Stephen Baxter - Destiny's Children 2 - Exultant

VIP免费
2024-12-04 0 0 904.79KB 398 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Exultant
Stephen Baxter
Exultant
Destiny's Children 2
To Gregory Benford
PART ONE
In the past we humans, struggling to comprehend our place in the universe, imagined
gods, and venerated them.
But now we have looked across the width of the universe, and from its beginning to its
end. And we know there are no gods.
We are the creators of the future. And the only entities worthy of our veneration are
our own descendants, who, thanks to our selfless striving, will occupy the gods' empty
thrones.
But we have a Galaxy to win first.
—The Doctrines of Hama Druz (5408 C.E.; Year Zero of the Third Expansion of
Mankind)
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (1 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
Chapter 1
Far ahead, bathed in the light of the Galaxy's center, the nightfighters were rising.
From his station, Pirius could see their black forms peeling off the walls of their Sugar Lump
carriers. They spread graceful wings, so black they looked as if they had been cut out of the glowing
background of the Core. Some of them were kilometers across. They were Xeelee nightfighters, but
nobody in Strike Arm called them anything but flies.
They converged on the lead human ships, and Pirius saw cherry-red light flaring.
His fragile greenship hovered over the textured ground of a Rock. The Rock was an asteroid, a dozen
kilometers across, charcoal gray. Trenches had been dug all over its surface, interconnecting and
intersecting, so that the Rock looked like an exposed brain. Sparks of light crawled through those
complex lines: soldiers, infantry, endlessly digging, digging, digging, preparing for their own
collisions with destiny. It was a good hour yet before this Rock and Pirius's own greenship would
reach the battlefield, but already men and women were fighting and dying.
There was nothing to do but watch, and brood. There wasn't even a sense of motion. Under the
Assimilator's Claw's pulsing sublight drive it was as if he were floating, here in the crowded heart of
the Galaxy. Pirius worried about the effect of the wait on his crew.
Pirius was nineteen years old.
He was deep in the Mass, as pilots called it—the Central Star Mass, officially, a jungle of millions of
stars crammed into a ball just thirty light-years across, a core within the Core. Before him a veil of
stars hung before a background of turbulent, glowing gas; he could see filaments and wisps light-
years long, drawn out by the Galaxy's magnetic field. This stellar turmoil bubbled and boiled on
scales of space and time beyond the human, as if he had been caught at the center of a frozen
explosion. The sky was bright, crowded with stars and clouds, not a trace of darkness anywhere.
And through the stars he made out the Cavity, a central bubble blown clear of gas by astrophysical
violence, and within that the Baby Spiral, a swirl of stars and molecular clouds, like a toy version of
the Galaxy itself embedded fractally in the greater disc. That was the center of the Galaxy, a place of
layered astrophysical machinery. And it was all driven by Chandra, the brooding black hole at the
Galaxy's very heart.
This crowded immensity would have stunned a native of Earth—but Earth, with its patient, long-
lived sun, out in the orderly stellar factory of the spiral arms, was twenty-eight thousand light-years
from here. But Pirius had grown up with such visions. He was the product of a hundred generations
grown in the birthing tanks of Arches Base, formally known as Base 2594, just a few light-years
outside the Mass. He was human, though, with human instincts. And as he peered out at the
stretching three-dimensional complexity around him he gripped the scuffed material of his seat, as if
he might fall.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (2 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
Everywhere Pirius looked, across this astrophysical diorama, he saw signs of war.
Pirius's ship was one of a hundred green sparks, ten whole squadrons, assigned to escort this single
Rock alone. When Pirius looked up he could see more Rocks, a whole stream of them hurled in from
the giant human bases that had been established around the Mass. Each of them was accompanied by
its own swarm of greenships. Upstream and down, the chain of Rocks receded until kilometers-wide
worldlets were reduced to pebbles lost in the glare. Hundreds of Rocks, thousands perhaps, had been
committed to this one assault. It was a titanic sight, a mighty projection of human power.
But all this was dwarfed by the enemy. The Rock stream was directed at a fleet of Sugar Lumps, as
those Xeelee craft were called, immense cubical ships that were themselves hundreds of kilometers
across—some even bigger, some like boxes that could wrap up a whole world.
The tactic was crude. The Rocks were simply hosed in toward the Sugar Lumps, their defenders
striving to protect them long enough for them to get close to the Lumps, whereupon their mighty
monopole cannons would be deployed. If all went well, damage would be inflicted on the Xeelee,
and the Rocks would slingshot around a suitable stellar mass and be hurled back out to the periphery,
to be reequipped, remanned, and prepared for another onslaught. If all did not go well—in that case,
duty would have been done.
As the Claw relentlessly approached the zone of flaring action, one ship dipped out of formation,
swooping down over the Rock in a series of barrel rolls. That must be Dans, one of Pirius's cadre
siblings. Pirius had flown with her twice before, and each time she had shown off, demonstrating to
the toiling ground troops the effortless superiority of Strike Arm, and of the Arches squadrons in
particular—and in the process lifting everybody's spirits.
But it was a tiny human gesture lost in a monumental panorama.
Pirius could see his crew, in their own blisters: his navigator Cohl, a slim woman of eighteen, and his
engineer, Enduring Hope, a calm, bulky young man who looked older than his years, just seventeen.
While Cohl and Hope were both rookies, nineteen-year-old Pirius was a comparative veteran.
Among greenship crews, the mean survival rate was one point seven missions. This was Pirius's fifth
mission. He was growing a reputation as a lucky pilot, a man whose crew you wanted to be on.
"Hey," he called now. "I know how you're feeling. They always say this is the worst part of combat,
the ninety-nine percent of it that's just waiting around, the sheer bloody boredom. I should know."
Enduring Hope looked across and waved. "And if I want to throw up, lift the visor first. That's the
drill, isn't it?"
Pirius forced a laugh. Not a good joke, but a joke.
Enduring Hope: defying all sorts of rules, the engineer called himself not by his properly assigned
name, a random sequence of letters and syllables, but an ideological slogan. He was a Friend, as he
styled it, a member of a thoroughly illegal sect that flourished in the darker corners of Arches Base,
and, it was said, right across the Front, the great sphere of conflict that surrounded the Galaxy's
heart. Illegal or not, right now, as the flies rose up and people started visibly to die, Hope's faith
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (3 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
seemed to be comforting him.
But navigator Cohl, staring ahead at the combat zone, was closed in on herself.
The Claw was a greenship, a simple design that was the workhorse of Strike Arm; millions like it
were in action all around the war zone. Its main body was a bulbous pod containing most of the
ship's systems: the weapons banks, the FTL drive and two sublight drive systems. From the front of
the hull projected three spars, giving the ship the look of a three-pronged claw, and at the tip of each
prong was a blister, a clear bubble, containing one of the Claw's three crew. For greenship crews,
nobody else mattered but each other; it was just three of them lost in a dangerous sky—Three
Against the Foe, as Strike Arm's motto went.
Pirius knew there were good reasons for the trifurcated design of the greenship. It was all to do with
redundancy: the ship could lose two of its three blisters and still, in theory anyhow, fulfill its goals.
But right now Pirius longed to be able to reach through these transparent walls, to touch his
crewmates.
He said, "Navigator? You still with us?"
He saw Cohl glance across at him. "Trajectory's nominal, Pilot."
"I wasn't asking about the trajectory."
Cohl shrugged, as if resentfully. "What do you want me to say?"
"You saw all this in the briefing. You knew it was coming."
It was true. The whole operation had been previewed for them by the Commissaries, in full Virtual
detail, down to the timetabled second. It wasn't a prediction, not just a guess, but foreknowledge: a
forecast based on data that had actually leaked from the future. The officers hoped to deaden fear by
making the events of the engagement familiar before it happened. But not everybody took comfort
from the notion of a predetermined destiny.
Cohl was staring out through her blister wall, her lips drawn back in a cold, humorless smile. "I feel
like I'm in a dream," she murmured. "A waking dream."
"It isn't set in stone," Pirius said. "The future."
"But the Commissaries—"
"No Commissary ever set foot in a greenship—none of them is skinny enough. It isn't real until it
happens. And now is when it happens. It's in our hands, Cohl. It's in yours. I know you'll do your
duty."
"And kick ass," Enduring Hope shouted.
He saw Cohl grin at last. "Yes, sir!"
A green flash distracted Pirius. A ship was hurtling out of formation. One of its three struts was a
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (4 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
stump, the blister missing. As it sailed by, Pirius recognized the gaudy, spruced-up tetrahedral sigil
on its side. It was Dans's ship.
He called, "Dans? What—"
"Predestination my ass," Dans yelled on the ship-to-ship line. "Nobody saw that coming."
"Saw what?"
"See for yourself."
Pirius swept the crowded sky, letting Virtual feeds pour three-dimensional battlefield data into his
head.
In the seconds he'd spent on his crew, everything had changed. The Xeelee hadn't stayed restricted to
their source Sugar Lumps. A swarm of them speared down from above his head, from out of
nowhere, heading straight for Pirius's Rock.
Pirius hadn't seen it. Sloppy, Pirius. One mistake is enough to kill you.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," Cohl said.
"Forget the projections," Pirius snapped.
There were seconds left before the flies hit the Rock. He saw swarming activity in its runs and
trenches. The poor souls down there knew what was coming, too. Pirius gripped his controls, and
tried to ignore the beating of his heart.
Four, three, two.
The Xeelee—pronounced Zee-lee—were mankind's most ancient and most powerful foe.
According to the scuttlebutt on Arches Base, in the training compounds and the vast open barracks,
there were only three things you needed to know about the Xeelee.
First, their ships were better than ours. You only had to see a fly in action to realize that. Some said
the Xeelee were their ships, which probably made them even tougher.
Second, they were smarter than us, and had a lot more resources. Xeelee operations were believed to
be resourced and controlled from Chandra itself, the fat black hole at the Galaxy's very center. In
fact, military planners called Chandra, a supermassive black hole, the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee.
How could anything we had compete with that?
And third, the Xeelee knew what we would do even before we decided ourselves.
This interstellar war was fought with faster-than-light technology, on both sides. But if you flew FTL
you broke the bounds of causality: an FTL ship was a time machine. And so this was a time-travel
war, in which information about the future constantly leaked into the past.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (5 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
But the information was never perfect. And every now and again, one side or the other was able to
spring a surprise. This new maneuver of the Xeelee had not been in the Commissaries' careful
projections.
Pirius felt his lips draw back in a fierce grin. The script had been abandoned. Today, everything
really was up for grabs.
But now cherry-red light flared all around the Rock's ragged horizon.
On the loops, orders chattered from the squadron leaders. "Hold your positions. This is a new tactic
and we're still trying to analyze it." "Number eight, hold your place. Hold your place."
Pirius gripped his controls so tight his fingers ached.
That red glare was spreading all around the Rock's lumpy profile, a malevolent dawn. Most of the
action was taking place on the far side of the Rock from his position—which was itself most unlike
the Xeelee, who were usually apt to come swarming all over any Rock they attacked.
The Claw would be sheltered from the assault, for the first moments, anyhow. That meant Pirius was
in the wrong place. He wasn't here to hide, but to fight. But he had to hold his station, until ordered
otherwise.
Pirius glimpsed a fly standing off from the target. It spread night-dark wings—said to be not material
but flaws in the structure of space itself—and extended a cherry-red starbreaker beam. The clean
geometry of these lethal lines had a certain cold beauty, Pirius thought, even though he knew what
hell was being unleashed for those unlucky enough to be caught on the exposed surface of the Rock.
Now, though, the rectilinear perfection of the starbreaker beam was blurred, as a turbulent fog rose
over the Rock's horizon.
Cohl said, "What's that mist? Air? Maybe the starbreakers are cutting through to the sealed caverns."
"I don't think so," said Enduring Hope levelly. "That's rock. A mist of molten rock. They are
smashing the asteroid to gas."
Molten rock, Pirius thought grimly, no doubt laced with traces of what had recently been complex
organic compounds, thoroughly burned.
But still, for all the devastation they were wreaking, the Xeelee weren't coming around the horizon.
They were focusing all their firepower on one side of the Rock.
Still Pirius waited for orders, but the tactical analysis took too long. Suddenly, human ships came
fleeing around the curve of the Rock, sparks of Earth green bright against the dull gray of the
asteroid ground. The formation had collapsed, then, despite the squadron leaders' continuing
bellowed commands. And down on the Rock those little flecks of light, each a human being trapped
in lethal fire, swarmed and scattered, fanning out of the trench system and over the open ground.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (6 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
Even from here, it looked like panic, a rout.
It got worse. All across the Rock's visible hemisphere implosions began, as if its surface was being
bombarded by unseen meteorites. But the floors of these evanescent craters broke up and collapsed,
and through a mist of gray dust a deeper glow was revealed, coming up from inside the Rock. It was
as if the surface were dissolving, and pink-white light was burning its way out of this shell of stone.
The Xeelee, Pirius thought: the Xeelee were burning their way right through the Rock itself.
Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. "Lethe," he said.
"Get us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!"
Cohl said weakly, "But our orders—"
But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and
pulling back.
Even as the Rock fell away, Pirius could see the endgame approaching. For a last, remarkable,
instant, the Rock held together, and that inner light picked out the complex tracery of the trench
network, as if the face of the Rock was covered by a map of shining threads. The asteroid's uneven
horizon lifted, bulging.
And then the Rock flew apart.
Suddenly the Claw was surrounded by a hail of white-hot fragments that rushed upward all around it.
The greenship threw itself around every axis to survive this deadly inverted storm. The motions were
rapid, juddery, disconcerting; even cloaked by inertial shields, Pirius could feel a ghost of his craft's
jerky motion, deep in his bones.
Everybody on the Rock must already be dead, he thought, as the ship tried to save him. It was a
terrible, monstrous thought, impossible to absorb. And the dying wasn't over yet.
Pirius's squadron leader called for discipline, for her crews to try to regroup, to take the fight to the
enemy. But then she was cut off.
Cohl shrieked, "Flies! Here they come—"
Pirius saw them: a swarm of flies, rising out of the core of the shattered Rock like insects from a
corpse, their black-as-night wings unfolding. They had burned their way right through the heart of an
asteroid.
Some greenships were already throwing themselves back into the Xeelee fire. But the Xeelee
deployed their starbreaker beams; those lethal tongues almost lovingly touched the fleeing
greenships.
Pirius had no meaningful orders. So he ran. The Claw raced from the ruin of the Rock. The cloud of
debris thinned, and the jittery motion of the Claw subsided. But when Pirius looked back he saw a
solid black bank, a phalanx of Xeelee nightfighters.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (7 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
He had no idea where he was running to, how he might evade the Xeelee. He ran anyhow.
And the Xeelee came after him.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (8 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
Chapter 2
The battle at the center of the Galaxy was watched from far away by cold eyes and orderly, patient
minds.
Port Sol was a Kuiper object, a moon of ice. It was one of a hundred thousand such objects orbiting
in the dark at the rim of Sol system. It was not the largest; there were monstrous worldlets out here
larger than Pluto. But it was no closer to other planetesimals than Earth was to Mars.
This immense belt was a relic of the birth of Sol system itself. Around the fast-growing sun, grains
of dust and ice had accreted into swarming planetesimals. Close to the fitfully burning young star,
the planetesimals had been crowded enough to combine further into planets. Further out, though, out
here, there had been too much room. The formation of larger bodies had stalled, and the ancient
planetesimals survived, to swim on in the silent dark.
Port Sol's human history had begun when its scattered kin had first been populated by a rum
assortment of engineers, prospectors, refugees, and dissidents from the inner system. More than
twenty thousand years had worn away since then. Now Port Sol's great days were long past. Its
icescapes, crowded with immense ruins, were silent once more.
But still, lights sparked on its surface.
This lonely worldlet had been home to Luru Parz for far longer than she cared to remember.
Sometimes she felt she was as old as it was, her heart as cold as its primordial ice. But from here she
watched the activities of humanity, from the bustling worlds of Sol system all the way to the heart of
the Galaxy itself.
And now she watched Pirius, Dans, and their crews as they strove to evade their Xeelee pursuers.
The incident, brought to her attention by patient semisentient monitors, unfolded in a Virtual image,
a searing bright slice of Galaxy center light, here on the rim of Sol system.
Faya, her cousin, was with her. "They're lost," Faya sighed.
"Perhaps," Luru said. "But if they find a way to live through this, or even if not, they might discover
something useful for the future."
"There is always that."
"Watch..."
The tiny, remote drama unfolded.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ter%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (9 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
Exultant
Chapter 3
Aboard the Claw, a strange calm settled. The loops were all but silent now, save for the ragged
breathing of Pirius's crew. But behind them, that black cloud of Xeelee ships closed relentlessly.
Another ship came alongside the Claw. It had taken a lot of damage. One strut had been crudely
amputated, and a second blister looked cloudy; but the pilot's blister was a bright spark of light.
Pirius looked back, but nobody else followed: just the two of them.
Pirius recognized the other's sigil. "Dans?"
"Large as life, Pirius."
"I recognized your lousy piloting."
"Yeah, yeah. So why aren't you dead yet?"
"Shut up." It was Cohl. "Shut up."
"Navigator, take it easy."
"Do we have to endure this garbage, today of all days?"
"Today of all days we need it," Enduring Hope said.
Pirius said, "Dans, your crew—"
"I'm on my own," Dans said grimly. "But I'm still flying. So. Every day you learn something new,
right? Those Xeelee always have something up their sleeves. If they have sleeves."
"Yes. In retrospect it's an obvious tactic."
So it was. The Xeelee's usual approach was to swathe a Rock with fire, trying to scour out the
trenches and get to the monopole cannons, all the time harassed by greenships and other defensive
forces. This time they had focused their assault on one side of the Rock, easily perforating the
defensive forces there. And they had used their starbreakers to burrow straight through the asteroid
and out the other side, thus destroying the Rock itself and hurling themselves without warning on the
remaining defenders.
"It's going to take some counterthinking," Pirius said. "We'll need scouts further out, perhaps."
"Yeah," Dans said. "And flexible formations to swarm wherever the first assault goes in."
"It won't be us doing it," said Cohl grimly.
"You aren't dead yet, kid," Dans called. She was twenty, a year older than Pirius, and a veteran of no
less than six missions before today.
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...er%20-%20Destiny's%20Children%202%20-%20Exultant.htm (10 of 398)24-2-2006 20:11:35
摘要：

ExultantStephenBaxterExultantDestiny'sChildren2ToGregoryBenfordPARTONEInthepastwehumans,strugglingtocomprehendourplaceintheunivers\e,imaginedgods,andveneratedthem.Butnowwehavelookedacrossthewidthoftheuniverse,andfromitsbe\ginningtoitsend.Andweknowtherearenogods.Wearethecreatorsofthefuture.Andtheonly...

展开>> 收起<<
Stephen Baxter - Destiny's Children 2 - Exultant.pdf

共398页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：398 页 大小：904.79KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-04

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 398
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注