Yuri bit back on a laugh as he saw Callum’s pale face darken from petulance; even his freckles had vanished in the flush. “All right.” He held up a hand to Alik. “That’s the option we’d like to happen. But, Callum, we plan for worst case, okay? It’ll give us something to do, if nothing else.”
“Sure, whatever.”
“I should be able to track down the physical location of this area’s nexus,” Jessika said.
Yuri frowned. “The what?”
“Nexus. It’s like a network junction in the neuralstrata. Take that out, and the onemind can’t perceive or control the whole zone.”
“Won’t it just use entanglement with its quint and service creatures to see in?” Callum asked.
“Yes, but those are restrictive viewpoints. Taking out the nexus will give us a big tactical advantage.”
“Okay,” Yuri said. “See if you can find the nexus. If we can reach it, then we’ll have it as an option. Otherwise we need to consider the easiest way to position the transmitter.”
Kandara pointed at the black disk. “Put it in some kind of drone, one that can fly, and fly fast. We can get it outside before the Salvation’s onemind can react.”
“More than one drone,” Callum said. “We need some redundancy here.”
“We need to know the armada’s here first,” Jessika said. “That means keeping track of the onemind’s thoughts.”
Yuri grimaced at that prospect. “Yeah.”
“Let’s see where we’re heading before we start making any plans,” Kandara said. “If it’s inside some kind of big storage warehouse, we are truly screwed.”
“A warehouse?” Callum said. “For arkships?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not getting that intimation from the onemind,” Jessika said. “Just a sense, kind of like a contentment, that it’ll be joining others.”
“We’re definitely heading somewhere,” Alik said. “And the Salvation is still accelerating.”
It took a day for their destination to become apparent. Orbiting seven AUs out from the sun was a gas-giant planet. Not that the sensors could obtain a visual image of it to start with; all they could see was a bright patch lurking deeper in the nebula where they were heading. But it had a tail that curved elegantly along ten percent of its orbit—a strange blemish in this mini-cosmos that was suffused with light. It was as if someone had taken a knife to slice through the nebula, cutting open a vein of inner darkness.
“How?” Alik asked simply.
“Impact,” Callum replied, studying the small amount of data the G8Turing was extracting from the images. “The gas giant is plowing its way through the nebula, and its magnetic field is acting like a buffer, bending the clouds around it. Then when ions and electrons hit the field, it accelerates them, which heats them, so the plasma expands away—which is why it’s a darker zone relative to the surrounding nebula. It’s basically a version of the Io plasma torus around Jupiter, but the magnitude here is something else again.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Hell yes, if you don’t have radiation shielding. And thermal baffles. You need to watch for electrical discharges, too. The worst part is that sparkle at the tail’s extremity. See it? That’s basically lightning forks about the same size as a moon. Get zapped by one of those brutes, and it’s terminal game over.”
Alik brightened. “So it’s a potential weapon?”
“Nah, the arkship is big and solid enough to weather it even if you could somehow lure it inside the tail. The static would make your eyes water, mind.”
“We don’t want to disable the arkship,” Yuri reminded the FBI agent gently. “There’re a billion humans living on board.”
“Call that living?” Alik retorted.
“Wait till we get close enough to see the buffer effect,” Callum said happily.
They were eleven million kilometers out before they could see through the enhanced glow of the nebula surrounding the gas giant.
“A super-Jovian,” Jessika announced as the figures started to resolve. “Two hundred thousand kilometers in diameter. But only forty times the mass.”
“Failed star,” Callum said. “Not quite big and dense enough to ignite. But hot.”
“So is the nebula going to slow it down enough to not crash into the star?” Kandara asked.
“Given time,” Jessika said. “But the nebula is only technically not a vacuum. For all the resistance it puts up, the gas giant has the same inertia as god. That really would take a hundred billion years to brake it out of orbit.”
“Maybe,” Callum muttered quietly.
Yuri could see he was studying the astronomical data intently. As they drew closer, the image improved. The gas giant had acquired wings. Vast elliptical arcs of bright rose-gold plasma currents curled around its phenomenal bulk—the result of a potent planetary magnetic field interacting with the mist of elementary particles that it was slamming through.
“It’s like a science text illustration,” Callum said. “You can actually see the magnetic flux.”
“The planet’s ring is wrong,” Jessika announced.
Yuri checked the display. The gas giant had a single ring, two and a quarter million kilometers above its highly agitated cloudscape, which put it just outside the fringes of the magnetosphere’s illuminated bow wave. Normally gas-giant rings orbited above the equator; this one was polar, and shepherded by a rosette of five small moons. The gaps between them were filled by thousands of individual light-gray motes. They were big—relatively—for a ring. There were none of the gravel-sized particles and dust grains that made up the rings of Saturn.
“Is that what I think it is?” Yuri asked.
Jessika just nodded.
“Jez-us,” Alik said. “They can’t all be arkships, can they?”
“Looks like it,” Callum said.
“How many?”
“The G8 is estimating fifteen thousand, assuming placement is constant. We’ll be able to get a more accurate count as we approach.”
“Fifteen thousand!”
“Yeah.”
“That has to be a mistake.”
“Why?” Jessika said. “Because you think it’s too high?”
“Well…I don’t fucking know. Fifteen thousand!”
“The Olyix have been doing this for a long time,” Jessika said. “Consider, the sensor outpost we came through is approximately fifty thousand light-years from here. That means it took the Olyix at least that long to fly a wormhole-carrying ship to it. And that’s assuming they didn’t expand their outposts in stages. Then there’s the unknown of how long it’s been there. Do you really think it’s likely to have picked up Earth’s radio signals the first year they arrived?”
“Holy shit. Fifteen thousand species taken captive?”
“It won’t be that many,” Yuri said.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“The human race wouldn’t fit into one arkship; there’s too many of us. And even a species as arrogant as the Olyix will need redundancy. So say they spread a captive race over two or three arkships—”
“Why so low?” Alik demanded. “Why not ten, or why not jam five species into one? Why—”
“Hey, calm the hell down, okay? This is just a what if. Let me have five, okay? It’s a starting point is all I’m saying. So five ships per species, that gives us maybe three thousand different types of aliens.”
“Three thousand evolutions cut short,” Jessika said flatly. “Three thousand species denied their future. Three thousand destinies destroyed. It doesn’t matter what ethics you have; that ring is the greatest crime it’s possible to commit in this universe.”
“Do you think your people will be in there?” Kandara asked.
“You’re my people,” Jessika snapped with uncharacte
ristic anger. “But my creators, the Neána? Yes, one of those ships will be the prison for those of them that didn’t escape in time.”
Yuri almost smiled at Kandara’s little flush of awkwardness. “Jessika nailed it. The Olyix have been doing this a long time. Maybe a hundred thousand years, and maybe a lot longer than that. It would take them time to expand across the galaxy. They didn’t go from this one star all the way out to the rim in a single surge.”
“So we should be grateful it’s not more than three thousand?” Kandara asked.
“I don’t think gratitude comes into this. I think this whole situation is too big for emotion. All we can do is deal in facts.”
“Observe and move on, huh?” Callum asked. “Don’t let it get to you.”
Maybe the others didn’t catch the edge, but Yuri did. He still hasn’t let go of Savi and Zagreus. A hundred years, for fuck’s sake. “Like Alik said, we have a job to do. A worthwhile one. We need to concentrate on that.”
“Sure. Yeah, right.”
* * *
—
The Salvation of Life altered course over the next couple of hours, rising up out of the plane of the ecliptic so it could decelerate into polar orbit around the gas giant. As they drew closer, there was no mistaking the composition of the ring. Every one of its particles was another arkship, though the sizes did vary. Most of them had acquired their own protracted fluorescent halo from the magnetic bow wave effect, a more intense violet than the gas giant’s gilded shimmer below their orbit.
As they maneuvered to rendezvous, sliding into a large gap in the ring, the Salvation of Life began to amass its own nimbus. Simultaneously, they lost the long tail of unquiet vapor they’d generated flying through the nebula.
Yuri was aware of the onemind’s contentment returning to enliven its thought routines, the same self-assurance it had possessed right up until the point they’d triggered the Signal. It was among its own now, exchanging welcome thoughts with the other successful arkships in their eternal storage orbit. A validation of a pilgrimage completed under extremely difficult circumstances. Arkships in the ring appreciated and understood what it had been through, more so than any of the oneminds outside. Those who had not yet proved themselves.
Bitchy, Yuri thought.
And behind the cozy thoughts percolating through the ring was the greatest union of all: the fullmind. A summation of all that was Olyix. A loving guide, directing their destiny until they arrived at the end of time.
“The priest-king,” he said out loud.
“Hey,” Kandara announced. “It’s come back.”
“What has?” Yuri asked.
“The odd quint.”
He pulled up the feed from the sensor clusters inside the hangar. Now that all the transport ships had gone, it seemed a lot bigger than it had on their voyage to the enclave. It was almost like viewing a still hologram, the thick weave of rootlike tubes clinging to the rock walls and ceiling, with meager twigs sprouting slim leaves. Serpentine lines of bioluminescent cells embedded along the surface of the bark illuminated the big space in a uniform orange-tinted light that banished shadows.
The hangar hadn’t changed since the plethora of service creatures and armored quint had searched it on the day the Avenging Heretic flew away on its doomed escape maneuver. Apart from once, when a quint visited and slowly walked around the whole area.
Now it was back.
“What’s it doing?” Callum asked.
The quint was standing in the middle of the hangar floor, its fat, disk-shaped body swaying in a ponderous circular rhythm as if it alone was hearing a slow dance beat. Yuri wondered if its golden annular eye was scanning around like an attentive radar sweep in time with the motion. Its skirt of flaccid manipulator flesh flopped about idly, though small peaks rose and fell along the rim without ever really forming any real appendage. He watched the thickest of the five legs, ostensibly the leading one, flex with an almost nervous twitch, the kind a terrestrial animal would have as a precursor to a charge.
“It’s…anxious?” he ventured.
“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” Alik said. “I’d say it is stressed; angry about something.”
“You can’t equate its body posture to ours,” Jessika insisted.
“Yeah? Tell me it’s not worked up about something. I know agitation when I see it.”
“Fight or flight reflex,” Kandara said. “I’m with Alik on this one.”
Yuri just managed to avoid giving Callum an amused glance at her loyal support. “It’s there for a reason. Everything they do has a reason. They don’t have our…”
“Whimsy?” Callum suggested. “Imagination? Poetry? Individuality? A soul?”
“Sure. All of that crap. Jessika, anything you can determine about it from the onemind?”
“I doubt it. The deliberations of a single quint are essentially lost in the onemind thought flow. Too small to matter. Only the sub-sub-sub thought routines handle them.”
Before he could ask her to try, she’d closed her eyes, concentrating. Yuri returned his attention to the odd quint. Distinguishing between quint bodies was difficult; there were very few individual characteristics. Given they were all produced in a convener, with every cell in their body stitched together to a standard template, they should be identical. But they did have occasional blemishes, a scar, or differences in the faint color striations inside the translucent manipulator flesh.
Everything their sensors viewed was recorded in a dedicated memory store. Yuri told his altme, Boris, to run a comparison.
“It is not the same quint body that was here last time,” his altme replied. “The manipulator flesh imperfections are different.”
“But it’s behaving strangely, like the last one.”
“Then it’s most likely to be the same quint, but this is a different one of its five physical bodies.”
“Right.”
“I have nothing,” Jessika said, her tone thoughtful.
“Okay,” Yuri said. “Well, thanks for trying.”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t find the hangar—our hangar—in the onemind’s thoughtflow.”
“Huh?”
“Let me show you.”
Yuri closed his eyes and accepted the simulation. It wasn’t the bridge anymore; she’d brought him into her own interface expression. He was immersed inside the onemind’s vast thoughtflow, literally inside a stream. A column of water that rushed past him, impulses from his skin telling him he was damp and cold. The rippling silver surface that was all around him was awash with poorly glimpsed images slipping past. He wanted to concentrate on them, but they were too fast and he couldn’t focus.
“This is how you perceive the onemind’s thoughts?” he asked.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“No. This…I’m more haphazard.” It made him wonder just how different her mind actually was. Maybe Kandara is right to be suspicious?
“It’s just not here,” Jessika said.
They broke through the surface like a spawning fish leaping upstream. Emerging into chambers within the arkship. Multiple jumps, none of them lasting a second. The new surroundings barely registering before they were gone again. The tunnels. Chambers filled with biomechanical systems. Skyscraper stacks of cocoons, tended by ugly service creatures. Gloomy caverns unused since leaving Earth. Hangars without ships. Hangars with ships—all of them similar. None of them their hangar.
Yuri jolted upright on his rock ledge, staring around intensely as his mind sought to reorient itself, place him where he should be in the universe. He sucked down air, as if he’d truly been underwater for too long.
Kandara was giving him a strange look. “You okay?”
He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak.
“There is nothing from our hangar,” Jessika said calmly. “T
he impulses from every sensory cell in the hangar have somehow vanished before they reach any of the onemind’s most basic routines, and they certainly aren’t incorporated in its memory. We only know this because our sensor clusters can see the quint in there. Nothing else can.”
“Did someone kill the nexus?”
“This has nothing to do with the nexus,” Jessika said. “If that was burned, then the neuralstrata would be denied over a much greater area. This blind spot is specific to our hangar and the passageways leading to it.”
“Why, though?” Callum asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, frowning. “Something has to be blocking the onemind’s perception.”
“Another neurovirus?” Alik asked in surprise. “There’s another dark-ops team on board?”
“No way,” Kandara said. “It took the combined resources of Alpha Defense and every settled world to get us on board. There is no second mission.”
“Whatever is doing this is more subtle than a neurovirus,” Jessika said. “The onemind doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. I don’t get it. You can’t get that deep into the autonomic routines. Or at least, I can’t.”
Alik’s taut face crumpled up in confusion. “You mean odd quint is hiding from the onemind?”
Jessika shrugged. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“So what the fuck is it doing?”
MORGAN
OLYIX SENSOR STATION
The battle had lasted three days. It wasn’t one giant fight between the two opposing sides; essentially it was over within the first two seconds when the armada’s generators captured the wormhole that led back to the Olyix enclave. After that, it was basically a mopping-up operation. There were dozens of Resolution ships guarding the seven concentric rings of the Olyix habitat. They were no match for the superior numbers and weapons of the history faction, but surrender was clearly not part of the Olyix genetic code. Every one of them fought to the end.
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