In addition to all the precise information coming at him through the console displays, Alik had the Salvation onemind’s more prosaic thoughts at the back of his mind. He could understand them better now; years of the spectral presence lurking like a malign secondary subconscious every time he opened the neural interface had given him the practice to focus on individual routines. That and Jessika’s invaluable tuition meant it was easier for him to sort through the cascade of alien impulses, teasing out the relevant aspects without the onemind realizing.
Right now he was experiencing something that the onemind had never projected before: eagerness. The end of the wormhole was close. They would arrive at the enclave, where it would be welcomed and become accepted. That’s wrong, he thought. Embraced? Supported? Favoured? The sentiment didn’t really have a human equivalent.
‘I don’t get it,’ Alik said. ‘What kind of reception is it expecting?’ He looked over at Jessika, whose chair’s puffy safety cushioning had practically absorbed her, leaving only her head and arms visible.
‘It’s content about becoming established within the enclave. Its purpose will have been achieved; it has returned with over a billion people to deliver to the God at the End of Time. So now it’s going into – I think – a storage orbit or resting place of some kind inside the enclave, along with all the other arkships that have returned in success. It can take up its rightful place.’
‘It thinks this is a success?’ Alik asked. ‘It got its ass kicked on S-Day.’
‘Depends on perspective,’ Callum said. ‘Earth is uninhabitable now. There’ll be tens of millions evacuated, which is basically a token when you consider the global population is still probably around the six billion mark. That means the next wave of Olyix will scoop up everyone left. They won, the bastards. This round. Because us being here is a success, as well, isn’t it?’
‘Je-zus, you are getting fucking bleak, man.’
‘I felt it, too,’ Yuri said. ‘Salvation is not . . . happy, exactly, but content. Its active part in the Olyix crusade is over, and it’s anticipating the next phase of its existence.’
‘Until our descendants come knocking.’ Kandara smirked from behind a display that was mostly sculpted in blood-red graphics.
‘See,’ Callum said, grinning. ‘Optimism.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Alik muttered.
‘I wonder how many arkships are inside the enclave,’ Callum mused. ‘How many other species.’
‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Jessika said. ‘It’s going to be interesting. I don’t know how long the Olyix crusade has been going. We weren’t told.’
‘Why the hell did your abode cluster think that’s classified?’ Kandara asked.
‘I don’t know. My best guess would be that information will expose something about the Neána that increases their vulnerability to the Olyix.’
‘How long have they been around, that they were close enough to the Olyix to observe them?’
Jessika’s hands rose through her display icons in an elaborate shrug.
‘Is it even worth guessing how many species they’ve done this to?’ Callum asked.
‘Utterly pointless,’ Jessika said. ‘We have no idea of how many sentient species rise up to a technological level in the galaxy in – say – a five-thousand-year period.’
‘And how many fall of their own accord,’ Yuri said.
‘And those that are sentient but don’t go along the technology route,’ Callum added.
‘Je-zus, can we focus on some positives here, people?’ Alik said. ‘Please. This day deserves that, at least.’ He turned his attention to the sensor data.
As always, the sensor clusters that their creeperdrones had installed around the hangar entrance showed nothing. Alik couldn’t stand looking at the non-space of the wormhole fabric. So for actual flight progress, he had to rely on the onemind’s strange perception of the wormhole – a dull grey tunnel whose wavering walls were threaded with golden strands. Now at some implausible distance ahead, those glowing lines had knotted together, creating a dawn light glow.
The Salvation of Life was fixated on the end of the wormhole.
‘Not long,’ Jessika said. ‘Stand by.’
Alik wasn’t sure what he was expecting. After all, they’d exited a wormhole before, back when they reached the Olyix sensor station. He didn’t remember the onemind being tense about that.
He waited in silence as the arkship continued its stoic flight through nothingness. He was having trouble accepting that they were finally arriving at the enclave. Four years of flight – plenty of which had been spent in suspension – should have prepared him. Although, to be honest, he hadn’t really expected to get this far.
The end of the wormhole flight, when it came, was an instantaneous transition. Alik’s visual display flipped from the emptiness he was trying to ignore to images of normal space. The impact was bewildering. At first, half of space seemed to be a glaring white nebula.
Data blossomed across the basic displays surrounding his seat like leaves surging into life along a tree’s branches after a long winter. The information deluge was as bad as the visual one. He ignored the factual summary the ship’s genten was assembling as a smile of wonder grew across his face. His eyes were slowly making sense of the sensor feed, revealing a large star in the foreground. Behind it, the galactic core was a vast jewel blazing white-gold across space. He couldn’t believe that many stars actually existed, never mind in a single congregation. ‘Je-zus wept. Where the fuck are we?’
‘A long, long way from home,’ Yuri said quietly.
Despite the grandeur of the galactic core, Alik was startled by the star they had arrived at. Tables of numbers multiplying around him confirmed how exceptional it was. ‘That is one big-ass star,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jessika agreed. ‘About twice the size of Sirius. The sensors haven’t found any planets – not on this side, anyway.’
‘Not even a gas giant?’ Alik asked, running through the information.
‘No. But that ring is something else,’ she said.
Alik focused on the thin band orbiting one point five AUs out from the star. Unlike the usual mucky grey of asteroidal regolith, this ring gleamed with refracted light from the brilliant star, as if quartz dust had settled like frost to coat every particle.
‘The particle density is crazy,’ Callum said. ‘That can’t be natural.’
‘It’s definitely not an accretion disc,’ Jessika said. ‘So I guess we know what happened to the planets.’
‘Why the hell would you do that?’ Yuri asked.
‘Because you can?’ she replied.
‘No,’ Callum said. ‘Check out those knots in the ring. They’re alive with activity.’
Alik directed his sensor feed to expand the area Callum had mentioned. The resolution wasn’t great – there was only so much you could do with sensor clumps the size of a pinhead – but each of the knot particles was slowly rotating around a vast artefact in a slow-motion hurricane whorl. ‘Olyix industrial stations?’ he wondered out loud. The main bulk of the things were spherical, with dozens of tapering spires radiating out. On the surface below them, a web of precise lines of purple and amber light cast multicoloured shadows up on the summits. Spaceships – a lot bigger than the Deliverance ships – were holding formation nearby. As he watched, another ship rose up from the station to join them.
Alik shifted focus to the next knot, where a similar station was surrounded by a flotilla of Deliverance ships. As he pulled the focus back, he could see a series of similar knots stretching right around the ring; there must have been thousands of them. Which means tens of thousands of spaceships – more like hundreds of thousands. Je-zus. One of the stations further along seemed to be clamped to a big rock particle, shaping it into a cylinder. An arkship! So that’s why Salvation has caves like you get on a planet: It used to be a part of a solid world.
‘They must have broken the planets down into digestible chunks,’ Jessik
a said. ‘Now they have the entire mass of the solar system as raw material to manufacture warships and arkships.’
‘Found the radio telescopes,’ Kandara announced.
Alik switched to the zone her icon was indicating. Three AUs outside the ring, glowing bright in the glaring starlight, were pentagonal dodecahedrons, big brothers to the ones they’d seen orbiting the star of the Olyix sensor outpost. If their positioning was constant all the way around the star, there would be a hundred and fifteen of them. ‘That’s good. We can use them to help boost the Signal from our transmitters,’ he said. ‘We just need the ones aligned on the section of space where Sol is.’
‘The genten’s nearly finished star mapping,’ Jessika told him. ‘But judging from the apparent size of the core, we’re about fifty thousand lightyears from home.’
The number didn’t really resonate with Alik. At some point in the last four years, he’d resigned himself that he’d never return to Earth. In reality, he probably wouldn’t even last more than a few hours after they reached the enclave star system. Setting up their fallback refuge had driven that point home. Even so – fifty thousand lightyears!
‘How the hell is any human armada ever going to get here?’ he asked. ‘If they pick up our Signal, which is going to be unlikely verging on fucking never, they’ll have to fly fifty thousand lightyears. Which – and correct me if I’ve screwed up the maths – will take them fifty thousand years.’
‘For a neutral observer it’ll take that long,’ Callum said. ‘But relativistic travel will make it a lot shorter for anyone on board the armada ships.’
‘Yeah? Well, we’re going to be those neutral observers, so we’re looking at a hundred and twenty thousand years before anyone turns up. Goddamn! This is insane!’
‘Are you saying we don’t send the Signal?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t fucking know. This whole mission was one giant mistake.’
‘We send the Signal,’ Kandara said. ‘The Avenging Heretic is going to get ordered to fly to some kind of dock for repair, or maybe they’ll want to scrap it and recycle the mass.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Alik sneered. ‘The Olyix are known the galaxy over for their environmental credentials. Recycling, my ass.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said with icy patience. ‘The Avenging Heretic will leave this hangar soon. That’s why we put the refuge together. One way or another, the Olyix will know we are here. So we send the Signal, and if it isn’t humans who detect it, maybe someone will. The Neána perhaps. Someone who can do something other than run and hide. We will have accomplished something. I did not come all this way just to walk up to the onemind and surrender like a fucking coward.’
‘I’m not talking about surrendering,’ Alik said angrily.
‘Then why don’t you tell us exactly what the hell you do want to do?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t know, man. Send the Signal, I guess. It’s just . . . This place. They’ve broken up planets so they can use them! I feel so goddamn small. And don’t any of you try telling me you don’t feel that, either.’
‘I’m with Alik,’ Jessika said. ‘I’ve just found the power ring. Check out the star’s equator.’
Surprise at having her agree with him battled with Alik’s dismay. ‘They built one for this star? The circumference is over thirteen million kilometres!’ But the display showed him she was telling the truth. A dark band was spinning above the corona, whipping up million-kilometre twisters of incandescent plasma that spun off huge, arching prominences.
‘It would have to be,’ Callum said. ‘I’ve been checking the number of wormhole termini in this orbit. Over a thousand so far. They are going to need the mother lode of energy to sustain them.’
The sensor clusters were showing faint purple glimmers following their own orbit ten million kilometres outside the ring. Some were brighter than others; those were open, with ships moving in and out of them.
‘Fucking hell,’ Yuri said. ‘Do all of them lead to sensor stations?’
‘I hope so, because as sure as it rains in Glasgow, I don’t want there to be other enclaves.’
‘Son of a bitch, what have we walked into?’ Alik murmured.
‘Exactly what we knew would be here,’ Kandara said. ‘Come on, get a grip.’
He wanted to scowl at her, but she was right, of course. That didn’t help, either.
‘Okay,’ Callum said. ‘So we can see the wormholes. Where’s the gateway into the enclave?’
Alik checked the displays, seeing the indigo shimmer of the wormhole terminus shrinking behind the Salvation of Life. A stream of big pyramidal ships was flowing in a wide spiral around the arkship. The onemind was greeting them all, returning to that strange state of satisfaction it had displayed when they arrived at the sensor station. In return, the ships were sending their welcome and congratulations that mingled with a thirst for information. The response to their curiosity was a flood of memories so vast that Alik couldn’t begin to absorb it. Instead he caught flashes of Earth and humans and city shields glowing like half-buried suns and MHD asteroids shattering in nuclear fire, the gargantuan explosions levelling Theophilus crater.
‘Motherfuckers,’ Alik said, his mood darkening.
‘The gateway has to be different, doesn’t it?’ Kandara said. ‘The wormholes lead away from here. We want something that goes . . . inside space?’
‘I’m going to see if I can find the location in the onemind’s thoughts,’ Jessika said. ‘Hang on.’
Alik watched the flock of pyramid ships that had greeted them shoot away skittishly. Despite their rigid geometry, there was something unnerving about such avian behaviour, as if they weren’t quite in control of their actions and were simply letting instinct guide them. Then he saw why they were departing. A whole flotilla of Resolution ships was approaching. Their size should have made them stately, moving with a ponderous surety, but instead they were fast and agile, an effortless show of power and precision that was intimidating all by itself. They twisted around the Salvation of Life – a salute to all it had achieved – then plunged on past, heading towards the wormhole’s intense Cherenkov gleam.
‘They’re heading for Sol, aren’t they?’ Kandara said.
‘Yes,’ Yuri agreed.
‘It will take them a while, though,’ Alik said. ‘Decades, you said.’
‘Yeah,’ Kandara agreed reluctantly. ‘So people will have some time to get ready. Exodus habitats will be built. They’ve probably already launched a dozen more by now.’
‘And in a hundred and twenty thousand years, they’ll be here to liberate us.’
Kandara gave him a finger, backed up by an exasperated glare. He knew he’d be on the receiving end of more grief when they came off duty.
‘I’ve found the gateway,’ Jessika announced. ‘It’s a million kilometres inside the ring, about one and a quarter AUs from us.’
Alik watched the display as the sensors zoomed in on the area of space she’d designated. In the back of his head, he could feel the onemind determining the course it had to take to reach the gateway, the vectors it needed to fly. It was preparing to increase power from the main generators and feed it into the gravitonic drive, which had been idle while they were inside the wormhole.
There were other thoughts he caught, too. A small subsection of the onemind started to orchestrate the ships it was carrying, designating their destination. None of them would be required once they were through the gateway and began the long hiatus until they arrived at the era of the God at the End of Time. Damage assessments were being reviewed, discovering if the ships had deteriorated further during the voyage home. Those that could no longer fly would be removed, their oneminds transferred into the empty bioneural core of new ships, while the ships themselves would be released into the ring, where they would vacuum ablate to dust and gas over the next million years – dust that would ultimately merge with other particles that would go on to feed the industrial constructors.
Okay, now that’s what I call sustainable recycling, Alik thought in dark amusement. A kind of long-term planning that put the exodus habitats to shame.
‘We need to deploy the Signal transmitters,’ Yuri said. ‘If the ships in this hangar start to wake up, they might notice our activity. And from what I can understand out of the onemind’s thoughts, we haven’t got long now.’
*
Jessika increased the level of distortion infecting the neuralstratum that covered the hangar as much as she dared to shield their exit from the Avenging Heretic. Alik and Callum steered more than a dozen creeperdrone spiders along the passageways and corridors leading to their refuge cave, alert for any quint or larger creatures who might be coming their way. With a perimeter watch established, they got ready to leave.
The bridge simulation faded from Alik’s mind, and he opened his eyes to see the others sitting around the table in the main life-support section. For some reason, they’d seated themselves in the same order they always used on the bridge. When he glanced around the cramped compartment with its little nests of dirt in acute corners and long-dried smears of food trodden into the floor, he was surprised to find how he’d grown accustomed to having just a few square metres of personal space.
‘Okay then,’ Yuri said dispassionately. ‘Let’s go.’
The environment suit the initiator had extruded was similar to the kind of gear Alik had worn on tactical raids back in his early days with the Bureau – a one-piece made from a grey fabric that had a weird blurred sheen, very hard for an eye to focus on. Presumably it would be equally difficult for the optically sensitive cells on the biological lattice of pipe trunks and leaves stretched across the hangar. The helmet was more sophisticated than the old tactical team gas masks, too. This was a simple hemisphere, with the same grey covering and no visor, so the optical fuzz was complete. He put it on, locking the collar, and his tarsus lens fed him the image from the helmet cameras, providing him with a sharp resolution and excellent zoom function. It had air recycler filters built in, so there was no breath exhaled for an infrared giveaway. Not quite a full spacesuit, but if they did suffer a depressurization event, it could protect them from the vacuum while they got to safety.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 28
