Xeelee: Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this collection of stories, available in ebook for the first time! Baxter's future history, known as the Xeelee sequence, is an exemplar of the form: it comprises his first four novels - Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux and Ring - and these marvellous linked stories, as well as those in the new collection XEELEE: ENDURANCE. Contains 21 short stories, all set in the XEELEE universe.

Release date: October 8, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 426

Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ghost cruiser hovered between Earth and Moon.

The ship was a rough ovoid, woven from silvered rope. Instrument clusters and energy pods were knotted to the walls. Around me, Ghosts clung to the rope like grapes to a vine.

The blue of crescent Earth shimmered over their pulsating, convex surfaces.

Earth folded up and disappeared.

The first hyperspace hop was immense, thousands of light years long. Then, in a succession of bewildering leaps, we sailed out of the Galaxy.

We fell obliquely to the plane of the disc. The core was a chandelier of pink-white light, thousands of light years across, hanging over my head. Spiral arms—cloudy,
streaming—moved serenely above me. There were blisters of gas sprinkled along the arms, I saw, bubbles of swollen colour.

Galactic light glimmered over the silvered flesh of the Ghosts, and of my own body.

We reached the Ghosts’ base—far from home, in the halo of the Galaxy.

It was a typical Ghost construct: a hollowed-out moon, a rock ball a thousand miles wide, and it was riddled with passages and cavities. It hung beneath the great ceiling of the Galaxy, the
only large object visible as other than a smudge of light.

We descended. The moon turned into a complex, machined landscape below me. Our ship shut down its drive and entered a high, looping orbit. The Ghosts drifted away from the ship and down
towards the surface, bobbing like balloons, shining in Galaxy light.

I let go of the ship and floated away from its tangled hull.

Ghost ships and science platforms swept over the pocked landscape, fragments of shining net. All over the surface, vast cylindrical structures gleamed. These were intrasystem drives and
hyperdrives, systems which had been used to haul this moon—at huge expense—out of the plane of the Galaxy, and to hold it here.

There was quagma down there, I saw, little packets of the primordial stuff, buried in the pits of ancient planetesimal craters. My information had been good, then.

What in Lethe were the Ghosts doing out here?

The world of the Silver Ghosts was once earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun.

As the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. When the atmosphere started snowing, the Ghosts rebuilt themselves.

That epochal ordeal left the Ghosts determined, secretive, often reckless. Dangerous.

They moved out into space—the Heat Sink—to fulfill their ambitions.

I had been told the Ghosts were close to completing their new quagma project. I was chief administrator of the Ghost liaison office, representing most of mankind. It was my job to stop the
Ghosts endangering us all.

So that I could deal with the Ghosts, I was remade, a decade ago.

I look like a statue of a man, done in silver, or chrome. My legs are pillars. My hands and arms have been made immensely strong. I don’t live behind my eyes anymore: I live in my
chest cavity. 1 feel like a deep-sea fish, blind and almost immobile, stuck here in the dark. My mechanical eyes are like periscopes, far above “me.”

I can subsist on starlight, and survive the vacuum for days at a time, enfolding my seventy-six-year-old human core—me—in warmth and darkness. I have a Ghost doctor; twice a year
it opens me up and cleans me out.

I have a face, a sculpture of eyes, nose, mouth. It doesn’t even look much like I used to, before. It doesn’t matter; apart from the eyes, the face is non-functional, put there
to reassure me.

I can run with the Ghosts. I can fly in space, if I choose to. I don’t, much. When I’m not dealing with the Ghosts I spend most of my time in Virtual environments.

So my physical form doesn’t matter much. In fact, lately I’ve come to wish the Ghosts had just rebuilt me as a sphere, as they are: simple, classical, efficient.

A Ghost came soaring up to me. It was a silvery, five-feet-wide globe, complex patterns shimmering over its surface. I recognized it from its electromagnetic signature:
contrary to myth, Ghosts aren’t all alike, at least not to another Ghost.

I greeted it. “Sink Ambassador.”

The Ambassador to the Heat Sink floated before me, shimmering; I could see my own distorted reflection in its hide. “Jack Raoul. It has been many years—”

“More than a decade.”

“It is pleasant to meet with you. Even if your journey has been a wasted one.”

So it began: the endless diplomatic dance. I’ve known the Ambassador, on and off, for a long time, and we have a certain—friendship, I guess you’d call it. But none of that
is ever allowed to interfere with species imperatives.

“I presume you want to get straight down to business, Sink Ambassador? It’s clear—I can see—that you’re running fresh quagma experiments down there, on that
moon. What are you up to now?”

“We have no need to justify our actions. You have no authority over our activities.”

“Oh, yes, we do. By force of treaty we have the right of inspection of any quagma-related project you run. You know that very well. Just as you have reciprocal rights over
us.”

It was true.

The study of primordial quagma—relics of the Big Bang—has proven immensely dangerous. Even to the extent of drawing the attention of the Xeelee.

Humanity—and the Silver Ghosts, and a host of other spacefaring species—have grown accustomed to the aloof gaze of the Xeelee, and their occasional devastating intervention in
our affairs. For example, fifty years ago the Xeelee disrupted the Ghost and human expeditions which crossed the Universe in search of a fragment of quagma.

Some believe that by such interventions the Xeelee are maintaining their monopoly on power, which holds sway across the observable Universe. Others say that, like the vengeful gods of
man’s childhood, the Xeelee are protecting us from ourselves.

Either way, it’s insulting. Claustrophobic.

In my time with them I’ve developed a hunch that the Ghosts feel pretty much the same. Which makes them even more dangerous.

Four decades after those first expeditions, we’d turned up evidence that the Ghosts were performing experiments with quagma, in violation of treaties between our races. I was sent to
see.

The lead turned out to be accurate. The Ghosts’ dangerous project was unfolding in the heart of a red giant star—concealing their work from the Xeelee, and, incidentally, from
us.

The disastrous outcome of that project all but destroyed us.

After that, human surveillance of Ghost quagma projects was stepped up.

And now it seemed that the Ghosts were at it again.

The Sink Ambassador said, “You do not understand, Jack Raoul.”

“Oh, don’t I?”

“This is a new program, of great significance. We have every right to progress it, unhindered. Now.” It suddenly turned hospitable. “You have traveled a long way. Your
doctor is on hand. Perhaps you wish to rest, before returning to the plane of the Galaxy—”

I approached it, holding my arms out wide, my silvered hands raised like weapons. I hoped that the Ghosts—the Sink Ambassador at any rate—had studied humans sufficiently to get
something out of my body language. “Sink Ambassador, we’re not going to let this go. We have to know what you’re doing, out here.” I pushed my sculptured face so close to
its silvery hide I could see my own distorted reflection. “After last time, we’re quite prepared to use force.”

It seemed to stiffen; I tried to read the thin tones of the translator chips. “Is this some formal declaration of—”

“Not at all,” I said. “Our communications are secure, right now. This is just you, and me, out here in the halo of the Galaxy. I simply want you to understand the whole
picture, Sink Ambassador.”

It hovered in space for a long time, complex standing waves shimmering across its surface. Then: “Very well. Jack Raoul—what do you know of dark matter?”

Dark matter: a shadow Universe which permeates, barely touching, the visible worlds we inhabit . . . And yet that image was misleading, for the dark matter is no shadow; it
comprises fully nine-tenths of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter which makes up stars, planets, humans, is a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark
ocean.

I let the Ambassador download data into me. In my enhanced vision, huge Virtual schematics overlaid the Galaxy’s majestic disc.

“Dark matter cannot form stars,” the Sink Ambassador said. “As a result, much larger clouds—larger than galaxies—are the equilibrium form for dark matter. The
Universe is populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it is a spectral cosmos, almost without structure.”

“This is no doubt fascinating. Sink Ambassador, but I don’t see—”

“Jack Raoul, we believe we have found a way to construct soliton stars: stellar-mass objects, of dark matter. Such is the purpose of the experiment, conducted here. We will build the
first dark matter stars, the first in the Universe’s history.”

I pondered that. It was a typically grandiose Ghost scheme.

But—what was its true goal?

And why all the secrecy, from the Xeelee and from us? I knew there must be layers of truth, hidden beneath the surface of what the Ambassador had told me, just as their nuggets of quagma had
been inexpertly hidden beneath the regolith of their hollowed-out moon.

“. . . Maybe I can answer your questions, Jack.”

From the glands stored within my silver hide, adrenaline pumped into my system. I turned.

“Eve.”

My dead wife smiled at me.

The Sink Ambassador receded, turning to a tiny point of light. The Galaxy shimmered like a Ghost’s hide, dimming.

Then all the stars went out.

I looked down at myself I was human again.

Once we’d owned an apartment at the heart of the New Bronx. It was a nice place, light and roomy, with state-of-the-art Virtual walls. Since my metamorphosis, I can’t use it
anymore, but I keep it anyhow, leaving it unoccupied. Unchanged, in fact, since Eve’s death. I just like to know it’s there.

Now I was back in that apartment. I was alone.

I went to the drinks cabinet, poured myself a malt, and waited. I can still drink, of course, but I’ve discovered that much of the pleasure of liquor comes from the tactile sensations
of the bottle clinking against the glass, the heavy mass of the liquor in the base of the glass, the first rush of flavor.

Being injected just isn’t the same.

I savoured my malt. It was terrific. There was more processing power behind this simulation, whatever it was, than any I’d encountered before—

One wall melted. Eve was sitting on a couch like mine. She smiled at me again.

“You have a lot of questions,” she said.

I sipped my drink. “Will you join me?”

She shook her head. She looked older than when she’d died. She pulled at a lock of hair, a habit she’d had since she was a child.

I said, “This is a Virtual simulation, right?”

“In a sense.”

“You’re not Eve. If you were, you wouldn’t even be here.” Even the Virtual copy of Eve would have cared too much to do this to me, to plunge me back into this
self-regarding mess.

Despite my loneliness after the metamorphosis, I hadn’t called up Eve in seven, eight years.

“Jack, I’m a better image than any you’ve seen before. Richer. Indistinguishable from—”

“No. I can distinguish.”

She said, “You must understand what the Ghosts are doing here. And why you must allow them to proceed.”

“Oh, must I? And you’re here to persuade me, right?”

She stepped up to the surface of the Virtual wall which separated us. After a moment, I put down my drink and approached her.

She stepped out of the wall.

I could feel her warmth, the feather of her breath on my face. My heart was pounding, somewhere, in a hollow metal chest cavity.

. . . But even as I stared at Eve, I was figuring how much processing power this Virtual must be demanding. This creature with me wasn’t Eve, and it sure wasn’t the cosy
untouchable Virtual representation my apartment used to call up. How were the Ghosts doing this?

She held out her hand. I reached out, and my fingers passed through her arm; her flesh, crumbling into cuboid pixels, had the texture of dead leaves.

“I’m sorry.” She pushed back her hair. She reached out to me again.

This time, when her fingers settled in mine, they were warm and soft; her hand was like a bird, living and responsive.

“Oh, Eve.” I couldn’t help myself.

“Jack, you must understand.”

Behind her, the wall turned black.

Eve’s hand was still warm in mine. “You must watch,” she told me, “and learn. It is a long story . . .”

There was a patch of light, diffuse, in the center of the wall. It resolved into the blue Earth. Ships swam around it, on sparks of light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the instant of his birth, a hundred impressions cascaded over him.

His body, still moist from budding, was a heavy, powerful mass. He stretched, and his limbs extended with soft sucking noises. He felt blood—thick with mechanical
potency—surge through the capillaries lacing his torso.

And he had eyes.

There were people all around him, crowding, arguing, hurrying. They seemed tense, worried; but he quickly forgot the thought. It was too glorious to be alive! He stretched up his new limbs. He
wanted to embrace all of these people, his friends, his family; he wanted to share with them his vigor, his anticipation of his life to come.

Now a cage of jointed limbs settled around him, protecting him from the crush. He stared up, recognized the fast-healing wound of a recent budding. He called out—but his speech membrane
was still moist, and the sound he made was indecipherable. He tried again, feeling the membrane stiffen. “You are my father,” he said.

“Yes.” A huge face lowered towards him. He reached up to stroke the stem visage. The flesh was hardening. He felt a sweet pang of sadness. Was his father already so old, so near to
Consolidation?

“Listen to me. See my face. Your name is Sculptor 472. I am Sculptor 471. You must remember your name.”

Sculptor 472. “Thank you,” he said seriously. “But—” But what did “Sculptor” mean? He searched his mind, the memory set he’d been born
with. Limbs. Father. People. Consolidation. The Sun; the Hills. There was no referent for “Sculptor.” He felt a stab of fear; his limbs thrashed. Was something wrong with
him?

“Calm yourself,” his father said evenly. “It is a name preserved from the past, referring to nothing.”

Sculptor 472. It was a good name; a noble name. He looked ahead to his life: his brief three-day morning of awareness and mobility, when he would talk, fight, love, bear his own buds; and then
the long, slow, comfortable afternoon of Consolidation. “I feel happy to be alive, father. Everything is wonderful. I—”

“Listen to me.”

He stopped, confused; his father’s tone was savage, insistent.

Something was wrong.

“Things are—difficult, now. Different.”

Sculptor 472 wrapped his limbs around his torso. “Is it me?”

“No, child. The world is troubled.”

“But the Hills—Consolidation—”

“We had to leave the Hills.” There was shame in 471’s voice now; again Sculptor became aware of the crush of people beyond the cage of his father’s strong limbs.
“The Hills are damaged. There are—Sun-people—strange forms, glowing, shining. We dare not go there. We had to flee.”

“But how will I Consolidate? Where will I go?”

“I’m sorry,” his father said. “We must travel far. Perhaps we will find new Hills, where we can Consolidate. Perhaps before your time is due.”

“But what about you?”

“Never mind me.” With harsh, urgent gestures, 471 poked at his son. “Come. Can you walk?”

Sculptor unwrapped his limbs, settled them to the ground and stood, experimentally. He felt a little dizzy, and some of his joints ached. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. But I must
know—”

“No more talking. Run, child!”

His father rolled away from him and surged stiffly after the fleeing people.

Without 471’s protective cage of limbs Sculptor was left exposed. The land here was bare, flat; the sky overhead was black and empty. He blinked away false memories of shaded Hills, of
laughter and love.

His people surged to the horizon, abandoning him.

“Wait! Father, wait!”

Awkwardly, stumbling as he learned to ripple his eight limbs across the uneven ground, Sculptor hurried after his father.

Michael Poole joined the flitter in Lunar orbit. He was met by Bill Dzik, the Baked Alaska project director. Dzik was a burly, breathless man, his face rendered unnaturally
smooth by Anti-Senescence treatment; he carried a small briefcase. His hand, plump and warm, engulfed Poole’s. “Mike. Thanks for meeting me.”

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here personally, Bill.”

Dzik tried to smile; his mouth was lost in the bulk of his face. “Well, we have a problem. I’m sorry.”

Poole stifled a sigh; a knot of tension settled in his stomach.

He followed Dzik into the flitter. The little ship was empty save for the pilot, a crop-haired woman who nodded briskly to Poole. Through the flitter’s curving windows Poole saw
Luna’s ancient light, and the baby-blue tetrahedron that was the Interface to the wormhole to Baked Alaska. Poole and Dzik strapped themselves into adjacent seats, and with a ghost’s
touch of acceleration the flitter surged forwards. Poole watched the approach of the hundred-yard-wide Interface; planes of silver-gold, fugitive, elusive, shone over the blue framework.

Problems, always problems. You should have stuck to physics, Mike.

Dzik shifted the briefcase on his lap and made to open it with his sausage-like fingers. He hesitated. “How’s the Cauchy coming on?”

You know how it’s coming on; you get my briefings from the Jovian site, and the rest of my reports. Poole decided to play along, unsure of Dzik’s mood. “Fine. Miriam
Berg’s doing a good job out there. The ship’s GUTdrive is man-rated now, and the production of exotic material for the portals is underway. You know we’ve tapped into Io’s
flux tube as an energy source, and . . .”

Dzik was nodding, his eyes on Poole’s face; but he wasn’t listening to a word.

“Come on, Bill,” Poole said. “I can take it. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Dzik smiled. “Yeah.”

The Interface’s powder-blue struts slid past the flitter, obscuring the Moon.

Dzik opened the briefcase and drew out a series of photographs. “Look at these.” They were coarse images of the surface of Baked Alaska. The sky was empty save for a speckling of
distant stars, any of which could have been the Sun. The landscape was bare, cracked ice—save for some odd, rooted structures rather like the stumps of felled trees.

“I’m sorry about the quality,” Dzik said. “These had to be taken from long range. Very long range.”

Poole riffled through the photos. “What’s this about, Bill?”

Dzik ran plump fingers through short, greasy hair. “Look, Mike, I’ve been involved in the wormhole projects almost as long as you have. And we’ve faced problems before. But
they’ve been technical, or political, or . . .” Dzik counted on his fingers. “Solving the fundamental problem of wormhole instability using active feedback techniques. Developing
ways to produce exotic matter on an industrial scale, enough to open the throats of wormholes a mile wide. Getting agreement from governments, local and cross-System, to lace the Solar System with
wormhole transit paths. And the funding. The endless battles over funding . . .”

Battles which weren’t over yet, Poole reflected. In fact, as he made sure Dzik never forgot, the commercial success of Dzik’s Baked Alaska venture was crucial for the funding of the
overall goal, the Cauchy’s flight into interstellar space.

“But this is different.” Dzik poked a finger at the glossies, leaving a greasy smear. “Not technical, not financial, not political. We’ve found something which
isn’t even human. And I’m not sure if there is a resolution.”

The flitter shuddered gently. They were close to the throat of the wormhole itself now. Poole could see the electric-blue struts of exotic matter which threaded the hole’s length, its
negative energy density generating the repulsive field which kept the throat open. The walls of the hole flashed in sheets and sparkles: gravitational stresses resolving themselves into streams of
exotic particles.

Poole peered at the pictures again, holding them up to the cabin light. “What am I looking at, here?”

Dzik made his hands into a sphere. “You know what Baked Alaska is: a ball a hundred miles across—half friable rock, half water-ice, traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons.
Like a huge comet nucleus. It’s in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with an uncounted number of similar companions. And with the Sun just an averagely bright star in the
sky, it’s so cold that helium condenses on the surface—superfluid pools, sliding over a water-ice crust.

“When we arrived at Alaska we didn’t inspect it too carefully.” Dzik shrugged. “We knew that as soon as we started work we’d be wrecking the surface features anyway
. . .”

The construction team had swamped the blind little worldlet with an explosion of heat and light. It was a home from home; even its rotation period roughly matched an Earth day. People had moved
out from the randomly chosen landing point, exploring, testing, playing, building, preparing for the Port Sol of the future. Structures of ice and liquid helium which had persisted in the lightless
depths of the outer System for billions of years crumbled, evaporated.

“Then someone brought in this.”

Dzik leafed through the glossies, picked one out. It showed a hummock on the ice, like the hub of a rimless wheel with eight evenly spaced spokes. “A kid took this snap as a souvenir. A
novelty. She thought the regularity was some kind of crystal effect—like a snowflake. So did we all, at first. But then we found more of the damned things.”

Dzik spread the glossies over his briefcase. Poole saw that the structures in the photos shared the eight-fold symmetry of the first. Dzik went on, “All about the same mass and
size—the span of those rootlike proboscides is about twelve feet; the height of the central trunk is six feet. They cover Alaska’s surface—particularly ridges which catch the
sunlight. Or they did, until we started messing around.” He looked at Poole defensively. “Mike, as soon as I figured out what we have here, I stopped operations and pulled everyone back
to the GUTship. We did a lot of damage, but—Mike, we weren’t to know. We’re an engineering crew, not biologists.”

Biologists?

“We managed to lase one of the things open. It’s riddled with fine, hairlike channels. Capillaries. We think the capillaries are for conducting liquid helium. Superfluid.” He
searched Poole’s face, unsure. “Do you get it, Mike? The damn things sit on their ridges, half in shade, half out. The sunlight sets up a temperature differential—tiny, but enough
to get superfluid helium pumping up through the roots.”

Poole stared at the pictures, astonished.

Dzik slumped back in his chair and folded his fingers across his liquid belly; he gazed out of the flitter at the sparkling tube of stretched space time which surrounded them.
“There’s no way the authorities are going to let us go ahead and develop Port Sol now; not if it means exterminating the tree stumps. And yet the stumps are so damned dull. Mike,
we’ve built a trillion-dollar wormhole highway to a flower bed. Even the tourist trade won’t be worth a fig. I guess we can haul the wormhole Interface off to some other Kuiper object,
but the cost is going to be ruinous—”

“You’re saying these things are alive?”

Dzik’s face was as wide and as blank as the vanished Moon. “That’s the point, Mike,” he said gently. “They’re made of water-ice and rock, and they drink
liquid helium. They’re plants.”

The Sun-people blazed through the sky. Sculptor cowered, flattening himself against the unfamiliar ground.

He imagined a Sun-person descending after his own Consolidation, its devilish heat scouring away the blood and bones of his hardened body. Would Sculptor be aware, residually, of the disaster?
Would he still feel pain?

He pushed himself away from the broken ground. No person could Consolidate with such a threat abroad; the need to find a safe, stable Hillside—with the proper degree of shade—was
like an ache in all of them. And so Sculptor 472 stumbled on with his people, refugees all, vainly seeking shelter from the glowing, deformed strangers.

He was already a day and a half old. Half his active life was gone. He fretted, complained to his father. He gazed around at the hulking, fleeing forms of the people, wondering which of
them—in some alternate world free of Sun-people—might have become his mates, or his opponents in the brief, violent, spectacular wrestling contests which decided the choice of
Consolidation sites. Sculptor was taller, stronger, smarter than most. In the contests he would have had no difficulty in finding a prime Hill site—

Would have had. But now, a refugee, he would never get the chance. He raised his speech membrane to the sky and moaned. Why me? Why should my generation be so afflicted?

His father stumbled. Two of his leading limbs had crumpled. He tried to bring his trailing limbs around, but he couldn’t regain his balance.

With a soft, almost accepting sigh, Sculptor 471 fell heavily to the ground.

472 hurried to his side. “You must rise. Are you ill?” He grabbed his father’s limbs and tried to haul him across the ice.

471’s body was tipped onto one side, his weight deforming his structure slightly, flattening it. “Leave me,” he said gently. “Go on. It’s all right.”

The thin voice, the collapsed face, were unbearable for 472. He wrapped his limbs around his father and squeezed, as if trying to rebuild the tall, confident figure who had sheltered him in his
first moments of life. “But I can’t leave you.”

“You know you must. It is my time. Consolidation—”

Sculptor was appalled. “Not here. Not now!”

471 sighed. “I can feel my thoughts softening. It isn’t so bad, Sculptor . . .”

Sculptor looked around desperately. The land was flat, hard. There was no Hillside here, no possibility of shade. And the way his father lay was wrong, with his limbs splayed around him, his
torso fallen.

Urgently Sculptor scrabbled at the ice. His flesh ripped, and superfluid blood hissed from the wounds, coating his limbs; but soon he’d opened up a shallow trench. He laid his limbs once
more across the still torso of 471. “If I can just roll you to the trench, then maybe there’ll be some shade. Come on, father—”

But 471 didn’t respond. As Sculptor dragged at him, one limb crumbled into hard fragments.

Sculptor fell across the jagged body of his father. Was this the fate which awaited him, too, to fall and perish on the unyielding ground, robbed of Consolidation immortality?

After a time he climbed away from his father. He stretched his limbs and stared around. The migration was a dark band on the horizon; here and there in their trail he saw dark mounds, the forms
of more fallen folk.

Deliberately he turned away from the refugees.

His stride stiff with rage and resentment, Sculptor walked back towards his ancestral Hills.

Poole and Dzik clambered aboard the GUTship. The ship was parked fifty miles from the wormhole Interface, a hundred miles from the surface of the Kuiper object called Baked
Alaska.

The ship’s corridors seemed immediately crowded, stuffy, claustrophobic to Poole; he became aware of the gaze of the crew on him—sullen, resentful. Bill Dzik hauled his bulk through
the corridors with a seal-like grace. “Don’t mind them. They don’t like being packed away inside the ship again; they were just getting used to the open spaces of the Alaska
beachhead.”

“And they’re blaming me?”

“You’re the big bad boss who might decide to shut down their operation. Don’t forget they spent a year of their lives hauling the portal out here.”

“As did you, Bill,” Poole said gently. “And you don’t resent me.”

“No.” Dzik looked at him sharply. “But I don’t envy you your decision either, Mike.”

Baked Alaska was a million cubic miles of water, an ice moon rolling around the lip of the Sun’s gravity well. Poole’s consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the
Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System. Poole’s vision was that Baked Alaska’s ice would be the fuel dump of the interstellar flights of the future.
A Gibraltar, a harbor mouth for a Solar System linked by wormhole transit paths.

They reached Dzik’s cabin. It was spartan, with an outsize sleeping cocoon, a zero-gee shower, a data desk unit. Poole felt grateful to close the door behind them.

Dzik strapped himself into a chair; with practiced stabs of his broad fingers he accessed the data desk. A series of messages flickered, priority-coded.

Poole looked around the cabin, hoping to be offered a drink.

After a minute, Dzik leaned back in his chair and whistled. “Now we