The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  So Dellian led them onto a troop carrier, where they waited, and waited…Tilliana and Ellici were in their tactical situation room on deck twenty-four, with a dedicated munc-interfaced genten feeding them prodigious amounts of real-time sensor data.

  Once again, Yirella had nothing to do. She waited in her cabin, lying on the bed, with the walls detextured. Her neural interface connected her directly into the Morgan’s network. The corpus humans who’d refashioned the warship had built in a full-capacity union for her. Riding the network channels was a seriously liberating experience, especially as she used a quantum array as a buffer to the vast quantity of available information. It was similar, she supposed, to the way the muncs’ neural instinct filtered data for Tilliana and Ellici. Except the processing power in the array also boosted her consciousness.

  In this state it was hard to justify remaining as a single flesh body, the advantages of elaborating up to corpus status were so obvious.

  There’s still time. All the time I want.

  She began to compartmentalize her newly expanded mind, each segment monitoring a separate block of information—the wormhole, the corpus armada ships, the neutron star’s cage, the squad’s troop carrier, Dellian in his new utterly lethal armor suit, his cohort at ease in their new attack body casings. Her primary attention flicked effortlessly between them. I really am a guardian angel this time.

  Immanueel’s presence impinged on her cognizance, a phantom hello, acknowledging her presence in the network.

  “Can I observe in concert with you?” she asked.

  “I would welcome your company,” they replied.

  She shifted her focus, moving into several (but not all) of the particles that housed aspects of Immanueel’s corpus. Some were little more than carrier craft for warships whose weapons could devastate whole moons. Others had more complex mechanisms.

  “I didn’t realize you were this…I was going to say big, but it’s more like: expansive.”

  “I am what I want to be,” they replied courteously. “Perhaps after FinalStrike I will reconjugate into something less aggressive.”

  Together they watched as the armada began to emerge from the wormhole terminus. As they passed the throat, their copper surfaces pared back, exposing the ships within and allowing a greater range of sensors to examine their new environment. They were six light-months from the Olyix signal station—a modest L-class star with an airless, rocky planet orbiting two AUs out, and a Neptune-sized ice giant huddled away in the cold thirty-two AUs distant.

  When the wormhole carrier ship had decelerated into this location two years ago, the history faction had dispatched a squadron of stealthed ships on toward the Olyix outpost, each one holding an expansion portal. They’d flown into the star system undetected. Now Yirella watched through dedicated links as they slowly glided into position, closing on their targets.

  “That is impressive,” she murmured grudgingly. Sensors on the stealthed ships were showing her detailed images of the Olyix structures. They locked onto the station itself as it orbited two thirds of an AU from the L-class star. It was a nest of seven concentric bands, spinning slowly. Their surfaces shone an intense purple in the sun’s lemon-tinted light, as if they’d been milled from a solid block of metal.

  “So that’s an Olyix habitat?” she said. The outermost ring was two hundred kilometers in diameter.

  “It would seem so. Given their technology level, we’re surprised they need something this large to operate an outpost like this. Perhaps it is related to how many biological server constructs they appear to use.”

  “So it’s a home for a onemind, and…what? A stable of constructs?”

  “Possibly. But there is no question there is plenty of activity here.”

  Yirella followed the station’s orbital track. Eleven huge radio telescopes were visible, pentagonal dodecahedrons that put her in mind of a clump of symmetric sunflowers, but two thousand kilometers wide. They were spaced equidistantly around the star, allowing them to scan interstellar space for any innocent radio broadcasts from emerging civilizations.

  Those she ignored. Her concern was spiked by the number of Resolution ships holding position fifty thousand kilometers from the big multi-ring station. The squadron had adopted a protective formation around a welcome ship, a rocky cylinder thirty-five kilometers long.

  Her perception enclosed it, magnifying the sight until it hung in the center of her conscience like a detailed ghost. Its profile was unpleasantly familiar from their encounter with a near-identical ship at Vayan.

  “I wonder how many humans are cocooned on board?” she mused.

  “Unknown,” Immanueel said. “We conclude it was assigned to the new war fleet en route to us. They thought they could capture us.”

  “Most likely,” she agreed. After examining the Resolution ships, confirming they were the upgraded version, her main interest was the star’s equator, where a loop of matter was spinning around the seething corona, partially occluded by an unnatural storm of prominences that its presence whipped up. “That’s got to be the generator to power their wormholes. Saints! The energy they’re producing!”

  “Indeed.”

  She switched focus to the wormholes that circled lazily around the station. Thirty-seven active ones, presenting as pools of Cherenkov radiation gleaming sharply against the blackness of interstellar space. Trailing farther along the orbital path, and drifting out of alignment, were eleven dead hemispheres of cold machinery, their delicate exposed elements fraying with vacuum ablation over the decades. Behind them were another two inert hemispheres slowly circling around each other in a ghostly dance.

  “Those eleven in the first clump have to be the termini for the wormholes you destroyed,” Yirella said.

  “Yes. And presumably the remaining pair were the termini for Vayan, and the lure world where they encountered the Lolo Maude.”

  “And the active wormholes? We’re assuming the largest is the one that leads back to the enclave.”

  “The others presumably lead to the ships currently flying to the neutron star and the Signal star. They’ll want to eliminate all sources of resistance.”

  “Yeah.”

  She watched as three stealthed corpus ships drifted in toward the largest of the Olyix wormholes. After their two-year flight, they were now within ten thousand miles. Dark puffs of inert molecules effervesced gently out of them, performing final course corrections.

  “No indication the Olyix have detected us,” Immanueel said. “Everything is going to plan.”

  Yirella had to wonder how much anxiety she was subconsciously leaking through the neural interface. Or perhaps Immanueel just knew her too well. She pulled her attention back.

  All around the Morgan, specialist systems and armada warships were converging on the expansion portals that were entangled with their twins in the stealth ships. They began to form up in their designated assault sequence, and she concentrated on the five negative-energy generators that would target the wormhole that led back to the enclave. If they didn’t get through, or if they failed to take control of the wormhole, the armada would have to take the long way around. They were utterly critical.

  She finally understood why humans on old Earth had assigned deities to the constellations. It was pleasing to believe there was a higher power you could beg to circumvent fate. Useless…but pleasing.

  Saints, but I wish I wasn’t so smart.

  “Here we go,” Immanueel said.

  The lead stealth ship approaching the enclave wormhole was less than a meter across. It had shed its external layer of molecular blocks in an unsymmetrical sequence, taking on an irregular shape so that any detailed scan would show a natural-appearing lump of asteroidal debris. The course it was on would take it twelve hundred meters south of the generator mechanism, approaching at three thousand seven hundred nineteen kilometers an h
our. Close, but not dangerous. The corpus expected the Olyix structures to have impact protection—a gravity distortion field if nothing else, deflecting space fragments away harmlessly.

  Data zipped through Yirella’s mind, delivered by the quantum array that operated at a seemingly instinctual level. The generator was indeed sitting at the center of an inverted gravity swirl. But there were no other active measures—yet.

  The stealth ships flashed in to the closest approach, their courses bending slightly as they skipped off the boundary of the gravitational deflection field like spinning stones bouncing along a lake. They curved around the hemispherical wormhole generator, one on either side of the glowing entrance, while the third followed the camber of the machinery. At two kilometers out, the portals expanded.

  Five negative-energy generators flew through the portals, fast. Defense cruisers corkscrewed around them, ready to ward off any form of attack, be it energy-based or physical. Immanueel wasn’t concerned by that. The only goal was to establish their own grip on the wormhole structure inside a second.

  For Yirella, aloof on her digital Olympus, that instant stretched out interminably thanks to the quantum computer’s hyperfast presentation, giving her old brain cells a jolt as she struggled to cope with the massive data input. The event hit her like an ice-cream headache, each aspect painfully clear.

  As soon as they emerged through the portals, the five generators interfaced with the throat of the wormhole, their negative-energy output locking the opening in place and providing enough power to maintain it. Less than a second later, they were buffeted by a severe gravitational distortion, coupled with a ferocious bombardment of energy beams. Simultaneous with that, the Olyix generator cut its own negative-energy emission. Without that, the wormhole should have collapsed. It didn’t.

  Once the defense cruisers confirmed the wormhole had retained its integrity and was under corpus control, they retaliated. The Olyix generator fractured abruptly as the entire bulk was subjected to a massive graviton pulse, twisting the internal structure into an impossible physical alignment. Then the deformation reversed. The entire generator structure shattered, jagged splinters streaking outward. Thousands bounced off the copper shells of the corpus ships, ricocheting back wildly. The remainder formed an expanding debris cloud scintillating in the tawny sunlight.

  “We got it!” she exclaimed.

  “We certainly did,” Immanueel agreed.

  At the heart of the twinkling knot of rubble and gas, the violet glow of the wormhole’s Cherenkov radiation remained steadfast.

  The remaining ten stealth craft infiltrating the star system expanded their portals. Two light-years away, the history faction’s copper-skinned armada swarmed through—a deluge that lasted five hours. With Ainsley leading one of the formations, they accelerated in sharply toward the Resolution ships.

  SAINTS

  OLYIX ENCLAVE

  They stayed in the bridge simulation as the Salvation of Life passed through the gateway. Yuri took a puzzled moment to examine the images being fed to him from the sensor clusters on the arkship’s hull. At first he thought it was just a multicolored smear—an instrument malfunction, or maybe some kind of spatial deformation like the interior of a wormhole? Then his brain finally grasped the scale, and he recognized what he was seeing.

  The smear resolved into monumental veils of gas twining around each other in a slow, almost sensual, sashay, fluorescing in spectacular hues as they crawled around their prison. A nebula, then. Caged by the enclave, a spherical zone that gave a good impression of infinity but which the G8Turing measured at about ninety AUs in diameter.

  “Fuck me,” he grunted. Five AUs away, the star at the center of this artificial micro-universe, just visible through the thick currents of dust and gas, was a twin of the one outside, over one and a half times the size of Sol, and burning an intense white below a highly agitated corona. Yuri had never seen so many sunspots and prominences contaminating a star. Vast braids of plasma were leaping out of the chromosphere, some soaring up vertically over a million kilometers before twirling down in epic cascades of incandescent rain.

  This time the star had five rings wrapped around it. The innermost was spinning around the equator in the same direction as the star’s rotation, while the second one was just outside that, inclined at twenty degrees, and spinning in the opposite direction.

  The three outermost rings were also inclined at progressively steeper angles, with the outermost encircling the poles. Unlike the solid inner pair, they were composed entirely of opalescent light that shone brighter than the corona underneath.

  “Exotic matter?” Callum speculated.

  “That’s not the usual Cherenkov radiation wavelength,” Jessika said. “But given the energy level involved in maintaining temporal flow manipulation across something as vast as the enclave, it’s got to be a variant. The impression I’m getting from the onemind is that they’re the generators, and the inner pair of rings are powering them.”

  “Man, I’m not sure I can get my head around this,” Alik said quietly. “Every stage of this trip we’re seeing something more impossible than the last. Maybe humans shouldn’t have gone down the technology route. Shoulda just stuck to the caves on the savanna. Kept it simple, you know.”

  Yuri couldn’t recall seeing such an amazed expression on the FBI agent’s face before. And somehow he couldn’t even snark; he was finding the enclave just as imposing himself.

  “We’re not quite in a vacuum anymore,” Jessika said. “That nebula has a measurable density. Take a look aft of the Salvation.”

  Yuri called up the correct sensor view. She was right. Behind them the gateway hung motionless like a black version of the spectral bubble outside. As the arkship accelerated away from it, they were stretching out a long tail, like an oceangoing ship of old scoring a bio-phosphorescent wake through nighttime water.

  “Why?” Kandara asked. “Is this stuff connected to the temporal flow?”

  “No,” Callum said. “The enclave is very finite. There’s nowhere for the solar wind to escape, so it just churns around in here absorbing all the star’s surplus energy. In a billion years it’ll be a proper atmosphere—one of hydrogen, but pretty bloody thick.”

  “And hot,” Jessika said. “And radioactive. The whole enclave will wind up resembling the interior of a red giant star. But hey, hopefully we won’t be here that long.”

  “A billion years in this time, or outside time?” Alik asked.

  “No way do we care,” Kandara said, with a sly grin. “Even I never planned on living a billion years.”

  “Inside time—but that was just a guess,” Callum said. “Actually, all they have to do is switch the enclave off for a day and let the nebula blast away into interstellar space, then switch it back on again.”

  “Oh, well, if you put it like that…Simple.”

  “It doesn’t matter how things work in here,” Alik said. “No one gives a shit. All we have now is the mission. We stay alive and free for as long as we can. And maybe at the end we get to tell a rescue ship where we are. That’s it. Period.”

  “There must be some way of knowing what speed time is flowing at in here,” Yuri said.

  “Only if we can compare it with the outside rate to get a baseline,” Jessika told him. “Which we can’t.”

  “Crap.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Alik persisted. “Concentrate on the mission. We’re here to guide a human armada to the Salvation, right? Which actually we lucked out on, because fuck knows you can’t see jack in here. Any invading ships will need to know where we are. We have a genuine purpose, people.”

  The bridge’s main display swept the nebula aside and revealed the inside of the cave. All of them were sitting around on the rock ledges they’d claimed, unmoving.

  The perspective was odd, Yuri thought, affecting him like a mild dose of vertig
o. He was in the simulation looking out at himself, whereas in reality the image he was seeing only existed inside his head. The schizophrenic version of standing between two mirrors and seeing an infinity of yous.

  Jessika had centered the camera on the transmitter the Avenging Heretic’s initiators had built, a simple black disk a meter wide, strong enough to blast a message across a solar system, with power reserves to last for an hour.

  We’ll never get that long.

  But a few minutes should be enough. Any armada that slammed its way into the enclave would have sensors capable of picking up a human broadcast.

  “Okay,” Yuri said. “So we work out the best way to get it to the hangar entrance.”

  “That’s a fluid situation,” Kandara said. “We don’t know what will be in or around the hangar when the armada arrives.”

  “So start with worst case,” Alik said. “It’s got armored quint standing guard in there.”

  “Standing guard?” Yuri snorted. “What is this, a medieval castle?”

  “Quint in one of those flying spheres is way more worst case, anyway,” Kandara said.

  “There won’t be anybody paying any attention to the hangar,” Callum said. “The Salvation of Life is going into some kind of storage. No invasion force is going to get here for thousands of years. The Olyix already think we’re dead, so the onemind won’t be looking for us. Actually, if we get really lucky, the onemind will have let the hangar’s biological systems die off by then. It doesn’t need them; it doesn’t need the hangar. All the Salvation has to do now is keep the cocoons alive.”

  “Congratulations,” Alik told him. “That is the biggest crock of shit I have heard since we left Earth. In fact, since I don’t know when.”