The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Oh. Why are you here?”

  “To fix this. It might take me a while, but I’ll be back, I promise.”

  She helped Tilliana back to her cabin, then pulled up a status display from the worn-out sub-network. Good news and bad news; there was plenty of processing capacity and a decent reserve in the power cells. The negative-energy conduits on the fuselage remained functional; they just needed operating instructions.

  What she still didn’t have was a working initiator. There were three on deck twenty-two, but the sub-network didn’t extend there. It was on a different time flow. She ran an inventory check for remotes and found three cargo trolleys available. Two worked.

  A minute later she was in a different stairwell shaft, sitting on the trolley as it clamped itself to the central column. Looking down past her dangling feet, sight switched to infrared, she saw the billowing air currents scudding about at what appeared to be a slower rate. She ordered the trolley to lower at maximum speed so she’d get through the gradient as quickly as possible.

  This time the discontinuity didn’t seem so bad. She wondered if deck twenty-two had a slow or fast time flow.

  The lights were in standby mode, giving off a dim green glow. And there was something wrong with the air; it carried a musty scent. Her infrared vision showed her the grills were barely pumping out any fresh air at all. Another standby mode.

  She connected to the sub-net and reviewed the logs. The nodes had been isolated from the network for sixty-three years. So, slower than the section incarcerating Tilliana and Ellici, but still fast compared to the one she’d started in. The gradient would be enough to kill a biological body trying to cross over.

  When she reviewed the log data, she saw the sub-net had waited for a year, during which there had been no power demand from any equipment. The atmosphere had remained unchanged with no carbon dioxide to scrub; no doors had opened; no movement was detected. The management routine had put everything into full stasis mode and waited for further instructions.

  Yirella provided them.

  The engineering compartment was already brightly lit, with fresh air blowing hard out of the grills when she arrived. The three cylindrical initiators were running internal pre-commencement checks. Yirella connected to their management arrays and loaded in the android design, then began to modify it. Some raw material simply wasn’t available, so she verified substitutions. After that there was Ainsley’s unnecessary anatomical fixation to…smooth over. Also, if this was her first shaky step elevating to corpus, the new androids shouldn’t have Ainsley’s profile.

  Once the design was finalized, she activated the initiators. Fabrication took eight hours. One of the initiators glitched halfway through the procedure—when she opened the cylinder’s lid it looked like a burned corpse was inside—but the remaining pair kept working.

  Five days later they’d produced thirty androids of herself. It was a strange sensation when each of the new aspects came online and started sharing her thought routines. She could feel her awareness expand as her mind acquired additional processing capacity—which wasn’t quite the equivalent of a greater intellect, but certainly helped problem solving—in particular, quantifying the negative-energy patterns that the Morgan’s conduits would have to direct. With that determined—in theory—she set about formatting the routines to load. The new androids also came equipped with a quantum logic clock, accurate enough for her to synchronize the channel activation across differing time flows.

  She dispatched twenty of them across the ship, with two primary missions. The first was to make contact with any other surviving tactical teams, while the second was to track down working initiators that could build more of herselves. The Morgan’s sleek conical profile was five kilometers long, which she estimated would now be subject to at least two hundred fifty different time flows. At least the androids didn’t need space suits to move through the sections in a vacuum, so they should be able to position themselves evenly throughout the ship.

  Two of them remained with the initiators to keep on producing more aspects. Seven accompanied the Ainsley android aspect back to the deck where Tilliana and Ellici lived, where three stayed, providing companionship and practical help to her two friends. The remaining four went back with the Ainsley android to where the original Yirella was waiting—

  * * *

  —

  —she swayed about as if caught in a blast of wind, the experience of living so much in the space of seconds almost taking her to her knees. “Fuck the Saints,” she moaned. But at the end, all she could see was Ellici and Tilliana—her smart, funny friends reduced to age-ruined shadows of the amazing people they used to be.

  When she blinked the sticky moisture out of her eyes, she saw her own mournful expression on the Ainsley android’s face. The rest of the knowledge it had brought back was sloshing about inside her head like storm waves hitting a rocky shore. “The conduits?”

  “We’ll activate them in another three minutes,” the Ainsley android said.

  Of course. The memory was there; she just had to concentrate. If those first twenty androids she’d sent into the ship had found more initiators, then there should be more than a thousand of her aspects positioned across the Morgan by now, all ready with their operating instructions loaded into conduit managers, and emergency power rerouted. If not, the two of herselves she’d left behind on deck twenty-two would have produced more than two hundred more androids by now, which should just be enough to activate all the conduits. It was all down to timing, governed by the quantum logic clocks.

  As she absorbed the situation she became very aware of how her attention was struggling to cope with the six aspects now on deck thirty-three that were linked up into one personality. It wasn’t that the images from six different pairs of eyes, and other more extensive senses, were confusing. It was rather that she couldn’t quite process all her aspects’ thoughts in unity. Her brain simply wasn’t wired for it, despite the corpus routines doing their best to smooth the perception and thoughts into one.

  “I think Immanueel and the others modified the neural structure in those biophysical bodies of theirs,” she said out loud. “This is going to give me a headache despite all the filtering I’m applying.”

  “Hang on in there,” her Ainsley android aspect replied. The other four aspects signaled their support and sympathy, reducing their own input to the common personality to help.

  She was starting to worry just how she’d cope if the Morgan did liberate itself from the time flows and hundreds of aspects joined her personality.

  There are worse things.

  And she wasn’t quite sure where that thought originated—her organic brain or the multi-aspect personality that she had elaborated up to.

  I’ll take it, though. Because it is mine.

  A countdown in her optik told her there were ninety seconds left. She accessed the hull cameras just in time to see the negative-energy conduits rising up out of their recesses in the Morgan’s shiny copper fuselage. As she looked at the lean curve and menacing point of the spurs, all she could think of were the ears of the morox that had attacked Del after the flier crash back on Juloss. The shape triggered way too many nerves.

  There were twenty seconds left on the count, with the aspects loading the pattern format into local management routines, when awareness burgeoned into her mind, deriving from the plural personality—a gentle mental nudge to a weak biological brain. It wasn’t just the spurs on their section of the fuselage that were rising. The cameras were showing them standing proud across all of the Morgan.

  “Saints,” she gasped. “It worked. I worked.” The countdown reached zero. A tremor ran through the deck, and her optik was deluged by icons detailing node status and recovery routines going active. Her personality aspects expanded at a phenomenal rate as the network reintegrated, elaborating her to seventeen hundred aspects. Corpus level! She
was scattered throughout the ship: in cabins, engineering bays, hangars, the dark spaces between tanks, wedged into machinery modules, airless interzones pressed against the fuselage, clinging to structural beams. All of her aspects interfaced with arrays and power systems, supervising the conduit patterns, scanning the nebula, arming weapons. Alarmingly, she could see the power drain from the conduits was absorbing almost all of the Morgan’s generating capacity to repel the time flows. They’d have to operate at redline limits just to accelerate, and as for beam weapons…She had to order them to power down. They couldn’t fight—not if they wanted to stay clear of the time flows.

  Thirty-seven hers were tending to ancient tactical personnel who had endured decades of miserable imprisonment in their isolated decks, while another fifteen were trying to calm squad tacticians who’d been in normal time flows or slow ones and who hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong yet.

  Operationally, the Morgan was running at about seventy percent capacity, with machinery that hadn’t been powered up for decades taking time to get back online, while some equipment was so worn it would need replacing entirely. But it was a warship, designed to keep functioning and fighting when it was damaged.

  “Armada status!” Yirella demanded. The main tactical display refreshed as the network reacquired the full sensor suite. For some reason she could analyze it calmly, no longer the Yirella who used to quail at the thought of taking an active part in advising the FinalStrike itself. Probably because only one aspect suffers hormonal stress, while the other seventeen hundred are pure analytics. That’s what I call a decent balance.

  The armada was besieged by photonic disfigurements, every ship the center of a shimmering cyclone of flickering microstars. “The squads,” she gasped in relief as she saw the troop carriers were in plain sight, still holding position a thousand kilometers out from the Morgan. None of them were being accosted by twinkles. Too insignificant. The thought angered her. Just you wait.

  Her comms were receiving calls from every squad leader—including Dellian. All of them were desperate to know what was happening. She talked to all of them simultaneously, ordering them back to the Morgan, where they’d be safer inside its hull, protected from errant time flows.

  At the same time she was also monitoring a squadron of eighty Resolution ships picking off the armada ships quickly and easily. More Resolution ships were flooding through the gateway behind them, accelerating toward the armada to add to the carnage. Nothing could fight back; the corpus warships were paralyzed by the different time flows twisting through their structure. They were being struck by graviton pulses and nuclear missiles and energy beams, detonating into vivid swirls of incandescent vapor that expanded out like a distorted cluster of weird tumors as their destruction times varied.

  While her android aspects handled tactical, her original body opened Dellian’s icon. “Hey, you. How are you doing?”

  “Yirella! Saints! What’s happening? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. The Olyix hit us with a weird time weapon. That’s why you’ve been ordered back to the Morgan. You’ll be safer inside.”

  “Right. Yeah. Listen, Ellici and Tilliana aren’t responding. Do you know if they’re okay?”

  She steeled herself for the lie. A white lie, though. The squads cannot have distractions when they get into the arkship. “Yes, they’re okay. Tactical’s really busy right now, so I took this job.”

  “Thanks, Yi. So is FinalStrike over? Are we retreating? We can see the armada ships being destroyed.”

  “No, Del, we’re not retreating. The corpus humans are going to start fighting back. We know how to beat the Olyix weapon. Our ships will be liberated.”

  “Thank the Saints for that. After all this, we can’t back out now. We can’t.”

  “I know. I’ll call you back.”

  “Sure. Thanks for stepping up. I get how stressful this must be for you.”

  “No problem.” She closed Del’s icon. The relief from hearing his voice was profound. She granted her original body a moment while her corpus personality finalized strategy. They really did need to liberate the armada fast. Otherwise this freedom wasn’t going to last long—

  The Morgan’s generators were nearly all back on line, providing close to a full power output—enough to power a whole continent back on old Earth. Her lips twisted into a smile. “Fire on those Saints-damned twinkles,” she ordered the Morgan’s network. “Every graviton beam we’ve got.” She needed to see what impact the weapons would have. The twinkles were just loci within the enclave’s slow-time continuum. There was nothing physical there to be blown up, but she was fairly confident they could be distorted, their temporal effect broken.

  Graviton pulses swiped through shoals of twinkles, scattering them like a tornado hitting a pile of leaves. The troop carriers swept in through the scintillating lightstorm, returning to their hangars. As soon as the last one was back on board, Yirella accelerated the Morgan at eighty gees, streaking toward the closest battle cruiser. They came alongside fast, graviton pulses bombarding the dense throng of scintillating blemishes that surrounded the long copper-sheathed shape. “It’s working,” she said gleefully, as fractured auroral curlicues scythed away from the battle cruiser’s hull.

  Immanueel’s communication icon appeared, routed through the armada’s secure links. “What just happened?” they asked. The battle cruiser was only a single aspect, but the contact was profoundly reassuring. She sent the file she’d composed. A second later the battle cruiser’s negative-energy conduit fins were sliding up through the copper hull.

  “I’ll get Ainsley,” she said. “You clear the rest of the armada.”

  “At once,” Immanueel replied.

  The battle cruiser speed-blurred in her sensor images as it shot away. The Morgan accelerated again, driving through the armada at three hundred gees, heading straight for Ainsley.

  The Olyix had made a mistake, she thought, by not targeting Ainsley first. But as the Resolution ships coming through the gateway had caught up with the tail end of the armada, they’d started attacking the helpless ships there. Bad strategy.

  By the time the Morgan reached Ainsley, Immanueel had lifted four more warships out of the disjointed time flows. They had each gone on to unshackle more; freedom was now growing geometrically. Judging by the rising intensity of the twinkles, the Olyix recognized the inevitable outcome.

  At two kilometers long, Ainsley was shorter than the Morgan. That made Yirella extremely confident they could rip it clear of the distortions. But the Olyix had obviously realized the same thing. When they rendezvoused, the white hull was almost invisible behind a cloud of the diabolical sprites. The Morgan was firing gravitonic pulses almost continuously; Yirella’s corpus personality had assumed direct command of the ship’s systems from the genten arrays and diverted every watt from the generators into the negative-energy conduits.

  It wasn’t a battle many sensors could see, let alone interpret. But the counters the Morgan was deploying methodically peeled the clashing continuum disfigurements away from Ainsley, creating a dark zone around the pair of them.

  Finally, Ainsley’s white icon appeared.

  “Motherfucker! Those sneaky little shits. Parts of me lived for a thousand years. Nothing worked. It was like being smothered for eternity. That…Goddamn. I’m having to delete entire memory clusters. It’s too painful. Fuck them! They crippled half of my mind, and the other half didn’t even know. I’m going rip them a new one bigger than their star. I am going to neurovirus every quint and make them eat the onemind neuralstratas—”

  “Ainsley.”

  “—when I am finished with them they won’t even be a boogeyman legend in this galaxy. I’m going to—”

  “Ainsley.”

  “Jesus fuck. What?”

  “Ainsley, we need you. Please.” She watched negative-energy fins telescope
smoothly out of the white fuselage. The ship’s winglike structures were briefly sketched by a complex web of glaring scarlet and turquoise lines that swiftly softened to a subliminal tessellation.

  “Right. Yeah. Fine. I’m realigning my mentality. I’ve got most systems under control. Fuck! Even some of my units have time ablated. Hell, if that’d gone on much longer, they could’ve compromised the phasefolded systems. Performance is returning.”

  “Ainsley, the Olyix are going heavy on targeting the neutron star with this temporal distortion crap. I think they’re trying to slow it down. So I need you to take out the power rings. We have to kill the enclave. Now.”

  “Got it. Yirella?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I went corpus. It was the only way to overcome multiple time flows.”

  “Okay. Well…uh, thanks, kid.”

  “You’re welcome. Ainsley—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tilliana and Ellici got trapped in a fast time flow. It finished them. They’re alive, but they lived in it for ninety years.”

  “Oh, Jeez, no. What about the boyfriend?”

  “He’s good. He’s alive and back on board the Morgan.”

  “Okay. I’m going to take down the power rings. See you at the arkships.”

  “Yes.” She watched Ainsley depart, scoring a long, dark line through the nebula. When she checked, the total elapsed time since she’d rendezvoused with him was two point eight seconds. So there are some benefits to elevation, then.

  The tactical display showed her the rate armada ships were being recovered was increasing dramatically. Ten minutes later the liberation was complete, even though she felt sick at how much glowing wreckage was clotting this whole section of the nebula—a swirling radioactive monument to their hubris. So many ships destroyed, so many aspects lost. But now attack cruisers were beginning to engage the Resolution ships that were still pouring in through the gateway, creating a new maelstrom of wreckage among the energy-saturated plasma of the nebula.