Darc sensed what he was thinking. “Give them a show, Pilot.”
Pirius grinned, and clenched his fists around his controls. The Earthworm hurled itself into the sky, straight up. The sublight jaunt, peaking at around half the speed of light, lasted only a fraction of a second, but Pirius glimpsed blueshift staining the crowded stars above him.
When it was over, Rock 492 had gone, snatched away from his view. And the target rock was dead ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be.
He felt a surge of triumph. “Still alive — oh, Lethe.” He was encased in red lights once more.
“We need to stabilize the systems,” Torec warned.
Pirius sighed. “I hear you, Engineer.” Once again the crew went to work, nursing their deformed steed; gradually the red constellations were replaced by an uncertain green.
The target, only a couple of hundred kilometers away, was just another asteroid, a bit of debris probably older than Earth. This Rock had been used for target practice by crews from Arches for generations. It was impossible to tell if the immense craters that pocked its surface were relics of the asteroid’s violent birth, or had been inflicted by trigger-happy trainees.
“Look at that thing,” Darc said. “Looks as if it has been cracked in two.”
Pirius said, “Let’s see if we can’t crack it again. Engineer, how are the weapons?”
Two threads of cherry-red light speared out from the pods on the Earthworm’s main body and lanced into the battered hide of the target rock.
“Nothing wrong with the starbreakers,” Torec said.
“Then let’s try the black-hole cannon.”
“My displays are green,” said Torec. “Most of the time anyhow.”
“Your course is laid in, Pilot,” Darc called from his navigator’s seat.
Pirius settled himself in his seat, smoothing out creases in his skinsuit. He stared at the rock, trying to visualize his flight.
Nilis had explained his latest tactics carefully. The microscopic black holes fired by the cannon had been enough to destroy a Xeelee nightfighter, but they would be pinpricks against a Galaxy-center black hole, and the living structures that fed off it — unless, Nilis had determined, two holes could be fired off together. If the holes could be made to collide correctly they would emit much of their mass- energy in a shaped pulse of gravitational waves — and Pirius had seen, in the wreckage of Jupiter, how much damage that could do. If such a bomb were set off at the event horizon of Chandra, the great black hole would flex and ripple, “like a rat shaking off fleas,” as Nilis had said.
But such a feat required huge accuracy. The greenships were going to have to fly around the black hole at an altitude of precisely a hundred kilometers above the event horizon: precisely meaning not more than ten meters out. Such a jaunt through the twisted space around a massive black hole was going to be “fun,” in Darc’s words, and the resistance of the Xeelee was going to make it more fun still. If they couldn’t achieve that degree of accuracy, the mission was a waste of time.
So today’s test was crucial. If Pirius couldn’t hit a dumb piece of rock, then Chandra was out of reach.
As the systems stabilized, the crew grew quiet. They would have to work together tightly during this maneuver. As pilot, Pirius would direct the line, navigator Darc was to check the accuracy of their trajectory, while engineer Torec worked the weapons. But the closest approach, during which they would have to fire the cannon, would happen in just a fraction of a second.
Darc said, “Pilot? I think we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Roger that. Engineer?”
“Do it.”
Pirius took his controls. The ship quivered, poised. “Now or never,” he said. He closed his fists.
The rock flew at him, exploding to a battered wall that seemed about to swat the greenship out of space. At the last moment the asteroid swiveled, dropped beneath his prow and turned into a lumpy landscape. Closest approach — but as the black-hole cannon fired, it was as if the ship had taken a punch to the guts — and red lights flared everywhere.
And then his blister flooded with impact foam, and he was cut off, embedded in a rigid casing, in the dark. It was over, as suddenly as that.
Frustration raging, he screamed, “Tactical display!” A working sensor projected a tiny Virtual image onto the inner surface of his faceplate.
The cannon had actually fired, and dotted yellow lines, neatly sketched, helpfully showed the track of the black-hole projectiles. They missed each other, and passed harmlessly through the loose bulk of the target rock, which sailed on, ancient and serene. And at the moment of closest approach the ship had exploded. Three crew blisters came flying out of an expanding cloud of debris.
Only nine weeks left, he thought helplessly. Nine weeks.
Chapter 39
The universe inhabited by the spacetime-defect fauna was quite unlike that of humans. There was no light, for instance, for the electromagnetic force which governed light’s propagation had yet to decouple from the GUT superforce. But the spacetime-flaw creatures, huddled around their black holes, could “see” by the deep glow of the gravity waves that crisscrossed the growing cosmos.
To them, of course, it had always been this way; to them the sky was beautiful.
The basis of all life in this age was the chemistry of spacetime defects, an interconnected geometric churning of points and lines and planes. Most life-forms were built up of “cells,” tightly interconnected, and very stable. But more complex creatures, built from aggregates of these cells, were not quite so stable. They were capable of variation, one generation to the next.
And where there is variation, selection can operate.
On some of the black-hole “worlds,” fantastic ecologies developed: there were birds with wings of spacetime, and spiders with arms of cosmic string, even fish that swam deep in the twisted hearts of the black holes. “Plants” passively fed on energy flows, like the twisting of space at the event horizons of the black holes, and “animals,” exploiters, fed on those synthesizers in turn — and other predators fed on them. Everywhere there was coevolution, as species adapted together in conflict or cooperation: “plants” and “animals,” “flowers” and “insects,” parasites and hosts, predators and prey. Some of this — the duets of synthesizers and exploiters, for instance — had echoes in the ecologies with which humans were familiar. But there were forms like nothing in human experience.
The creatures of one black hole “world” differed from the inhabitants of another as much as humans would differ from, say, Silver Ghosts. But just as humans and Ghosts were both creatures of baryonic matter who emerged on rocky planets, so the inhabitants of this age, dominated by its own dense physics, had certain features in common.
All life-forms must reproduce. Every parent must store information, a genotype, to pass on to its offspring. From this data is constructed a phenotype, the child’s physical expression of that information — its “body.”
In this crowded young universe the most obvious way to transmit such information was through extended quantum structures. Quantum mechanics allowed for the long-range correlation of particles: once particles had been in contact, they were never truly separated, and would always share information.
Infants were budded, unformed, from parents. But each child was born without a genotype. It was unformed, a blank canvas. A mother would read off her own genotype, and send it to her newborn daughter — by touch, by gravity waves. In the process, depending on the species, the mother’s data might be mixed with that of other “parents.”