Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

a
history on Earth that runs backwards as seen from a moving ship.
    ’Now do you see how faster-than-light screws things up? Causality
is controlled by the speed of light. As long as light has time to
travel from one event to another they can’t get out of order, from
wherever they are viewed, and causality is preserved. But in a ship
moving faster than light, you can hop around the spacetime graph at
will. I took a FTL jaunt to the Fog. When I was there, from my point
of view the history of the Base here was ambiguous over a scale of
decades… When I came home I simply hopped back to an event before
my departure.’
    I nodded. ’But it was just an accident. Right? This doesn’t always
happen.’
    ’It depends on the geometry. Fleeing the Xeelee, we happened to be
travelling at a large fraction of lightspeed towards the Base when we
initiated the hyperdrive. So, yes, it was an accident. But you can
make Tolman manoeuvres deliberately. And during every operation we
always drop Tolman probes: records, log copies, heading for the
past.’
    I did a double-take. ’You’re telling me it’s a deliberate tactic
of this war to send information to the past?’
    ’Of course. If such a possibility’s there you have to take the
opportunity. What better intelligence can there be? The Navy has
always cooperated with this fully. In war you seek every
advantage.’
    ’But don’t the Xeelee do the same?’
    ’Sure. But the trick is to try to stop them. The intermingling of
past and future depends on relative velocities. We try to choreograph
engagements so that we, not they, get the benefit. And of course they
reciprocate.’ Dakk grinned wolfishly. ’It’s a contest in
clairvoyance. But we punch our weight.’
    I tried to focus on what was important. ’OK,’ I said. ’Then give
me a message from the future. Tell me how you crossed the chop
line.’
    She paced around the chamber, while the Spline’s weird hyperdrive
muscles pulsed. ’Before the fallback order came, we’d just taken a
major hit. Do you know what that’s like? Your first reaction is sheer
surprise that it has happened to you. Surprise, and disbelief, and
resentment. And anger. The ship is alive; it’s part of your crew. And
you live in it; it’s as if your home has been violated. So there was
shock. But most of the crew went to defence posture and began to
fulfil their duties, as per their training. There was no panic.
Pandemonium, yes, but no panic.’
    ’And in all this you decided to disobey the fallback order.’
    She looked me in the eye. ’I had to make an immediate decision. We
had an opportunity; we were close enough to strike, I believed, and
we were in a situation where my orders weren’t valid. So I believed.
I decided to go ahead.
    ’We went straight through the chop line and headed for the centre
of the Xeelee concentration, bleeding from a dozen hits, starbreakers
blazing. That’s how we fight the Xeelee, you see. They are smarter
than us, and stronger. But we just come boiling out at them. They
think we are vermin, so we fight like vermin.’
    ’You launched the Sunrise.’
    ’Hama was the pilot.’ My unborn, unconceived child. ’He rode a
monopole torpedo: the latest stuff. A Xeelee Sugar Lump is a fortress
shaped like a cube, thousands of kilometres on a side, a world with
edges and corners. We punched a hole in its wall like it was
paper.
    ’But we were taking a beating. Hit after hit.
    ’We had to evacuate the outer decks. You should have seen the
hull, human beings swarming like flies on a piece of garbage,
scrambling this way and that, fleeing the detonations. They hung onto
weapons mounts, stanchions, lifelines, anything. We fear the falling,
you see. I think some of the crew feared that more than the Xeelee.
The life pods got some of them. We lost hundreds… Her face worked,
and she seemed to reach for happier memories. ’You know why the name
>Sunrisedwellers. They don’t know day and night. Every dawn is ours, not
theirs - one thing they can’t take away from us. Appropriate, don’t
you think? And you should see what it’s like when a Sunrise pilot
comes on board.’
    ’Like Hama.’
    ’As the yacht conies out of port, you get a flotilla riding along
with it, civilian ships as well as Navy, just to see the pilot go.
When the pilot comes aboard the whole crew lines the passageways,
chanting his or her name.’ She smiled. ’Your heart will burst