The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  All of them were fascinating, and she wanted nothing more than to talk to them for a decade solid. People who had lived and walked on old Earth. But now she had aspects inside the Salvation of Life. Thousands of corpus marines were helping the squads and their cohorts chase down and eliminate quint bodies and most of the service creatures. And three other machines advanced with them—mentalic aspects, little more than relay units for her corpus personality. They each made their way through the corridors and chambers of the arkship, hunting out a nexus. When they found one, they inserted a batch of needles that swiftly meshed with the neuralstrata nerve fibers.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Human, but not. I feel your mind, your thoughts are ordered like a machine.”

  “Some of me is, but that’s really not relevant right now, is it?”

  “Why do you do this? Why have you brought so much death and destruction to our haven? We love you.”

  “You know what, let’s just cut the crap. You’ve lost. This is my offer. Relinquish control of the arkship freely, and I will allow some of your quint to establish a colony. They will have no memory of their history, no knowledge of the message from your God, but your species will survive.”

  “I feel you investigating my memories. What are you looking for?”

  “I see you erasing your memories. What are you trying to hide?”

  “We are open to you, now and always.”

  “I never did understand your level of fanaticism. You would rather die than be given a second chance. That’s extraordinary.”

  “I am a single unit in the Olyix fullmind. Part of me will live on no matter how many of us are killed by your slaughter here today. This will not end our divine purpose. It is eternal.”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve heard your God’s message. It’s bullshit.”

  “Yet still you hunt through my mind. Is that what you seek? The message from the God at the End of Time? This I offer freely. It is our gracious task to bring it to all life that lives in the light.”

  “Don’t need it, because I already had a taste at Vayan. But I admit I am curious. Surely by now you’ve realized the universe isn’t cyclic? The only thing that’s waiting up there in the far future is heat death, not rebirth bringing a new light. You’ve had long enough for your astronomers to determine that—so many millennia. Us humans got there after just four centuries of studying the cosmos.”

  “Dear human, we have held the truth for so much longer than that.”

  Yirella smiled. The association had worked; she could see the arrival of the message at the Olyix homeworld, this very binary star, two and a half million years ago. “So you have. Thank you.”

  Finally, a bloom of uncertainty appeared in the onemind’s serene thoughts. “You wanted to know the time when the God at the End of Time blessed us with its message.”

  “That is part of what I seek, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can use it to defeat you.”

  “You cannot defeat a God. The nova your neutron star will create will eliminate this star system, but we have thousands of outposts across the galaxy. Each of them will flourish and grow into a new enclave. Each will continue our crusade.”

  “Yes, I was concerned that might happen. And I see you really believe that. So know this. We will deal with any survivors, and every attempt they might make to resurrect your despicable crusade. We have the ability now, and friends. So many friends, thanks to you.” She felt the onemind erasing vast sections of itself, a retreat that made her own incursion into its personality so much easier.

  “The locations of our valiant outposts are gone now. Dear human, my descendants will meet yours out there one day. This battle is merely one amid a war that will last until our God arises.”

  “I know.”

  “Then end your sacrilege. Stop this profane attack. It is not too late for your redemption. Humans now have the ability to travel to the era of our God in your own vessels. Join our pilgrimage as loving equals.”

  “You have ruined the evolution of thousands of species—billions upon billions of lives lost. And it was you personally that oversaw the death of my homeworld; almost as many people died from collapsing city shields as you stole. You’ve killed my friends, and your senseless zealotry is forcing me to make decisions that will never bring me closure, let alone happiness. After all the evil you have unleashed, you ask me to be merciful? And you still haven’t realized, have you? It wasn’t a God that sent your message; it was the devil, you psychotic shit. Now die.”

  SAINTS

  MORGAN

  Of all the things Yuri wasn’t expecting to find in a supertechnology warship built by some very weird post-humans, he had to admit a roaring twenties Parisian café would be close to the top of his list.

  Nonetheless, that was where he and Jessika and Kandara and Callum had wound up. They sat at one of the wooden tables where remotes served them the best food he’d tasted in…well, a long time.

  As they ate, the big arched windows showed tactical displays. The corpus armada had killed the oneminds in every arkship above the gas-giant world; squads backed by machine marines had occupied every arkship and welcome ship containing human cocoons. More marines had continued to overrun the other vessels with imprisoned aliens, but they were running out of time to implement the next phase of the mission.

  The neutron star was going to impact the big white-spectrum star in another ninety minutes. A vast fleet of Resolution ships was forming up on the fringe of the nebula. And the armada had expended most of its Calmissiles.

  “I can’t believe they still call them that,” Kandara said, shaking her head in apparent dismay.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Callum asked. “The Higgs boson, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Robson’s progression, Rindstorm’s door, Newton’s law of gravity. So many breakthroughs are named after their inventor.”

  “But they’re important historical figures,” Yuri said with a straight face. “The giants of human science.”

  “Then I’m in good company.”

  Jessika and Kandara both laughed at him. Callum ignored them, drinking his beer in an attempt at silent dignity.

  Yuri used his altme to call up a visual feed from the Morgan’s fuselage sensors. They were keeping station with the Salvation of Life along with twenty much larger attack cruisers from the armada. A swarm of small insectoid craft was hopping across the rock, attaching a multitude of dark hemispherical machines to the arkship’s surface. In the background, points of light sparkled through the nebula’s beautiful polychromatic clouds. For a moment he was concerned the twinkles had returned, but then he realized that—one by one—the stars were appearing as their light crawled across the empty expanse that used to be the enclave. Sure enough, as the arkship swept over the gas giant’s equator, he saw the galactic core rising from behind the planet as if it were the universe’s most intricate jewel moon.

  There was an outbreak of whispering over by the café’s counter, a heated discussion just below comprehension threshold. Yuri refused to look around, but Kandara did. She leaned in across the table. “The kids are home from school,” she muttered in amusement.

  When he did deign to glance in that direction, Yuri saw Dellian and a group of other young men clustered together, their argument stalled as soon as they saw him looking at them. Despite the obvious ethnic variances between them, they had a peculiar sameness—all of them squat and broad-shouldered, not so much Olympian-fit as carrying the kind of excess muscle Earth’s bodybuilders used to get from embracing a full illegal tox development. They also shared the same vaguely guilty expression as they stared at Yuri’s table.

  “Join us,” a grinning Kandara said before Yuri could object. But then, after so long spent with just the five of them, some fresh company wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Dellian’s squad and sev
eral more of their friends hurried over.

  “This is an honor—” Janc began eagerly.

  “Don’t,” Yuri said, holding up a finger in warning. “Just don’t. And we’re not Saints, either.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He let that one go.

  “So what state is the Salvation in?” Callum asked.

  “Secure,” Dellian said. “Yirella eliminated the onemind, so we have continuity in maintaining the cocoons. And we’ve eliminated a lot of quint.”

  “Yeah,” Uret said glumly. “But as we know from the Vayan ambush, it’s going to take months to track down the last of them. Those arkships are the biggest three-dimensional maze in the galaxy; there are a million places inside where you can hide unnoticed.”

  “Look who you’re telling,” Jessika said.

  Uret blushed.

  Kandara raised her glass of wine, regarding it intently. “So, you organize hunting parties?”

  “There are teams of marines on specialist tracking duty,” Xante said. “And remotes will install a comprehensive sensor network throughout every chamber and corridor. But we’re scheduled for duty rotations to that detail. It helps keep us fresh.”

  “It’s going to take most of the flight to be sure we got them all,” Janc said. “Last time, we transferred all the cocoons over to our habitat and got out of there fast, but we can’t do that this time.”

  “Last time?” Yuri asked.

  “Yeah. We got ambushed.”

  “Right. We knew the Olyix were raiding the expansion wavefront. There are five more ships here storing human cocoons.”

  “And thousands of other species,” Jessika said. “I understand from the Yirella androids that they’re all coming with us?”

  “Away from here, yes,” Dellian said. “They’ll be flown to the other end of the wormhole, then we’ll see what we do. Yirella was saying she thinks we should all settle stars close together, form some kind of grand interspecies alliance, in case the Olyix ever come back.”

  “Bold move,” Yuri said. “But suppose some of those species are even crazier than the Olyix?”

  “Please excuse Yuri,” Callum said. “He always thinks the worst.”

  Half of their rapt audience nodded eagerly. “We know.”

  For once, Yuri was at a loss for a rebuke.

  “It’ll take a lot of work,” Dellian said. “We need to find out all about them. But statistically, there will be some we’d want as neighbors.”

  Callum raised his glass and finished the beer in a couple of gulps. “Time will tell. In the meantime, what kind of beers from the future do you boys recommend for an old-timer?”

  YIRELLA

  MORGAN

  Yirella’s corpus personality observed the deck thirty-three café through sensors. She still hadn’t used her original body to meet the Saints. It was sitting quietly in the captain’s formal reception room along with a clone of herself. Immanueel had spent the last hour growing it for her inside a fast-time domain that was barely larger than the womb-vat. An initiator growing her a biologic body would have been a simpler solution, but she didn’t want to be that cheap. This body had to be perfect in every respect; he deserved that much.

  Both aspects were anxiously watching corpus ships and machines racing to install exotic energy conduits around the outside of all the huge Olyix ships they’d captured. Simultaneously, she kept a great deal of her attention focused on the progress of the neutron star. It was less than an hour out from the corona now. Vast rivers of nebula dust were flowing into it, flaring like solar prominences as they sank into the oblivion of its black horizon. As lightstorms went, it should have been spectacular. Yirella found it ominous.

  “We’re cutting this fine,” she said.

  “We are on schedule,” Immanueel said calmly.

  “Assuming nothing goes wrong. Don’t fall into the hubris trap. We’re not the Olyix. We need to leave now; you can finish fixing conduits to the arkships later.”

  “Very well. We concede your point, genesis human.”

  Yirella didn’t quite know what to make of that. Immanueel only used that honorific when they were being formal. “Did I just annoy you?”

  “No. The opinion of the genesis human is always treated with respect—even more so now you have chosen to elaborate.”

  “It’s not a full elaboration. I’m not ready for that.”

  “We understand. We remember when we began the process. It takes considerable mental adjustment.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We are flying the portals into place now.”

  Yirella concentrated the majority of her aspects on the feeds from across the armada. Another advantage of being many: You could really appreciate the bigger picture.

  Far away, the wormhole terminus was englobed by more than a thousand corpus attack cruisers. Unable to match its initial acceleration, the Resolution ships chasing it had fallen a long way behind. Most of them seemed to be decelerating. It was hard to tell; they only just registered on the billions of sensor fronds the wormhole had scattered in its wake. She read the distance in surprise. “How long were we in the enclave?”

  “A relativity question that has no correct answer—especially given how the Olyix fullmind manipulated the enclave time flow.”

  “The wormhole terminus is three quarters of a light-year away,” she said. “We must have been in there for months.”

  “Yes, but it means that the closest Resolution ships are nearly seven thousand AUs behind the wormhole. That is to our advantage.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “The evacuation is starting.”

  Expansion portals opened in front of every arkship, bathing them in a lush sapphire light. Yirella’s personality was still operating within the Salvation of Life neuralstrata—albeit with a great many protective routines and cutoffs in case the onemind had left behind any darkvirals. She had given up trying to activate its gravitonic drive. Whole sections had been decommissioned, with components fed into the Olyix equivalent of disassembly reactors, ready for the mass to be recycled. Some of the older arkships didn’t even have the chambers that housed the drive anymore; they’d all been repurposed to help support the cocoons.

  All she could do now was ensure the power supply to the massive cocoon vaults was maintained, keeping over a billion human brains alive. As responsibilities went, she hated it.

  An attack cruiser positioned itself a kilometer in front of the arkship and established a wide distortion boundary. The portal itself began to move backward, swallowing the Salvation of Life.

  I’ll never see the neutron star hit. We’re going to outrun the nova light all the way back to Earth. Shame. It should be pretty spectacular.

  The remaining attack cruisers and the Morgan followed the Salvation of Life through the portal. Yirella took a last look at the elegant nebula clouds framed by a thin blue rim. Once the ships were all through, Immanueel deactivated the portal.

  Yirella rearranged the feed from the Morgan’s sensors. A coma of flaring interstellar dust was forming around the Salvation of Life as the lonely molecules collided with the attack cruiser’s protective boundary and disintegrated into their elementary particles. A hundred thousand kilometers ahead, the wormhole was open and waiting.

  “So now you have one decision left,” Immanueel said. “Do you tell him?”

  Yirella rose to her feet, her original body and her new clone standing facing each other. “I can’t. He deserves the life we were promised. I refuse to deny him that. I love him.”

  Twenty-seven decks below, in one of the Morgan’s cargo chambers, she’d gathered all her android aspects together. She withdrew from them now, feeling them turn quiescent, their functions shutting down. Immanueel took over the Morgan’s network as she left that; then she handed over control of the Salvation of Life to them.
>
  And then there were two.

  Double vision—both images of herself, both aspects utterly identical, even wearing the same clothes. Because I cannot afford to be honest with him. Out of all the eeriness that came from being a host of corpus aspects, this was the most poignant.

  A portal expanded at the end of the reception room. Immanueel’s biophysical body came through, ducking down sharply, their tail quivering to maintain balance. “We’re ready,” they told her.

  “Thank you.” She gave their dark, mottled body a gentle hug.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes. I have to. He will never understand. Nor forgive.”

  “He might. He loves you.”

  “No. I know my Del. His war is over now. After everything he’s done, everything that’s happened to him, I cannot ask him to do more.”

  “What about you? Is this what you deserve?”

  “Deserve? That simplicity no longer applies. As I learned long ago, if you are in a position to make the choice, you have the right to make it.”

  “You are the true genesis human.”

  Yirella in her original body straightened her back and accompanied Immanueel into their centrex ship. Her mind twinned and separated. She looked back at her clone through the glowing rim of the portal and lifted a hand in parting. “Take care of him.”

  * * *

  —

  It was quite a party that had developed by the time Yirella got back to the café. Nobody could resist just dropping by to meet the Saints, who after an almost believable show of reluctance had bravely settled into accepting their idol status. Talk was loud, and the Latin music louder.

  Yuri was still at the table, facing down Janc and Xante; a heap of sticky shot glasses had piled up between them, along with two empty bottles of vodka so cold they were still covered in frost. Yuri poured a fresh trio of shots from a new bottle as he explained some heroic mission he and Kohei had run once upon a time to save the world from terrorists or revolutionaries or mad ideologues. Yirella was seriously impressed how steady his hand was, while Xante could barely see his shot glass, let alone pick it up.