Chapter 50

On Orion Rock, time flowed strangely for Pirius Red.

The days seemed to last forever, but his nights seemed very short. And the sum of those long days, as they accumulated into weeks, amounted to no time at all.

Pirius hammered home the ten-week target every time he spoke to his crews, and as the training schedule was compressed and the technical development work accelerated, the effort everybody put in was more and more frantic. But the calendars wore down, regardless.

Suddenly deadline day was here.

And it went, with no word from the Grand Conclave. One day passed, two.

Pirius figured they may as well use the time productively. The flight crews and ground staff continued their training. By now, as well as flying the modified ships on endless low-level loops past hapless target Rocks, they were running full-scale simulations with flight crews and a fully staffed operations room, everybody working together to iron out procedures. Commander Darc’s experience was vital in this — and to Pirius’s surprise, Pila proved observant and helpful, pointing out ways to improve the information flow between ships and the base. Even she seemed finally to be committing herself to the great effort.

All this was useful, as far as it went. Behind the scenes, though, those in the know became increasingly anxious. Even now it was possible that the Grand Conclave would, for its own inscrutable reasons, withhold final permission to fly the mission.

Up to now Nilis had remained remarkably calm. His design of the mission had been largely conceptual — “a mere data-desk sketch,” he said — and now that they were down to operational details there was generally little he could add. He kept himself busy with his continuing analysis of the true nature of Chandra. He said he wanted to make sure they understood what it was they were attacking before they “blew it to smithereens” — although he continued to complain about obstruction and a baffling lack of cooperation from the military authorities who were his hosts. “It’s almost as if they don’t want me to learn about Chandra!” he told a distracted Pirius.

But after the deadline expired, Nilis became increasingly agitated. He started to make lurid threats about how he would return to Earth and storm his way into the sessions of the Grand Conclave itself.

Then, two days after the formal deadline, an “Immediate Message” was handed to Pirius. It had come through the office of Marshal Kimmer, and was signed by the Plenipotentiary for Total War herself: “Operation PRIME RADIANT. Execute at first available opportunity.”

That was all. Pirius read the note again, hardly able to believe what he was looking at. He said, “Suddenly we are no longer a project but an operation.”

Pila was watching him, her beautiful, cold face intent. She seemed fascinated by his reaction. “How do you feel?”

“Relieved,” he said. Then, “Terrified.” He glanced at a chronometer. It was evening. First available opportunity. One more full day to prepare, then; after that, they would fly at reveille. “Thirty-six hours,” he breathed. “We go in thirty-six hours.” He stood up. “Come on, Pila. We’ve work to do.”

That night he called in Pirius Blue and This Burden Must Pass, his flight commanders, for a final operations meeting. With Pila at his side, he locked the door of his office, set up a security shield, and showed them the order. Red watched Burden carefully, still not quite trusting him. But neither he nor Blue showed shock, surprise, or fear. Maybe they didn’t quite believe it, Red thought.

At this point it was their job to go over every detail of the mission, and to talk through tactics regarding the resistance they might encounter, and how they would recover from any foul-ups at various points in the mission profile. After they were done, Pila would draft the final Operation Order that would be disseminated to the flight crews.

As they got to work, Red said, “Maybe this session will be quick. We’ve war-gamed this a dozen times.”

“You’d be surprised,” Burden said dryly. “The imminence of real action has a way of focusing the mind.”

Pirius Blue was watching his younger self curiously. “How are you feeling? You haven’t flown a combat mission before.”

Red said, irritated, “Yes, I’m the rookie; thanks for reminding me.”

“That may help,” Blue said awkwardly. “I mean it. There’s no substitute for going through it for real. When you lead crews into a situation where they’re likely to buy it, it frightens you — the responsibility — and that gets mixed up with your own personal fear. You can’t help it. It’s stomach- churning. But experience is one thing; the residual shock is another. You never quite recover. You have enough on your plate today. It may be better that you’re fresh.”

Red said, “I’m not frightened of dying. I’m not even frightened of the responsibility for other people’s lives.”

“But you’re frightened of screwing up,” said Burden.

“Yes,” Red admitted.

“Don’t worry,” Blue said. “We’re at your side.” He sat stiff in his chair, and he couldn’t meet Red’s eyes.

Red knew this was the closest Blue could bring himself to pledging loyalty to his own younger, less experienced, overpromoted self. It would have to do, he thought.

Red pulled a data desk toward him. “Let’s get on with it,” he said gruffly. “First, the launch sequence. We will go in two waves…

The next morning, as he began his day, Enduring Hope immediately knew something was up.

He made his usual inspection walk through the bomb dump, a hangar that had been modified as a store for the point black holes. And he walked into the big main hangar, where fifteen heavily engineered, thoroughly worn-out greenships were being treated with tender loving care by his technicians. Everywhere he went, he sensed a heightening of activity, and of tension. For one thing there were more flight crew around than usual, working with the ground crew on the ships they would fly. But there was more to this atmosphere than that. He’d been through this before, back on the other side of the magnetar incident that had cut his life in two, when he had flown his one and only combat mission.

Everybody understood the need for security. Generally you had no idea until a day or so before the launch of a mission exactly what your target was to be. This mission had been no different — save only for the novel bits of technology they all had to become used to. As always, there had been much speculation. The advantages of the new superfast processors and the formidable black-hole cannon were obvious. But nobody could figure out what the grav shield, difficult and temperamental, was actually for. Nor could anybody come up with a convincing target. It was sure to be something big, though — big and therefore exceptionally dangerous. But all this was scuttlebutt.

This morning, though, it was clear that things had changed: from somewhere in the higher echelons, it was being said, orders had arrived to proceed. Right now Pirius Red was probably briefing the senior staff, and everybody else was supposed to be in the dark. But it was astonishing how these things got out, how people picked up on almost imperceptible cues, if it really mattered to them — and this was an issue of life or death.

Hope knew his duty, anyhow. He was going to make sure each of these dinged-up greenships was ready to do whatever its crew demanded of it, if he had to crawl into the guts of every one of them himself. He went to work with a will.

In the middle of the morning, Virtual images of Pirius Red appeared around the hangar, summoning the flight crews to a general briefing in one of the big conference rooms. The crews gathered in little knots, talking quietly, and began to drift out of the hangar.