There was a face before him. Two bright eyes, peering from green shadow. He froze, shocked. At first he could make no sense of it. He saw eyes, nose, a mouth. But the proportions seemed wrong — the eyes too close, the mouth too wide. Then it shifted, as if one face were melding into another, or a Virtual image were failing. But the eyes were steady, that gaze locked on his. Was it possible this was the relic of some jasoft, come here to flee from the Coalition?
And was this a glimpse of his own fate?
“Help me,” he said. It came out as a whisper, and he tried again. “Help me. Humanity is in peril. We need to strike at the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. We need a way to harm a supermassive black hole.”
It seemed absurd. What could such things matter here? What was a war, even, in a place where a handful of sand grains held a million possible instants? What indeed was life or death? And yet he remembered his duty; he tried to speak to that monstrous, shifting face. “If there is anything left of the human in you, you must answer—”
A fist slammed into his face, with impossible force. He felt his nose crunch under the impact. And something was forced into his mouth, hard enough to tear the muscles of his cheeks.
The blow hurled him backward, out of the forest, his hunched body ripping through the tangle of causality. He landed on the beach, sprawled in reality dust. And his hand was burning, as if he had dipped it in fire. The pain distracted him even from the ache of his shattered face, the bitterness of the stuff in his mouth. The black ocean was lapping close to him, much further up the beach than before. Tides, he thought. Secondhand gravitational effects, working on open bodies of liquid. Bits of facts from his training, from a life that was lost.
He held up his arm. His hand was gone, the stump neatly filmed over with pink flesh, as if the hand had never been. The black stuff wasn’t water. It must have burned off his hand like the strongest acid. Neat it might be, but the pain was agonizing.
Causality, he thought. Entropy. That’s what Luru said the sea means. I am being eaten by a sea of entropy, dissolved into disorder.
He forced himself to roll over, away from the ocean. Pain lanced up his arm.
The stuff in his mouth shifted, blocking his breathing. He could suffocate lying here. Or the blow itself might turn out to be lethal. There were ways to kill people like that, he remembered; you rammed your face into your opponent’s nose, to push a shard of bone into the brain.
He was going to die here. But he was just a Virtual — not Pirius, not Pirius Red or Pirius Blue. He was Pirius Gray, he thought, Pirius the shadow. His death didn’t matter.
His mouth worked. Perhaps he could spit the crud out from his mouth. But some instinct made him bite into it. A thick, acidic fluid spurted into his mouth. He bit again, and forced himself to swallow.
Perhaps he had succeeded. He had come seeking answers, and he had been given a cruel feeding. But what had he expected, a textbook? Some philosophers said that humans shouldn’t dream of contact with the Xeelee; their warmaking was the only possible contact. And perhaps this revolting mouthful was the solution he had been sent for.
He tried to think of his name again. It was fading, fading like a dream in the moments after waking. Gray, gray.
Pain striped along his left hand side. He cried out. The black ocean had washed a little further up the beach. He tried to scramble away.
Deep inside Callisto, Pirius stepped into the door frame. There was a flare of light, electric blue, blinding. He pushed further forward, into the light.
On the far side of the portal he felt a hard, cold surface under his feet. Ice?
The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.
Suddenly his heart was hammering. He was still in the chamber, on Callisto, standing on the other side of the portal. He was Pirius, not the copy; he would have to leave that other to do his duty for him. “Lucked out,” he said.
“My eyes,” said Nilis. “Oh, my boy, what a terrible thing…”
Luru Parz said, “Look.”
Pirius turned. A Virtual projection hovered over the service bot, a complex, fast-shifting display, elusive, dense. Even the Navy guard was staring.
Pirius asked, “What is it?”
“Data,” said Luru Parz. “From configuration space. Coming back through the portal.”
“I think it worked,” Nilis said. “You found something, Pirius!”
Luru Parz growled, “Now all we have to do is figure out what it is.”
Chapter 32
The flight approached the terminus of East Arm.
The three main arms of the Baby Spiral, three fat streams of infalling gas, came to a junction, melding into a massive knot of turbulence. Pirius Blue could see it ahead, a tangle of glowing gas filaments. He knew that just on the other side of that central knot of gas lay the brooding mass of Chandra itself, and the powerful alien presences that infested it. No human crew had ever gotten so close and lived.
The silence on the Claw’s crew loop was telling. He remembered the words of his first flight instructor. “You pretty kids are all so smart. You have to be smart to fly a greenship. But in combat there’s only one thing worse than being smart. And that’s being imaginative.”
Pirius knew he ought to come up with something inspirational to say. But he didn’t understand how he felt himself. Not fear: he seemed to be finding a kind of acceptance. He recalled fragments of conversations with This Burden Must Pass, where that proselyte of the Friends of Wigner had mused about how it would be to reach the end of time and approach the Ultimate Observer, to approach a god. Perhaps it would be like this, the calm of being utterly insignificant.
Then the Xeelee attacked.
“Azimuth eighty! Azimuth eighty!” That was Four screaming, off to Pirius’s starboard.
Pirius glared around the sky. This time he saw the nightfighters just as the instruments blared their warnings. They were a ball of swarming ships, black as night, coming at him from out of the shining clouds. Starbreaker beams spat ahead of them, a curtain of fire. The nightfighters were beautiful, he thought, lethally beautiful. In this turbulent, violent place, the Xeelee looked like they had been born here.
No time for that.
Dray shouted, “Pattern delta!”
“Locking in,” Cohl snapped.
Pirius threw the Other Claw onto its new trajectory. The Galaxy center whirled around him, the merging lanes of gas spilling about his head.
Again the little convoy split, this time into two pairs. It was a copy of their first feint. This time Three and Four peeled off and went shooting away to Pirius’s port side, haring into the shining corridor of the Arm, as if trying to escape back to the Front. Meanwhile Wedge Leader and Wedge Seven, Dray and Pirius, went straight for the Xeelee, their weapons already firing.
Again there was a heartbeat of delay, as if the Xeelee were trying to decide what was happening. But this time they didn’t follow the decoy; this time they came straight on at Dray and Pirius.
Cohl said, “Lethe. They knew.”
“I don’t understand,” Nilis said.
“They didn’t fall for the bait,” Pirius said. “We were meant to look like a rearguard. The Xeelee were supposed to chase after the others. But they didn’t.”
“Your navigator said, ’They knew.’ “
“FTL foreknowledge,” Pirius said. “You can always tell when it cuts in. Suddenly they know what you’re going to do before you do.”
“They may know,” Dray said forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean they can stop us. Pirius, you’re less than a hundred light-days from Chandra. Make a single jump. Get in there, do what you have to do, get out.”