The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Sure.” She gave him a reassuring smile, as real as the canteen’s textured environment, and sat at the table with the rest of the squad. “So what’s happening?”

  SAINTS

  OLYIX ENCLAVE

  Kandara hadn’t made a list. Not exactly. But…if she had, then the way Callum made a gurgling, sucking sound every time he concentrated would be right up there at the top. Or the food. After twenty days of cold, bland food, her stomachache was nearly constant. Then there was Alik’s slow-boiling anger. Yuri’s sullenness. Only Jessika seemed relatively unchanged.

  So perhaps she is just a sophisticated AI after all.

  It wasn’t just the crap food and the confined space and the boredom that was preying on everyone. The news from outside the enclave had been getting progressively worse—not helped by the slowtime inside the enclave, which meant that news from outside arrived in bursts, with centuries of activity compressed into dense updates.

  They’d all been horrified when they learned how the Olyix had started to capture the ships and worlds humans had thought they were building in secret as they fled across the galaxy. Privately Kandara started to suspect that it was over; that they’d lost. And after a few days it was obvious she wasn’t alone with that thought; everyone’s mood was darkening further, flames burning up the last of the air. The only thing keeping them going now was routine; building the drone transmitters had come to resemble a workfare scheme in her mind. It was pointless but kept them occupied. Three fucking weeks, and we’ve completely lost our shit. Mother Mary!

  “Guess who’s turned up again?” Jessika exclaimed.

  Kandara didn’t bother to look up. She and Callum were running tests on the latest transmitter drone before they knitted up the casing. The initiators had produced all the components, but without an assembly bay they had to be put together by hand. Precision work—which was difficult even with the small manipulator rigs the initiators had provided first. On the plus side, she reflected, it kept Callum busy, so that was less moaning they all had to listen to.

  After a couple of false starts, they’d refined the design of the transmitters to the shape of a streamlined manta ray a meter long, with a sharp intake grid on the front instead of a mouth, and twin ion drives at the rear. With its flexible-camber wings it was designed to maneuver fast once it reached the passage outside, then flip into some elusive acrobatics in the hangar in case anything hostile was waiting there, before streaking out to freedom through the main hangar entrance. Once outside, the drones would call the invading human armada, revealing the location of the Salvation of Life in its storage orbit.

  Except time outside had stretched and stretched until it had become an abstract. As far as they could make out, close to ten thousand years had passed. That figure didn’t connect with her at all. She’d begun to wonder if her glands were malfunctioning and she was living in some kind of dream state.

  When Zapata, her altme, did shift the test data to one side, Kandara accessed the hangar’s remaining sensor feeds. Jessika was right; Odd Quint had returned. It began its lumbering walk around the hangar, a black stonelike orb held upright in a protuberance of its manipulator flesh, like a priest with an offering. Or maybe an Olyix with a hard-on.

  “What the fuck is it doing this time?” Alik asked.

  “Same as it always does—nothing,” Callum replied.

  “No,” Kandara corrected him. “This is the second time it’s brought that orb. That has to be significant.” Over the last couple of weeks, a quint (or the many bodies of a quint) had returned eight times to perform its strange examination of the hangar, its behavior singling it out and earning it the nickname. Every time, Odd Quint had neutralized the neuralstrata’s receptors so it remained unseen by the arkship’s onemind. If they’d been on Earth, she would have said it was engaged in some type of criminal activity. Smuggling human artifacts, maybe? Or could it be an alien nark dealer? But despite knowing ridiculously little about Olyix culture, she didn’t believe that. There was a purpose behind its constant appearances. And a covert one at that, which made her very uneasy.

  “The orb has to be some kind of sensor, or recording gadget,” Yuri said.

  “But Odd Quint doesn’t apply it to anything to analyze,” Callum complained. “It can’t be a Geiger counter, can it?”

  Kandara studied the way the quint was holding the orb up, the manipulator flesh shifting it from side to side, a motion that was partly obscured by its tilting walk. “It’s waving it,” she said. “Mary, you might have been right about the food smell, Cal. I bet that gadget takes air samples.”

  “Shit.” Alik gave the cavern’s jagged entranceway a guilty glance. “How sensitive can it be? I mean, like, bloodhound good? If it is, we are royally screwed.”

  “Anything we can do, so can they—and then some,” Yuri said.

  “If that sensor was as good as a bloodhound, Odd Quint would be here already, along with the rest of its bodies,” Kandara said. “So maybe we’ve got some time.”

  “Oh, here it goes,” Jessika said.

  Kandara watched as Odd Quint started to walk along one of the smaller tunnels leading away from the hangar. They didn’t have any sensor clusters hidden in the tunnel’s trunk pipes, so all they could see was the quint slowly enveloped by the thickening shadows, the orb still upheld.

  “Definitely smelling for us,” Kandara said.

  “I can buy that,” Alik said. “But why doesn’t it want the onemind to know?”

  She gave him a troubled glance. “I don’t know.”

  “There are eleven tunnels and corridors out of that hangar,” Yuri said. “So it’s only a matter of time till it passes the entrance to our cavern. If that orb has any decent level of sensitivity, it’ll smell us.”

  “We should kill it,” Kandara said.

  “That’s a real dumbass idea,” Alik said. “You step out here and shoot that mother, the rest of us’ll have ten minutes max.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Kandara said. “There’s still no neuralstrata coverage of the hangar, right?”

  “No,” Jessika agreed reluctantly.

  “So?”

  “So? It’s a fucking quint. One of five,” Alik snapped. “You shoot it, the other four are sure as shit going to know about it.”

  “Yeah, but are they going to tell?” She gave him a grin that was pure taunt—very superior. It was a mean tease—especially if you knew all Alik’s buttons, which she did. But being cooped up in this rock jail was driving her loco.

  Alik’s mouth opened, then shut; he looked at Yuri for help. “We’re not doing this, right? Tell me we’re not.”

  “We don’t know if whatever Odd Quint is doing is illegal,” Yuri said slowly, “or heretical, or whatever brings down the local gestapo. But it’s obviously not totally aboveboard.”

  “You cannot gamble our lives on that. Jez-us! We still got us the mission.” Alik gestured at the four completed transmitter drones, their sleek stealth-gray shapes soaking up the cavern’s low light. “Getting these outside is our priority, right?”

  “I wasn’t planning on going mano a mano, asshole,” Kandara said. “We rig up a creeperdrone and use a stinger. The biotoxin Alpha Defense worked up from Soćko’s formula will kill a quint, right, Jessika?”

  “It should do, yes. I can’t give absolutes.”

  “And if we use a creeperdrone”—she gestured at the row of inert spider creatures—“we can get an entanglement suppressor up close. Then the other four bodies won’t even know for certain it’s dead.”

  “So then what? You know they’ll just come down and investigate.”

  “Bad news for them.”

  “You cannot be fucking serious?”

  “Have you seen where we are?” she shouted, both arms flung out to deride the cavern. “Do you have any idea how deep this shit is? Drowning depth, okay? The
Olyix are scooping up every generation ship we fly now. We’re losing. Has that even registered with you? We are losing! This does not have a good ending, not for us. We are not walking off into the sunset, Alik. There is no sunset, because there is no Earth anymore to have a sunset on. They killed it—they murdered our world! All we have left now is our righteous vengeance. And in Mary’s name, I swear I will make them fucking pay. Before I am done, they will curse their God for ever sending them its message.”

  Alik looked at her in shock, a diminutive twitch bending the corner of his mouth. She’d never seen that before. On anyone else, it would have been a full jaw drop.

  “Hey.” Jessika put her arm around Kandara’s shoulder. “Take a breath. It’s okay.”

  “Oh-fucking-kay? This? This is okay?”

  “Absolutely. Get this: A ship’s just arrived from one of the Olyix monitor outposts along the expansion wavefront. The fullmind is startled. It’s never been startled before, not like this.”

  “What about?” Yuri asked.

  Jessika closed her eyes. “Something’s happened out there. They thought humans had set up another lure planet, Vayan, so they sent a welcome ship with a batch of Resolution ships. The wormhole collapsed as soon as they got to Vayan. Someone hit them hard.”

  “Finally,” Kandara breathed. For a second the tension in her thoughts actually slacked off.

  “Wait,” Jessika said, and her hand rose in an involuntary reflex. “A neutron star. That’s weird.”

  It was all Kandara could do not to scream at her. “What’s weird?”

  “The rotation speed changed.”

  “You can’t change a neutron star’s rotation speed,” Callum protested.

  “It’s changed,” Jessika insisted. “The Olyix sensor outpost made careful observations. Something is out there at that neutron star. Something powerful. The fullmind knows the plan is for humans to assemble at the nearest neutron star once the Signal has been received. It’s dispatching a harmony fleet.” Her eyes opened, showing puzzlement. “But we’re too far away. Our Signal couldn’t possibly have gone that far yet.”

  “We need to be ready,” Yuri snapped. “Callum, get that last transmitter drone finished. Kandara, we might have to deal with Odd Quint.”

  “I am so ready for that!”

  “Come on, man,” Alik said, “they’re forty thousand light-years away. Even if these neutron star people crush the harmony fleet, it’ll be forever until they get here.”

  “Twenty-five years—their ship time—if they travel at point-nine C,” Callum said. “For us, that’s probably six months to a year. But it gives the Olyix outside the enclave forty thousand years to build up their defenses.”

  “And the same time to track their progress,” Yuri said. “And intercept them.”

  “They changed a neutron star’s rotation,” Jessika said with a lot of emphasis. “That’s Kardashev Type Two right there—probably the high end of it, too.”

  “And the Olyix aren’t?” Alik asked. “Do you even remember what’s powering this enclave? Generator rings around a fucking star.”

  “I’m just saying it won’t be that easy to intercept them.”

  “You ask me,” Callum said, “this is the first piece of good news we’ve had since Feriton called us together for the assessment mission to Nkya. I’m with Yuri; we need to be ready.”

  Kandara grinned softly at that miracle. She and Callum finished running diagnostics on the transmitter drone components and instigated the casing knit. They usually ran more tests, but decided there was no point. If the tests showed a problem, there would be no time to correct it. So just finish up and hope it worked.

  “This is what you call a real all-up test,” Callum muttered as the upper casing segments closed up and fused together along the drone’s dorsal spine.

  Kandara was about to reply when she felt a frisson of surprise within the Salvation of Life’s onemind. When she tried to read it raw from the thoughtstream, instead of clarity, she felt a backwash of alarm.

  Jessika looked around with an incredulous smile on her face. “They’re here.”

  FINALSTRIKE

  Dellian knew there was no way he could tell he was in a slowtime flow, yet some annoying little instinct kept telling him there was something subtly wrong with his universe. The armada’s journey down the wormhole would take four years, real-time—depending on how you define real. But for the Morgan, it would only be four days. His brain kept searching for signs that something was wrong.

  “More like portents than signs,” Yirella said with cheerful mockery on the first night. “Portents are imaginary, after all. Time is always constant to the observer, Del. Forget about it.”

  He couldn’t, of course. Every paranoiac little sense he had, the hair-trigger responses he’d developed in combat training, were constantly alert. Being vigilant for so long was draining. He also stubbornly refused to use any of his glands to clear the nonsense away chemically, earning another eye roll from Yirella.

  And now here they were, only a couple of hours out. His anxiety had made him rise early, needing to be ready. Because if their artificial time had been misjudged somehow…

  Yi’s right, I am an idiot.

  With its long storage racks stretching away under gloomy lighting, the cohort hiatus facility on deck seven put Dellian in mind of a warehouse. As he walked down one of the aisles he could feel the resonance in the floor from all the support machinery.

  After the last training simulation, his cohort had been resting up for two days. He almost wished he’d been doing the same as they traveled to the enclave star system, but then he knew almost everybody on board was in an equally hyped-up state. All those final update briefings provided by corpus humans, data stripped directly from captured quint brains—and between those meetings, lots of frantic, needy sex.

  “You know this isn’t goodbye blues sex, don’t you?” Yirella had said last night as they clung to each other in bed. “I mean, we’re both nervous about FinalStrike; that’s natural. But it’s not the ultimate battle.”

  “Huh?” was all he could manage in a twilight created by the textured cabin in the Immerle estate woodland—the exact same one he’d been assigned in their senior year.

  “There is so much we have to do after we liberate the Salvation of Life and all the other humans in the enclave,” she told him earnestly.

  “Yeah. We’ve got to get them home for a start.”

  “Maybe. But the corpus humans don’t need us for that. If we’re going to end this threat, we have to take down the God at the End of Time itself.”

  He rolled around on the bed to stare at her in surprise. Does she ever inspire anything else? “Saints! What?”

  “It’s still out there, Del, lurking up in the future. There’s nothing to stop it sending messages to all the surviving Olyix, restarting the crusade all over again. Apart from us, of course. We can stop it.”

  “Us?”

  “Somebody has to. I don’t see the Neána stepping up, do you?”

  “But…how?”

  Which was when she told him about the tachyon detector that the corpus humans had built for her. When she’d finished, he didn’t know if he was going to laugh or cry. “But if we kill the God’s home star now,” he said slowly, his brain as always light-years behind her, “that means it won’t be around to send the message back to the Olyix. So Earth won’t be invaded, the exodus will never happen. We won’t be born.”

  “Paradox. I know. It’s fascinating how many theories there are about this, isn’t it? But don’t worry. If it is a temporal loop spun off by a time machine creating an alternative universe, us breaking that cycle will stabilize our timeline. We just carry on, but in this reality the God at the End of Time doesn’t send a message back to the Olyix, so there’s no further split, no new alternative Earth that suffers the same fa
te yet again. At least, that’s what Immanueel and the other corpus humans postulate.”

  He was horrified by how eager she sounded. Horrified that they would begin their own monomaniacal crusade. He’d committed his entire life to FinalStrike knowing that afterward—if he survived—he and Yi could go and live an ordinary life on a new world, or maybe even Earth itself. Now this.

  FinalStrike isn’t going to be the end for Yirella. Saints, she’s never going to stop, not until she’s seen the last Olyix in the galaxy dead and their God exterminated.

  He’d sat up in bed and rested his head in his hands, feeling the same numbness and despair he’d known when he’d heard of Rello’s death.

  Yirella’s arm went around his shoulders, and she hugged him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” he barked. “Fuck the Saints, Yi, don’t you ever just stop? Don’t you ever think about what anyone else might want?”

  “But killing the God-entity before it’s born will make us safe, Del.”

  “You sure about that? Because I don’t know, Yi. I’m too dumb to figure out quantum timelines and which reality is real. And don’t try explaining, not tonight, okay?”

  “I just wanted you to know tomorrow that I’m always going to be there, trying to think up answers,” she said meekly.

  He nodded, not trusting himself to look directly at her. “Sure. Hey, I knew that anyway. You’re the one stable thing in my world.”

  “That’s my line, Del, I’m the one who relies on you.”

  After that, of course, he hadn’t slept well. In the morning he did his best to make it up to her, eating a nice eggs Benedict breakfast together before leaving with plenty of hugs and kisses and a good show of reluctant yet glad to be finishing this. Except he wasn’t. Being scared shitless about the fight was one thing; despair at what came after was something else again.

  Saints, but I am one screwed-up mess.

  He came to a halt at the section of the racks that held his cohort. They were in new casings now, designed by the corpus humans. Still being stubborn about not using his neural interface—this morning of all mornings—he used his databud to activate the cohort. They were like flattened black eggs the same length as his own body, but made out of porcelain and inlaid with slim silver hieroglyphs. Smaller than before, then, yet managing to look even more efficiently deadly.