“Fuck the Saints,” Yirella exclaimed.
“That is a true paradox,” Immanueel said in a sympathetic voice.
“But you think causality precludes a classic-theory reset of the timeline, and that by eliminating the possibility of the God at the End of Time, all I’ll be doing is preventing this current cycle from repeating?”
“It is a complete unknown. And will probably remain so. The observer—you—cannot observe what will happen to themselves within a paradox. And all time travel is a paradox of one kind or another.”
“I really need to think about this.”
“Of course. And there is a third option. Some of our more—shall we say—unconventional theorists posit that temporal loops can only be triggered by an extrinsic factor.”
“Extrinsic?”
“The trigger originates from outside this universe.”
“You mean, when a time machine creates a new branch?”
“No. Completely outside space-time, no matter if our existence is within a universe or multiverse.”
“Fuck the Saints!”
“It is a theory that permits any and every causality violation you may want to consider.”
“Are you seriously saying the God at the End of Time doesn’t come from this reality?”
“It is a theory—unprovable until tested. If correct, it would mean destroying the message’s origin world in the present is impossible, for that origin world is not even a part of our reality.”
“So what do I do?” Yirella asked, despairing.
“Nothing. If it is an extrinsic factor, nothing we do will have any effect. If we live in a multiverse where any attempt to modify our timeline simply creates a new different timeline, nothing in our past will change. And if we do live in a pre-ordained simultaneous totality-existence universe, your decision, whatever it is, will make no difference, because it has already been made and taken effect; there is no such thing as change. In each case, all you can do is simply enjoy the life you currently experience.”
“Saints, I’m not enjoying this experience, trust me.”
“Yes. And yet from what Ainsley has told us, and what I myself have observed, you have and enjoy Dellian, do you not?”
She didn’t trust herself to answer. Instead she nodded ruefully. “Some kind of time travel is possible. The message proves that, right? I don’t think worrying about the possibility of resetting myself out of existence is a reason for inaction. After all, I have lived here and now; that cannot be taken away. It’s only the universe that will forget me, not me myself. So if I consider the enormity of what’s in play…I think that the God’s decision to send the message to the Olyix was the original decision, and our actions are determined by it. In that I have no choice. Therefore—” She took a breath. “I want us to bring the tachyon detector to the enclave. If we can work out where the Olyix were when the message was received, that’s when we make the ultimate decision: Do we go after the God at the End of Time?”
“Your first decision—and the one we were fully expecting you to make. Very well, genesis human, we will bring the tachyon detector with us.”
THE AVENGING HERETIC
YEAR FOUR
When he thought back to what the Avenging Heretic’s bridge used to be like during S-Day, all Alik could remember was basically a blank room with a big holographic projection in the middle. Now, it was the kind of chamber that belonged in a drama series—which he guessed was where a lot of it had been bootlegged from. The chief suspect was Callum, with Kandara as his accomplice—though she just laughed when he asked her. The alterations had been slow to materialize. One day the shape of the chairs had changed. They were bigger and bulkier, something that belonged in early-twenty-first-century war vehicles, but they were comfier, so no one said anything. Consoles increased in increments throughout the second year, their surfaces becoming army-green metal, acquiring black trim, which then developed glowing blue edging as the overall light was reduced. Control functions became more intuitive. The tactical display graphics grew into hemispherical bubbles around everyone’s head, with added neon-ziz. Chrome toggle switches popped up like cautious mushrooms—a few at first, then they were complemented by U-shaped guards, and eventually lined up in long rows. The chairs expanded again, with added protection, and straps, and crash webs. Red strobes and battle-station Klaxons protruded from the ceiling.
“For fuck’s sake, people!” Alik bellowed the first time Jessika tested them. His virtual avatar ears were ringing, while he blinked simulated blotches from his vision. “This is turning into a gamer fetish bunker. We’re neurovirtual in here.”
“Ambiance helps instill the right attitude,” Yuri said.
Alik’s teeth ground together at the mockery in that voice.
“Yeah,” Kandara chipped in. “Live the experience, man.”
He glowered at her and saw Callum trying to suppress laughter. Despite being on a ship with people who could be really fucking annoying when they wanted to be, he did admit the new formation was a considerable improvement. It made it somehow easier for his mind to mesh with the Avenging Heretic’s network. The simulation was, after all, window dressing, but it was customized to accelerate response time during the drills. So he supposed—grudgingly—that it did generate the right level of alert tension. Their mission was tactical at heart; they needed clear commands and unrestricted target and threat intelligence. But still, edging that glowed…
In addition to all the precise information coming at him through the console displays, Alik had the Salvation onemind’s more prosaic thoughts at the back of his mind. He could understand them better now; years of the spectral presence lurking like a malign secondary subconscious every time he opened the neural interface had given him the practice to focus on individual routines. That and Jessika’s invaluable intuition meant it was easier for him to sort through the cascade of alien impulses, teasing out the relevant aspects without the onemind realizing.
Right now he was experiencing something that the onemind had never projected before: eagerness. The end of the wormhole was close. They would arrive at the enclave, where it would be welcomed and become accepted. That’s wrong, he thought. Embraced? Supported? Favored? The sentiment didn’t really have a human equivalent.
“I don’t get it,” Alik said. “What kind of reception is it expecting?” He looked over at Jessika, whose chair’s puffy safety cushioning had practically absorbed her, leaving only her head and arms visible.
“It’s content about becoming established within the enclave. Its purpose will have been achieved; it has returned with over a billion people to deliver to the God at the End of Time. So now it’s going into—I think—a storage orbit or resting place of some kind inside the enclave, along with all the other arkships that have returned in success. It can take up its rightful place.”
“It thinks this is a success?” Alik asked. “It got its ass kicked on S-Day.”
“Depends on perspective,” Callum said. “Earth is uninhabitable now. There’ll be tens of millions evacuated, which is basically a token when you consider the global population is still probably around the six billion mark. That means the next wave of Olyix will scoop up everyone left. They won, the bastards. This round. Because us being here is a success, as well, isn’t it?”
“Jez-us, you are getting fucking bleak, man.”
“I felt it, too,” Yuri said. “Salvation is not…happy, exactly, but content. Its active part in the Olyix crusade is over, and it’s anticipating the next phase of its existence.”
“Until our descendants come knocking.” Kandara smirked from behind a display that was mostly sculpted in blood-red graphics.
“See,” Callum said, grinning. “Optimism.”
“Yeah, right,” Alik muttered.
“I wonder how many arkships are inside the enclave,” Callum mused. “How many other s
pecies.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Jessika said. “It’s going to be interesting. I don’t know how long the Olyix crusade has been going. We weren’t told.”
“Why the hell did your abode cluster think that’s classified?” Kandara asked.
“I don’t know. My best guess would be that information will expose something about the Neána that increases their vulnerability to the Olyix.”
“How long they’ve been around, that they were close enough to the Olyix to observe them?”
Jessika’s hands rose through her display icons in an elaborate shrug.
“Is it even worth guessing how many species they’ve done this to?” Callum asked.
“Utterly pointless,” Jessika said. “We have no idea of how many sentient species rise up to a technological level in the galaxy in—say—a five-thousand-year period.”
“And how many fall of their own accord,” Yuri said.
“And those that are sentient but don’t go along the technology route,” Callum added.
“Jez-us, can we focus on some positives here, people?” Alik said. “Please. This day deserves that, at least.” He focused his attention on the sensor data.
As always, the sensor clusters that their creeperdrones had installed around the hangar entrance showed nothing. Alik couldn’t stand looking at the non-space of the wormhole fabric. So for actual flight progress, he had to rely on the onemind’s strange perception of the wormhole—a dull gray tunnel whose wavering walls were threaded with golden strands. Now at some implausible distance ahead, those glowing lines had knotted together, creating a dawn light glow.
The Salvation of Life was fixated on the end of the wormhole.
“Not long,” Jessika said. “Stand by.”
Alik wasn’t sure what he was expecting. After all, they’d exited a wormhole before, back when they reached the Olyix sensor station. He didn’t remember the onemind being tense about that.
He waited in silence as the arkship continued its stoic flight through nothingness. He was having trouble accepting that they were finally arriving at the enclave. Four years of flight—plenty of which had been spent in suspension—should have prepared him. Although, to be honest, he hadn’t really expected to get this far.
The end of the wormhole flight, when it came, was an instantaneous transition. Alik’s visual display flipped from the emptiness he was trying to ignore to images of normal space. The impact was bewildering. At first, half of space seemed to be a glaring white nebula.
Data blossomed across the basic displays surrounding his seat like leaves surging into life along a tree’s branches after a long winter. The information deluge was as bad as the visual one. He ignored the factual summary the ship’s genten was assembling as a smile of wonder grew across his face. His eyes were slowly making sense of the sensor feed, revealing a large star in the foreground. Behind it, the galactic core was a vast jewel blazing white-gold across space. He couldn’t believe that many stars actually existed, never mind in a single congregation. “Jez-us wept. Where the fuck are we?”
“A long, long way from home,” Yuri said quietly.
Despite the grandeur of the galactic core, Alik was startled by the star they had arrived at. Tables of numbers multiplying around him confirmed how exceptional it was. “That is one big-ass star,” he said.
“Yes,” Jessika agreed. “About twice the size of Sirius. The sensors haven’t found any planets—not on this side, anyway.”
“Not even a gas giant?” Alik asked, running through the information.
“No. But that ring is something else,” she said.
Alik focused on the thin band orbiting one point five AUs out from the star. Unlike the usual mucky gray of asteroidal regolith, this ring gleamed with refracted light from the brilliant star, as if quartz dust had settled like frost to coat every particle.
“The particle density is crazy,” Callum said. “That can’t be natural.”
“It’s definitely not an accretion disk,” Jessika said. “So I guess we know what happened to the planets.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” Yuri asked.
“Because you can?” she replied.
“No,” Callum said. “Check out those knots in the ring. They’re alive with activity.”
Alik directed his sensor feed to expand the area Callum had mentioned. The resolution wasn’t great—there was only so much you could do with sensor clumps the size of a pinhead—but each of the knot particles was slowly rotating around a vast artifact in a slow-motion hurricane whorl. “Olyix industrial stations?” he wondered out loud. The main bulk of the things were spherical, with dozens of tapering spires radiating out. On the surface below them, a web of precise lines of purple and amber light cast multicolored shadows up on the summits. Spaceships—a lot bigger than the Deliverance ships—were holding formation nearby. As he watched, another ship rose up from the station to join them.
Alik shifted focus to the next knot, where a similar station was surrounded by a flotilla of Deliverance ships. As he pulled the focus back, he could see a series of similar knots stretching right around the ring; there must have been thousands of them. Which means tens of thousands of spaceships—more like hundreds of thousands. Jez-us. One of the stations farther along seemed to be clamped to a big rock particle, shaping it into a cylinder. An arkship! So that’s why Salvation has caves like you get on a planet: It used to be a part of a solid world.
“They must have broken the planets down into digestible chunks,” Jessika said. “Now they have the entire mass of the solar system as raw material to manufacture warships and arkships.”
“Found the radio telescopes,” Kandara announced.
Alik switched to the zone her icon was indicating. Three AUs outside the ring, glowing bright in the glaring starlight, were pentagonal dodecahedrons, big brothers to the ones they’d seen orbiting the star of the Olyix sensor outpost. If their positioning was constant all the way around the star, there would be a hundred fifteen of them. “That’s good. We can use them to help boost the signal from our transmitters,” he said. “We just need the ones aligned on the section of space where Sol is.”
“The genten’s nearly finished star mapping,” Jessika told him. “But judging from the apparent size of the core, we’re about fifty thousand light-years from home.”
The number didn’t really resonate with Alik. At some point in the last four years, he’d resigned himself that he’d never return to Earth. In reality, he probably wouldn’t even last more than a few hours after they reached the enclave star system. Setting up their fallback refuge had driven that point home. Even so—fifty thousand light-years!
“How the hell is any human armada ever going to get here?” he asked. “If they pick up our Signal, which is going to be unlikely verging on fucking never, they’ll have to fly fifty thousand light-years. Which—and correct me if I’ve screwed up the math—will take them fifty thousand years.”
“For a neutral observer it’ll take that long,” Callum said. “But relativistic travel will make it a lot shorter for anyone on board the armada ships.”
“Yeah? Well, we’re going to be those neutral observers, so we’re looking at a hundred and twenty thousand years before anyone turns up. Goddamn! This is insane!”
“Are you saying we don’t send the Signal?” Yuri asked.
“I don’t fucking know. This whole mission was one giant mistake.”
“We send the Signal,” Kandara said. “The Avenging Heretic is going to get ordered to fly to some kind of dock for repair, or maybe they’ll want to scrap it and recycle the mass.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Alik sneered. “The Olyix are known the galaxy over for their environmental credentials. Recycling, my ass.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said with icy patience. “The Avenging Heretic will leave this hangar
soon. That’s why we put the refuge together. One way or another, the Olyix will know we are here. So we send the Signal, and if it isn’t humans who detect it, maybe someone will. The Neána perhaps. Someone who can do something other than run and hide. We will have accomplished something. I did not come all this way just to walk up to the onemind and surrender like a fucking coward.”
“I’m not talking about surrendering,” Alik said angrily.
“Then why don’t you tell us exactly what the hell you do want to do?” Yuri asked.
“I don’t know, man. Send the Signal, I guess. It’s just…This place. They’ve broken up planets so they can use them! I feel so Goddamn small. And don’t any of you try telling me you don’t feel that, either.”
“I’m with Alik,” Jessika said. “I’ve just found the power ring. Check out the star’s equator.”
The Saints of Salvation Page 28
