The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She was dressed and ready when it entered the washroom, carrying a case of additional remotes the initiator had produced for her. Looking at the perfect replica of herself was the strangest sensation. She didn’t know if she should run or smile in admiration.

  This part of the plan was always going to be the most ambiguous, because she and Ainsley didn’t know quite what they were dealing with. One version—the original idea—had the initiators producing a batch of insect-sized remotes packed with sensors that she could control while resting in the chamber. It certainly had the least risk. Then the Morgan had detected Lolo’s Signal—a random factor that could never have been anticipated. Her year off everything—worrying, plotting—made her reluctant to hand everything over to remotes. She wanted to be more involved, telling herself she could do a better job than any sensor, that she needed to be in the room. So she’d designed the cyborg.

  Her doppelgänger lay back down in her suspension chamber, and the lid slid back up. That way, any of the duty crew performing a routine visual check—which was a mandatory once-a-day inspection—would just see her resting in there as normal.

  It was a long way around the Morgan’s life support section from the hibernation compartment to the captain’s private quarters, and several decks higher. Yirella took it carefully, deactivating the monitors section by section, constantly checking the position of any crew in the corridors so they didn’t come across her. Three and a half hours later she was outside the door. She ran one final review of the quarters to make sure Kenelm wasn’t inside. It seemed to be clear—unless of course Kenelm was using routines every bit as sophisticated as hers. After all, if she was right, sie had been on the Factory when Ainsley was made.

  Yirella hesitated just for a second, then sent an override code into the door mechanism. It unlocked silently, and she walked in. Kenelm’s private quarters were made up of eight rooms: a formal reception room, a lounge, an entertainment room wrapped around an interactive stage, a dining room, a spa, a bedroom, a washroom, and a study. Lights came on as she stood on the threshold. The small sensor remotes clinging to her clothes extended their insect legs and clambered down onto the floor. They spread out, and she closed her eyes, riding them, multiple images flowing into her brain through the neural interface. It allowed her to pervade every room of the quarters at once, examining the structure and fittings simultaneously.

  There were no independent sensors active, and no Kenelm sleeping on hir bed. Sie really had gone back into hibernation a day after Yirella, as scheduled. Yirella allowed herself to exhale and got to work. The remotes carefully recorded the layout of each room: the way everything had been left when Kenelm went for suspension, the position of all the loose items, even the way the chairs were oriented. It might have been excessive caution, but she didn’t want Kenelm to know someone had been snooping.

  When everything was mapped, the obvious place to start a forensic-level analysis was the study. She dispatched the majority of the remotes there while she sat down in the dining room. Kenelm certainly had some of the best food extruders in the fleet, and after three days on fluid nutrients oozing into her via the umbilicals, she was ravenous.

  Five hours later the remotes had examined and explored every square millimeter of the study and everything in it, even scanning for hidden alcoves or passages. Yirella stood in the middle of the room, looking around with the results splashed inside her head. Network cables seemed to be woven everywhere beneath the decking and walls. Power cables were bright fizzing lines; the ephemeral outlines of systems and sensors glimmered like fading holograms. She was here in person because she knew intuition was something that couldn’t be enacted through remotes. But now, it turned out that staring suspiciously around the study wasn’t the mystery-busting breakthrough in real life that it was in all the books she’d accessed.

  She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but the study certainly didn’t contain it. Her principal fear was that anything that might verify Kenelm had a hidden agenda would be contained in deeply encrypted files buried somewhere in the Morgan’s network. Given how much data was stored in the ship’s memory cores, they would be almost impossible to find unless a genten ran a full content analysis through each individual file—a task that would likely take centuries.

  The remotes were directed into the formal reception room. After all, wasn’t it Saint Yuri who said the best way to hide something was in plain sight? She frowned. Or was that Saint Callum?

  The bedroom was next. When the remotes finished that, she lay down for a short rest…

  Lounge.

  Dining room.

  Spa.

  By the time the remotes scampered en masse into the entertainment room, Yirella had been in the captain’s quarters for nearly two days—eating, sleeping, fretting. The antique book she was flicking through almost dropped through her fingers when the remotes told her they’d completed their scan. Everything was normal. Nothing was out of place, nothing was hidden behind false panels, there were no concealed alien gadgets.

  “Shit.”

  She got up and slid the book back onto the shelf with all the others after a quick check of the images she’d taken to confirm it was in the right place. Kenelm had twenty volumes detailing the complete history of Falkon’s terraforming process. They’d been printed on that planet, according to the title page. Her hand rested on the spine. She didn’t move it away.

  Kenelm clearly valued the books. And why not? They were important, a part of their heritage.

  But why these?

  Her brief flick through a few pages showed her they were spectacularly dull scientific papers. Even the illustrations were boring: bacteria, genetic sequences, three-D graphs, a clone tank, laboratory equipment, assessment team expeditions, skyscraper-sized biologic initiators, orbital geological surveys.

  She remembered Saint Yuri’s story, how he doggedly followed Saint Callum’s desperate hunt for his wife, Savi. How every good detective understood that people could be defined by what they considered important.

  “What am I not seeing?” she asked, and pulled out volume one.

  THE AVENGING HERETIC

  WEEK FOUR

  “Gotta admit,” Alik said. “This is my idea of exercise.”

  Kandara just rolled her eyes in derision at male hormones as she pulled on her ubiquitous black singlet. There was barely enough elbow room for that in the tiny cabin. “Very flattering. You need to use the gym more. We don’t know how long we’re going to be doing this.” She started hunting around for her sneakers. She saw them under the cot, beneath a tangle of his clothes.

  “I was hoping for quite a while.”

  “Idiot.” She shoved his legs out of the way and sat on the edge of the cot to get her shoes on. “I mean the whole mission.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Alik’s stiff features compressed into a sulky frown.

  “Seriously? Second thoughts already?”

  “No. Just waking up to the sharp end of reality. Time is an abstract, you know. People don’t really grasp it properly. I think it’s because we’re all in denial about growing old.”

  She gave his solid face with all its reprofiled muscle and plastic-sheen skin a weary glance. “Well…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t rub it in. Someone in my position has to go with the flow. Everyone on the Hill has more clone parts than original these days.”

  She patted his legs. “Not anymore.”

  “Hey, DC survived. Well…its shield was intact when S-Day started.”

  “I bet Rio’s a mess.” For a moment she was back there, running along Copacabana’s hot sands with the young and exuberant, strutting their stuff under the sun. The smell of street-stall food and sun cream in the breeze, the bands playing along Avenida Atlantica, living the daydream, a viz-u producer would stop and beckon them over. Nightlife: the football supporters going crazy in bars, sirens of
emergency bikes bulldozing revelers off the clear routes. Marches of pride, marches of protest, lovers alone in their world, families thronging the parks, everybody living good under the sun. The Carnaval—a beautiful, wild, joyous party of laughing maniacs winding its way along the streets like an earthbound rainbow.

  No more.

  And now this sterile, modified alien spaceship was the rest of her life. Probably coffin, too.

  “Sweetheart,” Alik snorted, “the whole fucking world’s a filthy mess now.”

  “Yes.” Sweetheart! Oh, Mary.

  “Hey, on the bright side, we’ll get to see it made new when this is over.”

  She grinned in bemusement. “That is so not you.”

  “What?”

  “Optimism. That we’ll get to complete any stage of this insane mission, let alone finish it.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Somebody has to be. What use am I back there? Now that the Salvation of Life is retreating, there won’t be another one-on-one fight on Earth until the Olyix reinforcements turn up—in twenty, maybe thirty, years’ time. I’ll be too old by then.”

  “Never!”

  “Now you’re just trying to get inside my pants.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “You can stop. Both of us are practical adults.”

  “Okay. Tonight?”

  “Sure.”

  His narrow smile tightened as his gaze slid across the shallow bulges on her forearms. “Hey, I thought you’d got rid of your peripherals…”

  “I did. The originals.” She winked. “Then I got myself some new ones.”

  “Jez-us. But Lim said they might be dangerous when we’re in the tank. No one knows what long-term immersion will do to them.”

  “Yeah. Which is why Lim made these tank-proof ones for me in an initiator.”

  “Why the hell wasn’t I told they were available?”

  “Did you ask?”

  “Fuck’s sake!”

  A grinning Kandara stepped out of his cabin into the main lounge. It was the lower third of the ship’s main cylindrical chamber, ringed by the tiny personal sleep cabins they used when they weren’t in their suspension tanks. That didn’t leave much floorspace, and the table occupied most of it. At least the mid-deck had room for the exercise machines, along with the washroom and a G8Turing-run medical bay, which she prayed she’d never need. Prejudice—but she preferred human doctors. Top deck housed the suspension tanks and their support systems. Her initial hope that they’d each get one of the other chambers for personal quarters was quickly dashed when the engineers started filling them with drones and printers and a batch of Neána-technology initiators. The old Olyix bio-gunk tanks were now full of raw materials the human machinery used. Everyone on their mission strategy team swore the trove of equipment would cover most contingencies. Kandara didn’t believe that for a second; they were corporate denizens who just didn’t grasp the maxim that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

  Callum was sitting at the central table, eating scrambled eggs and salmon, with a mug of tea steaming beside his plate. “Morning,” he said, waving a fork in her direction.

  She gave him a mildly awkward smile and went over to the food printer. Her altme, Zapata, splashed a reassuring green medical icon; her gland was working fine, keeping her neurochemistry stable. Not that there’s been any trauma to trigger schizophrenia. And if the gland packs up, I’ll just use Alik for stress relief. It was all she could do not to laugh out loud. Ah, the romance.

  “I’m going to stay out another twenty-four hours,” she announced as the printer squirted out her smoothie. “One more aerobics session.”

  “I haven’t got a clue why you think you need that,” Callum said. “It’s us truly old crocks that should be hitting the treadmills.”

  “Treadmi—? Am I the only one who uses the exercise apparatus?”

  “I used one of them a couple of days ago. My legs are still on fire with DOMS.”

  “Sweet Mary, I thought the docs fixed us all up. What kind of state were you in before? We were only in the tanks for three weeks. That was just a kindergarten trial run. The real slog doesn’t start until we reach the sensor outpost, or whatever it is.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She collected her smoothie and sat down beside him. The gloom in his tone was one she shared. It had been a huge blow to discover the Salvation of Life wasn’t flying directly back to the enclave. Instead, as they came to comprehend more of the onemind’s thoughts, they realized the wormhole ended at some kind of local observation base. The Olyix had built thousands of them scattered across the galaxy, each one watching for the emergence of sentient species in their own particular sector. That was where the wormhole back to the enclave star system waited.

  It was a perfectly logical setup. Just one they hadn’t anticipated. She almost wanted to break cover so they could send Alpha Defense a message: You smartasses didn’t think of everything after all.

  “You know what bothers me about it?” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “The Neána didn’t know.”

  “About the outpost?”

  “Yeah. We are completely dependent on their knowledge and their technology. And the first time we use it…Pow! Instant problem.”

  “Pessimist. I’d say issue, not problem. So the Olyix enclave is farther away than we expected. It doesn’t change the mission profile, or what we’re dealing with. And to be fair, when they arrived on Earth, Jessika and Soćko weren’t expecting us to do anything as fucking stupid as this mission. Deliberately abandoning every planet we have so our descendants can have a crack at the enclave? When you look at it the morning after, it’s really not a good idea.”

  “I know. But really, this ship: It’s just a tiny part of the whole exodus plan. Whether we live between stars like the Neána or go for Emilja’s migratory option and hop between planets while we build up an armory of the universe’s most dangerous weapons, there will be a time when we have to face the Olyix. All you and I are doing really is giving our species a fractionally better chance to succeed. If we fail, then they’ll find the enclave by themselves eventually.”

  Callum raised his mug of tea. “Great pep talk. Thanks.”

  “Sorry.” She chuckled. “What can I say? I’m a pragmatist.”

  “I’ll take that. At least it means we have a slightly better chance of pulling this off.”

  Kandara raised her glass of smoothie. “And in the meantime, enjoy the view.” She sipped the green slush and wrinkled her nose at the taste. It wasn’t quite right, not like the one she used to blend at home, with real fruit and horrifically expensive organic yogurt. Did knowing it wasn’t real emphasize the taste difference? If there is one.

  Alik came out a couple of minutes later. He wore a white t-shirt and shorts. It didn’t look right. Kandara had become so used to seeing him in a suit that having him walking around in his underwear unsettled her world almost as much as knowing they were inside an alien arkship, which itself was inside a wormhole.

  “Gonna get a shower,” he announced and headed up the ladder to the mid-deck.

  Kandara watched Callum struggle to keep his face composed. “Just don’t.” She sighed wearily.

  “I’m not judging. But you kids make sure you use protection, okay?”

  “Oh, fuck off!”

  He started laughing. Despite herself, Kandara found she was grinning happily. “It’s a long flight,” she said defensively.

  “And getting longer.”

  “Oh, Mary, forgive me.” She walked over to the food printer and ordered up a bacon sandwich with mashed avocado and a tiny dash of spiced tomato sauce, plus a warm pain au chocolat. Add black coffee and an orange juice, and she was truly the child of international resort cuisine. One way of keepi
ng the lost Earth alive.

  Yuri came out of his cabin as she was sitting down again. He was wearing an FC Dynamo midfield shirt and black shorts. Somehow the choice suited him. “Morning,” he said. “I thought I’d get back into the tank today.”

  “Impatient for action?” she asked.

  “Bored.”

  “The creeperdrone fake is making progress,” Callum said. “We’ll soon have something to see.”

  * * *

  —

  During the first week of the Avenging Heretic sitting in the hangar, all they did was observe, and absorb as many of the arkship onemind’s thoughts as they could. Once they established that the onemind had essentially zero interest in individual ships, Jessika set about infiltrating the local neural strata and gently deflecting its scrutiny. The perception cells on the thick trunk-like pipes that webbed the hangar surfaces still saw everything; it was just that the interpretation routines that received those images didn’t care.

  With a zone of out-in-the-open concealment established, they watched the biological creatures that tended to the Salvation of Life’s basic maintenance tasks. She’d seen recordings of the arkship’s three caverns—not dissimilar to a human habitat’s interior. The variance came from the way the environment was sustained. Humans used machines in their space habitats; the Olyix chose a menagerie of creatures instructed by the onemind.

  Very few Olyix quint ventured into the hangar. Some had appeared in the first days, performing inspections on the transports that showed the worst damage. Other than that, there had been very little activity. Things like giant slugs slid slowly across the gently curving floor and up the black bark of the pipes in a routine that seemed completely unaffected by the arrival of the transport ships. Smaller spidery organisms skipped about on five legs, tending to specialist cell patches. It was one of those that Jessika constructed in the Avenging Heretic’s biologic initiator, like the creeperdrones black-ops teams used to use to spy on their targets. They had detailed files on all the creature types humans had encountered during their visits to the arkship before the invasion—size, weight, coloring, speed and maneuverability, even a guess at the autonomous intelligence level.