For a boy brought up at the center of the Galaxy, the sky of Sol system was dismal, empty, its barrenness barely broken by the few stars of this ragged spiral-arm edge and the bright pinpoint of the sun. Even Saturn was surprisingly dim, casting little light; the immense planet might harbor the mightiest concentration of firepower in Sol system, but it seemed oddly fragile. He wondered briefly how it might have looked in the old days when its tremendous rings of ice and dust had not yet been burned up as fuel and weaponry. You couldn’t even see the Core. Nilis had told him that from here the Galaxy center should be a mass of light the size of the Moon, brighter than anything in Earth’s sky save Sol itself. But Galaxy-plane gas clouds hid it. The earthworms didn’t even know they lived in a Galaxy until a few centuries before star flight began.
But today he didn’t care about earthworms. To Pirius, sitting here, this bare Galaxy-rim sky was a wild, exotic space, and to be at the controls of a genuine nightfighter was an unimaginable adventure.
He said to himself, “Life doesn’t get any better than this.”
A scowling face, no larger than his thumbnail, popped into existence before his eyes. “What’s that, Ensign?”
“Nothing, sir.”
This was Commander Darc, a sour, middle-aged, evidently competent Navy officer. The Navy hierarchy had insisted that one of their own be Pirius’s only contact during the trial itself, and Pirius wasn’t about to argue.
“You okay in that cage? If you want us to pull you out—”
“I’m fine.” Pirius smiled, making sure his face was visible behind the visor.
Darc growled, “Yes, I bet you are. Shrunk to fit, eh, Ensign?”
That was a jab about Pirius’s compact frame. “If you say so, sir.”
“Listen up.” The mission clock was counting down, and Darc began his final briefing. “The cockpit we built for you is obviously normal matter, baryonic matter.” Pirius still wasn’t sure what that meant. “But the hull of the ship itself, including the wing stubs, is made of another kind of matter called a condensate. Now, condensate doesn’t have normal quantum properties.”
Pirius flexed his gloved fingers experimentally; icons sparkled around Darc’s disembodied, shrunken head.
If a chunk of matter was cooled to extremely low temperatures — a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or less — the atoms would condense into a single quantum state, like a huge “superatom,” marching in step, like the coherent photons in a laser beam. Such a state of matter was called a “Bose-Einstein condensate,” though Pirius had no idea who Bose or Einstein might have been.
“We don’t know how to make such stuff at room temperatures,” Darc said. “Or how to make it dense; our lab condensates are so thin they are scarcely more than vacuum. But condensate has useful properties. For instance, if you add more atoms, they are encouraged to join the condensate structure.”
Pirius thought about that. “A condensate is self-healing.”
“The physicists would say self-amplifying. But yes; so it seems. You do understand that only your wing stubs are condensate. The wings themselves, when unfolded, are the basis of your sublight drive and are much more extensive. And they aren’t material at all…”
There was a lot of tension with the Navy crew assigned to the Project. Darc had spent his career in the Solar Navy Group; Pirius had learned that he’d never been deeper into the Galaxy than the Orion Line. Solar would be mankind’s last line of defense against the Xeelee in case of the final collapse, and was itself an ancient force, whose officers were fiercely proud of their own traditions. But Pirius had heard a lot of muttering about the “inbred little freaks” from the center of the Galaxy who were getting all the attention.
But Pirius was in this seat, not any of them.
Pirius knew that Nilis was aboard one of the escort ships, no doubt listening to every word. He wished Torec were here to see this. In fact Torec had fought for the privilege of being pilot on these trials. Given where she had got to in her training back on Arches, she was in fact marginally better qualified than Pirius. But Nilis had assigned her to another part of the project, the development of his “CTC computer,” as he called it, his closed-timelike-curve time-travel computing machine. Nilis made it clear that he considered the CTC-processor work just as important as experiments with the Xeelee ship, and she had to accept the assignment.
Anyway, in Pirius’s mind there had never been any question about who should get this ship; in a sense it was already his.
Darc was still talking. “The cockpit you’re sitting in is all ours, a human construct, Pirius. You’ve got full inertial protection in there, and other kinds of shielding. And we believe we have achieved a proper interface of your controls with the ship’s control lines. It was technically tricky, they tell me. More like connecting an implant to a human nervous system than hacking into any electromechanical device.”
“Sir, you’re telling me you’re not sure if it’s going to work.”
“Only one way to find out, Ensign.”
It was hard to concentrate, sitting here in this cockpit. Of course this wasn’t all for Pirius’s benefit; Darc, a career officer, was taking the chance to grandstand for audiences of his own.
The icons before his face were tantalizing. Only one way to find out. Pirius was in the hot seat; for once in his life he had power over events — and here, not Darc, not Nilis, not even Pirius Blue could get in his way.
He spread open his hands.
There was a shiver. It was like a breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of Torec’s fingers on his back when he slept.
He turned. The nightfighter’s wings had opened. They swept smoothly out of their condensate stubs to become a billowing black plane, like a sheet thrown over some immense bed. He knew that these were not material, not even anything so exotic as condensate. They were constructs of spacetime itself.
And they pulsed. The ship seemed poised, like a tensed muscle. He could feel it.
Suddenly the ship was alive; there was no other word for it. And despite the worst predictions of the doomsayers, even though he knew he was triangulated by a dozen starbreaker beams and other weapons, the ship waited to do his bidding. He laughed out loud.
Darc’s face was hovering before him, a shining coin, purple with rage. “I’ll feed you to the recyclers if you try another stunt like that, you little runt!”
No, you won’t, Pirius thought. You won’t dare. In the Conurbations of Earth, I’m a hero. It was an unexpected, delicious, utterly non-Doctrinal thought. He had the power — and Darc knew it.
“Awaiting permission to start the trial, sir,” Pirius said, carefully keeping his voice level.
Darc’s mouth worked, as if he were chewing back his anger. Then he said, “Do it.”
Pirius selected hovering icons and gathered them together with gentle wafts of his hands. Then he pointed.
The sparse stars blurred, turned blue. Saturn crumpled like a wad of golden tissue, vanished. Then the stars settled back, like a curtain falling, and it was over, almost before he knew it had begun.
There should have been no kick in the back, no sense of acceleration; if the inertial shield failed by the slightest fraction he would have been reduced to a pulp. And yet he felt something, as if his own body knew it had taken a great leap.
“…hear me? Respond, Ensign. Darc to Pirius. Respond—”
“Yes, sir, I’m here.”
There was a perceptible delay before Darc replied. “Ensign, you traveled light-seconds at around three-quarters lightspeed.”
“Just as per the flight plan.”
“You even stopped where you were supposed to.”