The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.]

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The medical splash from Shango went dark.

  ‘Fuck!’ Kandara screamed. She didn’t know if she did it straight away or if she’d been staring mindlessly at Alik’s corpse for an age. Her whole body was numb from raw fury.

  ‘Uh,’ Callum said, ‘I could do with some help.’

  Kandara scanned around, ready to yell her filthiest insults at him. Alik was dead. Didn’t he understand that? Dead. Travelled fifty thousand lightyears to die in pain and blood and ignominy.

  She saw Callum slumped against the wall amid a tangle of mangled pipe trunks, with their glutinous juices pulsing out in anomalous rhythms. His left arm was bent at a bad angle, the environment suit sleeve torn from shoulder to elbow. He was pushing a klingskin bandage onto the wound inside, a feeble rubbing motion that seemed to be having no effect. She thought she could see a sharp dagger of broken bone sticking out of the flesh, but everything was so red it was hard to tell.

  ‘Hell!’ Jessika yelped. She snatched up her medipac and ran for him.

  Kandara glanced back at Alik. People were supposed to look peaceful when they passed. Alik didn’t.

  Good.

  She picked up Alik’s carbine and hung the strap over her shoulder. Then she stood up and started walking towards one of the three dead quint bodies – the one that had blown up a great swathe of pipe trunks and rock wall with its gun. ‘Yuri, did you get that last quint?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can see about a hundred metres along the corridor. There’s no body.’

  Kandara told Zapata to run a check on the remaining three transmitter drones. ‘Keep watching. I’m going to try and flush it out.’

  ‘Kandara—’

  ‘Keep watching,’ she insisted. ‘And everyone, tie yourself down. This is going to be fierce.’

  She picked up the Olyix gun. It was about the size of her forearm and must have weighed ten kilos. Instead of a handgrip, one end forked apart into prongs that ended in two large scalloped bulbs, which she’d seen the quint’s manipulator flesh envelop. No trigger, but there was a circle of five rubbery buttons. She hefted it up, using a knee to support the barrel.

  ‘No,’ Yuri warned. ‘Don’t.’

  Kandara ordered the drones to hover right in front of the membrane. They slid obediently through the thin strands of grimy smoke that now layered the hangar’s air.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Jessika grunted. She quickly finished sealing a pressure patch over Callum’s torn sleeve, then grabbed at his harness cable, attaching it to her belt.

  Yuri was running across the floor to the end of his cable. ‘Wait—’

  Kandara aimed the big gun’s muzzle at the wall around the membrane and pressed one of the buttons. Nothing. Second one. Third time lucky.

  It fired. A small white flare at the end of the muzzle, then a lightning ball was exploding out of the pipe trunks, sending electron tendrils crackling across the disintegrating bark. The membrane glared violet.

  ‘Wait, for fuck’s sake,’ Yuri shouted; he was doubled over, fumbling with his belt or something.

  Kandara pressed button three again. Again. Again!

  Inside the helmet, her yell was louder than the roar of detonations. She marched the strikes around the side of the big entrance, destroying every chunk of Olyix biotechnology on the wall, and a good portion of the rock underneath. The hit on the membrane generator’s last power cable came without warning. One second the membrane was there, glimmering like a window framing a clear sunset sky, then it vanished.

  Atmosphere howled out into the vacuum, creating an instant blizzard from the debris clutter across the floor. The dead quint bodies started to roll and slither, picking up speed before finally sailing out of the hangar entrance amid the rushing gas streamers. Kandara hadn’t quite expected the force of the wind to be so powerful. She flung herself down on all fours – not that traction counted for much, certainly not given the puddles of brown goop rippling across the floor. She had to use the harness cable, pulling herself along hand over hand to reach the rock, where she could get a decent grip in the gnarled pipe trunks. She prayed to sweet Mary that the cable would hold.

  Quick check around, and there was Yuri, doing the same thing as she was, still at the end of the tunnel where the last quint had gone. He’d managed to hang on to his pistol, which was more than she’d done with the Olyix gun. That’d gone twirling away to oblivion along with its previous user. By the side of the entrance, Jessika and Callum were clinging to the knotty strands of bioware, her arm around his waist as his feet kept lifting off the ground.

  ‘Yuri?’ Kandara called. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘Did the transmitter drones make it?’

  Zapata reported it had a signal from the three drones, though it was weak. The image from their sensors splashed across her vision, and she was looking at a jumble of vivid nebula billows and worn-grey rock as they careered around one another. Ion rockets were firing at full thrust to try to stabilize the drones. Tiny ice crystals and chunks of bark spun around them, spewing from the dark slit in the curving cliff of rock, swinging chaotically in and out of view. A lot of the image was taken up by sweeps of the gas giant’s heat-enraged cloudscape, and the golden glow of the bow wave wings that embraced it. The drones’ inertial guidance system calculated the section of the nebula where the human fleet ought to be and focused their antennae on it.

  Kandara ordered them to start sending, and added her own channel to the pre-recorded message. ‘Calling the invasion fleet. This is Kandara from the Avenging Heretic – if any of you even still remember us. We made it. We’re on board the Salvation of Life, along with all the cocoons – everyone they took from Earth before S-Day. They’re alive. Mary, am I glad to see you. But you coming here has kicked off the mother of all shitstorms. We’re cornered and could really do with your help. Now, please. We’re in the hangar that—’

  A dark, curving shape slid into the feed’s image, silhouetted against the planet’s beautiful bow wave, and every drone icon vanished from her tarsus lens, along with their image feeds and telemetry.

  ‘Ahh, Mary,’ she complained. ‘Well, the drones worked. Let’s just hope humans still use quaint old radio.’

  The hangar’s atmospheric pressure had dropped severely. All twelve of the corridors and tunnels that led off into the arkship were now acting like rocket exhausts, with powerful fountains of white gas firing out across the wide hangar, only to be sucked away through the big entrance. At least it meant the force that was tugging at her had reduced to a mere gale. She could almost stand upright, but the slippery floor was treacherous, and now the slick pools of fluid were bubbling off into the violent thinning atmosphere.

  ‘Mary, their starships have flown across the entire galaxy and they haven’t got health and safety protocols? Where the hell are the emergency doors?’

  ‘Kandara!’ Yuri barked. ‘It’s coming.’

  She fought her way across the hangar floor, keeping as low as she could. There were still dark flakes zinging through the thinning air, twigs and leaves and small fibrous tubules torn from the arkship biotechnology, each one with a punch like a cage fighter when it struck her.

  Yuri started firing his pistol along the corridor when she was still thirty metres away.

  The edge of the entrance next to him blew apart in a cascade of rock shards as it was hit by energetic gunfire from somewhere within. Yuri went sprawling, then rolled smoothly back into a crouch, pistol held steady on the corridor.

  Like he’s done it before, Kandara thought admiringly. She lurched for cover amid a tangle of broken pipe tubes that were swaying alarmingly, bringing the carbine around ready. The jet of mist roaring out of the corridor started to fluctuate, its subtle fluorescence dimming. A quint was bumping along the corridor wall, legs skittering frantically on the rock floor while its manipulator flesh surged out in thick pseudopods, trying to grapple onto the wall’s undulating pipe trunks and fluttering creeper fronds, but the malleable translucent flesh
wasn’t strong enough to hold the quint’s weight against the tremendous force of the atmospheric tsunami howling into the hungry vacuum beyond. One protuberance still held a weapon, which it was trying to aim at the still smouldering corridor entrance close to Yuri.

  ‘Mine,’ she bellowed. The carbine’s slender orange target graphics splashed into her tarsus lens, and she brought the weapon around carefully, tracking . . . She fired straight into the quint’s manipulator flesh, searing it deep. In response the flesh cratered as it tried to avoid the burn. She moved the carbine a fraction, scorching again, each time ruining more of the manipulator flesh.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Yuri demanded. ‘Go headshot. Kill the bastard!’

  ‘I am killing it,’ she growled. ‘But not the nice way.’

  Another salvo of accurate maser shots, and the crippled, smouldering manipulator flesh lost its grip. The quint body was ripped off the wall by the torrent of air, tumbling crazily, legs still kicking.

  Kandara stood up, bracing herself against the wind, and gave it an almighty forearm jerk. Yeah, you saw that. You know. I did this. I finished you, fucker. Me!

  The quint body slammed through the hangar entrance, smacking into the rock several times as it went. Kandara never even flinched at the brutal impacts.

  ‘Happy now?’ Jessika asked.

  ‘Oh, Mother Mary, yes. I truly am.’ She saw Jessika and Callum still clinging together and started crawling over to them. Three of the unruly atmosphere jets were between them.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Jessika said. ‘We’re okay.’

  ‘Right.’ She started to look for a safer route. But they all involved climbing up the wall and crabbing her way over the tunnel entrances mere centimetres from the jets. Crap.

  ‘They’re fading,’ Yuri said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. The pressure’s dropping.’

  Sure enough, the jets started to shrink, losing their vigour. Within a minute they had finished. The hangar was in a vacuum.

  ‘Finally,’ Jessika said. ‘Some health and safety protocols.’

  Kandara started towards them. She only got a few paces before realization hit and she stopped, scanning around. ‘Aww, Mary! No.’ Alik’s body was nowhere to be seen. He’d been blasted out into space.

  She thought she might cry again, but there was nothing. No emotion. Either her gland reigned supreme, or the sheer intensity of everything that had happened had scoured her clean of feelings forever.

  When she finally got over to Jessika and Callum, Yuri was already there. Everyone was examining Callum’s arm.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he insisted. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Yeah, you will be,’ Yuri said. ‘It’s not serious.’

  ‘What?’

  Kandara chuckled drily at the indignation in the old man’s voice. She suspected he wanted to argue with Yuri, make the universe right again.

  ‘But . . .’ Yuri said. ‘I am concerned about maintaining the suit integrity. That patch is medical. It’s not supposed to repair a rip like that in a vacuum. So keep as still as possible. I’m going to wrap another patch on top, then we need to get back to the cavern. The initiators can extrude something better for you until the human invasion fleet arrives.’

  ‘Not arguing,’ Callum said. He didn’t even object to Jessika helping him slowly to his feet as he held his arm out stiffly.

  Kandara slung the maser back over her shoulder and loaded one of the spare clips of wyst bullets into her magpistol. Only one clip left now. Callum’s powerblade machete was hanging off his belt. She unclipped it and fastened it to her own.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Yuri asked.

  ‘Haven’t you been counting?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Odd Quint. Quint. There’s five of it. We only took out four bodies.’ She pointed at the tunnel the first quint had gone into. ‘That one never came back.’

  ‘We’re in a vacuum,’ Jessika said. ‘They’re tough, but they still need to breathe.’

  ‘And yet here we are,’ she snapped. ‘I’d be worried if maybe we were in a spaceship, you know – the kind of vehicle that would carry some piece of equipment that allows quint to survive in a vacuum. Sort of a: space? Suit?’

  ‘You know what’s on the other side of whatever emergency door is up there, don’t you?’ Yuri said. ‘Every quint on the Salvation of Life – and all of them are going to be very keen to find out if we survived.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kandara patted the carbine. ‘Well, they’re about to discover the hard way.’

  ‘Please,’ Jessika said. ‘Don’t do this. We’ve won. I can see it in the onemind thoughtstream; the human ships are so close now. And you know Alik wouldn’t want you to do this.’

  ‘Cheap shot.’

  ‘But true,’ Callum said.

  Kandara stood completely still. The vacuum around her had taken away all the subtle noises that she normally never noticed, making the sound of her heart implausibly loud inside her helmet. It was a fast beat. She desperately wanted to eliminate the last of Odd Quint’s bodies. So I do still have feelings, even if they are only vengeance and anger. ‘I’ll just check the tunnel. Okay? That’s all. I won’t go past whatever emergency door is sealing the far end.’

  ‘Kandara . . .’ Jessika said wearily.

  ‘On Mother Mary’s life, I swear I’ll stay in the vacuum. But I have to know if the last Odd Quint body is there. And if the onemind is sending a battalion of quint down here after us, you won’t believe how fast I can run away.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Yuri said. ‘Please.’

  She grinned at the concern in his voice. ‘Middle name.’

  Morgan

  Yirella couldn’t bring herself to go back into the Morgan’s main council room. The memory of everyone sitting there – talking, arguing, making impassioned suggestions for FinalStrike – was too vivid. So she was sitting in the deck thirty-three cafe yet again, with the Ainsley android on the other side of the table. None of her other android aspects was present. She wondered why that was. Some kind of subconscious insecurity? My own androids are too much of me to reassure me? I need outside validation?

  Oh, stop it.

  The tactical situation wasn’t all bad. The Morgan was still plagued by twinkles, but they were only minutes out from the gas giant now. Even decelerating, its tremendous velocity was ripping through the nebula plasma, leaving a long contrail of emptiness roiling in its wake. The rest of the armada formation was expanding, ships heading for rendezvous with individual arkships. And Ainsley was approaching the power rings at a speed that was chilling her skin. He wasn’t decelerating at all. The residual plumes of nine Resolution ships were still dissolving behind him, while the white ship was all but invisible at the centre of an impenetrable cluster of fluctuating twinkles brighter than the corona it was approaching.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘That vector you’re taking is dangerous.’

  ‘Making sure.’

  ‘Ainsley . . .’

  ‘The Olyix know what I’m going to do. They’re trying to suffocate me with time flows, kid – really trying. I’m at maximum power output deflecting them. And, face it, my maximum can punch a hole through Jupiter. If I fire a q-v missile, the flow variances in this twinkle clusterfuck would cripple it as soon as it gets outside my hull.’

  Even now, her corpus personality – the most rational mind she’d thought possible – just didn’t want to process what she knew was inevitable. ‘So how are you going to kill the power rings?’

  ‘Up close and personal. Only way. Deliver the q-v myself.’

  ‘You can’t. We need you. There are thousands of arkships here. We have to save them.’

  ‘You got this. The technology the corpus retro-engineered out of my mentalic subsections works well on oneminds. Remember what I did to the Welcome ship at Vayan? You can fly those big mothers out of here without me easily enough. That’s what this is about, it’s why we’re here: to sa
ve those poor bastards who’ve been cocooned.’

  ‘I need you.’

  ‘And I need you to survive. To do that, I have to kill the enclave; you’re not going to get home otherwise. Resisting this time flow shit is too big a strain; it’s going to kick our asses eventually. Without it, you’ve got a decent chance.’

  ‘Oh, Saints, Ainsley. What about the shield? Can’t you use that? If it hits the inner ring at your current velocity, the inertia will destabilize its precession. It’ll start to drop into the chromosphere, and that’ll be catastrophic.’

  ‘The shield is backup, kid – because I cannot afford to fuck this up. When I hit the ring, the shield will be on board; it still has the same mass, remember. So either the q-v warhead will get it, or the shield mass will. Either way, we win.’

  ‘You won’t.’ But she knew it was no good; she could see Ainsley wasn’t altering course. There was no emotional appeal that would make him reconsider. He had reached a healthy fraction of lightspeed now and was starting to redshift.

  ‘Call it job satisfaction. That’s always been my motivation. You should have seen how we partied back in the day every time we pulled off a deal. Man, we could’ve shown the Romans a thing or two about decadence.’

  ‘Ainsley?’

  ‘Get the Salvation of Life home, Yirella. But before you do, find out where the Olyix god is hiding. Say hello to the bastard from me, okay?’

  ‘Oh, Saints.’

  The tactical display showed her Ainsley approaching the innermost power ring. She watched in dread. Given his phenomenal velocity, the margin for error was minute. If Ainsley hadn’t got the course completely right there was no time now to correct. Saints, that means I want the ship to hit.

  It did.

  Ainsley got the timing perfect, triggering the q-v warheads nanoseconds before any impact obliterated them, but close enough to affect the ring fabric: an impact like a bullet hitting an ice sculpture. The ring shattered, flinging out a massive halo of destruction that swarmed out across the ecliptic. As it disintegrated, the three outermost rings of exotic matter flickered then vanished. At the same time, the iridescent sparks blockading the armada ships were abruptly extinguished.