‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘My other aspects are dealing with the Salvation of Life onemind.’
‘Dealing with?’
‘Killing it. I need to take control of the Salvation’s main systems so we can maintain the cocoons.’
‘There are other arkships carrying human cocoons. Five, I think.’
‘I know. The armada is already engaging them, as it is all the Olyix ships here. There are thousands of different species imprisoned in cocoons or their equivalent. We have to save them all. It is our duty and honour to do so. We’re going to take them all with us, back across the galaxy to the expansion wavefront.’
That took Callum a moment to process. ‘Do you have that kind of . . . capacity?’
‘Just. We have taken more losses than expected. But the corpus armada prevails. An aspect will replace each onemind.’
‘Er, aspect?’
‘Corpus humans are people who have divided their minds into many aspects, each of which resides in a different vessel – biological bodies, quantum arrays, machines, warships . . .’
‘Androids.’ He was having trouble accepting what she was saying. Too much strangeness.
‘Some, yes. Now their aspects are starting to occupy the arkships as their oneminds are eliminated. And very soon we will have to leave.’
‘I know; you brought a neutron star with you. It’s going to hit this star, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. And it will soon turn nova, which in turn will trigger its twin. There is an eighty-two per cent chance the two combined will produce a supernova. It is our moral obligation to ensure none of the Olyix’s victims are left behind.’
‘I’m bloody glad to hear that. You’re frighteningly advanced, so it’s comforting to know you put so much emphasis on ethics. They are so easy to abandon in times of war.’
‘I am pleased I can reassure you. We owe you so much.’
‘Not really. The Signal we sent won’t reach Earth for another forty thousand years. So many people sacrificed so much to get us here. The gamble we took . . . And in the end, you found your way here without us.’ Callum found his throat was all hot and tight; tears were building in his eyes. Stupid, but . . . This life he was now living was not something he had ever expected. In so many ways it was an afterlife now, forever separated from those people he’d loved and lived with. He began to laugh, which turned into sobs.
The white android’s hand touched his shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah. I think reality is catching up with me. I’ve just realized the only contemporaries I’ve got left in this brave new world are Yuri, Kandara and Jessika. Bloody hell: the relic squad.’
‘The living are not relics. And you will soon be joined by billions from your own time. You are going home, Saint Callum. And when you do, you and the other Saints will be revered on the Earth rebuilt, along with every human world we settle.’
‘For what?’ It came out with more bitterness than he expected – or wanted.
‘You guided us here, Callum, you and your fellow Saints. You are the star we followed into the night. You are the heroes from our deepest legends. We – me, the squad you met, all the other squads who have travelled across half the galaxy to be here – we were all born for this one moment. How do you think we felt when we heard Saint Kandara’s voice and followed her broadcast here to the Salvation of Life itself, the greatest evil humans have known? The legend of you gave my generation the most precious gift ever, as it gave all the exodus generations before us. You gave us hope, Saint Callum. And we were right to believe in you, for none of you gave up, did you? You did your duty right to the end. Can you imagine how profound that is to those of us living through what has become the end of days?’
‘I didn’t ask for any of this, you know,’ he said meekly.
‘I know. None of us did. And possibly for the first time in my life, I am glad I exist. Because of you, Saint Callum. You are the reason I live. You are my life’s validation. Thank you.’
‘You’re very welcome. But I’ve got to warn you, we do not deserve your admiration.’
‘We’ll see. Even with a wormhole that’ll take us to within ten thousand lightyears of Sol and the old settled worlds, it’s going to be a long voyage.’
‘Back to Earth,’ he said in wonder. ‘Do you think we’ll make it?’
‘Yes. Effectively, this part of the war is over. We’ve won. Humans now possess the only wormhole leading away from this star system. It’s the one that brought us here, and it’s currently accelerating away faster than any of the Olyix ships pursuing it. They can’t catch it now.’
‘But we can?’
‘Oh, yes. A lot of very smart people put this campaign together.’
‘I look forward to meeting them.’ He hesitated as his arm began to itch under the blue medical sleeve. ‘We’re really going to go home?’
‘Yes.’
Yirella
Morgan
Yirella didn’t quite trust herself to meet the Saints in the actual flesh. She was pretty sure her original body wouldn’t be able to stop gushing with admiration and she’d make a total fool of herself. Even her android-housed aspects were thrilled to be in their presence.
She helped them out of their spacesuits in the clinic and ran basic scans to make sure they were all right, marvelling at how accurate all the stories were about them. Callum so world-weary, yet still with a core of optimism – a good man at heart, numb from their incredible mission. Yuri, all gruff and professional, working hard to keep his relief from showing – but no reticence about being suspicious. Jessika, so cool and enigmatic; human with a classy hint of Neána. Perfectly composed at where she found herself. But no, she said sadly, she didn’t know if the end of the enclave would mean the Neána abodes finally emerging from hiding. And Kandara, one tough dark-ops mercenary, a genuine professional killer, her lethal qualities only held at bay with neurological chemicals. Having aspects standing next to her, talking normally about the Morgan and what was happening with the armada, was a situation Yirella found darkly exciting. She’s killed people. Bad guys, terrorists, but still other humans.
All of them were fascinating, and she wanted nothing more than to talk to them for a decade solid. People who had lived and walked on old Earth. But now she had aspects inside the Salvation of Life. Thousands of corpus marines were helping the squads and their cohorts chase down and eliminate quint bodies and most of the service creatures. And three other machines advanced with them – mentalic aspects, little more than relay units for her corpus personality. They each made their way through the corridors and chambers of the arkship, hunting out a nexus. When they found one, they inserted a batch of needles that swiftly meshed with the neuralstratum nerve fibres.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Human, but not. I feel your mind, your thoughts are ordered like a machine.’
‘Some of me is, but that’s really not relevant right now, is it?’
‘Why do you do this? Why have you brought so much death and destruction to our haven? We love you.’
‘You know what, let’s just cut the crap. You’ve lost. This is my offer. Relinquish control of the arkship freely, and I will allow some of your quint to establish a colony. They will have no memory of their history, no knowledge of the message from your god, but your species will survive.’
‘I feel you investigating my memories. What are you looking for?’
‘I see you erasing your memories. What are you trying to hide?’
‘We are open to you, now and always.’
‘I never did understand your level of fanaticism. You would rather die than be given a second chance. That’s extraordinary.’
‘I am a single unit in the Olyix fullmind. Part of me will live on no matter how many of us are killed by your slaughter here today. This will not end our divine purpose. It is eternal.’
‘No, it’s not. I’ve heard your god’s message. It’s bullshit.’
‘Y
et still you hunt through my mind. Is that what you seek? The message from the God at the End of Time? This I offer freely. It is our gracious task to bring it to all life that lives in the light.’
‘Don’t need it, because I already had a taste at Vayan. But I admit I am curious. Surely by now you’ve realized the universe isn’t cyclic? The only thing that’s waiting up there in the far future is heat death, not rebirth bringing a new light. You’ve had long enough for your astronomers to determine that – so many millennia. We humans got there after just four centuries of studying the cosmos.’
‘Dear human, we have held the truth for so much longer than that.’
Yirella smiled. The association had worked; she could see the arrival of the message at the Olyix homeworld, this very binary star, two and a half million years ago. ‘So you have. Thank you.’
Finally, a bloom of uncertainty appeared in the onemind’s serene thoughts. ‘You wanted to know the time when the God at the End of Time blessed us with its message.’
‘That is part of what I seek, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘So I can use it to defeat you.’
‘You cannot defeat a god. The nova your neutron star will create will eliminate this star system, but we have thousands of outposts across the galaxy. Each of them will flourish and grow into a new enclave. Each will continue our crusade.’
‘Yes, I was concerned that might happen. And I see you really believe that. So know this. We will deal with any survivors, and every attempt they might make to resurrect your despicable crusade. We have the ability now, and friends. So many friends, thanks to you.’ She felt the onemind erasing vast sections of itself, a retreat that made her own incursion into its personality so much easier.
‘The locations of our valiant outposts are gone now. Dear human, my descendants will meet yours out there one day. This battle is merely one amid a war that will last until our god arises.’
‘I know.’
‘Then end your sacrilege. Stop this profane attack. It is not too late for your redemption. Humans now have the ability to travel to the era of our god in your own vessels. Join our pilgrimage as loving equals.’
‘You have ruined the evolution of thousands of species – billions upon billions of lives lost. And it was you personally that oversaw the death of my homeworld; almost as many people died from collapsing city shields as you stole. You’ve killed my friends, and your senseless zealotry is forcing me to make decisions that will never bring me closure, let alone happiness. After all the evil you have unleashed, you ask me to be merciful? And you still haven’t realized, have you? It wasn’t a god that sent your message; it was the devil, you psychotic shit. Now die.’
Saints
Morgan
Of all the things Yuri wasn’t expecting to find in a supertechnology warship built by some very weird post-humans, he had to admit a Roaring Twenties Parisian cafe would be close to the top of his list.
Nonetheless, that was where he and Jessika and Kandara and Callum had wound up. They sat at one of the wooden tables where remotes served them the best food he’d tasted in . . . well, a long time.
As they ate, the big arched windows showed tactical displays. The corpus armada had killed the oneminds in every arkship above the gas giant world; squads backed by machine marines had occupied each arkship and Welcome ship containing human cocoons. More marines had continued to overrun the others vessels with imprisoned aliens, but they were running out of time to implement the next phase of the mission.
The neutron star was going to impact the big white-spectrum star in another ninety minutes. A vast fleet of Resolution ships was forming up on the fringe of the nebula. And the armada had expended most of its Calmissiles.
‘I can’t believe they still call them that,’ Kandara said, shaking her head in apparent dismay.
‘Why wouldn’t they?’ Callum asked. ‘The Higgs boson, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Robson’s progression, Rindstrom’s door, Newton’s law of gravity. So many breakthroughs are named after their inventors.’
‘But they’re important historical figures,’ Yuri said with a straight face. ‘The giants of human science.’
‘Then I’m in good company.’
Jessika and Kandara both laughed at him. Callum ignored them, drinking his beer in an attempt at silent dignity.
Yuri used his altme to call up a visual feed from the Morgan’s fuselage sensors. They were keeping station with the Salvation of Life along with twenty much larger attack cruisers from the armada. A swarm of small insectoid craft was hopping across the rock, attaching a multitude of dark hemispherical machines to the arkship’s surface. In the background, points of light sparkled through the nebula’s beautiful polychromatic clouds. For a moment he was concerned the twinkles had returned, but then he realized that – one by one – the stars were appearing as their light crawled across the empty expanse that used to be the enclave. Sure enough, as the arkship swept over the gas giant’s equator, he saw the galactic core rising from behind the planet as if it was the universe’s most intricate jewel moon.
There was an outbreak of whispering over by the cafe’s counter, a heated discussion just below comprehension threshold. Yuri refused to look around, but Kandara did. She leant in across the table. ‘The kids are home from school,’ she muttered in amusement.
When he did deign to glance in that direction, Yuri saw Dellian and a group of other young men clustered together, their argument stalled as soon as they saw him looking at them. Despite the obvious ethnic variances between them, they had a peculiar sameness – all of them squat and broad-shouldered, not so much Olympian-fit as carrying the kind of excess muscle Earth’s bodybuilders used to get from embracing a full illegal tox development. They also shared the same vaguely guilty expression as they stared at Yuri’s table.
‘Join us,’ a grinning Kandara said before Yuri could object. But then, after so long spent with just the five of them, some fresh company wasn’t such a bad idea.
Dellian’s squad and several more of their friends hurried over.
‘This is an honour—’ Janc began eagerly.
‘Don’t,’ Yuri said, holding up a finger in warning. ‘Just don’t. And we’re not Saints, either.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He let that one go.
‘So what state is the Salvation in?’ Callum asked.
‘Secure,’ Dellian said. ‘Yirella eliminated the onemind, so we have continuity in maintaining the cocoons. And we’ve eliminated a lot of quint.’
‘Yeah,’ Uret said glumly. ‘But as we know from the Vayan ambush, it’s going to take months to track down the last of them. Those arkships are the biggest three-dimensional maze in the galaxy; there are a million places inside where you can hide unnoticed.’
‘Look who you’re telling,’ Jessika said.
Uret blushed.
Kandara raised her glass of wine, regarding it intently. ‘So, you organize hunting parties?’
‘There are teams of marines on specialist tracking duty,’ Xante said. ‘And remotes will install a comprehensive sensor network throughout every chamber and corridor. But we’re scheduled for duty rotations to that detail. It helps keep us fresh.’
‘It’s going to take most of the flight to be sure we got them all,’ Janc said. ‘Last time, we transferred all the cocoons over to our habitat and got out of there fast, but we can’t do that this time.’
‘Last time?’ Yuri asked.
‘Yeah. We got ambushed.’
‘Right. We knew the Olyix were raiding the expansion wavefront. There are five more ships here storing human cocoons.’
‘And thousands of other species,’ Jessika said. ‘I understand from the Yirella androids that they’re all coming with us?’
‘Away from here, yes,’ Dellian said. ‘They’ll be flown to the other end of the wormhole, then we’ll see what we do. Yirella was saying she thinks we should all settle stars close together, form some kind of grand inter-spe
cies alliance, in case the Olyix ever come back.’
‘Bold move,’ Yuri said. ‘But suppose some of those species are even crazier than the Olyix?’
‘Please excuse Yuri,’ Callum said. ‘He always thinks the worst.’
Half of their rapt audience nodded eagerly. ‘We know.’
For once, Yuri was lost for a rebuke.
‘It’ll take a lot of work,’ Dellian said. ‘We need to find out all about them. But statistically, there will be some we’d want as neighbours.’
Callum raised his glass and finished the beer in a couple of gulps. ‘Time will tell. In the meantime, what kind of beers from the future do you boys recommend for an old-timer?’
Yirella
Morgan
Yirella’s corpus personality observed the deck thirty-three cafe through sensors. She still hadn’t used her original body to meet the Saints. It was sitting quietly in the captain’s formal reception room along with a clone of herself. Immanueel had spent the last hour growing it for her inside a fast-time domain that was barely larger than the womb-vat. An initiator growing her a biologic body would have been a simpler solution, but she didn’t want to be that cheap. This body had to be perfect in every respect; he deserved that much.
Both aspects were anxiously watching corpus ships and machines racing to install exotic energy conduits around the outside of all the huge Olyix ships they’d captured. Simultaneously she kept a great deal of her attention focused on the progress of the neutron star. It was less than an hour out from the corona now. Vast rivers of nebula dust were flowing into it, flaring like solar prominences as they sank into the oblivion of its black horizon. As lightstorms went, it should have been spectacular. Yirella found it ominous.
‘We’re cutting this fine,’ she said.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 49
