every other moon — not like this. At this site there was a major crater called Valhalla — I don’t know what the name means — and in the time of Michael Poole there were extensive ice mining projects. But it all changed after Hama Druz’s visit.”
Pirius said, “What happened to the craters?”
“What do you think?”
He thought it over. “The surface looks as if it melted. What could melt a moon?”
“It was moved,” said Luru Parz, watching him. “In the process the surface shook itself to pieces.”
“Moved…” Pirius knew of no technology which could achieve such a thing.
Nilis prompted, “And the reason we are here—”
“This was the last refuge of many jasofts,” Luru Parz whispered. “And here is stored their oldest knowledge. But it will take a sacrifice to retrieve it.” She wouldn’t look him in the eyes, and Nilis looked away.
Pirius still had no idea what they wanted of him. Despite his training, dread gathered in his belly.
The corvette passed through the last line of the drones and began its final approach.
Pirius descended into the deep core of Callisto.
He rode an elevator with Nilis, Luru Parz, a servant bot, and a taciturn Navy guard. They passed down a shaft cut into the ice, its walls worn smooth. Pirius touched the walls; the ice was slick, cold, lubricated by a layer of liquid water. Beneath a surface patina of dust and grime he saw that the ice had a structure, a lacy purple marbling, receding into meaningless complexity. More strangeness, he thought.
It was cold, surely not much above freezing, and their breath fogged air that stank, stale. The elevator, a simple inertial-control platform, was itself an antique, and as it descended it shuddered and bucked disconcertingly. He felt as if he was being dragged down into the strata of time that overlaid every world in this dense, ancient system.
They arrived in a chamber cut deep in the heart of Callisto. Only the handful of floating globes which had followed them down the shaft cast any light, and the party huddled, as if nervous about what might lurk in the dark.
Pirius stepped off the platform. The chamber was a rough cube maybe twice Pirius’s height, crudely hollowed out. It might almost have been a natural formation, save for notches in the floor, and a regular pattern of holes in the wall. The only piece of equipment he could see was a kind of door frame, set purposelessly in the middle of the floor.