The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

Some Resolution ships tried to escape, presumably to try to reach and warn other Olyix outposts. They started accelerating outsystem hard within minutes of the armada emerging through their expansion portals. They had to be chased down, which took days. Ainsley took the lead on catching two of them.

  The station’s defensive formation of Resolution ships was eventually wiped out, leaving the seven rings exposed. Troop carriers from the Morgan flew in, escorted by armada battleships. The human squads even got into the rings, fighting their way through the honeycomb of chambers inside. They were backing up teams of corpus mobility weapons, which the squads had nicknamed “marines.” Working together, they’d managed to corner and subdue individual quint bodies. None of the raids lasted long. The Olyix had fought back in a frenzy, their huntspheres demolishing whole sections of the rings’ interior in their desperation to resist.

  It ended badly for the Olyix, with the corpus armada attack cruisers using antimatter blasts and graviton pulses to smash up the station rings and vaporize the larger surviving chunks. The rapidly expanding debris cloud absorbed the vapor plumes that used to be Resolution ships. With the station eliminated, attack cruisers swooped on the giant radio telescopes. Once they had disintegrated, the armada’s attention turned onto the giant hoop spinning around the star’s equator. A flotilla of fifty battle cruisers powered into a three-million-kilometer orbit above the extraordinary artifact. The corpus humans were interested in analyzing its composition and structure; their probes determined the outer structure had a unified quantum signature.

  “You mean the shell is one atom?” Yirella asked.

  “That interpretation is too crude,” Immanueel said. “It is an expansion of classic duality, which in effect makes it a singular wave while simultaneously unifying multiple particles. Both states co-exist within the modified quantum field. A clever solution to the stress that the loop is subject to—not only the extreme radiation and thermal loading from its proximity to the sun, but also for something that large retaining its physical integrity while it spins. Ordinary matter would simply break apart.”

  She watched dispassionately as Ainsley arrived in orbit two million kilometers above the star. His white fuselage had turned silver, making it look like a fragment of the star itself had broken free to hang above the rowdy corona. The corpus exploratory flotilla backed off fast, high-gee acceleration propelling them into the safety of the expansion portals. They emerged within the umbra of the star’s single rocky world, where the majority of the armada was flocking around the safety of its Lagrange 2 point.

  Ainsley fired a lone missile armed with a quantum-variant warhead. It detonated barely a thousand kilometers above the loop’s upper surface. The superhot gases of the chromosphere warped abruptly, forming a twister-vortex around the missile as they underwent dissolution. Then the effect struck the loop.

  The entire edifice shattered at the speed of light, the annihilation effect racing in two waves around the circumference in opposing directions. A trillion fragments flew outward, blazing like nuclear comets as they went spinning off across interplanetary space and then beyond. Ainsley dodged them by simply rising up out of his ecliptic orbit.

  “Great Saints,” Yirella whispered. “We are become death, destroyer of stars.”

  “Not yet,” Immanueel said. “But soon.”

  “The devastation,” she said, surveying the expanding debris cluster that was once the seven-ring habitat; the smaller glowing haze patches that had been Resolution ships. Nimbi of whirling rubble evidenced where the sedate radio telescopes had once orbited, while the radiation bursts from collapsed wormholes were already shrieking their demise out across interstellar space. “The scale is frightening.”

  “Come now, corpus and Olyix are Kardashev Type Two civilizations at war over the future liberty of a galaxy. Our battlefields will awe and perplex alien astronomers for millennia to come, no matter what the ultimate outcome. If there is any validity in our struggle, it is that magnificence.”

  “I guess so. Nobody will ever forget us now.”

  “Ever is too long. But we will leave our mark one way or another.”

  “Do you think the God at the End of Time can see what we’ve done?”

  “If it can, then we will have failed to kill it before it is born.”

  “Paradox.”

  “Always.”

  “I like to think of it as a condemned man on death row, watching the dawn arise on his execution day. It knows it will cease to exist, but there is nothing it can do to stop the sunrise.”

  “It will try. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do. But it’s not here yet.”

  “No. Your sun is still rising.”

  * * *

  —

  The noise and swirls of movement made for a hard impact on Dellian as he walked out of the troop ship. For all the high-stress charging around inside the Olyix habitat ring, the quick and lethal contacts with the enemy, adrenaline and terror, their combat had been inaudible. His helmet insulated him from the probably deadly sounds of high-energy discharges—beam, kinetic, plasma-blast. A quiet war, then, if not particularly civilized.

  Then on the ship traveling back to the Morgan, there wasn’t much room, so movement was at a minimum. But now here in the hangar, raw mechanical noise blared like a rock concert. The lighting was harsh, the air smelled metallic, and the remotes and the awesome corpus marines he’d fought alongside raced around on unknowable duties. He almost wanted to head on back into the sanctity of the troop carrier and wait for the commotion to die down. Almost. Because there she was, standing at the bottom of the ramp, a bright smile lifting her face as soon as she caught sight of him. Her specter of worry and concern was withdrawing into her lustrous eyes, so fast he thought he’d imagined it. So maybe he was only projecting what he wanted to see; after all, she more than anyone knew that he and the squad had come through unscathed.

  He scurried down the ramp, where she bobbed about excitedly and flung her arms around him, kissing him exuberantly. Smiles and happy jeers encircled them, and Yirella extended her welcome-home grin to take in the rest of the squad.

  “You’re all safe,” she said. “Thank the Saints.”

  Dellian saw the uncertainty flicker behind her happiness and knew what she was thinking. This is just a sensor station, a tiny outpost that was taken by surprise and superior numbers. Next time it’s going to be real. Next time nobody can know who’ll be coming down the ramp after—if there’s even going to be a ship with a ramp. Like her, he hid the worry deep.

  They hurried back to their cabin like the overeager kids they’d once been—too long ago now. Fucked hard and fast on the bed. Had a meal and a bath and fucked again. Slept. Spooned, less frantic teens now, more loving and sensual.

  “Did you watch us?” Dellian asked as they headed for the shower together.

  “Yeah,” she said as the warm drops rained over her scalp, running together in soapy streams down her back. “Tilliana and Ellici are good. Plus, your training helped. You’re tight now, not like back at Vayan.”

  “Not so naïve?” he teased.

  “That too.”

  “Yeah. I was pleased with everyone. Though I still think we’re surplus to the armada.”

  “They’re not patronizing us. They are so elevated now I doubt they take hurt feelings into account.”

  “Right.” He said it, but didn’t believe he’d sounded convincing. Then hands slippery from soap gel came sliding over his chest, and he could banish his doubts again.

  * * *

  —

  Dellian watched the feed in his optik as fragments of the Olyix power ring reached the rocky world. Silent blooms of their impacts peppered the dayside, sending gouts of debris shooting upward for tens of kilometers, obscuring the ancient landscape that had remained unchanged for a hundred million years. As the dust began to settle
, nothing remained of the ancient canyons and dry mares and worn mountains; they’d been replaced by overlapping craters whose centers still glowed as their new lava lakes slowly cooled and solidified.

  The devastation made him clench his stomach muscles in reflex as he and Yirella walked around deck thirty-three’s main corridor to a portal hub. Outside the Morgan, in the shelter of the Lagrange 2 point, the armada ships increased power to their gravitational deflection effect and waited for the lethal swarm to pass. He knew they were safe—technically. Nonetheless, that level of destruction chilled him; it was so much greater than anything the squad did.

  A portal took them into a xenobiology research facility housing one of Immanueel’s aspects. They walked straight into a huge central chamber constructed out of translucent pearl-white walls that broke it up into a wide spiral of hemispherical cells. To Dellian, it looked a little too much like the biological technology the Olyix used. When he got close to any of the curving walls, he could just make out a burgundy filigree of veins below the surface. The similarity made him uncomfortable.

  “Engineering always provides one definitive solution to a problem, right?” he asked as they walked in. “We work through methods and prototypes until we find how to do the job properly. I mean, there aren’t two ways to build a generator or a processor junction.”

  Yirella gave him a glance that conveyed mild puzzlement. “As a general rule, yes.”

  “So…eventually corpus humans are going to wind up with the same technology as the Olyix? It’s the plateau theory, isn’t it, that some things just can’t be improved any further, so it becomes universal, never changes?”

  “As a general rule, yes. What’s your point?”

  “Well, if everything we do drives us in the same direction, doesn’t that mean we might wind up like them? The Olyix?”

  “No! Whatever made you think that? Why would we want to go around the galaxy enslaving other species?”

  “It kind of adds a purpose to life, doesn’t it? I’m not saying it’s a good purpose,” he added quickly. “But it’s infected them; it gives them something to build their immortal lives around. I mean, look at Kenelm and all the others like him. This cause they had, to maintain Utopial philosophy down the generations, it kept him focused, gave him something to live for. Causes are dangerous, Yi.”

  “I know that. But, really, Del, we don’t think like the Olyix. They’re alien, remember. Not just in their biology and culture, but the way they think, too.”

  “Are they, or did they just shape themselves to fit the crusade that the God at the End of Time gave them? That’s what you can do if your biotechnology is so advanced it allows you to morph your own body for convenience. And that’s what we’ve got now, isn’t it? We’ve got the potential to live forever if we want to. But I’m not sure we’re built for that, not as we are. Our minds can’t cope with us lasting that long, so we’d have to change them. Just like the corpus humans have done. Our outlook will have to evolve to cope with extreme lifespans. And what about all the people we’re going to liberate?”

  “What about them?” she asked sharply.

  “Well, y’know.” He shrugged expressively, hoping not too much shame was showing.

  “No, Del, I don’t.”

  “Oh, come on. They’re not as…well, as enlightened as we are. The times they grew up in were different.”

  “And?”

  Dellian was really starting to wish he hadn’t begun this conversation. “Okay, the kind of people Saint Alik was dealing with—the New York gangs, for one. They’re not the kind of people we can give full access to an initiator, are they? Really, I mean. Hell alone knows what they’d build!”

  “Human civilization is always regulated, Del. It’s how it maintains itself, the eternal balance between freedom and authority. We all live in the middle, obeying the rules for the common good.”

  “Maybe,” he grumbled. “But the people from Earth might not be as accepting of limits when they see what we’ve accomplished, what our technology can provide.”

  “You’re being very judgy all of a sudden.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who normally has contingencies for everything. I’m just asking the question, that’s all.”

  “A lot of things will have to be agreed if FinalStrike is successful. We can start with some kind of citizens’ convention, I suppose, to agree a new constitution. When that happens, we can talk about introducing initiator restrictions, like the Neána did for their society.”

  “Okay. But I’m not convinced that attitudes will change.”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t liberate the humans who were captured?”

  “No! But, it’s just…nothing is easy anymore. When we left Juloss, I thought there’d be a couple of battles—tough ones—but after that it would all be over and we could all settle somewhere together and have a normal life.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time someone won the war then lost the peace. But really, Del, we have to win it first. Then we can start thinking what comes next.”

  “Yeah, but we will have to change ourselves. That’s what worries me, Yi: what we’ll become.”

  “If we change ourselves, and control how we change, we can keep hold of our souls. I’m not sure the Olyix did that.”

  “I hope you’re right. But we’ve been pretty monomaniacal about spreading terrestrial DNA across the galaxy. That’s a form of conquest, too.”

  “Not going to happen, Del.”

  He wanted to believe her. But not even Yirella could see clearly through so many variables. So he had to go on faith instead. That was easy. “Okay, so back to this tech equivalence. I was wondering if the Neána are hiding in slowtime enclaves, if that’s what their abode clusters actually are? What if they’re heading for the heat death of the universe in parallel to the Olyix, and one day both of them will finally confront each other?”

  “Great Saints, Del, where’s all this coming from?”

  “I dunno. Just trying to think outside of training and what we’re doing. I want the big picture, Yi. Like you have. But I don’t think I can do that being me.”

  “Del…are you thinking of elevating up to corpus? Is that what all this is about?”

  He shrugged limply. “I wouldn’t want to do it alone. If I did, that is.”

  Her hand came down on his shoulder, making him halt. He found himself looking up at her face, and the sorrowful expression she wore. “You’re not dumb, Del. You don’t need this right now. We have a vital role in FinalStrike.”

  Again the doubt, but the words did comfort—especially coming from her.

  “Afterward,” she said, “if you still really feel like this, then we’ll elevate to corpus together.”

  “Saints, you’d do that? Seriously?”

  “Yes. And you know why?”

  “I never understand you.”

  “Because it’s reversible. If it’s wrong for us, we just come back to being us.”

  He had to grin. “I thought you were going to say something about destiny, or love, stuff like that.”

  “Right.” She licked her lips. “You only want to try it because all your bodies would be having sex together.”

  “Hey! I never thought of that. Wow!”

  She sighed in martyred exasperation. “Come on. Before your brain melts. I want to see what Immanueel’s got for us.”

  Twenty of the research facility’s cells contained quint bodies. They’d been immobilized on top of a weird stool-like pillar, with their stumpy legs encased in black sheaths that were fused to the floor and a steel bracelet that encased their mid-torso skirt of manipulator flesh. Their neck and lower head were also collared by metal, leaving the apposition eye peering out above. Actinic white light shone down on them, which somehow added to the discomforting impression they were being crucified.

  Less s
urprisingly, the Ainsley android was in a cell with one of them. It and Immanueel’s big humanoid body were crowding in on the suspended quint: a timeless image of impassive scientists studying a specimen.

  “Making good progress,” Ainsley said as they came in. His featureless white hands were applying small scarlet hemispheres to the alien’s translucent flesh. Dellian could see fibers had sprouted from the base of each of the little gadgets to weave around the dark organs inside; they were all heading for the core of the torso where the brain sat. Somehow, he could tell the quint’s golden eye was unfocused.

  “Progress to what?” he asked.

  “Memory extraction,” Immanueel replied. “Unfortunately, none of our marines managed to isolate a ship’s central neural array before the onemind eradicated itself.”

  “Same problem I had back during the Vayan ambush,” Ainsley said. “As soon as the onemind realizes its integrity has been compromised by intrusion systems, it does the honorable thing and suicides. With something as massive as an arkship, which has a neuralstrata the size of a skyscraper, that takes time, and I could extract some memories. But the Resolution ships here were quick, and the habitat onemind had plenty of warning. It erased its critical memories before you guys even busted your way inside it.”

  Dellian stared at the quint, keeping his face neutral. “But the quint didn’t suicide?”

  “They did not,” Immanueel said. “At least not all of them. The squads and marines used a lot of entanglement suppression when you took the Olyix station, which breaks up the union between quint bodies. Once one is isolated from the other four in the unit, it becomes more averse to suiciding. I’m assuming that’s a residual instinct from when they were natural animals with a single body each, not this rigid elevated version. That hesitation was what allowed you and the marines to stun them.”

  “And those filaments you’re using? They suck the memories out?”

  “Essentially, yes. But we do have to allow them a level of consciousness to animate their minds. They try to resist.”