The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Every day forever.” His final smile was ruptured by the tip of a capturesnake forcing its way into his mouth; it started to worm its way down his esophagus. Biting it was useless; the flexing skin was hard as rock. He started to choke as the green light dimmed. Maria’s body was filling the portal. A final swipe at two capturesnakes surging after her, the satisfying flash of incandescence as their alien guts fried. The green light grew brighter as Maria’s legs quickly slid across the rim, then vanished completely.

  I’ll be waiting there for you after the end of time.

  THE AVENGING HERETIC

  YEAR TWO

  It was Callum’s second extended period out of the tank’s oblivion, and he was surprised at how quickly it had gone. The crew’s schedule was simple enough: Two people were on duty for three months, then everyone would be brought out of suspension for a month together, and after that a different pair would begin their duty watch.

  He’d thought his first watch would be difficult; he’d shared it with Jessika. There were doubts still lingering in his mind, not simply because she was alien—or should that be: her origin was alien?—but because he’d never known. All that time spent working together on Akitha, even going out for drinks a few times in the evening after work, a couple of binaries laughing gently at the foibles of their newly adopted Utopial home. There’d been no hint, not a clue, that she wasn’t fully human. After all life had thrown at him by that time, he’d always considered himself able to read people. So the failure was all his own, and that inevitably kindled a spark of inward-focused anger.

  Logically, of course, he had no reason to be suspicious of her. She had been created to help humans—a real-universe version of an angel dispatched to Earth. The final proof being that she was here, supporting this crazy-stupid mission. Which left him looking like the petty one for harboring doubts. He probably overreacted, trying to compensate with excessive politeness, and laughing a little too hard at her jokes. To the extent that after ten days together she asked: “Are you okay?”

  Shamefaced, he’d diverted by replying: “It was just Kandara’s crack about the Neána being a splinter group of the Olyix.”

  “It got to me, too,” she admitted. “But there is the counter argument: How come we didn’t know the enclave location?”

  “There’s a lot of things your group of Neána humans weren’t told. What your species actually is, where the abode cluster is. Security.”

  “Fair enough. But if I were you, I’d be more worried about Kandara’s other belief.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I’m not in charge of my destiny. That I have subconscious orders to betray you, or something worse.”

  “Thanks. Way to reassure me.”

  “But on the bright side, what could I actually do at this point to make it worse?”

  “Uh…”

  “Quite.”

  Callum admitted she’d won that one. It made the rest of their watch go smoothly.

  Then six months later when he and Yuri began their watch together, he was prepared for weeks of grumpy avoidance and barely civil grunts when they did encounter each other. But it turned out Yuri was actually far too professional for that. Not that he was a big talker.

  “I was thinking about something Jessika said,” Callum confided to Yuri at breakfast during their second week.

  “Which is?”

  “If she was a Neána, some kind of double agent, how could she damage the mission?”

  “Yes. And?”

  “Well, I don’t think she has a hidden agenda.”

  Yuri rolled his eyes as he ate some syrniki. “Glad we got that sorted out.”

  “But it did make me think about what might happen. You know, worst case scenarios and such.”

  “Ah. So?”

  “We know more about the Salvation of Life now; even I can understand some of its thought routines. The basic ones, anyway.” It had taken a long time, and plenty of coaxing from Jessika, but these days he could make a degree of sense out of the impulses flowing into his brain from their entangled cell nodule. The Salvation of Life’s onemind was surprisingly sedate. He’d always had the belief that any entity fanatical enough to embark on forceful conquest would be deranged—an opinion enforced by the human viewpoint. Earth’s history was crammed with examples, from individuals like Hitler and Pol Pot to the popularism that had damaged so much in the so-called democratic nations from the end of the nineteenth century onward. The realization that the onemind was methodical and composed in its beliefs and purpose had proved unnerving. Basically, that cold intent frightened him more than he’d expected.

  “It can’t see us, Callum,” Yuri said in a reassuring tone. “Jessika made sure of that. The visual routines for the hangar simply edit our creeperdrones out of its perception.”

  The fact that Yuri knew exactly what to say suggested to Callum that the old security chief had been thinking along similar lines.

  “No, it doesn’t see anything amiss,” Callum agreed, “because right now its observation is autonomic. There is no problem; therefore it isn’t looking for a problem. But if it really starts to look, do you think the glitch we’ve introduced into its local routines will hold?”

  “And it will start to look hard,” Yuri concluded.

  “Bloody right, pal. Once we trigger the Signal transmitters, the whole Olyix star system is going to know humans somehow piggybacked a ride to the enclave. They will tear the Salvation of Life apart to find us.”

  “Remaining here with the Salvation, and maybe calling to any future human attack force, was only a secondary aspect of the mission. Our absolute priority is to broadcast the Signal, to let humans know where the enclave is. You knew that when we began. We have to accept the inevitable. Once broadcast, the Signal cannot be cancelled.”

  “I do accept it, man. But it doesn’t mean we can’t take some precautions.”

  Yuri sipped some tea from his oversize mug. “Such as?”

  They spent the next ten weeks cheerfully shooting down each other’s wilder ideas, developing the concepts that did survive until they had something to bring to the others at the next watch changeover month.

  Jessika’s revival was always immaculate; she awoke from the tank as if she’d been dozing for a couple of hours. Alik and Kandara took a lot longer, and Callum identified with their crabby resentment as they were helped out of the tanks. His own body still took way too long to recover every time his period in suspension ended.

  In what was becoming tradition, twenty-four hours after they were out of the tank, everybody gathered around the table for a big Chinese meal. Callum even got the printers to provide therm-foil containers, so it looked like they’d ordered out.

  “A bunker?” Alik asked as he tried to use his chopsticks to hook a prawn out of his fried rice.

  “A fallback refuge,” Callum said. “They’re going to come hunting us after we trigger the Signal. There’re not many places we can be. They’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Figure it out, or search the entire arkship,” Yuri said. “Callum’s right. We need to be ready to abandon ship.”

  “And do what?” Kandara asked. “The Avenging Heretic gives us options.”

  “Limited options,” Yuri said. “After we pop out of this wormhole, our absolute priority is to trigger the Signal; only then can we think about getting inside the enclave. And triggering the Signal is going to create an instant shitstorm. They’ll know we’re here right away, so they’ll release the hounds. If we try and escape by flying off in real space, we have nowhere to go; we’ll be thousands of light-years from Sol.”

  “If we try flying away, the Deliverance ships would catch us anyway,” Jessika said. “Their acceleration is a lot higher than ours, and I’m guessing they’re not the most powerful warships at the gateway. Not by a long shot.”

  �
��I expect you’re right,” Yuri agreed glumly.

  “We originally assumed that if we could get to the enclave star undetected, we could stay invisible to the onemind after we sent the Signal,” Callum said. “Now that we understand a little more about how the Salvation of Life works, I don’t think we can. At the very least we need a decoy.”

  Jessika picked up some stir-fry noodles with her chopsticks and gave him a thoughtful look. “We could hijack another transport ship. There are twenty-seven in this hangar alone, in varying conditions; most of them are flightworthy. It could make a valiant fight for freedom and get tragically nuked.”

  “That sounds risky,” Yuri said. “You’d have to neurovirus its onemind.”

  “Which Soćko proved we can do.”

  “Yeah, right,” Alik said. “But here’s the thing. He was inside the transport ship, and had a direct physical connection to its neural fibers. How you gonna get inside one of them here?”

  “It’s a plan that needs work,” she admitted. “But I’m still putting it out there.”

  “Okay,” Yuri said. “That’s fallback number two. But I think we should start by exploring Callum’s option.”

  “We either do it or we don’t,” Kandara said. “What’s to explore?”

  “Location,” Callum told her. “I’ve been riding the onemind’s local perception routines for a few weeks now.”

  She grinned at him. “Everyone should have a hobby.”

  “There are twelve passages out of this hangar. Some are just tunnels, their version of utility channels; some are proper access corridors. And there are chambers off both of them, it seems. I’d like to send our creeperdrone spies down them to see if there’s anything suitable.”

  “And if there is?” Jessika asked.

  “Start building up a reserve of equipment.”

  “You mean transfer the contents of the Avenging Heretic into a cave?”

  “No,” Yuri said. “We won’t need that much. We can breathe the Salvation’s air, remember? So we need basic equipment, and enough food to last us a couple of months. Maybe a year.”

  “Months?” Alik said. “You’re shitting me!”

  “No. Inside the enclave, time flows slowly.”

  “Says who?” Kandara said harshly. She jabbed a chopstick toward Jessika. “The Neána? How do they know? If your kind weren’t here, how did they find out? And if they were here, when was it? What does that make them?”

  “It makes them a species who can neurovirus an Olyix onemind,” Yuri said. “Who can extract such knowledge from an arkship’s memory. And even if they are cousins to the Olyix, or rebels, what the fuck difference does it make now? It’s not like we can turn around and head for home. So far, all the information Jessika and her colleagues have provided is correct. We’re committed to this mission, and that means assuming the enclave is a bubble of slowtime.”

  “From what I’ve determined from the Salvation’s onemind, there is an enclave,” Jessika said earnestly. “Just like my original information.”

  “Yuri and I talked about this,” Callum said. “The enclave was built to take the Olyix to the end of time, so time has got to be flowing slow in there. Really slow. A year inside will cover centuries out here, if not longer. It has to; there’s no other way. Even if you go forward to when this galaxy becomes quiescent and stops producing new stars, you’re looking at billions of years.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If a human armada doesn’t come knocking within a year or two of enclave time, they never will,” Yuri said. “That will be thousands of years passing outside.”

  “So what do we do then?” Alik demanded. “If they never come?”

  “Please, you knew that was always possible. But we do not consider this, yes? We do not let it distract us. We continue our mission, we survive as long as we can. Then…” Yuri shrugged and ate a chunk of sweet and sour chicken.

  “Join the rest of the human race in a cocoon and find out what this alien god has in mind for us,” Callum said.

  “Or go out in a fantastic blaze of gunfire,” Kandara said wickedly.

  Yuri grinned at Alik. “See? So many choices. And you were worried this flight would be boring.”

  Alik closed his eyes. “Jezus H. Christ.”

  * * *

  —

  Callum piloted one of the creeperdrone spy creatures. He was confident in the operation now, even though it was painstakingly slow. The little spiderlike thing provided a slightly weird view from its bulbous eye clusters. He didn’t understand why Jessika hadn’t incorporated a more ordinary lens, but she’d muttered something about authenticity and avoiding variance the one time he’d asked.

  It was making its cautious way down a wide passageway. The floor was cut clean through the rock—a perfectly smooth surface that had dulled down the years. Walls and ceiling were a tousled weave of woody tubes—some as thick as oak trees—which were tangled by finger-wide stems, forming an enigmatic tapestry of alien browns and grays. There were fewer leaves in here, and the bioluminescent strips threaded along the bark were spaced widely, creating long stretches of shadow. Pools of liquids with sticky rims had coagulated on the floor under the fractured tubes, which Callum assiduously steered the spy creature around.

  Half a kilometer from the hangar, the floor started to rise up. There were vents in a couple of the big tubes—fat, bulbous shapes that he first mistook for knots in the bark. When he paused the creature close to one, he could see it was slowly dilating and contracting, breathing out damp air. The nearby bark was all covered in a furry blue-green growth, like a mold that was transforming into a fern.

  A couple of hundred meters up the slope there was a fork in the passage. He steered the creature into the smaller passage. It branched again, then came out into a junction with five tunnels, one going vertical, which was almost completely jammed with tubes in a faintly obscene twining contortion. Onward, again down the narrowest tunnel. There was a gap in the web of arboreal tubes just big enough for a human to wriggle through. It was lightless inside.

  Callum paused the creature and focused his consciousness on the chaotic tumble of the onemind’s thoughts. Filtering and interpretation was far more art than science. But eventually he believed he was perceiving the narrow tunnel where the creature was waiting. Whatever lay in the gap seemed to be a natural cessation in the onemind’s perception.

  “What do you think?” he asked Jessika. “Trap or genuine perception break?”

  “Let me review,” she replied.

  It was nearly an hour before she spoke again. “There is some kind of activity in there. The tubes go in, and I can sense pressure in the fluids. But there’s very little flow. The impulses are all part of the autonomic process. I’m guessing some kind of fluid reserve.”

  “A tank?”

  “Tank, bladder, reservoir—whatever. A place to store reserves.”

  “No armored quint inside waiting for us?”

  “Ninety-eight percent: no. I think it’s clear.”

  Callum took a breath and refocused on the spy creature. He eased it into the gap. At first guess, it was an original fissure in the asteroid before the Olyix started converting it into an arkship. The walls were irregular, creating a cleft that extended over fifty meters, varying in width from twenty meters down to paper thin at the extremities. A cluster of silky spheres five meters in diameter was affixed to the walls close to the entrance with tough strings of fiber encasing them like nets. The tubes plaited around them, slowly pushing fluids in and out. Callum thought they looked like eggs laid by some beast twice the size of a T. rex, and ten times scarier.

  Beyond the egg tanks, the cavern was empty.

  “This place goes against everything we know of asteroid composition,” Kandara said. “I’ve been on enough of them to know they’re either S-type—the solids—or a co
ngealed pile of rubble. They don’t have caves and caverns. That’s strictly part of planetary geology: Cavities in rock form from water eroding limestone. And the one thing you don’t get in space rock is limestone, because it’s sedimentary. The other thing you don’t get on an asteroid is water, let alone free flowing water.”

  “The obelisks Feriton reported seeing in the fourth chamber were made from sedimentary rock,” Alik said.

  “A fourth chamber which didn’t exist,” Yuri countered. “It was a simulation.”

  “And yet, here we have a bona fide cave. Somehow I don’t think the Olyix produced it for aesthetic satisfaction. It could be significant.”

  “I really don’t care about asteroid formation processes,” Callum said. “We have a cavern that has minimal perception inside. End of story.”

  “But why is it there?”

  “I dunno. Bring it up at the next philosophy-of-geology lecture. We have our refuge.”

  “We have the first possible site for our refuge,” Yuri said. “Although I agree it is favorable. Let’s keep reviewing the locale.”

  After another three days, they agreed Callum’s cave was the one they were going to use. There were other cavities within a kilometer of the hangar, but they were either smaller or packed full of the arkship’s biological structures.

  “So how do we get to it?” Alik asked.

  “The visual glitches in the hangar perception routines should cover us in here,” Jessika said. “It’ll take time, but I should be able to extend them up the passageway to the cave.”

  “And physically?” Yuri asked. “How do we get our supplies there?”

  “Trojan horse. We’ll use an initiator to assemble a creeperdrone in the shape of one of the medium-size creatures, and use its internal cavity as a cargo hold. That way we can move stuff there slowly.”

  “I’d like to establish our own sensors in the passageway first,” Kandara said. “The same type we’ve installed around the hangar; they can keep watch for any of the Salvation’s own creatures or a quint moving about. The last thing we want is your cargo creature unexpectedly bumbling into anything too analytical. We only make a delivery run when the passage is completely clear, agreed?”