With drive systems powered up, they rose out of their cradles and eased forward. Dellian reached out and gently ran an appreciative finger over the curving nose of the closest. They were all abruptly circling around him, nuzzling affectionately like metallic puppies. He was reliving the easier times when they were just muncs, sleeping with him in the estate dormitory, comforting and warm and adoring. Understanding him as he understood them, when knowledge was pure instinct.
Even now they could read his unhappiness; he could tell from the subtle angles they hovered at, the gentle pressure applied as they rubbed playfully against him, their little shakes of contentment as he stroked their cool casings while his hands felt only their short gray-and-chestnut pelt. His mind could hear the familiar soft hooting sounds they used to make.
“Thanks, guys,” he said. “We’ll get through this, okay?” He stood up straighter and gave them one last pat each. “Okay then, let’s”—he grinned—“lock and load.”
Farther down the rack, the cohort’s exoarmor came alive. Another innovation courtesy of Immanueel and their friends. The corpus all swore they didn’t model the exoarmor suits on hellhounds, but Dellian was pretty sure they were just covering their embarrassment at going full-on-nerd battle-gaming. After all, it wasn’t like the Olyix were going to be intimidated by cybernetic beasts from human mythology. But, Saints, surely any living creature would find them menacing?
Twice the size of a human, massing a good quarter of a ton, with four standard terrestrial limbs and two prehensile tails—which in just about any combination could claw their way along a narrow arkship tunnel if they didn’t have a clear flight path. They even had a wedge-shaped head on a stocky neck, containing sensors and weapons, while the shell was woven through with energy deflector fibers and atomic bond enhancers, leaving them capable of surviving a tactical nuke at close quarters.
The cohort settled their ovoid casings into the exoarmor’s shaped recesses, and the petal lids snapped shut over them. Limbs flexed, running through test procedures; a multitude of weapon nozzles telescoped out, then back again. The cybernetic hellhounds landed and formed up in an eager pack, their adaptive feet making clacking sounds on the smooth floor.
“Nice.” Dellian smiled down at them. His own hulking armor suit was farther along the rack. He walked toward it, just as Janc and Xante appeared at the end of the aisle.
“Saints, I thought we were early,” Janc exclaimed.
“And that’s why some of us are mere squad members, while I’m squad leader,” Dellian told them.
They jeered him loudly before the three of them hugged. It meant so much more today. He’d always thought leading the squad on their Vayan ambush mission was as intense as life got. But this…the Olyix enclave!
Uret was next, followed by Falar and Mallot. More squads were turning up in the hiatus facility, activating their cohorts. The noise level built steadily. Dellian was glad of the activity; he could concentrate on routine, making sure everyone had run their equipment tests. His own armor suit needed a replacement rear left visual sensor—the ultraviolet receptors were below optimal—while Xante’s needed a new magpulse rifle projectile feed tube. All their equipment was designed with multiple redundancy modes, ready for whatever damage they were punished with in combat, but he wasn’t going to allow anyone to move out at anything less than full operational capacity.
Just before they got into their suits he made them gather in a circle, arms around one another’s shoulders. We need to be this close. It might be the last time we ever see one another in the flesh.
“We left pep talks behind on Juloss,” he said. “And face it, I’m crap at speeches anyway. But we’ve trained for this our whole lives. Saints, this is what we were born for! So I know we’re going to watch one another’s backs and do the best we can—especially for the poor bastards we’re here to liberate. All I want to say is that I’m glad it’s you guys that I’m facing this with.”
The group hug tightened—almost as much as Dellian’s throat. He wiped away some tears from his eyes, not trying to disguise it. He wanted them to see how much they meant to him. Looking around, he wasn’t the only one overtaken by the moment. That felt good, too.
His suit was standing in front of its storage and maintenance alcove in the rack, chest segments open. Intellectually, he still wasn’t comfortable with the arms and legs. This brute was so big that his own limbs wouldn’t be long enough, so the corpus humans who designed it had provided its legs and arms with three joints apiece, giving him extra knees and elbows. The extremities were governed by his own physical kinesis—walking, running, reaching, lifting—as extrapolated by an integral genten to provide perfectly coordinated movements.
A maintenance remote brought a small set of mounting stairs out for him, and he climbed up, twisting awkwardly to get inside. He slipped his legs down the tunnels of spongy padding that felt like oiled leather until he was sitting on the haunches’ cushioning. Then there came the bad bit, fitting the waste extraction tubes—as usual accompanied by some serious grimacing. Finally he was able to push his arms into the suit’s sleeves. The suit went to active level one, and the loose padding in the arms and legs contracted around his skin, gripping firmly. There was no separate helmet. Instead his neck and head were completely enclosed by the top of the torso, reducing vulnerability. Its upper section hinged down and locked, triggering a long moment where he felt as if he’d been imprisoned in a medieval iron maiden.
Graphics and camera feeds swarmed across his optiks, and his databud confirmed full integration. Systems data swirled green. A quick double-check on the ultraviolet receptors, and he initiated full-motion possession, which allowed his physicality to puppet the suit’s movements. So…a shadow-box review for the arms, run on the spot, twist and sway and crouch in a seriously naff dance routine. From the claustrophobia of a second ago, he was now liberated, weighing nothing as he floated gracefully along the aisle.
Every display remained green.
He kept an eye on the rest of the squad, confirming their telemetry as they finished their screwy assessment calisthenics, half smiling at the way everyone’s cohort kept their distance, as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing.
He opened the mission comms icon. “Ellici, Tilliana, comms check, please. Switching to multiple redundant linkage.”
“We got you, Del,” Ellici answered. “Hardened em encryption, omni and directional, plus multiple entanglement rotation. Stand by. One hour to wormhole exodus.”
If everything goes okay, he added silently. “Thank you, tactical.” He raised his arms as if he were performing a blessing. “Okay, squad, let’s get down to the armory and load up. Embarking in twenty minutes.” He started walking toward the portal at the far end of the aisle, secretly rather pleased at looking like a full-on badass demon, his hellhound pack following eagerly.
* * *
—
Yirella found the Morgan distinctly unsettling that morning. The ship’s quarters were big—deliberately so—giving people space. You normally couldn’t tell if there were a hundred people in the chambers around you, or none. But now, walking along the curving corridor, she knew she was alone. If you were part of the Morgan’s crew you had one of two jobs: You were either a squad member, or you were in one of the tactical command cabins. No exceptions—apart from her. Even Alexandre was with Ellici and Tilliana as they approached the end of the wormhole.
Parting with Del wasn’t helping her mood, either. She thought she’d done the right thing telling him all about the tachyon detector, the prospect of eliminating the God at the End of Time in this era, of the intriguing complexity of quantum temporal theory. But it hadn’t gone down the way it had played in her mind: his fascination, enthusiasm. And certainly no admiration for her enterprise and determination, which she’d privately looked forward to. You selfish idiot, she cursed herself.
He
was going out to face a physical fight far worse than last time—and that’s if they even got through the gateway and into the enclave. The last thing he needed was uncertainty and complexity.
But that was my goodbye gift. Fool!
He’d smiled and been affectionate this morning during a breakfast he’d barely picked over. At least she’d recognized the anxiety shadowing his thoughts. It had taken all of her self-control, but she hadn’t pressed him about it—what do you think, what are you feeling? He didn’t need that, didn’t deserve more of her wild ambitions. So maybe she had helped.
“For fuck’s sake,” she shouted down the deserted corridor. “This is not about you!”
I should be in tactical. I should be capable of being in tactical. I should have made a lot of different choices.
But my choices brought us here.
The strength drained out of her as she went into the deck thirty-three canteen. It was pleasantly warm, the air scented with coffee and cinnamon. On the other side of the windows, the Boulevard Saint-Germain was waking up to a spring morning. Vibrant flowers in baskets decorated the façades of the other bars and cafés, the road was slick with water from a cleansing night rain, and cyclists were pedaling along with cheery smiles on their faces.
Yirella caught sight of herself reflected in the glass. Hunched shoulders, which with her height looked just pathetic; face that was beyond miserable and sliding into broken. She glared at her reflection. “Pull yourself together. He needs you.”
The food printers produced some croissants, and she made coffee. Columbian: black, strong, bitter. She held the cup in her hands and slumped back in the chair, eyes half closed, and began to sing.
I saw Earth reclaimed
Got me a ride back
An old ship, can’t reach near light
Earth where once we came
Earth where we all belong
Earth where life is strong
Oh to be—
“Mind if I join you?”
Yirella squealed as every limb twitched in shock. Her lurch sent coffee splattering over the table and onto her trousers. “Saints! I didn’t know anyone else was on this deck.” And it had to be hir!
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” Kenelm hurried over with a handful of napkins and started dabbing at her trousers. That only made it worse.
“Give me that.” She scowled and began wiping properly.
Abashed, sie began mopping up the puddle on the table. “I haven’t heard that song before.”
Yirella blushed. “It’s from back when we were just kids.” Which was good enough; no need to tell hir she’d gone through a big music phase when she was in therapy. Writing lyrics kept her mind busy and diverted from the problems that jailed her.
“It’s good.” Kenelm was standing over the table, looking lost. Sie wore a simple blue-and-green tunic that could so easily have been mistaken for a uniform.
Someone was having trouble adjusting to their lack of status.
Yirella gave up. “You’d better sit down. It’s going to be a long day.”
“Thank you.” A remote collected the clump of soaking napkins, and sie sat down, leaving an empty seat between them. “I’ve spent two thousand years waiting for this, but I know they’d be apprehensive with me on the bridge.”
“You say bridge, I say comfortable main council room. Sometimes I think our fabulous resources have tempted us down the wrong route. Maybe we should have stuck to the kind of structures our ancestors had. You knew you were going to war in the old ocean navy battleships.”
“You knew your chances of surviving weren’t too good, either,” sie countered. “Those days are badly over-romanticized.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Different era, different requirements. The gentens will handle most of the battle.”
“But it’s reassuring having people in the loop to make the final decisions,” she insisted. “There’s a psychology about facing the enemy. You need to have belief in your own ability, but not one that verges on hubris.”
“I think the Vayan ambush cured us of hubris,” Kenelm said.
“Yes. But I’m worried about Del.”
“That’s natural. It’s good.”
“Really? I might have said the wrong things before he left. I should be more…empathic.”
“Oh, please. I’ve never seen any couple more synchronized than you two. It’s like you’re each other’s munc. You know half the time the pair of you don’t actually speak in full sentences when you’re talking? You don’t need to.”
She frowned. “We don’t?”
“No. It’s funny and endearing. The rest of us are always left playing catch-up.”
“Oh.”
“One mind, two bodies. Or a quint missing three.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Sorry. Bad joke.”
“What was she like?” Yirella asked suddenly. “Emilja, I mean? I can’t believe you knew her. She’s history for me, not something we can ever connect to.”
“I have trouble remembering that far back, to be honest. Sometimes I think my life before Juloss is just a dream. But…she was tired, that’s what sticks the most now. I don’t mean lack of sleep tired, but weary. Exodus just wasn’t working as a concept, and it had taken everything she had to make it happen in the first place. So she’d spent eight thousand years watching it fail. Can you imagine that? Eight thousand years seeing hope slowly fade away, being beaten down century after century. All those Strike ships and generation ships we sent out into the galaxy, and all they gave back was silence. But she weathered it, even though she was trapped by her own vision.”
“That’s why she founded your group?”
“Yes. She knew we had to change, yet our own rigid cultural stability made that difficult.”
“So you’re actually a rebel?”
“Yeah.” Kenelm smiled wryly. “I guess you could say that. In my own way. I was never against you, Yirella. It was just that you wanted to change so much so quickly. It was reckless.”
“Yet here we are. With the corpus humans’ armada and about to FinalStrike. The first humans to ever get this far.”
“Yes. A fantastic achievement. But did you ever stop to think what would happen if it went wrong? You gambled with a whole human civilization. You once asked what gave me the right to guide the Morgan’s future away from Strike. That was a modest realignment compared to this.”
“But it worked.”
“It gives us a chance, granted. But worked…? I hope it does, because I don’t think there will be another human attack against the enclave. Ten thousand years, and this is the only one.”
“I don’t know,” Yirella said, toying with the coffee cup. “If your group’s strategy worked, there are a lot of humans safe in the dark out there. But they won’t hide away forever. It’s not in our nature. As you have discovered.”
“Touché.”
“If we fail, there will be others. The Factory ships will give what’s left of the exodus expansion a breathing space to regroup.”
“Maybe,” Kenelm said. “But for what it’s worth, I think this is the best shot we’ll ever have.” Sie grinned disbelievingly. “A fucking neutron star!”
“Yeah.” She ordered the printers to produce a new round of coffee and croissants. “Ten minutes.” There was a nervous tremor in her voice that no amount of willpower could banish.
“Let’s take a look.”
Yirella used her interface to summon tactical displays into the café windows. The cozy mirage of Boulevard Saint-Germain faded away, replaced by bright schematics. More data slipped directly into her mind, adding comprehension.
The wormhole representation was a tunnel made up of white walls, with subtle imperfections as if they were falling through the eye
of a hurricane, allowing her to track their progress. Ainsley was the lead ship, slowly rotating as he flew forward. Behind him were seven specialist ships containing negative-energy generators to assume immediate control of the wormhole when they arrived in the gateway system. Chasing them hard were more than a thousand warships and weapons platforms, assigned to defending the wormhole terminus. The armada would need to leave through the wormhole after FinalStrike was over, which meant it would be subjected to a ferocious assault by the Olyix.
The rest of the armada followed, with the Morgan class ships in the middle. As before, the neutron star was at the rear—an ominous presence that always seemed to be edging closer to the armada.
Yirella opened Ainsley’s icon.
“Welcome aboard,” he responded immediately. And she was flush with the sensation of speed leaking down the link into her neural interface—an exhilarating power plunge, spinning around for the sheer joy of it, a kingfisher on its dive. There was also a deeper sensation: the pent-up power of his phenomenal weapons bestowing an urbane confidence.
The end of the wormhole was visible now—a black speck some indeterminable length down the swirling white tunnel, but expanding. Ainsley leveled out his roll, and the speed seemed to increase. “Thirty seconds,” he said in perfect contentment.
“Whatever happens,” Yirella said, “I’m pleased we met.”
“It’s been too short, kid, but oh boy did we hit this universe hard.”
Ainsley flew out of the wormhole. There should have been a noise, Yirella thought, like a sonic boom but for when you punctured the fabric of reality to get back in—a detonation of light and sound that hadn’t been known since the big bang. Instead: nothing. The utter absence of sound as if her ears were in a vacuum. But there was light…
The Saints of Salvation Page 39