The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “But we flew in easily,” Alik said in protest. “All the transport ships did; and back out again.”

  “That was when there were ships using the hangar,” Callum said. “The onemind must’ve kept the membrane looser then. It’s hardened now to prevent any atmosphere leaking out. That means the drones can’t get through it. Nothing can.”

  “What do we do? We have to get those transmitter drones outside.”

  Yuri glanced over at Kandara. Judging from her expression, she already knew what he was going to say.

  “We go into the hangar and physically take out the membrane generator.”

  * * *

  —

  None of the Olyix ships in the enclave were flying on a course to intercept the armada. Some had, right at the start; then the neutron star punched through the gateway, and they’d swiftly altered course.

  “Are they waiting for reinforcements, do you think?” Yirella asked.

  “We are uncertain of their tactics,” Immanueel said. “None seem to have followed us through the gateway. That is strange, given the number of ships they have in the system outside. There may be a large presence of Resolution ships in the enclave that we have not yet detected.”

  “But they have to know Ainsley will take out the power rings, just like he did in the gateway system. They have to deploy against us fast if they want to try and stop that. Unless…” No, surely not. “Have they accepted they’ve lost?”

  “From what we understand of the Olyix character, that is extremely unlikely.”

  “Yeah.” She reviewed the neutron star again and tried not to let it chill her. The cage generators had performed their last course correction maneuvers and had disengaged, leaving the neutron star to fly along its final trajectory. At its current speed, it would take two days to reach the enclave’s star. “I always thought bringing the neutron star was overkill, but now that I’ve seen what the Olyix have built here, I think you made the right call.”

  “It is our guarantee should Ainsley fail; it will destroy the star and the enclave. Whatever the outcome for us, this will ensure the Olyix cannot rise again.”

  “Well, let’s just hope we can accomplish more than that.”

  “Thirty minutes to deceleration point,” Alexandre announced. “Stand by for troop ship deployment.”

  Yirella opened the squad’s icon. “Good luck, you guys. May the Saints be with you.”

  They replied with cheery comments. As soon as she accessed the sensors inside the troop ship, she realized how meaningless the visual feed was. Dark, lumpy machinery gripped by industrial-grade clamps, hanging in a gallery jammed with a profusion of cables so tangled they could have been shat out by a giant diarrhetic spider. Nothing human visible; no emotional connection to be made. No last images of faces.

  But I remember them. And that’s what counts.

  She switched to the Morgan’s external cameras, watching the troop ships launch out of their tubes—fat ebony wedge-shapes with twin spears extending out of the prow that cut a sharp profile against the meandering gyres of the iridescent nebulascape. They accelerated away to take up a bracelet formation a thousand kilometers out.

  That was when she saw the twinkles fading in and out of existence, as if the Morgan were flying through a sparse galaxy of microstars.

  “Hey, did we find out what those things are?” she asked. “They look like some kind of blemish in the enclave continuum, something that twists the light.”

  There was a long pause, then she heard Immanueel say: “Finding what those things are.”

  “What?”

  “Confirming aspect integration.”

  “Immanueel?” She turned to frown at Kenelm, who seemed equally puzzled. The Morgan’s network began to run analysis on the armada’s secure communication links.

  “Ainsley, are you in contact with Immanueel?”

  “Partial contact. There’s some kind of glitch. The Olyix are jamming our links. Running analysis.”

  Yirella checked the tactical status display. “Ah, okay. I’m having trouble accessing your fronds, too.”

  The café lights flickered, then stabilized. Yirella gave them a puzzled glance. Part of her tactical display froze, then the figures and graphics accelerated, becoming nonsense blurs. “What the hell? Are they virusing our network?”

  —

  “Ainsley?”

  —

  “Saints!”

  “The Morgan’s genten isn’t responding,” an alarmed Kenelm said. “The local management array is running this section of the ship. It looks like the network nodes have dropped out. There was some kind of massive data transfer generated internally, so the safety routines activated and isolated each physical sector of the network.”

  “Saints! How are they doing that? How did they get a virus into our systems? The corpus completely rebuilt the Morgan.”

  The look sie gave her said all she needed to know. They were both thinking the same thing—that somehow Olyix agents had infiltrated the expansion. And I know one person who’s been with us a long time, so long no reliable records exist. Just a picture in a book…She used her interface to check where the nearest personal weapons were—the deck below. So if I have to improvise? The café had plenty of cutlery.

  Stay calm. I don’t have any proof. Yet.

  “I don’t know,” Kenelm said. “But the genten will counter and purge any virus.”

  “Right.” She nodded, hoping sie couldn’t read her doubts. “Ainsley, we think the Morgan’s been virused.”

  Ainsley’s icon remained on, but there was still no reply. She used the deck’s sub-network to acquire feeds directly from any hull sensors it could reach. The view was restricted, but several troop ships around the Morgan were visible keeping position a thousand kilometers out. They looked okay. In the distance was the white dot that was Ainsley. She could see the swirls of disturbed gas it had created as it ripped through the nebula. Directly behind it, their motion had arrested in mid-churn. But around the big white ship, the outer fronds of the turmoil looked as if they were still fluctuating. It was hard to be certain. The curious warped lightpoints had thickened and multiplied around Ainsley; there were so many they were disrupting the view.

  “Oh, Saints!” She brought the focus back. The twinkles within the armada formation were appearing in greater numbers, their vivacity brightening. “This isn’t a network virus. They’re doing something to us.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like…Oh, shit! Tilliana?”

  There was no answer.

  Yirella hurriedly activated the general communication icon. The ship’s internal secure links were hardened against any form of electronic warfare. “Anyone? This is Yirella. Is anyone on the Morgan receiving this?”

  The displays told her the links were open, but no one was responding.

  “What’s happening?” Kenelm asked.

  “That twinkling we can see, it’s a lensing effect from blemishes in the enclave’s continuum,” Yirella said. “The Olyix are changing something in here. I think they’re slowing time around the armada.” But why is that affecting our internal network?

  “Hellfire.”

  When she used the sensor feed to check on the neutron star, it was enveloped by a shimmer of distorted light. Here, though, the glimmers seemed warped and fuzzy, fluttering like living things in torment. The nebula around them was fluorescing brighter than she’d seen it before.

  “I need to talk with Tilliana and Ellici. We have to get to their tactical command cabin.”

  Kenelm nodded reluctantly. “Yes.”

  “It’s on deck twenty-five. Let’s go.”

  They left the canteen together. As they walked, Yirella tried to examine the ship’s network diagram. “I don’t get this,” she complained. “The safety routines are blocking i
nputs from some decks where the data rate is extreme, while some are dead.”

  They arrived at a portal hub. Yirella stared around in dismay. The edge of every portal was glowing red, while the centers had become black and solid-looking. She’d never seen them in that state before.

  “That sucks,” Kenelm said.

  “Right.” Her interface pulled up a schematic of the Morgan’s decks. She knew the general layout of the life support section, but the exact details were vague. That’s what happens when you use portals all the time.

  The life support section had three main service support shafts running its full height up through all the decks, providing routes for pipes, ducts, and cabling, along with a spiral stair winding around the wall, and a central column that remotes could ride up and down. They started off toward the nearest one. Yirella used her interface to check if there were any available connections to a transmitter on the hull. It was possible; she had to route power from an emergency cell to a backup communication module and use alternative data cables to give her a solid connection.

  She stood still and concentrated on setting up the procedure.

  When she did reach the transmitter management routine, it didn’t have any navigation feed, so she couldn’t use a direct beam, because she didn’t have a clue where Dellian’s troop ship actually was in relation to the Morgan. So general broadcast it was. I will help you. I will be the guardian angel you need me to be.

  “Calling squad leader Dellian. This is Yirella in the Morgan. Are you receiving?”

  There was no reply. She loaded in discrimination filters and ordered the unit to expand the reception spectrum. Her reward was a flurry of static. She overrode the safety limiters to increase the power to the transmitter as high as she dared.

  “This is Yirella on the Morgan. We’re suffering communication difficulties. I think the Olyix might be changing the time flow. Is anyone receiving me?”

  Still nothing. She called a few more times, with no result. The nebula, one giant field of ionization, must have been blocking the signal. So she left her message on repeat and loaded a monitor routine to review the receiver output.

  “I can’t get anything,” she said dejectedly.

  Kenelm wasn’t there.

  She frowned and looked around. “Kenelm?”

  Sie was nowhere to be seen. Yirella told her databud to send out a ping. Kenelm’s databud didn’t respond. That’s not possible. A ping was databud to databud, with a kilometer range. But sie was here a moment ago.

  All the mistrust she’d had for Kenelm surfed back in on an adrenaline wave. Her skin grew hot, heart rate soaring upward. Fight-or-flight reflex dropped her into a kind of crouch, half-forgotten personal combat maneuvers bubbling up in confusion. She whirled around, hunting urgently.

  The brightly lit corridor curved away behind and ahead, completely empty. Innocuous, yet suddenly incredibly sinister.

  There was nothing she could use as a weapon. For a second she considered running back to the canteen and arming herself with the cutlery. Yeah, a cake fork; that’ll help. Saints!

  Three meters ahead there was a junction. According to the ship schematic, it led to one of the support shafts. She fixated on the junction and whatever lurked beyond as she crept along nervously, feverish thoughts alive with all sorts of nightmare scenarios. A glistening hive of monsters bulging out of the door to the shaft. Huntspheres blasting along the corridor at supersonic speed, chasing her down. Del’s cocoon dangling from the ceiling like some moldering chunk of spider food.

  Stop it.

  She peeked around the junction, pulling her head back fast in case something took a shot at her. Because targeting systems are really that slow. Come on, pull yourself together. The brief image she glimpsed made her squeak in shock. Slowly she shuffled forward to place herself in the middle of the junction, facing toward the support shaft door thirty meters away.

  Five meters along the corridor, Kenelm was sprawled facedown on the floor. She knew it was Kenelm; the body was wearing hir green-and-blue tunic. But sie’d been dead for a long time. Yirella could see hir head, the shrunken desiccated skin, tufts protruding from a skull that had decayed so far there was very little left. A disgusting stain had spread out from it, organic fluids long since dried.

  But…

  Hir feet were swollen and discolored, the flesh a vile mid-putrefaction green.

  All Yirella could do was stand there staring, muscles rendered useless by shock and incomprehension.

  The Olyix haven’t slowed time, she realized. They’ve speeded it up. But how did that kill hir?

  It made no sense. If Kenelm had walked into a zone with a faster time flow, then sie would simply live at that rate. Just like the Morgan had lived at a slower rate while they were flying along the wormhole.

  She examined the body again. The swollen feet were wrinkling up, the flesh darkening, while the head’s paper-like skin was diminishing away to nothing as wisps of hair fell to the floor.

  “Different rate,” she whispered. “It’s a gradient.”

  The zone of faster time flow didn’t have an abrupt border. It built over a few meters from the ordinary rate where she was standing to one where a human corpse decayed in barely a couple of minutes. A databud file told her that kind of decay would take years.

  Great Saints! She took an involuntary step backward. The gradient, short though it was, would be utterly lethal to any living thing. All the parts of your body would be living at different rates as you moved through it. Circulation would be impossible, nerve impulses from the faster sections would flood into the slower ones, overloading axons to burnout while the misfiring synapses of the brain would scramble every thought.

  She gagged as bile surged up into her throat. Initial inertia would sustain your motion across the gradient. But…parts of you would have been dead for a year, while the rest was still alive as you started to fall.

  Yirella dropped to her knees and threw up violently. Even now she couldn’t take her eyes off the corpse.

  That’s what was happening to the Morgan. They’d jumbled the time flow so it had been segmented. Some areas were fast, and some were slow; it was why the network dataflow increased from some sections while others slowed so much they didn’t even register. It would be the same with all the corpus aspects. It was not a straight communications failure; they were all separated in time. Alone.

  Being briefly separated into just two consciousnesses as all their aspects flew into the enclave had left Immanueel badly perturbed. Now each of their aspects would be solitary. All the corpus human aspects would be divorced. A disconnected armada.

  She took a juddering breath, spitting out the last of the bitter juices from her mouth. Slowly she backed away from the junction, terrified by the fate that awaited any unsuspecting soul crossing the boundary. Then she stopped. She had no idea where the other aberrative time flows began.

  Think. There must be a way of spotting them.

  First was a review of the network failures. Sure enough, the corridor to the service shaft had no operational connection to the section around her. Using that as a baseline, she began to plot other blank areas of the life support section. A pattern began to build. It was reassuringly simple. The Morgan had been divided up into layers—some slow, some normal, some fast. Comparison of data rates as the network collapsed told her just how different the flows were, but that was only an approximation. She knew the general area where the time flows changed, but there was no way of telling the exact position of the boundaries.

  So what would give them away?

  Yirella switched her optik to infrared, at the highest sensitivity. The air around her had currents. Purified air at an exact temperature of twenty-one degrees Celsius gusted out of the vents along the floor, while vents along the top of the wall sucked it back in to run through filters. They were slow currents, barel
y visible. But there were enough minute temperature variants to distinguish the general circulation movements.

  She looked down the corridor toward the stairwell. Beyond Kenelm’s corpse, the air was moving like a gas giant’s supersonic cloud stream. She gave it a respectful nod and backed away a little farther.

  The normal time area she was in seemed to be four decks deep, and over half the diameter of the life support section. A file showed her the zone that now incarcerated her was all living quarters—individual crew cabins, some lounges, canteens, a gym, a medical bay, and various compartments of support machinery. There was no power coming in from the ship’s main generators; everything was running off local backup quantum cells. A quick calculation for one inhabitant showed the decks she was trapped in could provide life support and reprocess nutrients to print food for the next three hundred seventy-two years—assuming optimum equipment operation. There were no initiators to provide spare parts should anything major fail. Then she realized she had no way of moving between decks. The portals had shut down, and she couldn’t get to the service shafts where the stairs were.

  “Oh, Great Saints.”

  Yirella went back to the canteen. Without the network, Boulevard Saint-Germain was stuck on a loop, condemning the happy, stylish Parisians to walk through their fresh new morning every seven minutes. The irony of sitting in a temporal bubble watching their closed time cycle was strong enough to burn. She switched the windows off.

  Now what?

  She wasn’t sure the corpus aspects were smart enough individually to solve this. They had mastered time flow technology back at the neutron star, creating the domains, but the enclave was on such a colossal scale they would need to combine again to counter it. The obvious—in fact, the only—solution was to destroy the power rings around the star. Without them, the enclave would fall. But the contrasting time flows were a plague that stopped any of them from acting, let alone flying to the star to attack the rings.

  So…

  She needed to reunify the Morgan somehow, to banish all the different time flows. Once it was operational again, she could start to fight back.