‘And it will start to look hard,’ Yuri concluded.
‘Bloody right, pal. Once we trigger the Signal transmitters, the whole Olyix star system is going to know humans somehow piggybacked a ride to the enclave. They will tear the Salvation of Life apart to find us.’
‘Remaining here with the Salvation, and maybe calling to any future human attack force, was only a secondary aspect of the mission. Our absolute priority is to broadcast the Signal, to let humans know where the enclave is. You knew that when we began. We have to accept the inevitable. Once broadcast, the Signal cannot be cancelled.’
‘I do accept it, man. But it doesn’t mean we can’t take some precautions.’
Yuri sipped some tea from his oversized mug. ‘Such as?’
They spent the next ten weeks cheerfully shooting down each other’s wilder ideas, developing the concepts that did survive until they had something to bring to the others at the next watch changeover month.
Jessika’s revival was always immaculate; she awoke from the tank as if she’d been dozing for a couple of hours. Alik and Kandara took a lot longer, and Callum identified with their crabby resentment as they were helped out of the tanks. His own body still took way too long to recover every time his period in suspension ended.
In what was becoming tradition, twenty-four hours after they were out of the tank, everybody gathered around the table for a big Chinese meal. Callum even got the printers to provide therm-foil containers, so it looked like they’d ordered takeaway.
‘A bunker?’ Alik asked as he tried to use his chopsticks to hook a prawn out of his fried rice.
‘A fallback refuge,’ Callum said. ‘They’re going to come hunting us after we trigger the Signal. There aren’t many places we can be. They’ll figure it out eventually.’
‘Figure it out, or search the entire arkship,’ Yuri said. ‘Callum’s right. We need to be ready to abandon ship.’
‘And do what?’ Kandara asked. ‘The Avenging Heretic gives us options.’
‘Limited options,’ Yuri said. ‘After we pop out of this wormhole, our absolute priority is to trigger the Signal; only then can we think about getting inside the enclave. And triggering the Signal is going to create an instant shitstorm. They’ll know we’re here right away, so they’ll release the hounds. If we try and escape by flying off in real space, we have nowhere to go; we’ll be thousands of lightyears from Sol.’
‘If we try flying away, the Deliverance ships would catch us anyway,’ Jessika said. ‘Their acceleration is a lot higher than ours, and I’m guessing they’re not the most powerful warships at the gateway. Not by a long way.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ Yuri agreed glumly.
‘We originally assumed that if we could get to the enclave star undetected, we could stay invisible to the onemind after we sent the Signal,’ Callum said. ‘Now that we understand a little more about how the Salvation of Life works, I don’t think we can. At the very least we need a decoy.’
Jessika picked up some stir-fry noodles with her chopsticks and gave him a thoughtful look. ‘We could hijack another transport ship. There are twenty-seven in this hangar alone, in varying conditions; most of them are flightworthy. It could make a valiant fight for freedom and get tragically nuked.’
‘That sounds risky,’ Yuri said. ‘You’d have to neurovirus its onemind.’
‘Which Soćko proved we can do.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Alik said. ‘But here’s the thing. He was inside the transport ship, and had a direct physical connection to its neural fibres. How you gonna get inside one of them here?’
‘It’s a plan that needs work,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m still putting it out there.’
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. That’s fallback number two. But I think we should start by exploring Callum’s option.’
‘We either do it or we don’t.’ Kandara said. ‘What’s to explore?’
‘Location,’ Callum told her. ‘I’ve been riding the onemind’s local perception routines for a few weeks now.’
She grinned at him. ‘Everyone should have a hobby.’
‘There are twelve passages out of this hangar. Some are just tunnels, their version of utility channels; some are proper access corridors. And there are chambers off both of them, it seems. I’d like to send our creeperdrone spies down them to see if there’s anything suitable.’
‘And if there is?’ Jessika asked.
‘Start building up a reserve of equipment.’
‘You mean transfer the contents of the Avenging Heretic into a cave?’
‘No,’ Yuri said. ‘We won’t need that much. We can breathe the Salvation’s air, remember? So we need basic equipment, and enough food to last us a couple of months. Maybe a year.’
‘Months?’ Alik said. ‘You’re shitting me!’
‘No. Inside the enclave, time flows slowly.’
‘Says who?’ Kandara said harshly. She jabbed a chopstick towards Jessika. ‘The Neána? How do they know? If your kind weren’t here, how did they find out? And if they were here, when was it? What does that make them?’
‘It makes them a species who can neurovirus an Olyix onemind,’ Yuri said. ‘Who can extract such knowledge from an arkship memory. And even if they are cousins to the Olyix, or rebels, what the fuck difference does it make now? It’s not as if we can turn around and head for home. So far, all the information Jessika and her colleagues have provided is correct. We’re committed to this mission, and that means assuming the enclave is a bubble of slowtime.’
‘From what I’ve determined from the Salvation’s onemind, there is an enclave,’ Jessika said earnestly. ‘Just like my original information.’
‘Yuri and I talked about this,’ Callum said. ‘The enclave was built to take the Olyix to the end of time, so time has got to be flowing slow in there. Really slow. A year inside will cover centuries out here, if not longer. It has to; there’s no other way. Even if you go forwards to when this galaxy becomes quiescent and stops producing new stars, you’re looking at billions of years.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘If a human armada doesn’t come knocking within a year or two of enclave time, they never will,’ Yuri said. ‘That will be thousands of years passing outside.’
‘So what do we do then?’ Alik demanded. ‘If they never come?’
‘Please, you knew that was always possible. But we do not consider this, yes? We do not let it distract us. We continue our mission, we survive as long as we can. Then . . .’ Yuri shrugged, and ate a chunk of sweet-and-sour chicken.
‘Join the rest of the human race in a cocoon and find out what this alien god has in mind for us,’ Callum said.
‘Or go out in a fantastic blaze of gunfire,’ Kandara said wickedly.
Yuri grinned at Alik. ‘See? So many choices. And you were worried this flight would be boring.’
Alik closed his eyes. ‘Jezus H. Christ.’
*
Callum piloted one of the creeperdrone spy creatures. He was confident in the operation now, even though it was painstakingly slow. The little spiderlike thing provided a slightly weird view from its bulbous eye clusters. He didn’t understand why Jessika hadn’t incorporated a more ordinary lens, but she’d muttered something about authenticity and avoiding variance the one time he’d asked.
It was making its cautious way down a wide passageway. The floor was cut clean through the rock – a perfectly smooth surface that had dulled down the years. Walls and ceiling were a tousled weave of woody tubes – some as thick as oak trees – which were tangled by finger-wide stems, forming an enigmatic tapestry of alien browns and greys. There were fewer leaves in here, and the bioluminescent strips threaded along the bark were spaced widely, creating long stretches of shadow. Pools of liquids with sticky rims had coagulated on the floor under the fractured tubes, which Callum assiduously steered the spy creature around.
Half a kilometre from the hangar, the floor started to rise up. There were vents in a cou
ple of the big tubes – fat, bulbous shapes that he first mistook for knots in the bark. When he paused the creature close to one, he could see it was slowly dilating and contracting, breathing out damp air. The nearby bark was all covered in a furry blue-green growth, like a mould that was transforming into a fern.
A couple of hundred metres up the slope there was a fork in the passage. He steered the creature into the smaller passage. It branched again, then came out into a junction with five tunnels, one going vertical, which was almost completely jammed with tubes in a faintly obscene twining contortion. Onward, again down the narrowest tunnel. There was a gap in the web of arboreal tubes just big enough for a human to wriggle through. It was lightless inside.
Callum paused the creature and focused his consciousness on the chaotic tumble of the onemind’s thoughts. Filtering and interpretation were far more art than science. But eventually he believed he was perceiving the narrow tunnel where the creature was waiting. Whatever lay in the gap seemed to be a natural cessation in the onemind’s perception.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Jessika. ‘Trap or genuine perception break?’
‘Let me review,’ she replied.
It was nearly an hour before she spoke again. ‘There is some kind of activity in there. The tubes go in, and I can sense pressure in the fluids. But there’s very little flow. The impulses are all part of the autonomic process. I’m guessing some kind of fluid reserve.’
‘A tank?’
‘Tank, bladder, reservoir – whatever. A place to store reserves.’
‘No armoured quint inside waiting for us?’
‘Ninety-eight per cent: no. I think it’s clear.’
Callum took a breath and refocused on the spy creature. He eased it into the gap. At first guess, it was an original fissure in the asteroid before the Olyix started converting it into an arkship. The walls were irregular, creating a cleft that extended over fifty metres, varying in width from twenty metres down to paper thin at the extremities. A cluster of silky spheres five metres in diameter were affixed to the walls close to the entrance with tough strings of fibre encasing them like nets. The tubes plaited around them, slowly pushing fluids in and out. Callum thought they looked like eggs laid by some beast twice the size of a T. rex, and ten times scarier.
Beyond the egg tanks, the cavern was empty.
‘This place goes against everything we know of asteroid composition,’ Kandara said. ‘I’ve been on enough of them to know they’re either S-type – the solids – or a congealed pile of rubble. They don’t have caves and caverns. That’s strictly part of planetary geology: cavities in rock form from water eroding limestone. And the one thing you don’t get in space rock is limestone, because it’s sedimentary. The other thing you don’t get on an asteroid is water, let alone free-flowing water.’
‘The obelisks Feriton reported seeing in the fourth chamber were made from sedimentary rock,’ Alik said.
‘A fourth chamber which didn’t exist,’ Yuri countered. ‘It was a simulation.’
‘And yet, here we have a bona fide cave. Somehow I don’t think the Olyix produced it for aesthetic satisfaction. It could be significant.’
‘I really don’t care about asteroid formation processes,’ Callum said. ‘We have a cavern that has minimal perception inside. End of story.’
‘But why is it there?’
‘I dunno. Bring it up at the next philosophy-of-geology lecture. We have our refuge.’
‘We have the first possible site for our refuge,’ Yuri said. ‘Although I agree it is favourable. Let’s keep reviewing the locale.’
After another three days, they agreed Callum’s cave was the one they were going to use. There were other cavities within a kilometre of the hangar, but they were either smaller or packed full of the arkship’s biological structures.
‘So how do we get to it?’ Alik asked.
‘The visual glitches in the hangar perception routines should cover us in here,’ Jessika said. ‘It’ll take time, but I should be able to extend them up the passageway to the cave.’
‘And physically?’ Yuri asked. ‘How do we get our supplies there?’
‘Trojan horse. We’ll use an initiator to assemble a creeperdrone in the shape of one of the medium-size creatures, and use its internal cavity as a cargo hold. That way we can move stuff there slowly.’
‘I’d like to establish our own sensors in the passageway first,’ Kandara said. ‘The same type we’ve installed around the hangar; they can keep watch for any of the Salvation’s own creatures or a quint moving about. The last thing we want is your cargo creature unexpectedly bumbling into anything too analytical. We only make a delivery run when the passage is completely clear, agreed?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Callum said.
‘Okay then,’ Yuri said. ‘We go ahead with this. Let’s start with a wish list. And, Kandara – personal defence weapons only.’
‘Mary, but you really know how to kill a party.’
Neutron Star
Morgan’s Arrival
The fleet was still two AUs out from the neutron star when Ainsley appeared, velocity matching perfectly so that the elegant white ship held position a thousand kilometres from the Morgan. The duty crew on the bridge had no warning; there wasn’t a single sensor on any ship in the fleet that had detected the giveaway gravitational waves that theoretically should have been coming from Ainsley’s drive as the ship approached.
‘A stealthed gravitonic drive,’ Yirella muttered as she clambered out of bed. ‘Who knew?’ The alerts zipping into her databud had woken her after only a couple of hours’ sleep. She’d gone to bed expecting to be well awake and refreshed when they finished their deceleration manoeuvre an estimated million kilometres outside the neutron star’s unnatural ring. So far contact had been limited: a few messages from the fleet when they were a lightmonth out, announcing they were coming – in peace. A brief: We know, you are welcome, in reply. And details – what orbit to go into, contact protocols; the neutron star inhabitants were organizing a reception congress to discuss ‘unified intent’. All reasonably predictable, if a little stark. There were no images of them or their habitats, no explanations of what the thermally active ring particles were.
Then right at the end came the only question the neutron star inhabitants asked: Is Yirella with you?
That was embarrassing.
In a pleasing way.
Dellian was sitting up beside her, a befuddled expression on his face as he scratched his neck, then his arm. Yawned.
‘Your other boyfriend’s back, then,’ he mumbled as he considered the data rolling through his optik.
Yirella resisted a sigh of exasperation. He was never going to let that go. She’d tried to explain to him that giving the seedships independence and freedom was her idea, her gamble, her responsibility. And she was only too aware, had she confided in him what she’d done, that burden of knowing would’ve chewed him up. Yes, it should have been a formal proposition to council, duly debated and voted on. Except it would have been voted down. Kenelm’s reaction alone proved that, and sie wasn’t the only one with that view on her utter irresponsibility. So every time she tried to mollify Del it came across as petulant and self-serving, which had to stop. She was confident he would ultimately forgive her, or at least stop snarking, given enough time – say, a couple of centuries.
‘So it would seem,’ she replied.
‘What now?’
‘Nothing. I expect Ainsley is just confirming we’re not a disguised Olyix attack.’
‘What about us making sure this isn’t an Olyix ambush?’
She pressed her teeth together, refusing to show him how that riled her. ‘Good call. Cinrea is on watch. I’ll tell hir.’
‘Don’t suppose I’m needed.’
‘Did the bridge call for you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good, then; they don’t think we’re about to be shot at.’ She quickly put a tunic on and left the cabin. When
the door shut, Dellian had rolled over to face the wall, his eyes closed.
‘Saints,’ she hissed quietly.
A white icon slipped into her optic. ‘Trouble in paradise?’ Ainsley asked.
‘And you can go to hell, too,’ she snapped at him.
His chortle was immensely annoying. ‘It’s good to see you. Genuinely. How was the flight?’
‘Eventful.’ She told him about Kenelm, and the group of Utopial devotees Emilja and Soćko had gathered to steer exodus generations.
‘Well, we did think it would be something like that, didn’t we?’ Ainsley said. ‘Two thousand years of political fraudulence, though; gotta admit, that’s impressive. My father used to tell me that when he was a kid, change – in culture and technology – was so endemic that people were complaining no one had a job for life any more. I wonder if Dad would approve of this particular reincarnation of sinecure.’
Yirella smiled. ‘I thought politics was a calling, not a job.’
‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’
‘So what in the sweet Saints have people built here? They changed the star’s rotation rate!’
‘Yeah. How better to announce to the whole galaxy: Here we are. This civilization got very smart, and . . . libertarian isn’t the word, and post-scarcity communism doesn’t fit, either; I’m not quite sure how to describe their politics. Put it this way: they were very argumentative once they started to think properly for themselves. But they did agree to majority consensus. It brought a tear to my eye.’
‘So are they going to fight the Olyix?’
‘You’ll see. It’s quite a congress they’re putting together for you.’
‘They, uh, asked about me.’
‘Ah, yeah, about that; I may have pushed your role in our little conspiracy to facilitate their society.’
‘Oh, Saints.’
‘Don’t go all morose on me. It’ll work in your favour.’
‘You think?’
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 24
