‘Yeah. Well, on the plus side, we know the sensor station is thirty-seven lightyears from our present location.’
‘And now they know we beat the ships they sent to our Vayan lure. The wormhole collapsed the moment you took out their Welcome ship. That’s going to stir them up.’
‘No shit, Sherlock.’
‘Look, I’ve been talking to Wim’s physics team. We’re never going to retro-engineer all of your weapons. The real optimists claim we might crack nucleonic molecule theory in a couple of years, but the Saints alone know how to handle ultradense matter, let alone create some for ourselves.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
Yirella drew a deep breath. ‘We have to hit them with the unexpected.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Not helpful. This is going to be risky enough.’
‘But, kid, we have nothing to lose.’
‘So we have nothing to fear. I remember the aphorism.’
‘Uh, I think it’s more of a neologism, but carry on.’
‘Kenelm won’t like the risk. Hir job is to protect all of us – and especially the Calibar survivors. I even agree with that. Which makes another lure a tough sell.’
‘This is as bad as convincing the council to adopt the exodus habitat project and sacrifice Earth! I can just take control of your networks, you know. Remove Kenelm from the equation. That would make life a whole lot easier.’
‘Absolutely not! We steer, we don’t force.’ She flinched. ‘To start with.’
‘Now you’re talking.’
*
Dellian let go of Yirella’s hand as they walked into the Morgan’s bridge. She’d remind him of that later, he knew. Adults in a long-term relationship showing affection was hardly a social transgression; he just didn’t think it was appropriate for something as official as a full session of the captain’s expanded advisory council. She’d been silent when he put on a full dress uniform to attend, but he knew what she was thinking. Routine was important to him – especially now, providing the stability that enabled him to function at a level approximating his old self. If people knew that was a lie, they politely kept quiet about it.
The number of seats around the truncated table had been increased to thirty, allowing representatives from the Calibar to contribute. He smiled quickly at Alexandre, who was sitting almost opposite him.
Kenelm came in. Somehow the Strike mission’s neat grey-and-blue uniform looked a lot better on hir than on any of the squad leaders around the table. Wim accompanied the Captain, stubble marring hir haggard face, divulging every one of hir hundred and eighty-three years.
As they sat down, Ainsley appeared on the screen wall, an image of the ship that was currently drifting around the fringes of their little interstellar habitat cluster like an enigmatic guard dog.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ Kenelm said formally. ‘We have several presentations from our developmental tactician groups to get through, which I hope will provide some clarity on our future policy.’
Dellian didn’t risk glancing at Yirella; he knew what her group had been formulating. People weren’t going to like it. After the Strike and its fallout, everyone wanted to play it safe. Part of him wanted to agree with that, but he knew that his pre-Strike self would be contemptuous.
Two of the five proposals were for maintaining the habitats in interstellar isolation. ‘We know the Olyix now have dominion over the galaxy’s star systems,’ Loneve, one of the Calibar survivors, submitted. ‘But the gulf between the stars is so much greater, and offers us true asylum. I understand that many have a sense of loss or disassociation about our situation, but we should not be afraid to prosper out here. As we grow and advance our technology – thanks to the principles we’re learning from Ainsley – we’ll see that the desire to cling to the traditional paradigm of planet-based existence is wrong. Out here we will be free in a way that has eluded us since we left Earth. And ultimately we may rise to heights that may finally enable us to challenge the Olyix directly.’
Wim wanted almost the same thing but suggested splitting off the original Morgan Strike mission from the habitat population. ‘It solves the problem of different goals,’ sie said. ‘There are those in the Morgan crew and squads who have had enough of the Strike, and there are a great many from the Calibar who want to initiate a new Strike. Forcing both strands of opinion to live here together is untenable, not to mention immoral. We’ve already been through this division; we know it cannot be allowed to fester.’
‘And if the Strike fails again?’ Loneve asked. ‘Then our position will become known to the Olyix. You would condemn us because of your actions.’
‘Then portal out as soon as the Strike mission leaves,’ Yirella said in a tone only just short of contempt. ‘And portal again and again until you feel safe.’
The next proposal came from Ellici. ‘We use the next decade here to build the most powerful ships we can devise and arm them with the nucleonic weapons Wim’s team is developing from Ainsley. That will give our new society time to settle down. When we’re ready, people will be able to make an informed choice – who remains and who leaves. Look, right now the distance we have to travel seems daunting.’ She glanced at Ainsley’s image. ‘Are you sure you got the enclave location right?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he replied. ‘Extracted straight out of the Welcome ship’s onemind, like pulling teeth the old-fashioned way. The enclave is forty thousand lightyears from here, which puts it just past the galactic core.’
‘Okay. But actually that isn’t so much of a problem, not with relativistic flight. And we can fit our Strike ships with the drive we developed for the Actaeon project, which will get us there in twenty years – ship’s time. People can manage that. Ainsley can come with us, which is what you want, right?’
‘Eliminating the Olyix is why I exist, sure,’ Ainsley replied.
Politician’s answer, Dellian thought.
Then it was Yirella’s turn. ‘We need to build another lure, and use that to invade the enclave directly – through their own wormhole,’ she said primly.
Everyone around the table disapproved, groaning in disappointment or simply saying no.
‘Why would you even suggest that?’ Tilliana asked. ‘The Olyix know we create lures. We’d be exposing ourselves.’
Dellian almost winced at the pitying smile lifting Yirella’s lips. ‘We create another lure precisely because they know that we know that they know about human lures. So obviously, from their point of view, we precious few – the Morgan and Calibar survivors – will never build another one, because we’re busy with Ellici’s proposal: hiding out here while we put putting together a new Strike armada to fly the long way around to the enclave.’
‘Risky,’ Ellici said. ‘You’re trying to second-guess them second-guessing us.’
‘So to push the odds in our favour, we make it authentic.’
‘What do you mean, “authentic”?’ Kenelm asked, a hint of concern in hir voice.
‘A human civilization.’
‘You can’t,’ Wim declared. ‘That’s . . .’
‘What?’ Yirella challenged. ‘Dangerous? Unethical? This is a war for our existence. There can be no restrictions, no line we will not cross. The Olyix hold our entire species captive. We are beyond desperate, here. Unless we get this absolutely perfect, we are living the last days of our species.’
‘What sort of human civilization do you want this lure to be?’ Alexandre asked.
‘The Olyix know of our Strike plan, so they know what we are supposed to do in the event we acquire the enclave location: rendezvous at the nearest neutron star. That course of action made sense back when Emilja and Ainsley put this whole exodus plan together. Neutron stars are distinctive, so much so that humans had mapped their locations back on pre-portal era Earth. So any ship or settled world who receives a Signal revealing the enclave’s stellar coordinates travels to the nearest one. All the ships that arrive join up and assemble a war armada.�
��
‘If we’re not too busy arguing with each other,’ Dellian muttered.
‘I’d like to see you come up with a better plan,’ Ainsley snapped. ‘You have no idea what it was like back then.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘Let’s keep it relevant, please,’ Kenelm said.
It took a lot of willpower for Dellian not to sigh in exasperation, but he managed to keep his cool. As always, he wondered why he was included in these meetings. To help provide a full range of democratic views for the council to consider. Which was, as Ainsley would say: bullshit.
‘Firstly,’ Yirella said, ‘if the Olyix see us establish ourselves at a neutron star, they’ll know it is for one reason – that we now know where their enclave is. It doesn’t matter how we got it – a Strike mission snatched it out of a onemind; the Neána finally told us. There are plenty of possible sources. But they also know that the neutron star civilization will be busy building an armada powerful enough to invade the enclave, which means they’ll have no choice in their response. They’ll have to come. The Welcome ships they send through ordinary space will be carrying wormholes to deliver their fleet directly from the sensor station. That gives us our chance.’
‘No human civilization would broadcast radio signals,’ Kenelm said. ‘That’s ingrained in us now – survival 101. And a human society at a neutron star certainly wouldn’t.’
‘So our lure civilization does something else,’ she said dismissively. ‘We change the neutron star composition by dropping strangelets into it, or generate hyper-frequency gravity waves. We produce exotic matter with an abnormal signature. It doesn’t matter how the Olyix sensor station notices them, just that they do.’
‘Then what?’
Yirella gestured theatrically at the image of Ainsley.
‘I’m there to greet them,’ Ainsley said. ‘As are you, equipped with some new seriously badass weapons hardware. This time, we don’t have to worry about pulling our punches to protect cocooned humans, so we can go in hot. Capture a wormhole terminus and fly down it to the sensor station. From there, it’s just one long step to the enclave.’
Dellian watched Kenelm glance around the table, as sie tried to judge the mood. Theoretically, sie had the authority to issue any order on hir own, but the Calibar survivors made it politically difficult to assert unconditional authority.
‘So this would be a split?’ sie asked. ‘Some of us would remain here and some of us travel to the neutron star?’
‘Yes,’ Yirella confirmed. ‘As before, we send out seeder ships to found the lure civilization, then we follow in warships. The nearest neutron star is a hundred and thirty-seven lightyears from here. We time it so the seeder ships arrive fifty years before us, which will give them plenty of time to go exponential and initiate humans.’
‘Wait, you want to populate it with real humans? I thought you were talking about cyborgs.’
‘Of course it has to be real humans. This is no time for half measures.’
‘Absolutely not. You’d be putting actual people directly in harm’s way.’
‘I don’t see that. The seedship gentens will have the same level of technology we have. They’ll be heavily armed. And if we hothouse the neutron star humans, they might be able to push their own technology development even further.’
‘What do you mean, “hothouse”?’ Tilliana asked.
‘We do what the Neána did: grow fully formed adults in biologic initiators; it’s just an adaptation of the process we used to rebuild the Calibar cocoons back into their proper bodies. That way, they’ll have fifty years straight to advance their own society and develop new weapons.’
‘And what personality are you going to animate these instant adults with?’ Ellici challenged.
‘I’ve discussed this with the metavayans. They suggest we give each of them basic human thought processes – routines that take them up to genten operational self-awareness, which we then individualize with personalities compiled from volunteers in the habitats: memories, experiences, feelings, responses.’
‘So, basically, it’ll be us living there? We’re duplicating ourselves?’
‘No. Their location alone means they’ll have to live very different lives to us. That’s a fantastic opportunity to expand the human experience.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Kenelm said. ‘I cannot agree to this aspect of your proposal. They would develop without any guidance from us. Who knows what views they will have? They might even be hostile to us.’
‘So?’
Kenelm gave her a shocked look. ‘People have to understand. We are fleeing for our lives. That has to be emphasized to every new generation so they understand the threat. You cannot seriously be proposing entrusting that sacred duty to gentens?’
‘And to Ainsley.’
Dellian thought Kenelm was going to let loose a contemptuous sneer at that, but sie managed to retain hir composure. ‘No,’ sie said firmly. ‘The risk inherent in this scheme is simply too great. We have to remain in control. It is our responsibility to ensure that any new humans are fully aware of their circumstances. However, the rest of your idea does have a degree of validity. A post-planetary human society at a neutron star would undoubtedly attract the Olyix.’
‘Yet if we designed that society, it would be terminally bland compared to what they could evolve for themselves,’ Yirella said. ‘Environment is always key to human development, and a neutron star’s circumstellar disc will be a weird and harsh place to live. It should propagate something special – beyond anything we can conceive of sitting in a habitat.’
‘We went for absolute realism on Vayan,’ Wim said. ‘And for what? All any human in this galaxy has to do is shout: Here we are, and the Olyix will come. If you want a lure, you don’t even need to send a seedship to the neutron star, just an initiator with a genten and have it build antimatter warheads so it can test them on the asteroids in the circumstellar disc and blow shit up on a huge scale. That way, they’ll know for sure we’re building planet-killers.’
‘It has to be completely convincing. Antimatter bombs are crude. We even made them back on Earth, for Saints’ sake.’
‘I’m going to agree with Yirella, here,’ Ainsley said. ‘From what I managed to extract from the onemind, the Olyix are devoting a hell of an effort to detecting and ambushing humans along what’s left of the exodus expansion wavefront. But there’s one thing they won’t be expecting at a neutron star civilization.’
‘What?’ Kenelm asked.
‘Me. Yirella was right. Logically, this hypothetical group of humans won’t build another lure. We’re delving into some pretty fucking audacious bluffs and out-thinking manoeuvres here, but that gives us an advantage.’
‘Are you saying this is the option you prefer?’ Alexandre asked.
‘Hey, pal, there are no absolutes here. All of these ideas could work. But there is a grade of probability, which you have to follow if you want to win – and win big. And remember, I cut my teeth in the crucible of Wall Street when it was at its vicious peak. So, yeah, for me Yirella’s idea comes out on top. Gold standard for sheer audacity, if nothing else.’
‘And for any of these to work, we’d need your cooperation. Which effectively gives you a veto.’
Dellian gave their old mentor a curious look. He knew hir well enough to recognize distrust in hir tone.
‘We all want the same thing,’ Ainsley said, ‘but I’m not sure a straightforward assault on the sensor station is a good idea. That bastard is going to have a multitude of reinforcements by now – precisely because it’s the logical place for whatever defeated the Olyix on Vayan to go next. They still don’t know exactly what I am, because the Welcome ship’s wormhole died minutes after the onemind sent a ship down it to warn the sensor station. But they know the Vayan system had something that killed their ships, so they are going to beef up their defences to a maximum and keep a serious watch. But if half of them fly to the neutron star, we’ll have split
their forces, which bumps up our odds of success. The only other option is the one Ellici suggested, that we travel directly to the enclave the long way around. For the ships, it only takes twenty years at relativistic velocity, but it gives the Olyix forty thousand years to improve their defences.’
‘I thought time in the enclave went slowly,’ Dellian said.
‘So it does, according to the Neána. But if you suspect a dangerous unknown is on the way to whup your ass, why wouldn’t you put your biggest, smartest weapons division outside the slowtime bubble? Forty thousand years working on weapons R and D – who’s not going to do that?’
‘If you fly straight to the enclave, would you want us to come with you?’ Alexandre asked.
This time, it was all Dellian could do not to frown. The distrust was palpable.
‘Sure I’d like you to,’ Ainsley said. ‘And don’t be coy; it’s what the Morgan crew were expecting to do anyway. But forty thousand lightyears is a goddamn big ask, especially now we also have some workable options that don’t have the same level of demands on you guys. And who knows what we might encounter on the way? Plus, there’s the fifty-thousand-lightyear trip back to Earth if we succeed. So, yeah, Yirella’s plan gets my first preference vote.’
Kenelm took another look around the table. ‘I’d like an indicative vote at this point. With one stipulation – Yirella’s plan does not include trying to establish a community of actual humans at the neutron star. That lure civilization is to be as artificial as Vayan was – which I’m sure will be equally excellent,’ sie added, with an appreciative smile at Yirella. ‘Those in favour?’
Every hand around the table went up, even Alexandre’s eventually.
‘Del?’ Yirella asked.
Sheepishly, he realized he hadn’t raised his own hand. It was just . . . She and Ainsley outmanoeuvred everyone so effortlessly. Why does that make me uneasy? It’s like that time back on Juloss when she’d worked out what was really happening at the crash. She’s not telling us everything. Oh Saints, is it because she doesn’t trust us to do what we’ll ultimately have to do?
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 7
