His chair swivelled so he was facing Emilja and Ainsley. They were staring at the chamber’s central display, watching the patch of empty space where the massive arkship had been.
Ainsley raised a fist in victory. ‘That’s it, then. We dick-punched the bastards.’ He started laughing.
‘Heaven preserve us,’ Emilja said. ‘What have we done?’
‘The only thing we could,’ Johnston assured her.
‘They will be back.’
‘Oh, yes. And when they return, there is only one thing left for us to do: run. We need to be ready.’
‘Christ’s sake, you two,’ Ainsley said. ‘Lighten up. We won. In a couple of centuries, we can fight them on our own terms. You’ll see.’
Emilja gave him a pitying smile. ‘Thankfully, I won’t. That is our children’s fight. And they are not going to thank us for it.’
Nashua Habitat, Delta Pavonis
S-Day, 11th December 2206
Gwendoline Seymore-Qing-Zangari was in the department of exodus habitat construction’s main lounge – a huge communal area where the staff could go and chill. The design subroutine that had produced it had aimed for European stately home but had landed at corporate employee informal function zone. However, the sofas were deep and comfy, the holographic projector top quality, the software in the servez delivering drinks reasonably semi-sentient, and the printed snacks surprisingly good. She could have gone to her apartment with its spectacular view along Nashua’s cylindrical landscape, but being alone when such a decisive – the decisive – battle for the future of the human race was being fought would have been too depressing. No way was she going to observe with her family. And since she’d arrived two years ago, there’d been precious little time to make any friends. So she’d chosen to settle down and watch Strikeback with her team; they’d all grown close enough over the last twenty months, even though they weren’t Zangaris. She’d brought in a few colleagues from her London office – ones she’d worked with in the past and knew were super-competent. Others had been assigned to her by Delta Pavonis: some from Alpha Defence – which in reality meant the Sol Senate, checking up that the Zangaris and Utopials were upholding their part of the arrangement to build the exodus fleet – and the rest from various astroengineering consortia, weighted in favour of the Eta Cassiopeiae Billionaire Belt.
The display hanging in the air was heavy on data tags, with plenty of long-distance sensor imagery of explosions above Earth, and more disturbingly in the atmosphere.
‘We really are never going back, are we?’ Matilde d’Gorro said bitterly. ‘Not with that radioactive shit piled on top of the Olyix toxicology.’ She’d been one of Gwendoline’s executive administrators back in London, partying as hard as she worked – which was with total dedication. Now she was a paid-up miserabilist, but still kept her impressive focus, which was why Gwendoline continued to use her.
‘They’re single-phase fusion bombs,’ Bettine Abbey, one of the Billionaire Belt science directors, responded. ‘Clean ignition, so they don’t pump out much contamination.’
‘Ten thousand of them?’ Josquain sneered. ‘Those gamma emissions will—’
‘We’ve terraformed worse. Look at Ulysses.’
‘Delta Eridani was different. It didn’t have the kind of particle decay Earth’s going to suffer. And anyway—’
‘Enough,’ Gwendoline said. ‘None of us will ever be returning to Earth.’
‘But it’s our homeworld,’ Matilde exclaimed, almost in tears. ‘There are still whole areas of the biosphere we know nothing about. How are we going to catalogue them now?’
‘Save it for the people who are never going to join the exodus,’ Bettine snapped.
‘Earth is more than just humans!’
‘Oh, fuck, you’re not seriously going speciesist on us? Today?’
‘Time out, both of you,’ Gwendoline ordered. She knew she should be kinder, more sympathetic, but everyone was exhausted, everyone was frightened, and everyone had family who were affected. The arguments about drawing up lists of those who’d get to embark on the exodus habitats were fractious at best. She’d heard there’d been physical fights break out over them.
We just don’t have the psychology to deal with Armageddon. Though judging by the confidential medical reports the Zangari council had allowed her to see, humans certainly had the mood drugs for it.
She watched the clusters of Olyix transport ships fleeing Earth. They were flocking together in huge squadrons and accelerating hard for the Salvation of Life up at Lagrange Three. That puzzled her. A surprise first strike against the alien arkship would have been better tactics, surely? They could have disabled the wormhole and gravitonic drive, leaving the arkship stranded. The cocoons could have been rescued. But now the Olyix onemind knew the Strikeback cruisers and missiles were approaching and was undoubtedly preparing to flee.
‘Call Loi,’ she told Theano, her altme.
‘Network unable to connect.’
‘What? Try again.’
‘Unable to connect. He is offline.’
She grimaced. He was heavily involved in Strikeback, possibly even in the command centre along with Yuri, so he’d be incredibly busy right now. And definitely wouldn’t appreciate a call from his mother. But . . . ‘What’s his location?’
‘Classified.’
‘Well, what was his last non-classified location?’
‘The Delta Pavonis star system.’
‘Okay. Well, leave a message for him. I want to—’ She stopped in surprise as Ainsley Zangari III’s icon splashed into her tarsus lens. ‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Stop trying to call Loi,’ Ainsley III said.
‘I just wanted to—’
‘You’re tripping all sorts of security alerts. He’s involved in Strikeback; you know that. Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is rather critical to our survival right now. Stop being his mother, for fuck’s sake. He’s old enough to take care of himself and make his own decisions.’
‘But—’
Ainsley III’s icon vanished.
What the actual hell? She glanced surreptitiously around the lounge to see if anyone was looking at her. No. Now you’re getting paranoid. But the reaction from Ainsley III was disturbing. So Loi was in the command centre helping. That wasn’t a reason to snap at her. Unless he wasn’t in the . . . Oh, shit!
Horatio, at least, responded straight away to her call. ‘Hey, you. Did you know this was going to happen?’ he asked breezily.
‘What?’
‘The fightback, silly. What did you think I meant?’
Very conscious a G8Turing security routine would be monitoring her closely now, she said: ‘It is what we’ve been working towards.’
‘It’s magnificent, Gwendoline! The Deliverance ships have all gone. The London shield isn’t under attack any more. There’s no sound, no devil-sky light – not any more. I’ve got people here in the community centre crying their eyes out. We knew the settled worlds would help us. I’ve always kept telling everyone that, but it’s been such a long two years. You should see the party that’s kicking off down here.’
‘I’m so glad,’ she said. For some reason her eyes were tearing up.
‘The government’s opened some visual feeds from orbit. We can see the Olyix ships retreating. Are your forces going to invade the Salvation of Life?’
‘I have no idea what’s going to happen next. And if I did . . .’
‘You wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Damn right.’
‘Good for you. God, I am so happy right now. I wish you were here, just for today. You have no idea what it was like seeing those bastard Deliverance ships turn tail and run.’
‘I miss you,’ she said. ‘Really badly.’
‘Yeah, so much likewise. But this helps, right?’
‘Helps?’
‘You and me,’ he said. ‘I know it isn’t the victory people here think it is right now. I’m guessing we can’t even switch off the shield, the
Olyix have ruined the climate so badly. Which means everyone has to leave.’
Gwendoline couldn’t do it, couldn’t tell him. There was no ice left anywhere on land, not any more – no glaciers, not a single mountain left that was crowned in stately white. What was left of the Arctic ice cap was shrinking rapidly, while the massive Antarctic ice shelves that had so slowly thickened again after the twenty-first century’s anthrochange had finally fractured, breaking off so the remaining country-sized bergs were melting fast. Rising sea levels would soon add to the misery of the surviving cities, as dangerous as the overheated atmosphere tormented with its single world-throttling storm. ‘They do, yes,’ she said softly. ‘We think the Olyix will be back. And you don’t want to be around when that happens; nobody does.’
‘I want to be with you when that happens, to go . . . wherever. The two of us together.’
‘You can be here inside of a minute, you know that. You have the portal.’
‘Yeah, but in the meantime I have to be here. I can’t abandon my people, not now. I’m doing so much good here, Gwendoline. I’m helping.’
And it’ll all be for nothing. ‘I know. I’m so proud of you.’
‘You’re keeping your end of the bargain, as well, aren’t you?’
‘I am. Of course I am. We’re going to build hundreds of exodus habitats – thousands if we get the time.’
‘Thank you. Love you.’
‘Love you.’
FinalStrike Mission
Flight Year 9
Yirella was already yawning when she and Dellian walked into the hibernation compartment. There was something about the place that was simply restful: its size, the quiet efficiency of all the sarcophagi-like suspension chambers, the reduced lighting, and a temperature several degrees below the rest of the Morgan. She suspected this was the way temples and churches had felt on old Earth.
They went into the washroom together and undressed, smirking as if they were back in the senior year on the Immerle estate.
‘We had last night,’ she said coyly.
‘I know.’
Being together for the last fourteen months had been good. Everyone who’d been revived for the Captain’s Council had been active while the fleet accelerated up to relativistic velocity.
Yirella had relished contributing to all the review-group meetings about the Signal from Lolo Maude, speculating on what had happened and where the original Strike mission had gone – if it had. The Morgan had constructed new sensor arrays to study the K-class star, but that had added nothing to their knowledge. All they had were assumptions and guesswork, which put her in her element.
Outside of the meetings and official watch duties, she and Dellian had treated the time like the holiday they’d never had on Juloss. So much so that, during the last month, she’d found herself resenting the approaching day when they’d be back at point-nine lightspeed. The interlude had given her a chance to relax in a way she never had before. From their perspective, the goal they were heading for was so remote it could be comfortably ignored, giving her a degree of freedom that was unique in her experience. Limited freedom, maybe, but the Morgan had centuries’ worth of music and drama and literature on file that she could dip into whenever she wanted, and it had Dellian, who for once wasn’t stuck in an eternal cycle of fitness routines and combat training sessions. It was like finding out what being human was actually like – a year of living what they’d always been promised.
By the time they stood beside his suspension chamber and she kissed him goodbye, she was struggling with a tangle of emotions.
‘See you in a heartbeat and three years,’ he said tenderly.
‘That’s a date.’
Yirella refused to look back as she walked over to her own chamber. A medical technician was waiting for her. ‘I can manage,’ she said, slightly irritable, as sie offered her an arm.
There was the inevitable moment of coffin fever as the transparent lid slid shut. On the other side of the glass, the med tech gave her a thumbs-up, and she nodded, taking an apprehensive breath. Slim robot arms slid out of the padded sides of the chamber and carefully plugged umbilical tubes into her abdominal sockets. She closed her eyes and activated her neural interface.
The little biotech unit hadn’t been removed after she’d helped with Dellian’s treatment. She’d told Alimyne it would help her work, designing the neutron star civilization, allowing her to access and direct the G8Turing formatting routines a lot faster than through a standard databud. Alimyne had reluctantly agreed.
And she’d been right; it had proved incredibly useful in crafting the directives that the seedships would use as a foundation for the neutron star civilization they were to birth. But it also gave her a much greater access to the Morgan’s network than a databud. Combined with the override routines Ainsley had provided her, she had a level of control over the ship that would have alarmed Dellian had he known.
Yirella used her direct link to load a simple instruction into the suspension chamber management routines and closed her eyes, smiling faintly as the umbilicals fed the preliminary sedative into her body.
*
Consciousness arrived easily. Yirella’s body recognized it as if she were waking up in the morning rather than recovering from hibernation, but then it had only been three days. She felt refreshed and roguishly thrilled by what she was about to do. First she checked that the compartment’s monitoring routines were ignoring her; the overrides she’d loaded had created a blind spot around her chamber. No alerts had been triggered.
The umbilicals unplugged, and the lid slid back. While she showered she reviewed the ship’s status – particularly the location of the active-duty crew – then finally reviewed the other illicit procedure she’d begun. Two decks down, a biologic initiator had spent three weeks producing a human body. The cyborg didn’t have a full range of organs, just basic modules that could sustain the biologic muscles that overlaid a carbon skeleton, which in turn had been dressed in very realistic skin.
And it was ready.
Her routines scouted the route up to the suspension compartment, creating a safe passage. Yirella walked the cyborg up carefully.
She was dressed and ready when it entered the washroom, carrying a case of additional remotes the initiator had produced for her. Looking at the perfect replica of herself was the strangest sensation. She didn’t know if she should run or smile in admiration.
This part of the plan was always going to be the most ambiguous, because she and Ainsley didn’t know quite what they were dealing with. One version – the original idea – had the initiators producing a batch of insect-sized remotes packed with sensors that she could control while resting in the chamber. It certainly had the least risk. Then the Morgan had detected Lolo’s Signal – a random factor that could never have been anticipated. Her year off everything – worrying, plotting – made her reluctant to hand everything over to remotes. She wanted to be more involved, telling herself she could do a better job than any sensor, that she needed to be in the room. So she’d designed the cyborg.
Her doppelgänger lay back down in her suspension chamber, and the lid slid back up. That way, any of the duty crew performing a routine visual check – which was a mandatory once-a-day inspection – would just see her resting in there as normal.
It was a long way around the Morgan’s life-support section from the hibernation compartment to the captain’s private quarters, and several decks higher. Yirella took it carefully, deactivating the monitors section by section, constantly checking the position of any crew in the corridors so they didn’t come across her. Three and a half hours later she was outside the door. She ran one final review of the quarters to make sure Kenelm wasn’t inside. It seemed to be clear – unless of course Kenelm was using routines every bit as sophisticated as hers. After all, if she was right, sie had been on the Factory when Ainsley was made.
Yirella hesitated just for a second, then sent an override code into the door mechanism. It u
nlocked silently, and she walked in. Kenelm’s private quarters were made up of eight rooms: a formal reception room, a lounge, an entertainment room wrapped around an interactive stage, a dining room, a spa, a bedroom, a washroom and a study. Lights came on as she stood on the threshold. The small sensor remotes clinging to her clothes extended their insect legs and clambered down onto the floor. They spread out, and she closed her eyes, riding them, multiple images flowing into her brain through the neural interface. It allowed her to pervade every room of the quarters at once, examining the structure and fittings simultaneously.
There were no independent sensors active, and no Kenelm sleeping on hir bed. Sie really had gone back into hibernation a day after Yirella, as scheduled. Yirella allowed herself to exhale and got to work. The remotes carefully recorded the layout of each room: the way everything had been left when Kenelm went for suspension, the position of all the loose items, even the way the chairs were oriented. It might have been excessive caution, but she didn’t want Kenelm to know someone had been snooping.
When everything was mapped, the obvious place to start a forensic-level analysis was the study. She dispatched the majority of the remotes there while she sat down in the dining room. Kenelm certainly had some of the best food extruders in the fleet, and after three days on fluid nutrients oozing into her via the umbilicals, she was ravenous.
Five hours later the remotes had examined and explored every square millimetre of the study and everything in it, even scanning for hidden alcoves or passages. Yirella stood in the middle of the room, looking around with the results splashed inside her head. Network cables seemed to be woven everywhere beneath the decking and walls. Power cables were bright fizzing lines; the ephemeral outlines of systems and sensors glimmered like fading holograms. She was here in person because she knew intuition was something that couldn’t be enacted through remotes. But now, it turned out that staring suspiciously around the study wasn’t the mystery-busting breakthrough in real life that it was in all the books she’d accessed.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 17
