The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Two thousand of them deployed out of the expansion portals at the rate of one every five seconds. Each one came out on a vector slightly different from the previous ship’s, and ignited its fusion rockets, accelerating away at four gees. They didn’t have quite the maneuverability of the Olyix transports, but they made up for that in sheer numbers.

  The Olyix ships above Earth immediately began evasive maneuvers, streaking away from their orbital track at seven gees. High above them, the Yi Xian cruisers kept coming, spreading out like a falling storm cloud. The first forty to emerge fired an octet of conventional fusion rocket missiles that accelerated down at fifty gees. They ignored the Olyix ships above the mesosphere and plunged on down into the stratosphere, where the transports were powering up through the ozone layer in their bid to escape.

  Earth’s damaged atmosphere was hit by multiple hypersonic shock waves rippling out from the missiles as they tore the beleaguered air apart. All of them ejected a barrage of tiny sensor spheres that spread out in mimicry of a meteorite shower to provide unparalleled observation data to Strikeback command’s G8Turing. With the lead Olyix transport ship still a hundred kilometers west of the Azores, and traveling at Mach eighteen, the missiles began to explode their twenty-five-megaton warheads in a carefully calculated sequence.

  The sensor spheres observed the intense atmospheric devastation, tracking energized blast waves and radiation surges, scrutinizing their effect on the exposed Olyix craft. Alpha Defense had designed the nukes with an enhanced gamma emission effect. The transports seemed to have very little resistance to the radiation. As soon as the bombs started to explode, they began to lose acceleration. Those closest to the blasts lost power altogether and began to tumble out of the sky. Then the colossal blast wave struck the remaining ships. Several disintegrated, and the remainder were slammed about helplessly, spinning out of control toward the glaring breakers far below. The sensors tracked every aspect of their decay and death for the G8Turing to analyze.

  A second batch of missiles was fired from the Yi Xian cruisers. These had smaller warheads and detonated to the west of the first barrage, close to Bermuda, where the desperate Olyix were racing for the top of the mesosphere. Their fate provided another tranche of detailed performance data to the Strikeback G8Turing, refining the operational parameters of the Olyix ships. Johnstone watched the information build.

  Soćko’s icon splashed into his display. “You’ve rattled them,” he said. “The Salvation onemind is deeply shocked by the attack. They didn’t expect us to use nukes on Earth. It’s redeploying Deliverance ships to protect the transports.”

  “But not recalling them?” Johnstone asked.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Very well, let’s get it to take us more seriously. Move to phase two.”

  Eight hundred portals opened above Earth, completely encircling the globe. Cruisers poured through. The majority started to head down to the planet, while others formed up into fifty-strong attack formations and accelerated along interception courses toward incoming Deliverance ships. Space was drenched with slender fusion plumes, fashioning a crosshatch of incandescent light above the upper atmosphere, caging the whole planet.

  Eight thousand miles above the Indian Ocean, a Deliverance ship performed an eleven-gee parabolic maneuver to align itself on one of the attack formations. Incredibly powerful energy beams stabbed out from it, slicing straight through the cruisers’ defense shields, killing the ships in a blaze of energized vapor. The formation’s survivors responded with a synchronized barrage of Calmissiles. They were small—two meters in diameter—but they used the same principle as human sublight starships, making the teardrop-shaped casing a single portal. Holes accelerating through space at twenty-five gees.

  The Deliverance ships only knew they were there because of their exhaust plumes. They shot energy beams at them; they fired kinetic harpoons; they detonated thirty-five-megaton warheads, whose plasma spheres saturated local space with high-energy particles. None of them had the slightest effect. Every assault simply passed through the hole, ejecting from the portal’s inert twin thousands of kilometers away.

  The first Deliverance ship was struck by seventeen Calmissiles within a one and a half second period. Traveling at over seventy kilometers a second, each of them cored out a perfect tunnel through the ship, slicing through whatever solid structure they encountered. Milliseconds later, each of those gaps was flooded with their fusion plasma exhaust. The Deliverance ship started to disintegrate, only to have the ruptured fragments instantly turn into a sleet of raw atoms.

  “Okay,” Soćko said. “That frightened the onemind.”

  “Start the clearance,” Johnstone ordered. “Every Olyix ship below geostationary orbit.” He focused on the display section locked on northern Utah. “Loi, stand by.”

  KNOCKDOWN MISSION

  S-DAY, DECEMBER 11, 2206

  There were three of them in the transit chamber when its blast doors rumbled shut and locked with a loud series of clunks. In front of Loi, the rims of seven expansion portals glowed a vivid turquoise, surrounding a center of insubstantial gray, as if they were being lit from behind by weak moonlight.

  His suit closed around him in readiness. It was a brute of a thing, adding more than half a meter to his height. Beside him, in hir own suit, Eldlund stood three meters tall. Lim Tianyu was a mere two meters sixty centimeters.

  For a brief moment, as the light vanished, Loi was gripped by a pang of claustrophobia. The helmet was solid, like the rest of the suit, its thick carapace the same dull pewter sheen as medieval suits of armor. Loi knew those old knights used to ride on horses specially bred to carry the enormous weight—something else he shared with those long-ago nobles. Right now, he weighed in at more than half a ton. Unlike the armor that modern mercenaries and corporate security wore on their combat missions, very little of that weight was weaponry. This was all about protection. His armor’s primary purpose was to defend the wearer from radiation. Not even a tactical nuke’s gamma pulse could get through it. Nearly a third of the mass was artificial muscle, without which he wouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone move. The weight and toughness made it apposite for enduring Earth’s wrecked climate. No, this suit didn’t have knights of old in its heritage; its grandparents were more likely to be army tanks.

  His tarsus lens splashed the armor’s external sensor image, and his breathing became calmer. Tactical displays showed him the titanic battle going on in space above Salt Lake City. As well as the armada of human warships, the newly enlarged portals above Earth were also shooting out a swarm of sensor satellites to enhance Strikeback’s intelligence-gathering. The G8Turing plotted the byzantine weave of ship vectors. In orbit, Olyix transport ships were being massacred in their hundreds. Deliverance ships were fighting a furious rearguard action against the deluge of cruisers, but there was nothing they could do to stop the Calmissiles.

  “You smashed it, boss,” Eldlund exclaimed. “We’re killing them!”

  “Damn right,” Loi agreed. “Here comes the ground wave.”

  Thousands of cruisers were descending into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, unleashing a deluge of Calmissiles toward the Olyix ships that ringed every surviving city. Loi bit on his lip. They couldn’t afford to use nukes close to the overstressed shields, but neither could they avoid using them. This phase had to be convincing.

  “Loi, stand by,” Johnstone ordered.

  The tactical splash gave Loi the three best portal options for deployment. “Three and five,” he decided.

  “I concur,” Eldlund said.

  “Brace yourselves.”

  “Got it,” Lim said.

  All three suits leaned forward.

  In front of them, the gray pseudo-center of portals three and five melted backward, allowing a different, more vacant, texture of gray to resolve. Air howled in, bringing a flurry of dirt and dust th
at churned vigorously around the walls. The suits swayed fractionally from the impact, but held position.

  Loi consulted the tactical display again. Down in South America and over in China, five-megaton warheads were detonating twenty to thirty kilometers above the ground, close to the convoys of Olyix transport ships lifting off. When the shock waves slammed down, ships lurched around violently before beginning their fatal nosedives. Those that hadn’t yet launched juddered about on the ground, their hulls thudding into rocks and slopes, crumpling on impact. In response, the Deliverance ships bombarding the city shields diverted their energy beams upward, targeting the incoming missiles, which relieved some of the pressure on the city shields. More Olyix transport ships used the respite to take off, seeking a precarious sanctuary in the sky.

  In reply, the black loci of Calmissiles descended in silence, consuming air and X-ray lasers with equal serenity, until they punched through the Deliverance ships, eviscerating the wreckage.

  Even though Loi had been at most of the Knockdown meetings and knew the plan by heart, watching the numbers wind up was unnerving. The cruisers were expending munitions at a phenomenal rate, and he was keenly aware of the reserves. They’d pushed manufacturing stations to the maximum in order to be ready for today, but even so it was going to be tight.

  The Knockdown tactical display splashed the cruisers above Utah, closing to their optimal attack points. Deliverance ships around Salt Lake City responded to their approach by firing at the gathering above. Missiles began to streak down in retaliation, slicing incandescent lines through the crud-clotted air.

  Three command icons splashed green.

  “Go,” Johnstone said.

  Loi started moving toward portal five. It took time to get up to a run, even with all the artificial muscle the suit was packing; that much inertia couldn’t be overcome easily. When he and Eldlund had been practicing in the suits, they’d found the best way to stop when you were sprinting was just to drop to the ground, then dig your knees and elbows in to bulldoze through dirt until you halted.

  He’d reached a reasonable jogging speed when he passed through portal five’s blue rim. His balance shifted, which the suit’s network corrected. There was an intruder synth-turtle just behind his heels, squatting on the side of Mount Kessler’s steep slope in the heart of the Oquirrh range. Eldlund emerged from portal three, twenty meters to the west, with Lim following him out.

  The gale pummelling the mountains was so thick with a hail of soil and stone flakes that Loi’s visual sensors couldn’t see them at all. The stones pinged off his armor, making it sound like he was being shot with old-fashioned bullets. He kept moving forward, sustaining his momentum despite the unstable ground. The tactical splash exposed the Olyix ships ranged across the nearby mountains. They’d emerged a kilometer from a transport ship—while two and a half kilometers beyond that, along a precarious ridge, a Deliverance ship had pulverized the top of Farnsworth Peak, creating a flattish plateau on which it had sat for the last two and a half years while it assaulted Salt Lake City’s shield.

  The transports were starting to take off while the Deliverance ships were shooting upward at the swarm of missiles hurtling down. This time it was the Calmissiles that arrived first. Their exhaust plumes were bright enough to shine through the murky atmosphere, turning the slope into a stark monochrome wasteland. Loi could even glimpse the hulking shapes of the other two armor suits lumbering along.

  Five Calmissiles punctured the Deliverance ship at Farnsworth Peak, cutting clean through and boring vertically down into the mountain until their spacial entanglement casings were switched off seconds later. By then the incandescent exhausts had already devastated the interior of the Deliverance ship. It burst apart in a cascade of molten slivers and jagged structural segments.

  The glare faded, replaced by intense flashes from somewhere overhead as a fusillade of nuclear warheads detonated. Loi could just make out the shadow shape of the transport ship lifting off—a truncated-cone profile with its nose angling up as it started to accelerate. More explosions bloomed, their shock waves crashing down in massive pressure surges. The transport ship was more than three hundred meters high when the full force of the blast wave struck. It was flung down, twisting sharply as if trying to regain its correct flight vector. Then it smashed hard into the ground. Splits multiplied along the fuselage, but it remained intact.

  Loi designated the fusion chamber exhaust ports at the rear, and the suit fired a tactical missile. The warhead was only a two-decaton nuke, and it exploded twenty meters away from the ship. Still, it was powerful enough to lift half of the transport off the ground as it shunted the whole mass along. The nose crunched into a rock clump, and the fissures in the fuselage ripped wide open. The aft quarter crumpled badly, blackening as the nuke’s small mushroom cloud was immediately torn apart by the wind.

  Loi crouched down. Even so, he wound up sprawling on his back as the blast wave flipped him over. Three high-velocity drones streaked forward from Eldlund’s dispensers, hitting the transport ship’s mangled fuselage and sticking fast.

  “Entanglement suppression active,” Eldlund exclaimed. “The Salvation onemind doesn’t know what’s happening to the ship.”

  Loi had righted himself and was plowing forward as fast as he could go. The flashes from nukes overhead were coming less frequently. All part of the Knockdown strategy, allowing the remaining ships to escape to orbit.

  The transport was in bad shape. Its somber-red fuselage had so many cracks and gashes it was clearly never going to fly again. Internal tanks had been torn open. Fluids were gurgling out to splurge over structural spurs and the curving decking before splattering on the baked ground. Some of the liquid bleeding from the ship’s vitals was cryogenic, bubbling away from exposure to the hot winds, producing vigorous clouds of white vapor that veiled the deeper mysteries of the interior.

  Loi switched his suit sensor array to active, and it probed clean through the clouds, exposing the layout ahead. The ship was one he was painstakingly familiar with, identical to the original design of the Avenging Heretic. Directly under the fuselage skin was a thick seam of systems to manipulate exotic matter, allowing the ship to fly through a wormhole. Gravitonic drive units and fusion generators occupied the aft quarter, now mostly mangled slag thanks to the tactical nuke he’d fired. The bulk of the ship was composed of cylindrical compartments linked by overlapping circular corridors that resembled wide pipes.

  He reached the ship and gripped both edges of a wide fissure. Artificial muscle cranked up to full strength, and he actually heard the grinding sound through the suit insulation as the gap was pried farther apart. Then he was inside, battling to keep a decent footing on the oily fluid coating the corridor walls, while icy white vapor from the broken cryogenic tank gushed around him, blocking the visual sensors. Millimeter-wave radar delineated something moving up ahead. The splash showed him an odd profile—an octopus whose tentacles projected radially out of its body in two equidistant rings, top and bottom, with whip cables sprouting from the midsection. It was clambering toward him fast. His shoulder-mounted mag-miniguns deployed, swiveling forward. They fired a couple of half-second bursts, producing a ferocious jackhammer vibration that made his teeth rattle. The body of the Olyix construct was immediately reduced to tattered shreds—almost the same consistency as the bubbling fluid Loi was slewing through.

  Three more of the things came flailing along the corridor. He blasted each of them, then he, Eldlund, and Lim arrived at the central compartment. It was a basic cylinder that ran the height of the ship, separated into three sections by simple walkway grids. Halfway up, in the center of the walkway, was a two-meter-diameter sphere, held in place by ten radial poles. There must have been more than twenty of the Olyix creatures in there, of different sizes and with varying lengths of tentacles. They were moving sluggishly as though they were drunk, and sensors didn’t see them carrying an
ything that resembled weapons. Loi and Eldlund opened fire. Ten seconds later, their armor suits were covered in ribbons of gore, the creatures were all dead, and the compartment’s walls had hundreds of fist-sized holes where the armor-piercing micro-harpoons had struck.

  “That makes it easy,” Lim said. She began to scale the wall with the ease of a jazzed-up freefall climber, using the holes to jam feet and hands in. If they weren’t big enough, she punched or kicked them until they were.

  Loi used his suit sensors to watch the two corridors at the bottom of the compartment while Eldlund covered the three entrances at the top. The gale of cryogenic vapor had withered away, leaving everything in stark relief.

  Lim reached the midsection walkway and swung onto it. If the transport ship’s onemind was alarmed at her presence, there was no physical sign of it. But Loi kept vigilant as the blood fizzing around his body turned to pure adrenaline. So great-grandfather Ainsley’s paranoia is hereditary, after all.

  The tactical splash showed him that the nearly two dozen Olyix transport ships around Salt Lake City were now airborne. The surviving pair of Deliverance ships was lifting with them, their energy beams cutting apart the last barrage of missiles. Two hundred kilometers above them, a formation of cruisers swept eastward, with a second formation following fifteen hundred kilometers behind. The gap between them was the one that the Olyix ships were aiming for. After two years analyzing the flight capabilities of the transport ships, Strikeback had determined that over fifty percent should be able to make it through that gap and continue to climb.

  “Starting extraction now,” Lim announced.

  Loi’s suit sensors zoomed in. Lim had placed a glossy black package on the surface of the sphere, next to one of the radial spokes. Its surface rippled as if it were composed of a particularly viscous liquid.

  This was the part they were completely dependent on the Neána for. The aliens were the ones with the neurovirus, which they claimed couldn’t be used by humans. They had to rely on Lim and Jessika. Loi wanted to believe they’d pull through, but Kandara’s suspicions kept playing in his mind. So much had to be taken on trust. Our survival.