Exultant by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780345457905
Goodreads: 6989595
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2004-10-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

“The Central Star Mass,” Nilis said. “Isn’t that what you call it, Pirius Blue? The Mass—what a mundane name for a place where you can find ten million stars in a space a few light-years across—a volume in which, at the Galactic vicinity of Sol, you would on average find one. How marvelous, that we feeble humans should have come so far!”

He had called Pirius Blue to the small quarters he had been allocated in Quin’s Officer Country. His face shining with enthusiasm, his long robe as scuffed and threadbare as ever, he bumbled around the room, setting out his data desks on the low table. The Commissary was just as Pirius remembered from the trial, though he seemed older, rather more careworn. But Nilis hadn’t been prepared for Pirius’s new eyes; at first sight he had recoiled, his shock comical.

This wasn’t the real Commissary, of course. Nilis was too busy with his mysterious projects in Sol system to come all the way to the center again in person. This was only a Virtual.

Nilis was still struggling to get political support for his schemes. He said he had forced his way into Quin Base on a pretext. He had managed to persuade his bosses at the Commission for Historical Truth that it was time somebody took a fresh look at the deviant religions sprouting here in the Core. But quizzing This Burden Must Pass about the nature of the Ultimate Observer was not Nilis’s true goal.

“Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.

Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”

But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front—into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”

“Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”

Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit—aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.

“But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”

And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.

“You want me to fly the mission.”

“To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew. . . . Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”

“Historic? Suicidal.”

Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how

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