The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.]

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘So we should be grateful it’s not more than three thousand?’ Kandara asked.

  ‘I don’t think gratitude comes into this. I think this whole situation is too big for emotion. All we can do is deal in facts.’

  ‘Observe and move on, huh?’ Callum asked. ‘Don’t let it get to you.’

  Maybe the others didn’t catch the edge, but Yuri did. He still hasn’t let go of Savi and Zagreus. A hundred years, for fuck’s sake. ‘Like Alik said, we have a job to do. A worthwhile one. We need to concentrate on that.’

  ‘Sure. Yeah, right.’

  *

  The Salvation of Life altered course over the next couple of hours, rising up out of the plane of the ecliptic so it could decelerate into polar orbit around the gas giant. As they drew closer, there was no mistaking the composition of the ring. Every one of its particles was another arkship, though the sizes did vary. Most of them had acquired their own protracted fluorescent halo from the magnetic bow wave effect, a more intense violet than the gas giant’s gilded shimmer below their orbit.

  As they manoeuvred to rendezvous, sliding into a large gap in the ring, the Salvation of Life began to amass its own nimbus. Simultaneously, they lost the long tail of unquiet vapour they’d generated flying through the nebula.

  Yuri was aware of the onemind’s contentment returning to enliven its thought routines, the same self-assurance it had possessed right up until the point they’d triggered the Signal. It was among its own now, exchanging welcome thoughts with the other successful arkships in their eternal storage orbit. A validation of a pilgrimage completed under extremely difficult circumstances. Arkships in the ring appreciated and understood what it had been through, more so than any of the oneminds outside. Those who had not yet proved themselves.

  Bitchy, Yuri thought.

  And behind the cosy thoughts percolating through the ring was the greatest union of all: the fullmind. A summation of all that was Olyix. A loving guide, directing their destiny until they arrived at the end of time.

  ‘The priest-king,’ he said out loud.

  ‘Hey,’ Kandara announced. ‘It’s come back.’

  ‘What has?’ Yuri asked.

  ‘The odd quint.’

  He pulled up the feed from the sensor clusters inside the hangar. Now that all the transport ships had gone, it seemed a lot bigger than it had on their voyage to the enclave. It was almost like viewing a still hologram, the thick weave of rootlike tubes clinging to the rock walls and ceiling, with meagre twigs sprouting slim leaves. Serpentine lines of bioluminescent cells embedded along the surface of the bark illuminated the big space in a uniform orange-tinted light that banished shadows.

  The hangar hadn’t changed since the plethora of service creatures and armoured quint had searched it on the day the Avenging Heretic flew away on its doomed escape manoeuvre. Apart from once, when a quint visited and slowly walked around the whole area.

  Now it was back.

  ‘What’s it doing?’ Callum asked.

  The quint was standing in the middle of the hangar floor, its fat, disc-shaped body swaying in a ponderous circular rhythm as if it alone was hearing a slow dance beat. Yuri wondered if its golden annular eye was scanning around like an attentive radar sweep in time with the motion. Its skirt of flaccid manipulator flesh flopped about idly, though small peaks rose and fell along the rim without ever forming any real appendage. He watched the thickest of the five legs, ostensibly the leading one, flex with an almost nervous twitch, the kind a terrestrial animal would have as a precursor to a charge.

  ‘It’s . . . anxious?’ he ventured.

  ‘That’s a bunch of bullshit,’ Alik said. ‘I’d say it is stressed; angry about something.’

  ‘You can’t equate its body posture to ours,’ Jessika insisted.

  ‘Yeah? Tell me it’s not worked up about something. I know agitation when I see it.’

  ‘Fight-or-flight reflex,’ Kandara said. ‘I’m with Alik on this one.’

  Yuri just managed to avoid giving Callum an amused glance at her loyal support. ‘It’s there for a reason. Everything they do has a reason. They don’t have our . . .’

  ‘Whimsy?’ Callum suggested. ‘Imagination? Poetry? Individuality? A soul?’

  ‘Sure. All of that crap. Jessika, anything you can determine about it from the onemind?’

  ‘I doubt it. The deliberations of a single quint are essentially lost in the onemind thoughtflow. Too small to matter. Only the sub-sub-sub-thought routines handle them.’

  Before he could ask her to try, she’d closed her eyes, concentrating. Yuri returned his attention to the odd quint. Distinguishing between quint bodies was difficult; there were very few individual characteristics. Given they were all produced in a convener, with every cell in their body stitched together to a standard template, they should be identical. But they did have occasional blemishes, a scar, or differences in the faint colour striations inside the translucent manipulator flesh.

  Everything their sensors viewed was recorded in a dedicated memory store. Yuri told his altme, Boris, to run a comparison.

  ‘It is not the same quint body that was here last time,’ his altme replied. ‘The manipulator flesh imperfections are different.’

  ‘But it’s behaving strangely, like the last one.’

  ‘Then it’s most likely to be the same quint, but this is a different one of its five physical bodies.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I have nothing,’ Jessika said, her tone thoughtful.

  ‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘Well, thanks for trying.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t find the hangar – our hangar – in the onemind’s thoughtflow.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Let me show you.’

  Yuri closed his eyes and accepted the simulation. It wasn’t the bridge any more; she’d brought him into her own interface expression. He was immersed inside the onemind’s vast thoughtflow, literally inside a stream. A column of water that rushed past him, impulses from his skin telling him he was damp and cold. The rippling silver surface that was all around him was awash with poorly glimpsed images slipping past. He wanted to concentrate on them, but they were too fast and he couldn’t focus.

  ‘This is how you perceive the onemind thoughts?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘No. This . . . I’m more haphazard.’ It made him wonder just how different her mind actually was. Maybe Kandara is right to be suspicious.

  ‘It’s just not here,’ Jessika said.

  They broke through the surface like a spawning fish leaping upstream. Emerging into chambers within the arkship. Multiple jumps, none of them lasting a second. The new surroundings barely registering before they were gone again. The tunnels. Chambers filled with biomechanical systems. Skyscraper stacks of cocoons, tended by ugly service creatures. Gloomy caverns unused since leaving Earth. Hangars without ships. Hangars with ships – all of them similar. None of them their hangar.

  Yuri jolted upright on his rock ledge, staring around intensely as his mind sought to reorient itself, place him where he should be in the universe. He sucked down air, as if he’d truly been underwater for too long.

  Kandara was giving him a strange look. ‘You okay?’

  He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak.

  ‘There is nothing from our hangar,’ Jessika said calmly. ‘The impulses from every sensory cell in the hangar have somehow vanished before they reach any of the onemind’s most basic routines, and they certainly aren’t incorporated in its memory. We only know this because our sensor clusters can see the quint in there. Nothing else can.’

  ‘Did someone kill the nexus?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with the nexus,’ Jessika said. ‘If that was burned, then the neuralstratum would be denied over a much greater area. This blind spot is specific to our hangar and the passageways leading to it.’

  ‘Why, though?’ Callum asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’
she said, frowning. ‘Something has to be blocking the onemind’s perception.’

  ‘Another neurovirus?’ Alik asked in surprise. ‘There’s another dark-ops team on board?’

  ‘No way,’ Kandara said. ‘It took the combined resources of Alpha Defence and every settled world to get us on board. There is no second mission.’

  ‘Whatever is doing this is more subtle than a neurovirus,’ Jessika said. ‘The onemind doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. I don’t get it. You can’t get that deep into the autonomic routines. Or at least, I can’t.’

  Alik’s taut face crumpled up in confusion. ‘You mean Odd Quint is hiding from the onemind?’

  Jessika shrugged. ‘When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

  ‘So what the fuck is it doing?’

  Morgan

  Olyix Sensor Station

  The battle had lasted three days. It wasn’t one giant fight between the two opposing sides; essentially it was over within the first two seconds when the armada’s generators captured the wormhole that led back to the Olyix enclave. After that, it was basically a mopping-up operation. There were dozens of Resolution ships guarding the seven concentric rings of the Olyix habitat. They were no match for the superior numbers and weapons of the history faction, but surrender was clearly not part of the Olyix genetic code. Every one of them fought to the end.

  Some Resolution ships tried to escape, presumably to try to reach and warn other Olyix outposts. They started accelerating outsystem hard within minutes of the armada emerging through their expansion portals. They had to be chased down, which took days. Ainsley took the lead on catching two of them.

  The station’s defensive formation of Resolution ships was eventually wiped out, leaving the seven rings exposed. Troop carriers from the Morgan flew in, escorted by armada battleships. The human squads even got into the rings, fighting their way through the honeycomb of chambers inside. They were backing up teams of corpus mobility weapons, which the squads had nicknamed ‘marines’. Working together, they’d managed to corner and subdue individual quint bodies. None of the raids lasted long. The Olyix had fought back in a frenzy, their huntspheres demolishing whole sections of the rings’ interior in their desperation to resist.

  It ended badly for the Olyix, with the corpus armada attack cruisers using antimatter blasts and graviton pulses to smash up the station rings and vaporize the larger surviving chunks. The rapidly expanding debris cloud absorbed the vapour plumes that used to be Resolution ships. With the station eliminated, attack cruisers swooped on the giant radio telescopes. Once they had disintegrated, the armada’s attention turned to the giant hoop spinning around the star’s equator. A flotilla of fifty battle cruisers powered into a three-million-kilometre orbit above the extraordinary artefact. The corpus humans were interested in analysing its composition and structure; their probes determined the outer structure had a unified quantum signature.

  ‘You mean the shell is one atom?’ Yirella asked.

  ‘That interpretation is too crude,’ Immanueel said. ‘It is an expansion of classic duality, which in effect makes it a singular wave while simultaneously unifying multiple particles. Both states coexist within the modified quantum field. A clever solution to the stress that the loop is subject to – not only the extreme radiation and thermal loading from its proximity to the sun, but also for something that large retaining its physical integrity while it spins. Ordinary matter would simply break apart.’

  She watched dispassionately as Ainsley arrived in orbit two million kilometres above the star. His white fuselage had turned silver, making it look as if a fragment of the star itself had broken free to hang above the rowdy corona. The corpus exploratory flotilla backed off fast, high-gee acceleration propelling them into the safety of the expansion portals. They emerged within the umbra of the star’s single rocky world, where the majority of the armada was flocking around the safety of its Lagrange Two point.

  Ainsley fired a lone missile armed with a quantum-variant warhead. It detonated barely a thousand kilometres above the loop’s upper surface. The superhot gases of the chromosphere warped abruptly, forming a twister vortex around the missile as they underwent dissolution. Then the effect struck the loop.

  The entire edifice shattered at the speed of light, the annihilation effect racing in two waves around the circumference in opposing directions. A trillion fragments flew outwards, blazing like nuclear comets as they went spinning off across interplanetary space and then beyond. Ainsley dodged them by simply rising up out of his ecliptic orbit.

  ‘Great Saints,’ Yirella whispered. ‘We are become death, destroyer of stars.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Immanueel said. ‘But soon.’

  ‘The devastation,’ she said, surveying the expanding debris cluster that was once the seven-ring habitat; the smaller glowing haze patches that had been Resolutions ships. Nimbi of whirling rubble evidenced where the sedate radio telescopes had once orbited, while the radiation bursts from collapsed wormholes were already shrieking their demise out across interstellar space. ‘The scale is frightening.’

  ‘Come now, corpus and Olyix are Kardashev Type Two civilizations at war over the future liberty of a galaxy. Our battlefields will awe and perplex alien astronomers for millennia to come, no matter what the ultimate outcome. If there is any validity in our struggle, it is that magnificence.’

  ‘I guess so. Nobody will ever forget us now.’

  ‘Ever is too long. But we will leave our mark one way or another.’

  ‘Do you think the God at the End of Time can see what we’ve done?’

  ‘If it can, then we will have failed to kill it before it is born.’

  ‘Paradox.’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘I like to think of it as a condemned man on death row, watching the dawn arise on his execution day. It knows it will cease to exist, but there is nothing it can do to stop the sunrise.’

  ‘It will try. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I do. But it’s not here yet.’

  ‘No. Your sun is still rising.’

  *

  The noise and swirls of movement made for a hard impact on Dellian as he walked out of the troop ship. For all the high-stress charging around inside the Olyix habitat ring, the quick and lethal contacts with the enemy, adrenalin and terror, their combat had been inaudible. His helmet insulated him from the probably deadly sounds of high-energy discharges – beam, kinetic, plasma-blast. A quiet war, then, if not particularly civilized.

  Then on the ship travelling back to the Morgan, there wasn’t much room, so movement was at a minimum. But now here in the hangar, raw mechanical noise blared like a rock concert. The lighting was harsh, the air smelt metallic, and the remotes and the awesome corpus marines he’d fought alongside raced around on unknowable duties. He almost wanted to head on back into the sanctity of the troop carrier and wait for the commotion to die down. Almost. Because there she was standing at the bottom of the ramp, a bright smile lifting her face as soon as she caught sight of him. Her spectre of worry and concern was withdrawing into her lustrous eyes, so fast he thought he’d imagined it. So maybe he was only projecting what he wanted to see; after all, she more than anyone knew that he and the squad had come through unscathed.

  He scurried down the ramp, where she bobbed about excitedly and flung her arms around him, kissing him exuberantly. Smiles and happy jeers encircled them, and Yirella extended her welcome-home grin to take in the rest of the squad.

  ‘You’re all safe,’ she said. ‘Thank the Saints.’

  Dellian saw the uncertainty flicker behind her happiness and knew what she was thinking. This is just a sensor station, a tiny outpost that was taken by surprise and superior numbers. Next time it’s going to be real. Next time nobody can know who’ll be coming down the ramp after – if there’s even going to be a ship with a ramp. Like her, he hid the worry deep.

  They hurried back to their cabin
like the overeager kids they’d once been – too long ago now. Fucked hard and fast on the bed. Had a meal and a bath and fucked again. Slept. Spooned, less frantic teens now, more loving and sensual.

  ‘Did you watch us?’ Dellian asked as they headed for the shower together.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said as the warm drops rained over her scalp, running together in soapy streams down her back. ‘Tilliana and Ellici are good. Plus, your training helped. You’re tight now, not like back at Vayan.’

  ‘Not so naive?’ he teased.

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Yeah. I was pleased with everyone. Though I still think we’re surplus to the armada.’

  ‘They’re not patronizing us. They are so elevated now I doubt they take hurt feelings into account.’

  ‘Right.’ He said it, but didn’t believe he’d sounded convincing. Then hands slippery from soap gel came sliding over his chest, and he could banish his doubts again.

  *

  Dellian watched the feed in his optik as fragments of the Olyix power ring reached the rocky world. Silent blooms of their impacts peppered the dayside, sending gouts of debris shooting upwards for tens of kilometres, obscuring the ancient landscape that had remained unchanged for a hundred million years. As the dust began to settle, nothing was left of the ancient canyons and dry mares and worn mountains; they’d been replaced by overlapping craters whose centres still glowed as their new lava lakes slowly cooled and solidified.

  The devastation made him clench his stomach muscles in reflex as he and Yirella walked around deck thirty-three’s main corridor to a portal hub. Outside the Morgan, in the shelter of the Lagrange Two point, the armada ships increased power to their gravitational deflection effect and waited for the lethal swarm to pass. He knew they were safe – technically. Nonetheless, that level of destruction chilled him; it was so much greater than anything the squad did.