Of course the most likely cause of his death would be his suit’s failure. But perhaps he could juggle its systems, force the hole itself to kill him. He grinned fiercely. It would be a challenge.
Chapter
59
On the long journey back to Arches they saw no sign of Xeelee.
Ops told them that when the black hole web was abandoned, the Xeelee appeared to have ceased their operations, right across the face of the Galaxy, from Core to rim. Pirius found it hard to believe that this one action had made such a difference. But he was glad that they weren’t harassed; they would have been easy targets.
He was only bringing back four ships, though. This Burden Must Pass had volunteered to stay at Chandra for an additional day. He would record what he could of the field of action, and search for any survivors of the lost ships. Pirius agreed to this reluctantly. It was standard operating procedure, and as the sole surviving flight commander Burden was the right man for the job. But Pirius knew that this offer had more to do with the contents of Burden’s own head.
Besides, he didn’t like the idea of leaving anybody behind. He made sure Burden’s crew were happy with the idea before he agreed, but they seemed loyal to Burden.
Four ships left, then—and then another was lost. It was another systems failure—catastrophic, as the containment of the point black-hole bombs failed, and the ship was immediately torn apart. After that, Pirius ordered the crews to dump their remaining bombs. He knew he would regret for the rest of his life not having thought of this precaution earlier.
So in the end only three ships returned to Arches Base. They were directed to a hangar with enough cradles to hold the ten that had flown out from Orion Rock fifteen hours before.
Pirius was the first down. He made a shaky landing, dropping his ship too hard into its cradle. There were dozens of ground crew on standby, and they came swarming around immediately. But of course there was only Pirius and Bilson to help out of their blisters; the stump of Cabel’s nacelle was a mute testament to the loss.
Enduring Hope and Cohl were both here. Pirius was unreasonably pleased to see their familiar faces. They embraced, stiffly, in their skinsuits. But he could see their distress at the loss of Blue, “their” Pirius.
Marshal Kimmer, in a bright skinsuit adorned with badges of command, came striding forward. “Well done, pilot, well done!”
Pirius allowed his hand to be shaken. But when Kimmer demanded to know how the operation had gone, Pirius just said, “Wait for the debrief,” and turned back to his crew. You didn’t speak to a senior officer like that, but he was too tired to care.
Pirius sent Bilson to the sick bay, but he fought off the medics who tried to lead him away. He wasn’t about to leave the hangar until the other surviving ships made it home.
In they came, one at a time. Neither made a landing much better than he had, but both got down safely. The crews in their skinsuits clustered on the floor of the hangar, while medics and reserve flight crew crowded around them, and Hope’s technicians moved in on the ships.
Everybody talked at once. Relief was the first emotion, relief to be alive. The release of nervous energy was almost like elation. But those empty cradles told a harrowing story. People would wander off alone and glance at the sky, as if expecting one of the lost ships to come limping home even now.
Pirius’s most difficult meeting was with Torec. She hugged him, but her small face, inside her visor, was closed with grief. “I’ve got you back,” she said, “but I’ve lost you as well. How am I supposed to cope with
that
?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
Once inside the base, the crew were taken through standard post-operation processing.
First the medics checked them over. All but one, a navigator with a broken arm, were released. Then they were taken to a refectory, where food and drink were heaped up. They suddenly discovered how hungry they were. But there was enough food for thirty, and it was uncomfortable to be surrounded by empty chairs.
After that, though Pirius felt so exhausted he thought he would sleep for a week, they were taken away for preliminary debriefs, individually, in crews, and then as a whole. That went on for six wearying hours, until at last a consensus Virtual record of the operation was put together, combining all their viewpoints and the logs of the surviving ships. The crews accepted this as necessary. Details about the mission could be argued over for years, but these first moments, when memories were fresh and unclouded by sentiment or denial, were essential for an accurate record. It was grueling work, though.
Marshal Kimmer sat silently throughout these sessions. The only emotion he showed came when Pirius described how he had taken his ship back for a second run on Chandra, to guide Blue and to deflect the flak.
When the debrief was over, Kimmer approached Pirius. “You were right,” he said gruffly. “I should have waited for the debrief. But I’ll say it again. Well done, Pilot.” He seemed to want to say more, but his small, mean-looking mouth appeared incapable of expression. He bowed and walked away, his entourage of aides at his heels.
By now Pirius was so tired he felt numb, detached, as if he were still wearing a skinsuit. But he knew he had one more duty.
Commissary Nilis was in his room, deep in Officer Country. Pila sat with him. They were sorting through data desks, and Virtual images of Chandra and its surrounds floated in the air. Nilis actually shied away from Pirius when he came in, a kind of shame showing in his broad, rumpled face.
Pila, though, gazed at Pirius. “Well done,” she said softly.
He wondered what she was feeling. This strange, cold woman from Earth had been on her own journey, he supposed. He said, “I couldn’t have done it without you, Pila. I won’t forget that.” He turned to Nilis and said formally, “Commissary—I was glad to have taken part in the final experiment that proved your theories.”
That took Nilis by surprise. “Oh, my boy, my boy. Thank you! And you validated my faith in you, in spades. You have come a long way from that mixed-up child on Port Sol and Venus, my boy, a long, long way. You are a man—you poor wretch!
“And of course it
has
been a great technical achievement.” He smiled, his rheumy eyes wet. “Who would have thought, when we were limping around in Sol system, that we could have brought it off? Well, I always had faith in you, Pirius; I knew you could do it, if anybody could.”
“And we made history today.”
“Oh, yes, there’s that too. How remarkable to think that of all the galaxies we see in the sky, only ours is clear of the Xeelee—and all thanks to human endeavor! And it is a historic moment in other ways. It’s a fallacy, you know, that communication is always possible between alien cultures. The dismal records of the Assimilation prove that. Sometimes perceptions of our common universe simply diverge too much. In an awful lot of first contacts, ‘communication’ is primal: only to be ignored, eaten, or attacked. And there is no record of the Xeelee attempting
any
form of communication with any lesser species, save extreme violence. But in this incident they
did
respond. We threatened Chandra, they withdrew, we did not attack; information, of a sort, passed between us, and a kind of agreement was reached.” He sighed. “If only it were possible to build on this breakthrough! Perhaps the perpetual war could be ended. But I fear that may be utopian.”
Pirius knew how important this sort of philosophical stuff was to the Commissary. “A triumph in many ways, then.”
“Yes.” But Nilis’s face crumpled. “But too many people were lost—too many young lives rubbed out because of me and my dreams. Those moments when the first two runs failed, and I thought that despite the sacrifices I had demanded, I had failed, were almost more than I could bear.”
Pirius tried to find words about the proportionality of the losses compared to what had been gained. But Nilis, he saw, was inconsolable for now. After a time he left him to his work.
In their barracks, Torec was already asleep. She hadn’t even taken off the coverall given her by the medics after they peeled her out of her skinsuit. Pirius crawled in with her. She stirred, mumbled, and turned into his arms, a bundle of soft warm humanity.
He had thought he would be too agitated to sleep. Besides, he felt guilty about lying down to sleep when others had died, or were still out there. If he slept, this long day would finally end, and he would somehow lose it, lose them.
But sleep rose up like a black tide, regardless.
The next day, his first priority was his crews.
He toured the base. They were in their barracks, or the refectories, or the sick bays, or the gyms and training rooms where they had gone to work out the tension from their systems. A couple of them had gone back to the ships to help the ground crews with their own investigations and debriefing.
Some just accepted what had happened. It was a gamble worth taking, they said; you win some, you lose some. Others were bitter at the stupidity of the commanders, including Pirius himself, who had sent them into the Cavity with such poor intelligence. He absorbed their anger. And some just talked. They went over and over what they had done, telling and retelling their own small war stories as part of the whole. That was all right. It was part of the healing, and Pirius’s job now was to listen. And it wasn’t going to stop here, he knew. The shock of what they had gone through, and the guilt at having survived where others hadn’t, would never leave them.
Pirius had lost a temporal twin, a part of himself, and he wondered which way his own damage would work out—and how Torec, who had lost her lover and welcomed him home at the same time, would sort out her own complicated, guilt-ridden grief.
More than twenty-four hours after Pirius’s return, This Burden Must Pass brought his own battered ship home.
Pirius hurried to meet him, and walked with his crew to the sick bay. With his visor cracked open, Burden’s face was drawn, dried sweat was crusted under his shadowed eyes, and his hair was plastered to his head. Burden said that they had encountered no Xeelee harassment on the way back. “It looks as if it really is true,” he said. “They have abandoned the Galaxy to mankind. And because of
us.
”
“Quite a story to add to that end-of-time confluence of yours,” Pirius said.
“Yes, quite a story.” Burden said more slowly, “Pirius. About what happened out there—”
“Forget it,” Pirius snapped.
“I can’t do that,” Burden said. “If I’d gone into Chandra as you ordered, as was my duty, maybe Blue would have survived.”
“We’ll never know. We’ve all come home with regrets, Burden. Now we move on.”
Burden nodded, his eyes downcast. “We move on.”
Burden said he had found no traces of Jees’s lost ship. “It was smashed up. Two of the crew nacelles, more or less intact. But the systems had failed before the safety cut-ins could work.”
“They didn’t survive.”
“We sent the crew blisters into the black hole.” Burden smiled thinly, exhausted. “It seemed fitting.”
“That it does.” Pirius was thinking over what Burden had said. His thoughts were muddy; already the events of the flight seemed remote, as if they had happened a decade ago, or in another life. But there was something missing from Burden’s report. “You didn’t mention the third nacelle. Jees rode with the Silver Ghost.”
Burden grinned. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. I’ll have to report it, I suppose. Of the Ghost’s nacelle I found not a trace. Not only that, it looked to me as if it had been sheared off—I mean, deliberately.”
“The Ambassador escaped,” Pirius said, marveling. Once more there was a Silver Ghost loose in the Galaxy. “But what different can one Ghost make?”
“The Ghosts are remarkable creatures, and very resourceful. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Sink Ambassador. And you have to wonder if, from the Ghost’s point of view, this whole operation was set up—if
we
were set up—just to give the Ghost a chance to get free.”
“That’s impossible.”
Burden glanced around. “I’m not going to repeat this in the debrief. But I want to go back out there again.” He spread his gloved hands. “After all, the war is over, it seems. They don’t need me to fight any more. Not that I was much use at that in the first place. I want to go back to the center again, to look for the Ambassador.”
“Why?”
“Because we never finished our philosophical discussions. Things are different now. Perhaps we can learn from the Ghosts about how we’re going to live our lives from now on. Oh, Pirius—one more thing.” He dug out a data desk and showed him some complicated schematics. “Something the sensors picked up.”
Burden had observed structures of dark matter drifting through the center of the Galaxy. Invisible to human senses, passing through even the crowded matter around Chandra as if it was no more substantial than a Virtual, the shadowy forms had settled around the central black hole.
Burden said, “I remember what you said about Nilis, and Luru Parz, and their interpretation of history. The Xeelee cleaned these dark matter creatures, the ‘photino birds,’ out of the Core. Now the Xeelee are gone—and in less than a day the birds are back.” He put away the data desk. “Silver Ghosts loose, dark matter creatures swarming through the Core—we have planted many seeds, as Nilis would say. Something tells me the future suddenly got a lot more complicated.”
A week after the crews returned from the core, Arches Base received visitors from Earth. The scuttlebutt in the dorms was that one was a member of the Grand Conclave itself, the highest body of governance in the Coalition: one of just twelve people who governed a Galaxy, and she was
here.
Not only that, the scuttlebutt went, she had come to give them all medals.
The day after that, the crews of Exultant Squadron and everybody connected with Operation Prime Radiant were called to the hangar. The hangar was covered by a translucent dome that gave a view of the sky, and the hot white light of the Core beat down into the interior of the pit. All ten of the ships’ cradles were empty now; the surviving ships would perform a flyby, piloted by reserve crews.