Callum tried to stay focused on the drone, but his mind kept visualizing pure data – not in columns or graphics, but swirling masses of symbols he had vague recollections of. The intrusive spectres flowed straight into his brain from the Avenging Heretic’s network via the neural interface – a distraction he couldn’t ignore, because trying to ignore it made him concentrate harder.
He sort-of knew the data concerned the status of the Olyix nodule’s cells – how the support cylinder was meshing its own capillary tendrils with them, establishing nutrient feed and extraction, and finally a direct neurological connection. Verifying functionality.
‘The nodule is alive,’ Jessika pronounced.
Her voice allowed Callum to focus, reducing the errant data to a sparkle.
‘And the support unit?’ Kandara questioned.
‘It’s sustaining the cells for the moment. Long term, we’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘If the nodule lasts for today, we go,’ Yuri said. ‘Strikeback, we’re green.’
‘It’s been an honour to know you,’ Johnston’s voice declared. ‘All of you. There is no precedent in human history for what you are undertaking. Future generations will thank you in person. I can only wish you good fortune.’
‘Be seeing you.’ Alik chuckled.
Callum’s thought/wish/order switched his attention back to the image ringed by their consoles in the digital sensorium that was now his skin over the real world. The Avenging Heretic hung in space, ten AUs out from the glare of Delta Pavonis, alone except for a small blue-edged disc a hundred metres beyond its squat nose. A tactical splash of North America showed a flotilla of Olyix transport ships racing upwards from Utah like a flock of terrified birds, with one surviving Deliverance ship at their apex. They were already three hundred kilometres above the planet and accelerating hard.
‘Deploying interception squadron,’ Johnston said calmly. ‘Stand by.’
Twenty expansion portals opened two hundred kilometres above the fleeing transports. Cruisers streamed out. Missiles launched, their fusion plumes a lacework of flaring light, twisting restlessly then attenuating into a glowing shroud as if a borealis storm had thundered up out of the atmosphere. Five Calmissiles sought out the Deliverance ship, destroying it within seconds. The nuclear missiles started to explode in and around the transports, turning a vast section of space into an anarchic nebula.
‘Go,’ Johnston ordered.
The expansion portal in front of the Avenging Heretic grew rapidly; white light shone through. The Avenging Heretic surged forwards, emerging in the middle of the nuclear holocaust above Utah. Ultra-hard radiation saturated the fuselage, and the disintegrating wreckage of Olyix ships shot past at catastrophic speed.
‘Disengaging suppression,’ Jessika said. ‘Entangling with the Salvation onemind.’
Callum held his breath, knowing he wasn’t – not with his body in the suspension unit in the middle of the ship. He wasn’t even breathing air. But the simulacrum obliged. He counted seconds away as pounding blood grew louder in his ears.
All his goodbyes had been made two days ago. Savi, of course; they’d remained relatively civil to each other for decades. She’d wanted to know why he was calling her and making such maudlin small talk. Always was smarter than me. His deflection was risible, and he guessed she knew that.
‘I have an assignment when S-Day comes,’ he’d said. ‘It’s a tough one. It might take a while.’
‘And if I ask you what it is, would you tell me?’
‘I can’t. Security. You understand that, don’t you?’ It wasn’t meant as a taunt, a reminder of Zagreus, but he was worrying needlessly. She didn’t take offence. They were long past that stage.
Then the really tough calls – kids and their families. For the great-great-grandkids he made recordings; they were twins, only seven months old, so in the future they’d hear his love spoken from the past like some historical artefact. I hope they’re bored by the messages. That’ll mean they’re living for real.
‘It’s accepted us,’ Jessika said. Her face betrayed considerable elation. ‘The pattern fooled it into recognizing us as the ship the Knockdown team took out.’
‘What’s it saying?’ Yuri asked.
‘It doesn’t so much say things as provide autonomic impulses, like we’re an extension of it. I’ll try and show you. Look inwards.’
Callum reluctantly closed his eyes, seeking out . . . sounds? Colours? Heat? Cold? Instead, the faint sensation was like a balance response to shifting ground. He wanted his body to sway, then bend, pivot. Something unseen beckoned him forward, to safety. Concern enveloped him like a physical constriction – the urge to get free of the shocking danger that had erupted without warning around the planet of the newly beloved. More concern over those already sleeping at the start of their great voyage to the God at the End of Time. Batwing rustling of a billion calculations a second echoed in a black cavern the size of mountains, reluctantly determining the safest route away.
He opened his eyes – a demand to see their current situation. Space had darkened around the Avenging Heretic’s fuselage as the plasma residue from the missile nukes evaporated. Below lay the huge crescent of Earth, smeared in dirty white storm clouds. He couldn’t tell if they were over land or sea; nothing was visible beneath the blanket of rucked cirrocumulus peaks. Wreckage was still flashing past them, the husks of broken transport ships dwindling as they fell, whirling helplessly towards the grinding hurricane swirls.
His reaction to the tumultuous vista was complex: so many emotions. Delight at the rout of the Olyix even though he knew it was irrelevant, a move in the most complex chess game ever devised. Then there was the doubt and insecurity about their mission, which made him want to shout: ‘No, turn around; I don’t want this. I can’t do it. I want to join the exodus. The Neána are right: we should hide between the stars and live quietly with our friends and families.’ Instead, his father’s face seemed to have ghosted its way into the bridge, looking at him expectantly.
Oh, bloody hell. We must be fucking crazy.
That might have been spoken out loud, judging from the way the others were grinning at him.
Acceleration began as Jessika activated their gravitonic drive. They rose amid the Olyix survivors from the siege of Salt Lake City, reaching for the relative safety of altitude. The tarnished white globe of Earth now had dozens of flotillas striving for the haven of the arkship at its Lagrange Three point orbit, three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above the surface, directly opposite the moon.
When they were four thousand kilometres out from Earth, the various Olyix flotillas began to merge into larger groups. Callum kept watch through the fuselage sensors while experiencing the urges to congregate from the Salvation’s onemind. The impulses gradually began to make sense as the G8Turing refined its interpretation, enhancing the basic impulse into a multi-themed complexity; picking the individual strands apart was even more difficult, like trying to isolate a specific instrument from an orchestral symphony. He was amazed and impressed that Jessika could make any sense of it.
‘Alpha Defence is consolidating its cruiser fleets,’ Yuri observed.
‘Chasing us,’ Alik said. ‘And, oh, look, strategically never quite catching up. Bummer, huh?’
‘The cruisers were specifically built to have a lower acceleration than the transports,’ Kandara said. ‘Some of the transports have to be allowed to escape.’
‘That’s got to be suspicious,’ Callum told her.
‘The onemind isn’t thinking in those terms,’ Jessika said. ‘Its entire attention is focused on a strategic withdrawal, safeguarding the cocoons it has on board. Its main worry is what to do with all the ships retreating to it – including this one. There’s not enough hangar capacity on board. We’re being instructed to fly directly into the wormhole.’
‘Can we do that?’ Yuri asked.
‘The negative energy regulators are fully functional, so that won’t be a probl
em. But our mission is to stay with the Salvation of Life.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘The Olyix retreat is still taking a lot of punishment. Plenty of ships are damaged. I can mimic impairment to our regulators. That might get us assigned to a hangar.’
‘Do it,’ Yuri said.
Callum kept watching their flight to the arkship. Cruisers were still firing barrage after barrage of missiles at the fleeing Olyix transport ships. The rate of dispatch was lower now, giving the wholly true impression that human munition stocks were depleting. There were almost no Calmissiles being fired at all, allowing the few surviving Deliverance ships to defend the transport flotillas more effectively.
Jessika’s request to the Salvation onemind was a whispered tune on the edge of Callum’s subconscious, a feeble little plea. He didn’t think the arkship would pay anything so diminutive the slightest attention. It was completely absorbed by the Strikeback attack.
‘Do you think it’ll conform to our strategy?’ he asked.
‘The son of a bitch goddamn should conform,’ Alik said. ‘We need that. We need it to do what we want. Strikeback is all about backing it into a corner. That’s why this whole attack exists. The only reason—’
‘It will,’ Kandara said. ‘The onemind has shown considerable tactical aptitude. It must know we could have launched our surprise attack directly against it. A thousand Calmissiles would have turned it into the universe’s biggest lump of Swiss cheese, and rotational inertia would have finished the job.’
‘Ah, Lord bless the mighty Calmissiles.’ Alik laughed. ‘Just look at those mothers go.’
‘We’re lucky to live in an age where such wonders exist,’ Kandara said levelly.
‘Oh, go fuck yourselves,’ Callum grumbled. ‘Using portal fuselages as a weapon was a good idea, and you know it.’
‘Don’t we just.’ Yuri smirked.
‘It was, Cal,’ Jessika agreed. ‘The onemind is genuinely disconcerted by them. It knows it’s incredibly vulnerable to a mass strike.’
‘It also knows we wouldn’t risk that,’ Yuri said. ‘We’re desperate, but not so much that we’d slaughter every cocoon on board, which is what would happen if it disintegrates. It knows we’re working on saving them, on reversing the cocooning process.’
‘Trust Johnston,’ Kandara said. ‘The strike against Salvation will be precise. The onemind will know we’re trying to cripple it by killing the wormhole now that we’ve eliminated the bulk of the Deliverance ships. That’s a logical move on our part. That leaves it with only one option.’
Callum felt the impulse from the Salvation onemind come – a multifarious incitement to all the Olyix transport ships in their flotilla. He was pleased he didn’t have to ask Jessika what it meant.
Time for the Avenging Heretic to flip over and decelerate towards the Salvation of Life. The manoeuvre would leave all the approaching transports vulnerable to the cruisers who had no such need. They weren’t going to rendezvous with the arkship; they were going to flash past at high velocity and launch a final massive barrage of missiles. He could even sense how disconcerting that was to the Olyix.
Deliverance ships clustered protectively around the Salvation of Life were dispatched to intercept the cruisers, as were the ones escorting the transports. The timing was going to have to be perfect.
Trust Johnston.
Fortunately it was more than just the Adjutant-General. Strikeback was two years of effort and planning, millions of people involved manufacturing warships, thousands of people managing the effort. Hundreds of tacticians crafting and analysing the plan, building in multiple contingencies. Six supervising, in conjunction with the most powerful G8Turing hypercube ever built. This was not simply throwing the dice and hoping.
Knowing that still didn’t stop him from fretting.
The Avenging Heretic was eight minutes out from the Salvation of Life, and decelerating at three gees, when four stealthed portals opened a thousand kilometres from the arkship’s aft end. Twenty Calmissiles streaked out, followed by a flock of sensor satellites. The remaining five Deliverance ships guarding the arkship immediately fired salvos of high-velocity missiles. As before, it was no use. Fifty-megaton explosions had no effect. The Calmissiles simply swallowed anything that crossed their vacant boundary: radiation, particles, plasma . . . Seconds later all twenty holes struck the Salvation of Life, cutting clean through the rock at thirty-two kilometres a second. High-resolution sensors revealed the damage. The narrow tunnels seethed with rapidly cooling fusion flame from the Calmissile drives. Where they intersected machinery, the damage was severe, but structurally the arkship remained unbroken. The new tunnels were insignificant on something that size.
Callum felt the onemind’s concern deepening. It was analysing the attack vectors the Calmissiles had flown, seeing how humans were targeting the arkship’s engineering systems – and, more important, the wormhole terminus mechanism. Amid it all was a faint reply to Jessika’s request, an acknowledgement that was one of utter insignificance, simply an inclusion to the general orchestration of hundreds of Olyix transports that were damaged but still flightworthy.
‘We have a hangar assignment,’ Jessika confirmed.
The first wave of retreating transport ships was arriving at the Salvation of Life. As they closed in, each ship activated its negative energy regulators – hundreds of small fin-like protrusions bristling up out of the smooth fuselage like porcupine spikes reacting to a threat. In the centre of the Salvation’s aft section, the open throat of the wormhole glimmered with the signature violet sparkle of Cherenkov radiation. It was only just smaller than the diameter of the arkship. Looking down it, there was no funnel-like perspective, no distant vanishing point at the end of a tunnel through spacetime. The wormhole’s throat was simply a place where the real universe ended.
Callum shivered as he accessed the sensor image. What if the nothingness escapes?
The transport ships dived into the glowing emptiness, their manoeuvres as elegant and agile as a shoal of fish, instantly vanishing from view. Then the Avenging Heretic was only a hundred kilometres away, soaring along amid its own kind. No longer decelerating, but aligning themselves on the scintillating target. Seventy kilometres. Forty.
‘Er . . .’ Callum managed.
Behind her console, the unreal Jessika had her eyes closed, her face composed in perfect concentration. She even had perspiration glinting on her brow. The Avenging Heretic glided smartly out of the flow of transport ships, elevating itself away from the wormhole. Then they were skimming over the surface of the arkship, its dreary rock a blur of mottled grey, fluctuating wildly in brightness as the nuclear-tipped missiles chasing the transports continued to detonate behind them. A surface far too close as Jessika flew them in a tight, twisting trajectory. Even in this state, Callum perceived the shadow impulses of hard gravity variabilities tugging at his suspended physical body, as if they were riding an out-of-control roller coaster. Sensors revealed the Avenging Heretic’s own shadow flowing over the rock like a fluid ghost, flickering in and out of existence with every flash of light from the explosions.
Blackness eclipsed them so fast he yelled in shock. They’d streaked straight into a hangar entrance in a perfectly measured deceleration burst. Jessika’s piloting ability was phenomenal. He couldn’t imagine a transport’s onemind being so agile and precise.
Did the Salvation onemind notice we’re too good?
He took a breath, wondering if he should conjure up some tranquillizers from the suspension tank’s support modules, because that kind of thinking was where healthy paranoia bubbled over into outright crazy.
‘Holy shit!’ Alik exclaimed. ‘Damn, that was a ride.’
Sensors focused on their new surroundings. They were in a vast cavern whose rock walls were threaded with crinkled black roots, as if they’d dropped into the underground grotto of Nordic elementals. The floor was already home to more than twenty transport ships in various conditions, f
rom little visible damage to those with fuselages warped and split from close proximity to nuclear blasts. The Avenging Heretic slipped smoothly among them, searching for a space to land. Jessika steered them towards the rear of the hangar where several badly damaged ships were parked, and slowly settled the Avenging Heretic amid them.
‘Oh, sweet mother Mary,’ Kandara said. ‘I don’t believe this. We made it.’
*
‘They’re in,’ Johnston exclaimed as the density of tactical data expanded towards solidity in the air around him. A single frozen image hung poised to his left – the tail end of the Avenging Heretic disappearing into the darkness of a hangar entrance at the middle of the arkship. Other icons splashed, confirming the entanglement communication channel with the ship had gone, deactivated in case the Salvation of Life was able to detect it.
He focused on the ring formation of twenty stealthed portals surrounding the Salvation of Life six hundred kilometres out. ‘Initiate phase five,’ he ordered.
The portals expanded. Calmissiles flew out of them, volley after volley curving sharply to hurtle in towards the arkship, lining up on the aft section where the wormhole glimmered. Long lines of Olyix transport ships were still racing into it.
Johnston wanted to start praying. This was the moment – the greatest gamble of all time. The Neána had assured them that the arkship was capable of travelling down the wormhole, even though it carried the terminus generator on board. If it didn’t – if they were wrong, or the onemind refused to retreat – the combined punctures of eight hundred Calmissiles would obliterate the Salvation of Life.
Alpha Defence estimated there were now more than a billion human cocoons on board.
‘Come on,’ he implored. The lead Calmissiles were twenty seconds out. Fifteen. ‘Run away, curse you.’ Ten.
The strange wavering lilac light of Cherenkov radiation flooded out past the arkship’s rim. Somehow, the vast cylinder of rock was sinking into it. The light vanished, and with it the Salvation of Life.
Johnston searched every data splash for information, but there was none. Hundreds of Calmissiles were criss-crossing the zone of space where their target had been moments earlier. The command centre coordinators began directing them to intercept the abandoned transports and Deliverance ships.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 16
