Callum was having a terribly earnest conversation with Ovan about the Don’s last amazing season in the Scottish first division before he’d left Earth, while Kandara was teaching Uret and Falar how to samba—really samba—much to their audience’s whooping approval.
Dellian was chatting enthusiastically to Jessika, the pair of them looking up at a window’s tactical display. Yirella slid her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder where it belonged. “Hello, you.”
“Finally!” he exclaimed and kissed her happily. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
“It’s been a busy time.”
“Yeah!” His smile faded. “Tilliana and Ellici?”
“Alive. We can rejuvenate their bodies, the same way we recovered everyone on the Calibar.”
“Great!”
“Their bodies, Del. Their bodies will recover. But there’s not much of them left.”
He nodded despondently. “Right.”
Yirella smiled at Jessika, who was giving her a calculating look. Almost as if she knows. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise. And thank you.”
“I have to ask: Did you know, when you arrived on Earth? Did you think we’d be the ones who beat the Olyix?”
“Nothing is certain. But I had confidence.”
“Right. Well, and here we are.”
“So what happens next?”
Yirella gestured at the window and brought up a visual image of the wormhole terminus. Arkships were sliding into its open throat one after the other. “In about three minutes we go in there, and four years later we come out at a small star that used to be an Olyix sensor station. It’s not anymore; the armada saw to that. Then it’s a ten-thousand-light-year trip to Earth the long way around.”
“So easy—if you say it quickly.”
“You’ve been there—to Earth, I mean. We haven’t.”
“It was in quite a state by the time I left. It’s going to take some rebuilding.”
“We can do that,” Yirella blurted. “We’ve had practice terraforming so many worlds. We can rebuild it. Ainsley used to laugh at me when I said things like that.”
Jessika raised a tall cocktail glass. “Sounds like him.”
“Yeah.”
“There are a lot of Olyix still alive out there. You know that, don’t you? Their ships and industrial stations here; all their outposts across the galaxy. This isn’t over. I talked to the Salvation of Life onemind briefly once, back when we arrived at this star and it thought I was inside the Avenging Heretic, just before the Deliverance ships blew it up. I felt its fanaticism.”
“I know. But destroying the enclave is the beginning of the end. For them.”
“I hope so,” Jessika said.
“Starting now. All those armada ships on protection duty around the wormhole terminus? They’re about to go dark.”
“Dark?”
“Once the last arkship is safe inside the wormhole, the corpus humans will close it, just like the Salvation of Life did when you forced it to flee from Earth. Then all these dark warships will quietly circle back around and start tracking the Resolution ships. The Olyix can’t stay here now. Their stars will go nova, maybe even supernova—then who knows, a black hole? They have to leave in order to live. And they’ll travel to their outposts. Our warships will follow them. And—when they’re light-years from anywhere—strike.”
“Bloody hell,” Jessika muttered. “The corpus humans will do that?”
“Yes. Their aspects will separate and multiply; they’re prepared for it. We have a duty to protect the innocents in this galaxy, to make sure they have a history.”
“Is that what humans are going to do now?”
“You did. Passively, when you came to Earth. We’re not passive.”
“I’m human,” Jessika said sorrowfully. “As I always say: just like you.”
Yirella studied her through narrowed eyes. “Of course.”
“It could be quite something, having a galaxy with thousands of different species in contact with one another. So different from the isolation and loneliness we’ve had to endure for the last two and a half million years.”
“Yes! We can establish wormholes and portals to link all the stars again like Connexion did, but on a huge scale. A loop of stations right around the galaxy, so we can travel among all the species and cultures, and just…live.”
“You’re a dreamer, Yirella.”
She hugged Dellian tight and smiled down at him. “I’ve been accused of that before.”
Dellian kissed her. “Come on. It’s almost time.”
The party paused. Everyone crowded around the windows, watching as the Morgan flew toward the wormhole. Drinks were clasped to chests in anticipation.
“Like Hogmanay,” Callum said happily.
Yirella frowned and turned back to look at Jessika. How did she know the Olyix crusade started two and a half million years ago?
Someone started a countdown. Yirella put the question to one side and hurriedly grabbed a glass to join in. Ahead of them, the Salvation of Life slipped into the wormhole, swallowed by extrinsic darkness. Negative-energy conduits rose up out of the Morgan’s fuselage.
“Three. Two. One!”
The wormhole enveloped them, and the windows went blank. The cheering was ecstatic; the drinking epic. Yirella made sure she kissed everyone in the café, then started dancing, laughing at Dellian, whose enthusiasm outranked his grace. Finally they wound up just holding each other tight, swaying gently amid the riotous dancing queens and disco jivers.
At the end of it all, when the music was slow, and glutted bodies were sprawled everywhere, she bent down and kissed him properly. “I love you,” she said. “I never want to live without you.” Then she started crying.
Her beautiful Dellian smiled up at her, his face as adoring as it had been ever since they were five years old. “Silly thing,” he said as a finger caressed her tears away. “Nothing can separate us. And what a life we’re going to live in a galaxy you made happen.”
Her thoughts slipped oh-so-briefly to her other aspect—the one she’d left behind to accompany Immanueel, the one who would finish her quest. Because if you can’t trust yourself, then who can you trust? “We’re together now,” she told her love. “And we always will be.”
RETURN FLIGHT
MORGAN
The Morgan didn’t have actual viewports, not ones you could look through. Of course it didn’t; it was a warship, designed to withstand nuclear blasts, hypervelocity impacts, and intense energy beam assaults. But during the voyage home, everyone realized they wanted to see the world that was legend, not just watch a projection of it, however excellent the resolution. So during the hiatus when the armada emerged from the wormhole at the L-class star that used to be the Olyix sensor station, a slight redesign was instigated. A curving transparent blister now rose out of the smooth hull, as if it were beset with a tumor.
Kandara waited until the first rush of sightseers had all had their fill of the system’s eerie blue ice giant before she ventured a look. The observation lounge was spartan compared to the rest of the starship’s quarters with their texture surfaces. She couldn’t really even tell she was inside. The dome was optically perfect, invisible unless a star’s glimmer caught it at an acute angle to create a minute diffraction halo. As far as her natural senses could make out, she was standing on the hull, naked to space.
The armada ships and their appropriated Olyix arkships were orbiting the star’s solitary ice giant—thousands of lightpoints forming a slender ring a million kilometers above the frigid cloudscape. She watched the dull, slow-moving hurricanes of ammonia crystals swirling gently so far over her head, occasionally harassed by the flicker of lightning blasts. That was when she started working out the scale. Some of those storm swirls were the same siz
e as South America, which meant the speed they were spinning wasn’t so sluggish after all. And as for the power in each lightning bolt…
She heard footsteps approaching, someone deliberately making their presence known. So someone who knew not to creep up on her. “Hello, Yuri.” She hadn’t seen much of her fellow Saints during the trip back down the wormhole; not that they’d sought her out, either. A welcome break.
Thanks to the slowtime flow within the Morgan, it had only taken a week to get here. She’d spent most of it with Dellian’s squad—nice kids who were starting to relax properly for the first time in their lives. Like her, they didn’t know what the hell they were going to do now, which made them all kindred souls.
“Quite a view,” Yuri said as he stood beside her.
“Not really, but it’s the first time I’ve actually seen the outside in ten thousand years. We were in Kruse Station for so long before the flight, then everything since we left has been a sensor feed into my neural interface. This viewing dome is an anachronism; sensors provide a much better view, and in higher resolution. But, Mary, this, this is real. It helps to ground me.”
“Yeah, that many ships does put everything into perspective, doesn’t it?”
Kandara nodded as she shifted her gaze to the long loop of glowing dots that arched sedately around the ice giant. The closest was a large one: the Salvation of Life itself. She had very mixed feelings about that. “Yeah. Here we are, back in a parking orbit right beside that bastard. Some rescue, huh?”
“A necessary step in the journey. I’ve been talking to Immanueel and Yirella. There is some debate as to what we should do next.”
“I thought that was settled. We’re going back to Earth, aren’t we?”
“We are. Before the armada left, the corpus people dispatched several wormhole-carrying ships back there. More are now on their way to the original settled stars.”
“There’s an unspoken but in there somewhere, Yuri.”
“The corpus humans have catalogued the arkships and welcome ships we brought with us. There are six thousand four hundred and twenty-three alien species in various kinds of stasis.”
“Various kinds?”
“Yes. There’s one that is entirely unhatched eggs—millions of them. Their world was in an elliptical orbit that lasts forty-five terrestrial years; so every generation lived for about thirty years, then died off at the onset of winter after they laid their eggs. All the Olyix had to do was drop in after winter started and scoop them up.”
“That sounds…bizarre. How did they ever discover radio in thirty years?”
“Nature, it turns out, is quite neat. Apparently the egg yolk is some kind of chemical memory extruded by a gland in the adult brain. The embryos absorb it as they grow. So once they hatch, they simply move into the buildings their ancestors left behind, and have all the knowledge to make everything work. They understand science, too, and carry on the research.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one: It is neat.”
“Another one is a cold-blooded race that the Olyix have literally frozen in liquid nitrogen under extreme pressure. Then there’s one that—”
“Yuri, I don’t need a rundown of all six thousand species, thanks. What’s the debate?”
“We have to decide where to send them.”
“Ah.”
“It’s going to take ten thousand years for the starships to reach Earth; so we certainly have time to decide.”
“Now I get it. We need to evaluate each species, and decree which ones we want living near human worlds. Oh, and I’m guessing what level of technology we provide, too?”
“Right. Some may be hostile. We have to be careful. In which case, we don’t bring them out of stasis before we re-establish human society.”
“Because they’d have ten thousand years to advance their own technology…”
“Yes.”
“Well, I appreciate the thinking behind that. After all, another century and Earth would probably have been able to take on the Olyix. So who is going to make all these evaluations?”
Yuri gave her a modest shrug. “Immanueel is concerned that it shouldn’t just be corpus humans. It’ll be a council, with people revived from various arkships and eras. Yirella, of course. And Jessika should be able to bring a decent new perspective.”
“Council? I think you mean a bureaucracy, don’t you?”
“I found it quite reassuring. Even corpus humans, faced with a problem, instinctively form a committee.”
“Presumably you’re going to be on it?”
“I was asked. I have spent a lifetime in security, after all. And so have you.”
“What? Oh, no. No. That’s not the mission I signed on for. I’ve done my part.”
“And in doing so, built yourself a reputation: Saint Kandara. You know no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Besides, what else are you going to do for the next ten thousand years?”
“A time I fully intend to spend in a corpus domain with an exceedingly slow time flow.”
Yuri’s lips flickered with a smile. “Saint Callum’s already agreed.”
“Mary, color me surprised. And Yirella? You said she’s on this committee?”
“Yes.” Yuri gave her a shrewd look. “Why? Don’t you trust her?”
“Sure. I trust her.”
“See, this is the kind of instinct we need on the committee.”
“It’s not instinct, it’s…”
“Prejudice?”
“Fuck you. But have you noticed how everything Yirella suggests is inevitably what happens?”
“Because she’s smart.”
“So are corpus humans.”
“They do have a reverence for her that I find a little disturbing. It’ll be good to have someone like you to act as a balance to her.”
“Oh, Mary.”
“Excellent. First meeting is in two days’ time. The species catalogue is available for you to access.”
“You expect me to review six thousand four hundred species in forty-eight hours?”
“They’re grouped into preliminary categories. But I expect we’ll be spending the first dozen sessions arguing what we do with the ones we really don’t want in a neighboring star system.”
“Sure.”
“Then we have to decide what kind of human culture we want to establish when we do return everyone to Earth. With the power that corpus-level technology gives us, there will have to be restrictions on individual usage.”
Kandara just glared at him, not trusting herself to speak. As always, she wondered just how effective her gland was. “Right,” she snapped.
“Face it, who else would you trust with this? We are Saints, after all.”
LONDON
FAR FUTURE
When he became conscious, Horatio screamed and screamed. His body fought the capturesnakes that were violating him, every limb conjuring up wild sweeping motions that strangely resulted in swathes of white cloth sweeping around him like sails caught in a storm. But even his frantic, terrified mind eventually realized there was something wrong about that—and there was no pain. He stopped thrashing and actually looked where he was: wrapped in a fresh white cotton sheet, in the middle of a big circular bed that curved up gently around him, preventing him from falling out. Two people were standing at the side of the bed, wearing stylish green tunics that marked them down as some kind of medics; their faces registered sympathy.
“It’s okay,” one said, smiling in reassurance. “It’s over. The capturesnakes are gone. You’re in recovery. And you’re doing fine. Just try and settle. Take as much time as you need. We’re here to help.”
Something about the tone infuriated Horatio; the medic was aiming for assurance but was hitting patronizing. Needs some proper empathy training. Which made him bark a laugh, because being off
ended at someone who’d saved him from the Olyix was about as dumb as you could get. So he did indeed settle, and steadied his breathing. “What happened?”
Again the smile that didn’t quite reach genuine sympathy. “You’ve been extracted from cocooning and re-bodied.”
“Uh—” What that should have been was: Gwendoline disobeyed the rules and sent security agents through to snatch you from the capturesnakes. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the emergency clinics here on Pasobla are the best. “Where’s Gwendoline?”
The two medics exchanged a glance. “Disorientation like this is common. I’d suggest you take a moment to prepare yourself for us to explain your status. But everything is going to be okay; I can’t stress that enough.”
“I’m not disorientated,” he said in a dangerous voice. His hands rose up—not to clench into fists. No. But then he saw those hands properly and focused on his skin. His youthful skin. A startled cry, and he was sitting up, pulling at the sheet, exposing more and more of his body. It was perfect—slim, nicely muscled, limb movements fast and assured, no joint pain. The body from nostalgic memory—the one he used to see in the mirror in the best days of late adolescence. “What? What?”
“Take it easy.”
“Don’t fucking patronize me!” he roared. “Where am I? What’s happened?”
“Okay. Simply put, the Olyix turned you into a cocoon. Then a long time later, you were rescued. Now you’re back in the Sol system, on a habitat orbiting Earth. Right now, there’s a huge ongoing operation to reseed the biosphere after the damage the Olyix siege of the cities caused. Our dear homeworld was in a new Ice Age when we returned, but our geotechnicians think they’ve initiated a self-sustaining reversal.”
The Saints of Salvation Page 51