Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the Rock’s
surface in lightweight skinsuits. The asteroid was just a ball of
stone some fifty kilometres across, one of a swarm that surrounded a
hot blue-white star. The young sun’s low light cast stark shadows
from every crater, of which there were many, and from every dimple
and dust grain at Luca’s feet. He found himself fascinated by small
details - the way the dust you kicked up rose and fell through neat
parabolas, and clung to your legs so that it looked as if you had
been dipped in black paint, and how some craters were flooded with a
much finer blue-white powder that, somehow bound electrostatically,
would flow almost like water around your glove.
    But it was a difficult environment. His inertial-control boots
glued his feet to the dusty rock, but in the asteroid’s microgravity
his body had no perceptible weight, and he felt as if he was floating
in some invisible fluid, stuck by his feet to this rocky floor - or,
if he wasn’t careful about his sense of perspective, he might feel he
was walking up a wall, or even hanging from a ceiling. He knew the
others, especially Teel, had noticed his lack of orientation, and he
was mortified with every clumsy glue-sticky step he took.
    Meanwhile, all across the surface of this Rock, by the light of
the endless war, soldiers toiled.
    The troopers wore military-issue skinsuits, complex outfits
replete with nipples and sockets and grimy with rubbed-in asteroid
dirt. Some of the suits had been repaired; they had discoloured
patches and crude seams welded into their surfaces. These patched-up
figures moved through great kicked-up clouds of black dust, while
machines clanked and hovered and crawled around them.
    Most of the troopers’ heads were crudely shaved, a practicality if
you were doomed to wear your skinsuit without a break for days at a
time. With grime etched deep into their pores it was impossible to
tell how old they were. They looked tired, and yet kept on with their
work even so, long past the normal limits of humanity. They were
nothing like the steel-eyed warriors Luca had imagined. They looked
like experts in nothing but endurance.
    It seemed to Luca that what they were basically doing was digging.
Many of them used simple shovels, or even their bare hands. They dug
trenches and pits and holes, and excavated underground chambers, each
trooper, empowered by microgravity, hauling out huge masses of
crumpled rock. Luca imagined this scene repeated on a tremendous
swarm of these drifting rocky worldlets, soldiers digging endlessly
into the dirt, as if they were constructing a single vast trench that
enclosed the Galaxy Core itself.
    Dolo made a remark about the patched-up suits.
    Teel shrugged. ’Suits are expensive here. Troopers themselves are
cheaper.’
    Luca said, ’I don’t understand why they are digging holes in the
ground.’
    ’To save their lives,’ Teel said.
    ’It’s called >riding the Rock<, Novice,’ Dolo said.
    When it was prepared, Luca learned, this asteroid would be thrown
out of its parent system, and in through the Molecular Ring towards
the Xeelee concentrations. The first phase of the journey would be
powered, but after that the Rock would fall freely. The troopers,
cowering in their holes in the ground, would ’run silent’, as they
called it, operating only the feeblest power sources, making as
little noise and vibration as possible. The point was to fool the
Xeelee into thinking that this was a harmless piece of debris, and
for cover many unoccupied rocks would be hurled in along similar
trajectories. At closest approach to a Xeelee emplacement - a ’Sugar
Lump’ - the troopers would burst out of their hides and begin their
assault.
    ’It sounds a crude tactic, but it works,’ said Dolo.
    ’But the Xeelee hit back,’ said Luca.
    ’Oh, yes,’ Teel said, ’the Xeelee hit back. The rocks themselves
generally survive. Each time a rock returns we have to dig out the
rubble, and build the trenches and shelters again. And bury the
dead.’
    Luca frowned. ’But why dig by hand? Surely it would be much more
efficient to leave it to the machines.’
    Dolo said carefully, ’The soldiers seem to believe that a shelter
constructed by a machine will never be as safe as one you have dug
out yourself.’
    ’That doesn’t make sense,’ Luca said. ’All that matters is a
shelter’s depth, its structural qualities - ’
    ’We aren’t talking about sense,’ Dolo said. ’We are touching here
on the problem we have