“Oh, we’re coming with you, all right,” Yirella said as the display’s projection light sent faint strokes of colors playing across her face. It heightened how intent she was—a determination that always captivated and unnerved Dellian.
He exchanged a knowing glance with the white android, which raised a whole new level of questions. Is Ainsley actually looking through those blank eyes?
When it happened, the attack was completely anticlimactic. The scarlet icons simply vanished. That triggered some cheering and clapping across the hall, but otherwise people just accepted the outcome tamely. Dellian was almost resentful they had no immediate sensor coverage; it took several seconds to get a visual image of the Resolution ships exploding. Even then it was just white-sphere-on-a-black-background—nothing to really indicate the true violence of the spectacle, the success they should feel.
“Did the wormholes collapse?” Yirella asked urgently.
Immanueel nodded. “Yes. The Olyix will not be able to return here for sixty-seven years. So the sensor station will believe—until we arrive there.”
Dellian watched the tenuous white plasma blooms diminishing. The tactics in play here were too much like a horribly advanced chess game that he could never quite fathom, making him thankful that his own part was just going to be storming an arkship and killing quint—nothing complicated. Destroying the Resolution ships’ wormholes had been a misdirection by the corpus armada, intended to keep the Olyix concentrating on the enigma of whatever dwelled at the neutron star. They’d be desperate to return—in force—to confront the challenge. In reality, thirty-four years ago the corpus humans had launched a starship, carrying a wormhole, toward the sensor station. It would arrive decades before any Olyix force returned here, catching them unawares and unprepared.
“What happens if the Olyix have a second wave of ships behind the ones you’ve just taken out?” he asked. “Or a third—or more?”
“We will remain alert for any further ships approaching,” Immanueel said. “There will be an unknown number of Olyix ships materializing in real space between here and the sensor station as the wormhole collapses around them. Some might decide to travel here rather than return. We do not anticipate them being a problem.”
Yirella stared keenly at the fading explosions. “Good. We can start the real fight back now.”
* * *
—
Two hours later, Dellian walked through a portal back into the rebuilt Morgan. The ship was completely different from the one that had left Juloss. Where before it had been a stack of spherical grids, this iteration was a streamlined five-kilometer cone of the same protective copper mirror shell that encased all the other neutron star ring particles. Its base was a simple shallow hemisphere, fluoresced by the aquamarine light of an advanced gravitonic drive, with a rim that had sprouted long scarlet and black needles like a crown of bloodied thorns.
A layout unfolded across Dellian’s optik. The forward section was mostly hangar space holding a range of weapons and ancillary craft, while behind that were all fifty-two decks of the life support section, with the engineering deck aft. That was it. The Morgan no longer had any of the complex asteroid mining and refining equipment, nor the von Neumann replicator systems to begin a new civilization. This was a purebred warship now. There was no compromise, no allowance for failure. He had to concede the logic was impeccable. If they lost at the Olyix enclave, there would be no running away and hiding to regroup somewhere safe amid the lonely stars. They’d be dead or worse. But if—when!—they won, there was an open future with the human race reunited in victory and rich in possibility.
That outcome was so close Dellian was practically living it as he walked along the circular main corridor of deck thirty-three to the cabin he and Yirella had been assigned. The floor was flat, which he wasn’t used to, but this version of the Morgan didn’t spin to provide gravity.
“Artificial gravity is only one function of manipulating exotic matter,” Yirella said approvingly. “It’ll provide time-flow control in here, too. They’ve really mastered this technology.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You know, I’m really not convinced they need us.”
“They don’t. But I need to go.”
“Sure. I’m with you on that, Yi.” The decision hadn’t been that difficult, at least not for him. And thankfully the rest of the squad had chosen to face FinalStrike together—though a good portion of the warship crews who’d arrived at the neutron star had chosen to go their own way and build habitats adrift in the vast gulfs of interstellar space. Surprisingly, Kenelm had chosen to stay with the Morgan.
Dellian didn’t resent those who’d left, nor even the ex-captain for staying. When they did finally arrive at the Salvation of Life, he only wanted the truly dedicated to be storming it with him.
He sank down on their bed—bigger and softer than before. The walls were blank, awaiting Yirella to format their texture.
“How long do you think you’ll need to adapt to all the armor upgrades?” she asked.
“A couple of months, at least. I’ve been reviewing the capabilities. They’ve gone micro and macro. Some of those weapons could take out a whole squadron of huntspheres, while the subtle ones can wipe whole sections of the neuralstrata.”
“Saints, you be careful using anything that interfaces with a onemind again.”
He spread his arms wide. “I learned my lesson, trust me. There’s some kind of failsafe in these new systems.”
“Riiiight.”
“There is! A nuanimate routine analyzes any impulse coming out of the neuralstrata. It’s like an independent corpus sub-aspect—smart but not self-aware.”
“Well, listen to you: the coding master.”
“I just read the instructions. But the tough part is going to be training the cohort to deal with all the new hardware we’ve got. That’s a whole fresh set of response reflexes we’ve got to build in. It’ll take time.”
“Well, that’s the advantage of controlling time. You can have as much or as little as you want.”
Dellian propped himself up on his elbows to look at her. “I can think of a few other things we could use all that extra time for.”
“I’m sure you can,” she said with a roguish grin.
“No! Well—yes. But no, I meant we could do what all those neutron star people did, the…what did Immanueel call them, naturalists? They lived for thousands of years. They had a life where they were never burdened by the threat of the Olyix. We can have that life.”
“Everyone can have that life, Del. Once we liberate them from the enclave.”
“Yeah. I suppose so. Put it like that…”
“But I do understand.” She sat next to him and started rubbing his back between the shoulder blades.
“Doesn’t it bother you how…different the corpus humans are?” he asked.
“Bother me? No. I’m a bit in awe of them, to be honest.”
“Saints, really? So would you elaborate yourself? Become corpus? Like they’ve done?”
“Not today.” She flashed a flat smile, which did nothing to reassure him.
“But you’ve thought about it?”
“Haven’t you?”
“Not really. But…Saints! In this place, with all their domain timeshift technology, you could walk out of here and come back an hour later my time, having spent fifty years a full corpus. I’d never know.”
“Yeah. This timeshifting is hard to get your head around, isn’t it?”
“Sure. Me. With my thick head.”
“Don’t be like that. You have a beautiful head. I know. I’ve been inside it.”
“Oh, crap. We really are going to do this, aren’t we?”
“Well, the corpus weapons will do most of it for us, but yes.” She inclined her head solemnly. “We’re going to do this. We’re going to face the encla
ve.”
“We were too cocky before. Even if we’d won at Vayan, can you imagine us going up against the enclave with ships like the Morgan used to be? We would have been cocooned in the first minute.”
“Maybe we still can be. Who knows what the Olyix are capable of? In that respect, going to face them now is no different than before. It was never going to be the Morgan alone. The Strike plan was always for humans to gather at a neutron star and combine forces to attack the enclave. And that’s what we’ve done.”
“What you’ve done.”
“I armed us with hope, that’s all.”
“Saints! How about we go living those four thousand years, Yi? We could do that, you and me, have that life. Then after we’ve lived everything there is, we go kick down the enclave door.”
“No, Del. However wrong Alexandre’s generation was to create us: Here we are. And we have a purpose, even if we had no choice. And we’re hardly the first humans to be in this position.”
“Well, here’s hoping we’re the last.”
* * *
—
The squad gathered around a couple of big tables in deck thirty-three’s canteen, which someone had textured to resemble a Parisian Left Bank café circa 1920, all high arched ceilings and flickering gaslights inside frosted glass shades, with a long polished wood counter along one side—an effect spoiled only by having food extruders instead of stewards wearing stiff white tunics. The tall windows, which ostensibly opened out onto the city’s famed Boulevard Saint-Germain, had clouded over with tactical displays of the neutron star system.
Dellian sipped his hot chocolate as he watched the history faction prepare to depart the neutron star. Like everything in the disk around the star, the wormhole generator was a big nondescript particle with an undulant copper surface protecting whatever machinery was within. As he watched, the covering peeled back with a sinuous flourish to reveal a maw glowing with the distinct violet radiance of Cherenkov radiation. He was moderately disappointed that the shimmer didn’t curve back into an infinite vortex.
“How far does it extend?” Xante asked.
“The history faction launched their carrier ship toward the Olyix sensor station twenty-two years before we arrived,” Tilliana said. “And we’ve been here twelve years, so the ship is already thirty-four light-years away, give or take. It’s only got another thirty-two to go.”
“I’m finding it hard to believe there were only ever two factions here,” Ellici said. “History and egress. Out of a hundred thousand people? Come on, that’s not realistic.”
“Their factions are a broad church,” Tilliana said. “And don’t forget there was a whole bunch of naturalists, the ones who didn’t elaborate up to corpus level.”
“Oh, hey, the ring particles are moving, look,” Uret said.
Dellian glanced over at the displays. The particles closest to the wormhole were accelerating toward it, with more following. The whole movement reminded him of a shoal of playful fish smoothly following the leaders.
After an hour they could see the entire ring was on the move, every particle heading for the wormhole.
“So the whole ring is coming with us to invade the enclave?” Janc said.
“Every particle, yes,” Yirella confirmed. “They’re either warships or specialist weapons. It’s an armada, and our little fleet is a part of it. Finally!”
Alexandre’s icon appeared in Dellian’s optik. “Stand by,” sie said. “We’re launching toward the wormhole terminus.”
Data in the optik showed him the Morgan was under acceleration. He frowned when he saw they’d passed ten gees. The gravity felt absolutely stable, as if they were on a planet.
“Maybe we should have had a test flight or twenty first,” Uret said. “I mean, what would’ve happened if the compensators didn’t work?”
“All the fleet ships were extensively tested while we were taking our break in the domain,” Yirella told him. “They ironed all the bugs out.”
“Er…what bugs?”
Her lips lifted into a faint smile. Dellian watched her closely. She was sitting with Ellici and Tilliana at the other end of the table from him, a distant expression on her face, eyes closed.
It was a pose he was seeing a lot more lately. She was otherwhere half the time, her body a spirit that moved through this world without any real grounding. While her mind…He knew she was using the neural interface to link directly into the Morgan’s network. It gave her a much greater perception of the digital universe than any databud could. His own interface had remained unused since his treatment. Several times he’d gone down to the Morgan’s clinic, ready to have it extracted. Each time he’d paused at the door and walked away. I want to be her equal…or at least not be regarded as inferior.
The visual displays filling the café windows were showing all one hundred fifty of the very large particles, the ones with the powerful gravity wave emissions. They were starting to move in closer to the neutron star itself. More than half of them were changing orbital inclination, rising out of the ecliptic plane so that they were evenly dispersed above the dark surface.
“They’re forming the cage,” Yirella said.
Dellian didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He picked up his almond croissant and took a bite. “What cage?”
“The major particles are high-power gravitonic systems that are going to contain the neutron star during transit. They’ll also act as negative energy conduits, same as every ship that flies inside a wormhole.”
“Transit?” Uret asked.
Yirella opened her eyes and smiled at her friends. “So I’m guessing none of you bothered to access the full mission plan?”
Tilliana grinned. “Of course they didn’t.”
“Takes a lot of power to hold a wormhole open across sixty-odd light-years, let alone all the way to the enclave,” Yirella said. “Really, a lot.”
“Oh, Great Saints,” Dellian blurted as mission data finally zipped across his optik. “It’s coming with us. They’re bringing the neutron star to the enclave.”
“To be more accurate,” Yirella said, “they’re going to attack the enclave with the neutron star. It’s the ultimate magic bullet.”
“Against what?” Falar demanded. “I know everyone keeps saying we don’t know what’s inside, but there’s got to be thousands of different Olyix structures. All the arkships storing cocoons, for a start.”
“There’s only one target,” Ellici said, “and it doesn’t get any bigger. The enclave has to have a star to power it. If you kill the star, you cut the power. Best way to kill a star—”
“Hit it with a neutron star,” Yirella finished for her, smiling gleefully. “Boom! Nova. Probably followed by collapse into a black hole if the enclave star is big enough.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Uret demanded.
Yirella’s index finger sketched a circle around her head as she smirked. “Is this my kidding face?”
“Saints!”
“This is a war, people. Win or lose, it’s the last one humans will ever fight. And it’s not one we’re going to win with half measures.”
* * *
—
It took a day and a half for all the corpus particles to fly into the wormhole. Once the majority had entered, the Morgan’s fleet—all seventeen remaining ships—slipped in after them.
Dellian was in the café again, watching the displays showing a feed from external sensors. When they were a thousand kilometers from the wormhole terminus, the Morgan’s negative energy conduits—small, blade-like spurs—slipped out of their recesses across the fuselage. Acceleration dipped down to point-one gee, guiding them along their course. The other ships of the fleet took up position behind them. Then Ainsley came gliding in behind the formation, its white fuselage reflecting the wan violet light of the wormhole’s Cherenkov ra
diation.
The Morgan slipped past the wormhole’s throat, and every visual image died simultaneously.
“What the Saints…?”
“We’re not in natural space-time anymore,” Tilliana told him as she tucked into a breakfast of pancakes, maple syrup, and berries. “Whatever’s outside the hull doesn’t propagate photons.”
“So how do we know where the other ships are?”
“Their mass shows up as distortions in the Morgan’s exotic mass detectors.”
Dellian changed his optik’s input feed, so he was looking along a simple white tube leading away to the vanishing point, with gray smears ahead and behind, like dense clots of mist. Then the tube surface deformed, with ripples running along it. His imagination filled in a judder as they passed the Morgan. Behind them, a black sphere was filling the narrow tunnel, forcing it to warp around its bulk. All he could think of was a snake swallowing a big rat, the bulge slowly working its way along.
“The neutron star,” Yirella announced in satisfaction.
Something about having the neutron star racing along right behind them was deeply discomforting. But then he hadn’t quite been prepared for the whole wormhole experience. Looking around the table, his friends hunched in their seats, nursing various cups of tea, coffee, and juice, that concern was something they all seemed to be sharing.
“We need to start training,” Dellian announced. Anything to take his mind off what was outside. Not that there was anything outside, not even a vacuum. Which is the whole problem.
Tilliana smirked. “Good. We’ve been working up new scenarios for you boys. The welcome ship at Vayan gave us the basis for some realistic environments to simulate for you when you’re in the egg. This’ll be fun.”
“Fun?” Xante asked cautiously.
“For me and Ellici.”
* * *
—
The corpus armada emerged from the wormhole half a light-year away from the Olyix sensor station. All the squads were on alert as the Morgan dropped back into space-time. They’d joked and grumbled as they suited up three hours before passing through the terminus, blustering through the knowledge that if the Olyix were waiting, it would be over so fast they’d probably never know. But if there was a delay, a skirmish between evenly matched ships, there was a remote chance they’d be needed to play a part.
The Saints of Salvation Page 32
