And meanwhile the stars he was able to see were not the few thousand visible in solar space by the naked human eye. His extraordinary speed had imposed a Doppler effect; the stars behind had been redshifted to darkness, while the 'visible' stars ahead, including the sun, had similarly been blueshifted to obscurity. But conversely red stars, giants and dwarfs pregnant with infra-red, now glowed brightly, crowding the sky, a hundred thousand of them, it was thought, crammed into that tight disc.
Sol itself was somewhere in there, at the dead centre of his visual field, and he knew that the navigators on the bridge had elaborate routines to disentangle the relativistic effects from the starfield. But a primitive part of him longed just to see the sunlight again, with his own unaided eyes, for the first time in so many decades—
Snow sparkled over the lifedome, gone in an instant. He flinched, half-expecting the blister to crack and crumple over him. He called, "What was that?"
A Virtual of Flood appeared in the air before him, the avatar // used by the ship's AI to communicate with the crew. "We lost Fist One," Flood said bluntly.
"How?"
"A dust grain got it. The earthworms. They blew up an ice asteroid in our path, creating a screen of dust hundreds of kilometres wide. We have defences, of course, but not against motes that size, and at such densities. At our velocity even a sand grain will hit with the kinetic energy of a—"
"There shouldn't be any asteroids here. We're out of the plane of the ecliptic."
"Evidently the earthworms have prepared defences."
"So how come we survived?"
"The destruction of One blew a hole in the debris cloud. We sailed through."
Densel considered. "So if we follow each other, even if the lead ship is taken out by further screens, it might clear a path for the rest."
"That's right. We will still achieve our objective if only three, two, even just one of the Fists gets through." Flood hesitated, and the image crumbled slightly, a sign of additional processing power being applied. "There is other news. The Third Wave ships came under fire when they rounded the sun. Two were lost."
"That was smart by the earthworms." Densel wondered if he ought to be exulting at this victory, for Earth, after all, was his home planet. But his heart was on Footprint, with the families he would never see again. He didn't want anybody to die, he realised.
Flood said, "Smart, yes. But six ships survive, of eight. Meanwhile the earthworms are regrouping. Half of their ships, twelve of them, are heading for Jupiter." Flood nodded. "We have to eliminate the Navy, to win. Then that is where the decisive encounter will come, for the Third Wave."
"And the other earthworm ships?"
"Converging on the course of the Fists."
Densel nodded. "But now, in Two, I'm in the van. The next in line for the duck shoot."
Again that hesitation, that fragility. "The crews are conferring. That would not be optimal."
"Optimal?"
"The line is to be reconfigured. Fist Two will continue astern of the remaining ships, not in the lead, protected by the others."
"You want to give Two the best chance. Why?"
"Because Two has you aboard." The avatar grinned, an imperfectly imaged, eerie sight. "I told you. You are useful, Densel Bel." Theatrically it consulted a wristwatch. "Subjectively you are little more than a day away from Sol. Thirty-three hours, that's all it will be for you. Then it will be done. Try to get some sleep." It crumbled to pixels and disappeared.
S-Day plus 6
Imperial bunker. New York
Admiral Kale was shocked by what he found of New York.
The great wave had spared some of the mighty old buildings, which stood like menhirs, windows shattered, their flanks stained by salt water. But the human city at their feet was devastated, scoured out, millennia of history washed away. Even now the aid workers and their bots dug into the reefs of rubble the wave had left, and the refugees were only beginning to filter back to what remained of their homes.
But in her bunker of Construction Material, deep beneath the ruin of Central Park, the Empress sat beside her pool of logic and light, imperturbable.
"You are angry, Admiral Kale," she said softly.
"Every damn place I go on the planet I'm angry," he said. "The destruction of history—the harm done to so many people."
"We are not yet defeated?"
The tone of the question surprised him. "No, ma'am, we are not. We are massing the Navy cruisers at Jupiter—"
"I have viewed the briefings," she said.
"Ma'am." He stood and waited.
"I have brought you here, Admiral, to speak not of the present but of the past, and of the future. You spoke of history. What do you know of history, though? What do you know of the origin of the empire you serve—and, deeper than that, the dynasty of the Shiras?"
He was puzzled and impatient. Surely he had better things to do than listen to this. But she was the Empress, and he had no choice but to stand and take it. "Ma'am? I'm a soldier, not a scholar."
"I need you to understand, you see," she rasped. "I need someone to bear the truth into the future. For I fear I may not survive this war—at least I may not retain my throne. And a determination that has spanned centuries will be lost."
"Ma'am, we're confident that—"
"Tell me what you know."
Hesitantly, dredging at his memory, he spoke of the Emergency nine hundred years before.
The great engineer Michael Poole had opened up Sol system with his wormhole projects, and worked on the first generations of interstellar craft. But Poole had greater ambitions in mind. He used wormhole technology to establish a time tunneclass="underline" a bridge across fifteen hundred years, a great experiment, a way to explore the future. But Poole's bridge reached an unexpected shore. The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole was confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. It was a war—brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Sol system before. It was an invasion from a remote future, an age when Sol system would be occupied by an alien power.
The incursion was repelled. Michael Poole drove a captured warship into the wormhole, to seal it against further invasion. In the process, Poole himself was lost in time.
"An invasion from a dark future, yes," hissed the Empress. "An invasion from which the first Shira, founder of the dynasty, herself was a refugee. She saw Poole disappear into time, collapsing the wormhole links. And when the way home was lost, Shira was stranded. But she did not abandon the Project."
"The Project?"
"Shira belonged to a philosophico-religious sect called the Friends of Wigner. And their purpose in coming back in time was to send a message to a further future yet ... "
Kale, frustrated, had to endure more of this peculiar philosophising.
Life, Shira said, was essential for the very existence of the universe. Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being—for without conscious observation there could be no actualisation of quantum potential to reality. And if this were true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organise data—all data, everywhere—to observe and actualise all events. In the furthest future the confluences of mind would merge, culminating in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.