Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the Galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole.

Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee.

The Xeelee won, but at a huge cost. And, defeated in a greater war, the Xeelee eventually fled the universe. Most of them.

A handful were left behind, equipped with time travel capabilities, their task to tidy up: to reorder history more to the Xeelee's liking. That million-year war with humankind was one blemish. It had to be erased. And in order to do that, a lone Xeelee was sent back in time to remove Michael Poole from history . . .

Release date: June 15, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

 

2

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Beyond the flitter’s viewing window, Jupiter loomed.

The light out here was eerie, Michael Poole thought. Or at least he was reminded of that whenever he had visitors from Earth. The light of the Sun, five times as far away as from the home world, was diminished, yet it was far brighter than any star or planet: a strange in-between light, unfamiliar, and the shadows it cast were sharp and rectilinear. The face of Jupiter itself, huge in the sky, was misty, elusive, an ocean of banded clouds.

Today, before that face, there drifted a wormhole portal, a spindly tetrahedral framework of electric blue. Automated monitor probes swarmed. And in the portal’s faces, glimmering gold, another world could be glimpsed.

It looked perfect. It wasn’t.

Something strange had been detected coming from that wormhole portal. Gravity waves: anomalous bursts of energy. Poole didn’t understand this; nobody understood. And because of that anomaly the wormhole, beautiful as it was, was in danger of being shut down.

The wormhole was Poole’s creation. His whole career depended on the success of the current trials. Indeed, he felt as if he were on trial himself. He was twenty-five years old.

There were four people in this flitter, including Poole: two corporeal, and two Virtuals, images projected over from Michael Poole’s own ship, the Hermit Crab, whose elegant bulk was at rest alongside the flitter. Even though they were in zero gravity the flight deck of the Crab Junior felt crowded. The skinsuits they all wore, with helmets at their sides, didn’t help.

Harry Poole, Michael’s father, was one of the Virtuals. He raised a glass of single malt, as unreal as he was, and tapped the arm of the woman beside him. Shamiso Emry, the UN Oversight Senior Coordinator, soberly dressed, hair silver grey, was the second Virtual, hence her sensation of Harry’s contact; Michael thought she stiffened against the touch.

Harry said, ‘More whisky, Co-ordinator?’

‘I’ve barely touched my glass – thank you, Mr Poole.’

‘Harry, please. Beautiful spectacle, isn’t it? Look, I know we’re here on business—’

‘We’re here because of a suspected flaw in your prototype wormhole—’

‘But when I bring people out here, I always encourage them to take a moment, and just look.’

Harry was fifty-six years old; AS-preserved, he looked younger than Poole himself. And with his wide grin, blond-white hair and blue eyes he was a contrast to his son, who was shorter, more heavy-set, darker – broad nose, brown eyes, black hair – more like the rest of his family. But then Harry hadn’t been born a Poole. Harry, though, always had more presence than his son, Virtual or not. And so it was now, during this official inspection.

Harry grinned. ‘What a sight!’

While Harry and Shamiso Emry sat on Virtual images of comfortable couches, projected from the Crab, Michael Poole and Nicola Emry – Shamiso’s daughter, the fourth occupant of the cabin – sat in bulky, confining pilot couches, side by side.

Now Nicola looked around. ‘What sight, pray? Jupiter, that big ball of gas? Or the ramshackle thing you Pooles built that’s getting in the way?’

Poole was irritated by that jab. And it had galled him that Nicola had insisted on taking the left-hand seat, the pilot’s seat, in his flitter. ‘That “ramshackle thing” is an example of the highest technology in the Solar System right now.’

‘So you say.’

‘Yes. So I say. And look – can you see those flashes of blue, through the gold?’

Nicola squinted that way. She was shaven-headed, her features sharp. ‘Earth, right? I see clouds, hints of continents – that grey-green splash is the big north European forest, I think. But I thought I saw multiple images. It was . . . kaleidoscopic.’

‘Good observation,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Most people miss that.’

Poole found Nicola difficult to fathom, and intimidating. He knew that the only skill Nicola Emry claimed for herself was as a pilot – hence her monopoly of the left-hand seat – and her eyes, evidently without augmentation, seemed sharp enough. She looked maybe thirty years old. AntiSenescence treatments always turned true ages into the subject of a guessing game, but such was her immaturity, in Poole’s eyes, that he would have been surprised if she was much older – and besides, the mother, who seemed to have allowed herself to age naturally, was only about sixty herself.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is just a prototype, the portal’s a couple of hundred metres across. One day the finished articles will allow ships much bigger than the Hermit Crab over there to travel between Earth and Jupiter. Five astronomical units – that is, five times Earth’s distance from the Sun, around eight hundred million kilometres – spanned in minutes. Effectively faster than light.’

Nicola raised an eyebrow. ‘Gosh.’

He pressed on doggedly. ‘As for what you can see through the portal – the wormhole is a short cut. It’s as if we’ve folded spacetime and pinched together the locations of Jupiter and the Earth. But the transit itself isn’t instantaneous; you still have to travel through the wormhole throat, a finite distance. That’s because of instability problems. Make the throat too short and you find that the exotic-matter structures of the mouths interact . . . Well. Light from Earth can pass through the wormhole – that’s why, sitting here, we can glimpse the planet – but the wormhole throat is long enough, you see, that there is more than one path for that light to travel. Hence the multiple images. Yes, some people call it kaleidoscopic.’

Now Nicola did laugh out loud, but with a kind of delight.

Shamiso Emry ducked her head. ‘Well, I can’t see it.’

Harry said solicitously, ‘That’s probably an artefact of the Virtual projection. We are in a different location from the youngsters.’

Curiously, Shamiso looked out now at the Crab, floating alongside the flitter.

The Hermit Crab was Poole’s own design, based on GUTdrive technology long ago patented by earlier generations of Pooles. A spine, a kilometre and a half long and crusted with fuel tanks and antenna clusters, was fixed at one end to a block of ice taken from the crust of Europa, Jupiter’s moon, pocked and blackened where it had been mined for reaction mass, and at the other to the gleaming hemisphere of a lifedome, a splash of Earth colours in the Jovian night. Somewhere in there were the originals of Harry and Shamiso. And so Shamiso was looking back at herself, Poole thought.

Shamiso said, ‘Tell me again why we need to be in two ships?’

‘Safety, Co-ordinator,’ Harry said promptly. ‘Backup options. Jupiter space is a pretty lethal radiation environment. Even as far out as Ganymede you would pick up a lifetime dose of radiation in a couple of years; less, if unprotected. We always send out ships in pairs, or larger flotillas. All this was mandated by some earlier Oversight committee – oh, generations ago.’

Nicola grinned at Poole, and whispered, ‘Oversight. Isn’t that a fine word? You engineers paid for this huge technology demonstration yourselves, didn’t you? And now here we are, deciding whether to shut you down or not.’

Poole found her irritatingly intriguing. ‘You talk big, but here you are running around after your mother.’

‘Oh, I’m just a cab driver, I know that. Call it nepotism if you like. My mother gave me a choice: this or prison, or a dose of memory-editing.’ She winked at him. ‘I do have a habit of breaking the rules, you see. I’m not a scion of mankind like you and your illustrious forebears, Michael Poole. I’ll tell you this, though. By Lethe, I’m a good cab driver.’

‘Perhaps we could get on with it,’ Shamiso snapped. Her face, square, strong, seemed not unfriendly, but her expression was stony. ‘We’re here, after all, because of anomalies you’ve yet to explain away. You spoke of instabilities in the wormhole structure. Could that be the cause—’

Before Poole could respond, Harry said quickly, ‘I’m confident that’s not the problem, Co-ordinator. Look – a functioning wormhole exploits inherent instabilities. We design them in, manipulate them. We understand this stuff.’ He waved a hand at the gleaming blue tetrahedron. ‘Left to itself, a wormhole would collapse quickly. So you have to thread the throat and portals with exotic matter—’

‘That’s the blue frame,’ Nicola said.

‘Yes. It’s called “exotic” because it’s a manifestation of negative energy.’

‘Which is a kind of antigravity.’

She seemed to be understanding more than Poole had expected.

Harry grinned. ‘You’ve got it. And that’s essential to keep the wormhole mouths open – though the process has to be actively managed. You see, these are known, indeed useful instabilities, Co-ordinator.’

Nicola was looking out, the blue light casting highlights on the planes of her face. ‘I know exotic matter is a quantum-gravity phenomenon, essentially. So those blue rods must scale accordingly. Line density with dimensions governed by lightspeed and the gravitational constant would be . . .’ She conjured up a Virtual workstation in the air, worked it quickly. ‘My, my. Says here that a loop of the stuff a metre across should mass as much as Jupiter.’

Poole was grudgingly impressed. ‘That’s the kind of estimate they came up with when the idea of traversable wormholes was first floated back in the nineteenth century. Or was it the twentieth? What you see out there is the result of a millennium and a half of engineering development since then. The portal itself is two hundred metres across, but its mass is no more than that of a kilometre-wide asteroid—’

‘And he’s longing to give you all the details you already read about,’ Harry said, with a kind of mock fondness in his voice. ‘How we pluck natural wormholes from the quantum foam . . . How we use Io flux-tube energy to extract exotic matter from the Hub, a manufacturing facility based around the quantum gravity field of a mountain-mass black hole suspended deep in the clouds of Jupiter itself . . .’

Nicola said, ‘There’s nowhere near enough energy density in the flux tube to enable you to build this.’

Again Poole was reluctantly impressed. ‘True. But we use the tube as a siphon, a trigger for a nonlinear cascade which extracts mass-energy, via coupled magnetic fields, from Jupiter itself.’ He smiled. ‘You should see it. When we inject energy into the portal structure, it grows exponentially, doubling in size, and doubling again—’

‘Spare me the sales pitch.’

Harry said hastily, ‘Of course the most important detail of all this is the cost. Which will be, crucially – when we’re up and running, and if you look at our business case which applies net-present-value discounting – astronomically less than the cost of running GUTships, like the Crab over there.

‘It’s not just the efficiency. It’s the scale that will be transformative. One day our wormholes will link all the major bodies of the System, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. And you’ll be able to travel in a flitter like this, all the way to Earth, in a matter of minutes. Whereas now it takes six days in a ship like the Hermit Crab. And, crucially, with the new system, for the first time we will be able to transport very large masses between the worlds cheaply. For such grand purposes as, some day, taking nitrogen from a source like Titan to supply the great arcologies on Mars. Or even carrying food grown in Titan’s organic-chemistry seas to feed Earth.

‘All this will have an impact you can barely imagine. But we Pooles have been here before. Everybody thinks the story of the Pooles started with Michael Poole Bazalget.’

Nicola grinned. ‘Even I heard of him. The Arctic guy.’

‘Yes – in the twenty-first century, back in the Bottleneck – the Poole who stabilised methane deposits around the Arctic Circle, thus saving the world from a particularly savage dose of greenhouse-gas warming. One of the pioneering acts of the Stewardship generations . . . Long before him, though, Poole ancestors were involved in the great railway boom of the nineteenth century. The first great modernisation of transport, which opened up industrial development in Britain, and then Europe, America, Asia – and the global economy exploded. Now our wormholes, laid down by this generation of Pooles, are going to do the same thing on an interplanetary scale.’

Shamiso said dryly, ‘That would be heart-warming if I hadn’t read it all in your brochures. But it doesn’t help us with the problem I was sent out here to resolve, does it? Shall we get to the point?’ She waved a hand and brought up a Virtual display of her own, an orrery-like model of the Solar System, a plane centred on a gleaming, jewel-like Sun.

Nicola was peering through the forward viewing port, those sharp pilot’s eyes intent. ‘Mother . . .’

‘Hush, Nicola. We monitor gravity waves routinely. They have been our main astronomical tool since – well, my grasp of history isn’t as obsessive as yours. And, recently, we saw this.’

Another gesture, and fine, cherry-red lines shot out from the position of Jupiter, a pink ball in the Virtual model – streaks of energy crossing the Solar System. Most of these bolts were in the plane of the System, though they seemed to be laid down at random, not targeting a planet or any other obvious body. But some of them went spearing out of that plane, off into the emptiness of interstellar space.

Every time Poole saw this image sequence, he felt sick deep in his stomach. It really did look like a weaponised energy beam, he’d thought from the first time he’d seen it: thunderbolts spearing out of the wormhole portal. No wonder the Oversight committee had submitted its order for an inspection of the project. But the fundamental problem was that still nobody knew what this was.

Shamiso said, ‘I should emphasise these energy tracks are harmless. Spectacular – an unprecedented gravitational-energy phenomenon within the Solar System – but harmless in terms of the perturbation of ships, habitats, still less moons and planets. But naturally the citizenry is concerned. Even more so when the source of these energy bolts was identified.’

Nicola was still staring out of the window. ‘I think there’s something out there.’

Harry spread his hands. ‘Co-ordinator, I can assure you – look, there’s nothing intrinsic to the wormhole, its morphology and dynamics, that can have anything to do with these pulses.’

‘Yet they exist. Yet they are coming from your wormhole, evidently, even if they aren’t caused by it. If I were to recommend shutting down the project—’

Nicola turned now, and faced them all. ‘I think it’s too late for that. By the waters of Lethe – look, Mother!’

At last her forcefulness broke through Shamiso’s concentration. She looked through the view window. And Poole saw her mouth sag, almost comically.

Finally he turned around himself, swivelling in his chair, and looked out at the wormhole portal.

To see something coming through.

 

3

Even Harry seemed to forget the politics, his corporate role. He, or his Virtual avatar, drifted to the window, gaping in fascination at the thing, black and huge, that was emerging from the shining blue portal.

Poole himself saw a moulded black carapace, symmetrical with spiky protuberances, and sharp, curved edges between moulded planes. All of it pushing steadily out of the wormhole. Around this mass the portal face’s golden glow shimmered, flickered, broke up. And behind it Poole made out flashes of light of another quality: purplish, lurid.

Harry checked the flitter’s console. ‘Are we recording all this?’

Poole called up a Virtual slave of the control desk of the Hermit Crab’s instrument suite, much more extensive than Junior’s. ‘All of it, multispectral.’

‘I’ll call up Oversight backup imaging too,’ Shamiso said.

‘Those purple flashes look like particle cascades to me.’

‘It’s brushing the walls of the wormhole throat,’ Harry said. ‘Whatever it is. It’s only just squeezing through. At that size it must be withstanding ferocious tidal stresses. And its surface doesn’t look like any hull material we use. Not metal, not ceramic, not carbon composite. More like a kind of chitin. It looks . . . insectile, doesn’t it? A huge beetle.’

‘Maybe.’ Now Poole could see a body behind that misshapen head, slowly emerging into the pale Jovian sunlight – what looked almost like shoulders, extending to some kind of wing.

‘We’re seeing more of those gravitational pulses,’ Shamiso said now, glancing at a monitor. ‘Spreading at lightspeed across the System. A storm of them. Evidently the signals we received before were a precursor of this event.’

Harry muttered bitterly, ‘Well, that should keep your swarms of scrutineers happy for a while.’

Nicola laughed. ‘You know, Harry, this is something – different. Alien, obviously. It’s got nothing to do with us. Humanity, I mean. Or with your wretched wormhole, even if that is how it’s getting here. And all you can think of is that it’s breaking your pretty toy.’

Harry glared.

Poole couldn’t take his eyes off the portal. The steadily emerging anomaly – that head, attached to what looked increasingly like a slim body fitted with flaring wings . . . he felt a deep, instinctive revulsion. ‘This shouldn’t be here. It doesn’t belong.’

‘And it’s not alone,’ Nicola said.

‘What?’

She pointed away from the portal itself, to a shining dot, star-like, swimming against the face of Jupiter with its drapery of clouds.

Poole hastily checked his monitors. ‘There’s a swarm of those things – silvered spheres, each maybe ten metres across, squeezing out of the wormhole around the insectile mass. They’re returning blank reflections from the sensors. Perfectly spherical, perfectly smooth, any irregularities beyond the reach of our instruments. And – look at this display – I think there’s something else, a third class of anomaly, massive, but hard to resolve.’

Harry moved forward through the air. ‘Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any stranger.’

‘I have it.’ Nicola pointed. ‘There. Look, against Jupiter’s face . . . A kind of shadow. Is that your third kind?’

‘Show me,’ Poole snapped.

Her eyes, augmented or not, really were much sharper than Poole’s, and she had to manipulate recorded imagery to show him what she meant.

Translucent discs, passing over Jupiter’s pale colours.

Nicola said, ‘I thought at first they were some kind of reflection, or a lighting effect from your wormhole, like the multiple Earth reflections. But I made sure the Crab’s full sensor suite took a look at them. Look at the gravity readings.’

The ‘phantoms’ were actually regions of spacetime warped by dense concentrations of mass, Poole saw – just granules, but very dense indeed. They were visible through a kind of gravitational lensing, the distortion of light coming from behind the objects by their gravity fields.

‘That’s incredible,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing a kernel of matter compressed beyond nuclear densities. Like a knot of quarks. And then, within that, something denser yet, hotter. Those are the temperatures and densities we achieve in our GUT-energy pods.’ He glanced at Shamiso, checking her understanding. ‘GUT – Grand Unified Theory. We compress matter and energy to such densities that we emulate the first moments of the universe, and the forces of physics recombine. It takes us an accelerator wrapped around Copernicus Crater on the Moon to do this. So how can these – knots of the stuff – just be floating there?’

Harry leaned forward to see. ‘Those silver raindrops of yours are sticking close to the main mass. The beetle. The phantoms are moving out more widely. Filling space. Almost as if they’re searching for something.’

Shamiso said quickly, ‘“Searching”? I’d hesitate to use such words yet. Because they ascribe agency, you see. As we haven’t encountered minds equivalent to ours anywhere beyond Earth, an assumption of intelligence ought to be a last resort. Of course some hypothesise intelligence in Grantt’s Lattices on Mars, but—’

Nicola said impatiently, ‘I don’t think this is the time for an academic debate about bugs on Mars, Mother.’

Harry leaned forward, ignoring the pixelated sparkle where his Virtual self brushed a chair. ‘Look, I think it’s nearly all the way out of the portal now. The big mass.’

The two ships were so close to the portal that Poole’s view of the anomaly was almost face on. He quickly manipulated the sensors’ data streams until he had produced a composite three-dimensional image of the object as a whole that he could rotate, expand, explore. That central fuselage, the mass that had emerged first, was like a fist in a black glove, clenched tight. And from it, he could see now, two wings swept back, one to either side of the main body, almost paddle-shaped, but flat and sharp-edged – in fact, he saw, flat and sharp to within the resolution limits of the Crab’s equipment. And both black as night.

‘Not like a beetle,’ Harry said, wondering. ‘Like a sycamore seed.’

Symmetrical, with smooth, sweeping lines, the surfaces seamless: if this was engineering, it was fine work. Yet it was not beautiful, as Poole had thought of his wormhole portal. Not ugly either. It did not fit into that category – or any human category. ‘You do not belong,’ he murmured.

Nicola looked at him, not unsympathetically. ‘Whether it belongs or not, it’s here.’

‘But it only just got though,’ Harry said. ‘It couldn’t have got through a wormhole much narrower. It scraped the sides, of the throat, the portal.’

Shamiso said, ‘Got through from where? The other end of your wormhole is in Earth orbit – correct? Could this sycamore seed and its entourage have come through from Earth, then? Surely some alarm would have been raised . . . Ah, but we’re restricted by lightspeed; any warnings might still be on their way to us.’

Poole was doubtful. ‘If it’s come through from the Earth end we’d know about it. There are instruments in the portals, test data sent through the wormhole itself.’

‘Oh, it’s obvious this thing didn’t come from Earth,’ Nicola said impatiently. ‘You’re thinking too literally – you at least, Mother, if not these two brooding geniuses. One of the reasons the Pooles built this prototype was to understand wormholes themselves better. Correct? It says so in your prospectus. Mother, you think a wormhole is some kind of simple high-speed transit system? There’s nothing simple about it. A wormhole is a flaw, a link between two events that shouldn’t be linked at all. Events that can be anywhere in spacetime – in space, on the other side of the Andromeda Galaxy, or somewhere else in time, anywhen, in past and future. Even in other universes, some think.’

Harry scowled. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that you hoped to build an interplanetary superhighway. In fact you opened a kind of crack in space that could lead anywhere. And that could let in anything. Didn’t you even think of this, when you were doodling Earth–to-Jupiter subway systems on your softscreens? I’m getting you into focus, Michael Poole. You’re the worst sort of visionary meddler. Like a weapons manufacturer. You can see the glorious technology, and you persuade people to give you the money to build it. But you don’t see the consequences, do you . . .?’

These ideas swirled in a fog of dread in Poole’s mind. A crack that could let in anything. ‘She’s right,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason that thing, the sycamore seed, is as big as it is – a reason it’s shown up today, of all days.’

Harry still didn’t get it. ‘Why?’

‘Because this is the first time we’ve built a wormhole big enough. You said it yourself; it only just squeezed through. This – thing – has been waiting. Out there somewhere. And as soon as we opened the door far enough—’

Shamiso looked at him in growing horror. ‘In it barged—’

Her image broke up in a burst of cubical pixels.

The flitter lurched. Poole was thrown forward.

 

Suddenly the flitter was hurtling backwards. He saw that the portal had shrunk in his vision, as had the sycamore seed ship.

Nicola was at her controls, sweeping stylised icons through the air with sharp, decisive, very physical gestures. This was her style; it was possible to control a modern craft with the mind, without any bodily movement at all. Right now Poole found he approved.

As he hastily strapped into his couch Poole glanced over his shoulder. Harry and Shamiso’s Virtuals, reformed, were both back in their projected seats, and both looked shocked. Poole snapped, ‘Put on your helmets and close them up. Make sure the Co-ordinator does it right, Harry.’

His father nodded, silent for once, and complied.

Poole turned on Nicola. ‘What did you do?’

‘Moved us away.’

‘Lethe, this is my ship.’

‘So’s the Hermit Crab. Look at it.’

She brought up a display showing the Crab’s status. The display was littered with red alarm flags. Poole had designed the display himself; he read it in an instant. ‘Something is destabilising the Crab’s GUTdrive.’

‘Yes. And you know what that something is.’

‘The phantoms?’

‘The third type of entities. Squirmy, ghostly things made of GUT-stuff themselves. I think that’s what they were searching for – more sources of GUT energy. Feeding, maybe? Or refuelling. Well, they found one. The Crab’s drive pod.’

‘And you reacted,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Faster than I did. You got us away. We should be OK in this tub; it only has a fusion drive. The Crab, though – Harry?’

‘Here, son. I heard all that.’

‘You need to get the Crab back to Ganymede. Use the attitude thrusters, not the main drive.’

‘I’m way ahead of you.’ Harry’s Virtual was already throwing invisible switches. ‘I’ll broadcast warnings, to keep GUTships clear until we know what we’re dealing with. I’ll take care of your ship, son. And Co-ordinator Emry. What about you?’

Poole thought quickly. ‘I’m going to Io. Miriam and Bill are there. The flux-tube teams. Stuck down a deep hole in the middle of the magnetosphere’s most intense region. And their radiation shields are powered by—’

‘GUTengines. So they’re in immediate danger. Take care.’

Nicola Emry watched Poole coldly. ‘OK, since you ask, I’ll come with you. Do you want me to send a message to Earth, the inner System?’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where the sycamore seed ship is heading.’

When he looked out of the window, for the first time since Nicola’s impulsive manoeuvre, he saw that the huge black object had gone.

 

4

Poole frantically tried to establish a decent link to Inachus Base, at Babbar Patera on Io. At first all he could get was a scratchy head-and-shoulders Virtual image of Melia, senior artificial mind at the base, and even that was prone to breaking up into a fluttering cloud of pixels. And the time delay between her responses, of a second or so, was heart-breaking. It was the kind of delay suffered between Earth and its Moon, and an indication of how far Poole still had to travel to get back from the wormhole site to Io. Such was the scale of the Jovian system.

But Melia, as she had been designed to be, was calm. ‘I’m doing my best to restore contact with Bill Dzik and Miriam Berg. As soon as I have them I’ll patch them through—’

‘If the uplink can handle it.’

‘Be assured we’re on the case, Michael.’ She smiled, sketchily. ‘We follow your adventures with interest. As soon as it was clear that there was some kind of anomaly at the portal site, I called a general alert. Retrospectively endorsed by Bill and Miriam.’

‘You made the right call. Though you know you didn’t need that authorisation.’

‘Better safe than sorry,’ Melia said primly. ‘Every second of down time costs money. The shareholders—’

‘Are more unstable than Io’s volcanoes, I know.’ For Poole Industries the wormhole operation had always been out at the edge of the envelope of financial plausibility. And for an investor you couldn’t get much more of a confidence-sapping glitch, Poole thought with gnawing anxiety, than some kind of alien artefact pushing its way out of your prototype wormhole. But for now there were more immediate priorities. ‘How’s the evacuation going?’

‘In hand,’ Melia assured him. ‘We’re lifting everybody up from the Hub, inside Jupiter. And every craft we can get hold of that can run independently of a GUTdrive, including your own flitter, will be enlisted to— I have Miriam Berg. Please hold.’ The Virtual collapsed.

Nicola, piloting the flitter, glanced over at him. ‘You guys run a big operation out here, but your comms link is worse than I had in my bedroom aged five.’

Poole looked at her with some contempt. ‘So? This is the frontier. There’s no larger human operation between us and the stars. And Jupiter is about as hostile a place you can come to work.’ He shook his head. ‘One power plant failing you can cope with. We never envisaged a contingency that could take them all out.’

‘Then you lack imagination. Who’s Miri