Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Alik simply scowled.

  Yuri and his assistant, Loi, came next, conversing with Captain Tral. They were quickly followed by Kandara and Jessika, along with the Neána’s armored escort and five drones.

  “I’m going to ask again,” Alik said as he sat next to Callum. “Where are we? What is this place?”

  “Kruse Station is basically the Delta Pavonis equivalent of Sol’s Alpha Defense,” Jessika said. “This is where the fight against any alien invasion of this star system will be coordinated.”

  “Ironic, considering you’re already inside,” Emilja Jurich said.

  Callum sat up straight as she walked into the room. The joint founder of the Utopial movement brought an imperial presence greater than any hereditary monarch could ever manage. Today she was wearing another of her customary high-collared dresses, made from turquoise-and-scarlet Indian silk over which gold Aztec-style symbols slithered like reef fish. Emilja acknowledged him with a sardonic smile, her light gray eyes twinkling.

  “Thanks for this,” he said with as much irony as he could project. He’d never wanted to be part of the assessment team, but she had been unusually insistent.

  “No problem,” she replied.

  Throughout the years he’d spent as her chief technology advisor, he’d come to respect then admire Emilja’s drive and ambition for the new society she’d helped found. Her political ability, in terms of building consensus amid the stubborn, self-righteous grade-one citizens of Delta Pavonis, was remarkable, too. And yet for all that time, some deep-seated instinct had niggled away that she was holding something back from their working relationship. Now I know. A distrust of the Olyix, just as intense as Ainsley Zangari’s.

  So he wasn’t in the least bit surprised when Ainsley arrived right behind her, escorted by three aides. For someone over a hundred and seventy years old, the CEO of Connexion was in fantastic shape. Callum acknowledged this even while telling himself he wasn’t envious. He couldn’t even begin to guess how much money Ainsley had spent on various genetic treatments—certainly orders of magnitude greater than Callum ever had. Ainsley’s hair was as thick and dark as any thirty-year-old’s, while his skin had none of the motionless sheen afflicting Alik’s face, leaving him with features rugged enough to star in a Hong Kong interactive. Since the single time they’d met in the flesh, a hundred and twelve years ago, Ainsley had grown more youthful. The personality, though, the urbane self-assurance that surrounded him like an old-time saint’s aura…That belonged to something ancient, and not particularly benign.

  The self-styled richest man in history gave Callum a wry look. “Hello, Callum,” he said gruffly. “Been a while.”

  Callum matched his ex-employer’s indifference. Two can play that game. “Aye, it has.”

  His composure was only slightly thrown by Alik’s bass chuckle. Ainsley sat next to Emilja on the other side of the table from the assessment team, with a couple of the sharp-suited aides standing attentively behind him, and another sitting at the table. Now that limited access to Kruse Station’s network had been granted, Apollo ran identity checks. Inevitably, the trio were all family. Tobias and Danuta Zangari—Ainsley’s grandchildren, who were in their forties—flanked their grandfather as they surveyed the assessment team with judgmental expressions. And claiming the prestigious chair beside his grandfather was Ainsley III; at eighty-two, he was the oldest of all the grandchildren. He had devoted his life to the company, rising steadily until he was now CEO of Connexion’s TranSol division. Callum wondered if his eerily similar features had been subtly altered over the decades to emphasize the Zangari family bond; they certainly looked like brothers if not quite identical twins. Solnet gossip whispered that Ainsley III was the favored successor over his own father, Ainsley II.

  Callum was amused by the way Tobias and Danuta both exchanged a fleeting acknowledgment with Yuri’s assistant, Loi. Checking up on a junior family member always came first for a Zangari.

  “We’ll take it from here,” Captain Tral told the squad as the Zangaris established one of their own had come through safe and sound.

  The armed figures left, leaving the drones floating discreetly in the air behind Tral, who took the seat to Emilja’s left.

  “So exactly who the fuck are you?” Ainsley snapped at Jessika.

  “I am a member of a mission sent to Earth by the Neána to warn you about the true nature of the Olyix, and to help you resist them.”

  “So you’re not a Neána yourself?” Ainsley III queried.

  “Physically, no—and I have no memory of, or information about, what a Neána looks like. My body is a biologic unit, grown by the insertion ship that brought us to Sol. However I do have certain abilities that humans lack, all of which we are prepared to give you to aid your fight.”

  Kandara leaned in closer, her black tank top revealing tensed-up biceps. “You’re an android?”

  “I’m not really sure worrying about definitions is going to be useful at this point,” Jessika said. “But my body is very human.”

  “I want to know how much free will you have, or if you’re just following a program.”

  “I believe I can be classed as fully self-aware. My thoughts run in a human neural structure. The insertion ship generated my personality around the imperative to help humans survive the Olyix. If I have any hidden commands, they have not yet become apparent.”

  “But then you would say that,” Emilja said.

  “I certainly would. Our exposure to you was always going to generate deep suspicion. All I can say is that I believe you will come to trust me and my colleagues as the Olyix reveal their true intent.”

  Ainsley gave Yuri a worried glance, a slow flush creeping up his face. “Which is to kidnap us? All of humanity?”

  “Essentially, yes. They will send their Deliverance fleet through the wormhole terminus inside the Salvation of Life. Humans will be collected and cocooned.”

  “Like those poor bastards we found in the Olyix transport ship your colleague hijacked,” Alik muttered. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “When will the Olyix crusade start?” Emilja asked.

  “It will have begun the second I put that axe through the quint agent’s head,” Jessika said. “The Salvation onemind will work out pretty damned fast that I’m a Neána, so it’ll know that right now you’re either warned, or being warned.”

  “Go back,” Yuri said. “The onemind?”

  “The Salvation of Life’s controlling intelligence,” Jessika said. “The transport ship on Nkya had a single controlling brain, remember? Well, the same goes for the Salvation of Life. And it’s to scale, too.”

  “And where does the Salvation’s wormhole lead to?” Yuri asked.

  “Back to a gateway that connects directly into their enclave.”

  “Their homeworld?”

  “I don’t know. My information is that the enclave is a section of space-time that has a much slower timeflow than outside, so the effect is one of flying through time—like a relativistic spaceship that doesn’t move. The timeflow can be manipulated, of course—reverting to a normal flow to allow the Olyix’s ships to emerge, and for their network of monitoring stations to report the detection of new sentient species emerging in the galaxy. Such a construct would by necessity be large—and presumably big enough to encompass the Olyix homeworld.”

  “But you don’t know,” Alik said. “Not really.”

  “I have the information I was given, and that’s what I’m here to deliver to you. I don’t see why the Neána would lie, or why they would create me to warn you, if it wasn’t real.”

  “You need to give us some kind of proof,” Ainsley said sharply. “Fuck, the decisions you’re expecting us to make on your word—the word of a species we’ve never heard of, and who supposedly hides somewhere between stars…If you truly know us, you’ll know that’s an impossible ask.
”

  Jessika gave him a direct stare. “Was Feriton Kayne not evidence enough?”

  “That revelation was persuasive,” Emilja admitted. “And we’ll know more when the xenobiology department has examined his remains.”

  “Its remains,” Eldlund said. “It. Not human.”

  Callum thought about reprimanding his assistant; this was the grown-ups’ table, after all. But he held back. The kid did have a valid point.

  “Yeah,” a discomfited Ainsley said.

  “Look,” Jessika said. “In order to speed this along and get where we need to, I suggest that you accept what I’m saying with a healthy dose of skepticism—which will fade as you see the Olyix mission begin in precisely the fashion I’ve told you. At the very least, you have to acknowledge that some of your concerns have been borne out by Feriton Kayne. They have infiltrated your senior security organizations and engaged in some serious covert acts, subverting your ability to defend yourselves. That alone should warrant taking my warning seriously. The very least you can do is prepare yourselves.”

  “Wait,” Alik snapped. “You’re talking about Cancer, aren’t you? Was she an Olyix?”

  “Most likely,” Jessika said. “They’ll have hundreds of cored-out human bodies walking around Sol and the terraformed worlds, gathering information.”

  “Fuck,” Yuri grunted. “How compromised are we?”

  “It could be worse,” Jessika said. “I initiated the procedures to deep bioscan everyone entering any of the critical facilities in the Delta Pavonis system, and most of Sol’s Alpha Defense command centers have similar protocols.”

  “Connexion was starting to initiate an equivalent policy,” Yuri said, and sighed. “Hindsight is a fucking wonderful thing.”

  “Look closely, and you’ll probably find Feriton or some other Olyix agents were the ones slowing it down,” Jessika said.

  “Sonofabitch,” Ainsley growled, his fists clenching so tightly his knuckles whitened. “I fucking knew it!”

  Ainsley III’s hand came down over his grandfather’s—a reassurance that was also trying to restrain the anger. Callum was nonplussed by the old man’s raw rage; he’d always assumed the larger-than-life persona was part of the act, of being The Ainsley Zangari on the solnet streams. In private, he must be more accommodating and political, surely?

  “We have one person’s word for it,” Emilja chided. “A person who also claims to be an alien. I’d urge some caution about accepting everything she says at face value.”

  “All right,” the richest man who’d ever been said grudgingly. “But what happened to Feriton proves the Olyix have been spying on us, and it can’t be for any good reason. You’ve gotta give me that.”

  “I’m not denying what’s happened,” Emilja said. “I’m just saying our response cannot be to lash out blindly. We need to think this through.”

  “Okay,” Ainsley III said in a reasonable tone. “Suppose Jessika here is right, and the Olyix are worse than we ever figured. What sort of protective measures are we talking about?”

  “All of them!” Ainsley shouted.

  Callum knew the nark he’d taken was working. He should have been in a state of complete panic at the idea of the Olyix invading, but he faced Jessika with curiosity rather than alarm. “Earth’s shields,” he said. “How secure are the cities?”

  “I can’t make any guarantees,” she replied. “My colleagues and I did our best to expose the vulnerabilities in your defenses. You responded quite well. But you’re going to have to declare a full level-one global emergency.”

  “Now we’re talking!” Ainsley said.

  Jessika nodded. “The city and habitat shields have to go active now. That way we’ll see which ones actually function. Even if the Salvation of Life launches a Deliverance fleet in the next six hours, it will take them days to reach Earth. That gives us a small window to re-establish control of any shields they’ve disabled.”

  “Six hours?” Yuri asked, aghast. “You’re fucking joking, right?”

  “No. Now that the Olyix know you have been informed of their true purpose, they will move swiftly. Any hesitation on their part just allows you more time to prepare, so they will want to prevent that.”

  “And apart from raising the city shields, what else would you advise?” Emilja asked.

  “You need to be on guard for acts of sabotage. What the Olyix need is for governments and security agencies to be incapacitated. They’ll try to cut solarwell power to Earth’s grid, then shut down solnet and most of the Connexion hubs. Without those basics, your society will be unable to function, let alone defend itself. But their biggest problem is the terraformed worlds. The way your portals have allowed you to spread out from Sol in a relatively short time is unusual in our experience. They’ll have to make a huge effort to secure the trans-stellar portals, which will allow them to take their invasion out to the planets you’ve settled.”

  “Won’t they just send more arkships to the stars we’ve reached?” Loi asked.

  “They might have to,” Jessika said. “Especially if you can prevent them from capturing the portals. But that will take time, and add an order of magnitude to the complexity of their invasion.”

  “All right,” Kandara said in a skeptical voice. “We alert the security agencies, defend the trans-stellar portals, and switch on the shields. But that’s just passive defense. That doesn’t stop anything; it just buys us time. So how do we defeat them?”

  Jessika gave her a puzzled look. “Defeat them?”

  “Yeah. Defeat them. Shoot their Deliverance fleet out of the sky. Blow up the Salvation of Life. Nuke this enclave of theirs back into whatever stone age they had.”

  “You can’t.”

  “What the actual fuck?” Ainsley exclaimed.

  “They cannot be defeated,” Jessika said, looking around the table, hunting understanding. “They are too well-established, too powerful.”

  “Then, for Christ’s sake, what—?”

  Emilja held a hand up. By some miracle Ainsley halted his tirade, but his face was a mask of rage.

  “So what do you expect us to do?” Emilja demanded. “You clearly have some idea. Whatever sent you here had a reason.”

  “To warn you,” Jessika said. “To stall the invasion long enough so that some of you can flee out into the depths of space. Your habitat construction ability is impressive. You will be able to build your refuges in the emptiness between stars. This way your species will survive.”

  “No,” Emilja said simply. “That is not survival. To even say such a thing shows that you do not understand us at all. We cannot live on hiding in fear. That would give the Olyix an absolute victory. No. We need to resist this. We need to defeat them, to prevent them from ever doing this to us or any other species ever again.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jessika said. “We don’t even know how long they have been prosecuting this insane campaign. Millions of years, most likely. Their enclave accelerates through time, lifting them out of life in real space-time. There is no way in, and no way to reach them. They only emerge to conquer, and to steal your minds for their so-called god. You cannot fight them, for you can never find them. Even if those who survive the invasion go on to develop the most advanced weapons imaginable, what can they do? Remain vigilant for a million years waiting for the Olyix to emerge on another invasion? No society can last that long and retain its purpose. Decadence will set in. You will decay or forget. You will fall from whatever peak you reach. And then they will come again and scoop up whatever remains.”

  “Is that what happened to your species?” Alik snarled.

  “I don’t know what we’ve done. I don’t know what we became or where we went. All I know is I am here to help however I can.”

  “A biological civilization may well fall eventually,” Eldlund said, “but a digital-mechanical
one would not.”

  “And the relevance of that is?” Alik asked sourly.

  “Those who survive this invasion and fly to safety in interstellar space could build an army, an armada that would never die. Our von Neumann ships would visit every star system in the galaxy over that million years and turn them all into armed fortresses. I’d like to see the Olyix survive that.”

  Emilja directed a humorless smile at Eldlund. “Let’s just put the eternal death robot navy in the bank for now.”

  “Why?” Ainsley said. “Sounds like a fucking good idea to me.”

  “Because we have twenty billion people who are about to have their bodies taken away from them,” Emilja retorted. “That is our immediate problem. Once we’ve prevented that from happening, we can focus on what to do next.”

  Ainsley shrugged exuberantly. “Whatever. But I still go with not being defensive the whole goddamn time. These sons of bitches need to be shown there’s a price to be paid for what they’ve done.”

  “We will hit them,” Yuri said, “and hit them hard. But from what we’ve seen and know, Jessika may well be right about them launching an insurgency offensive. That cannot be allowed. We have to go to alert status. Right, Alik?”

  Alik Monday flinched, but he went on to give Yuri a grudging nod. “Yeah. That’s going to be my immediate recommendation. Putting agencies on alert costs practically nothing. If this turns out to be bullshit we lose nothing and everyone had a good drill.”

  “It is not bullshit,” Jessika said forcefully.

  “I dig that. But you’ve gotta see the politics behind this, right? You want a Sol-wide alert, you got to play the game. Something this big, people up at the top of the chain will be scared shitless of making a false call. They gotta be eased into it.”

  “But you don’t think it’s bullshit, do you?” she persisted.

  Alik took a long breath, his stiff facial muscles shifting toward an expression of concern. “No. This is some serious shit going down right now, that’s beyond question. And until we establish exactly what the Olyix’s intensions are, I say take precautions.”