Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  It would happen. He just needed to buy them out of Copeland Road. One big job…

  He left Gran in her room and stood on the top of the stairs, trying to breathe against the rising anger. He hadn’t done it. Again. The test was simple enough. One drop of blood, a pinprick Gran wouldn’t even feel. The nanopore chip would read her ApoE structure. He’d know within a couple of minutes if she really did have early onset Alzheimer’s.

  It was treatable, that was the good news. Everything was treatable these days. But the London Civic Health Agency only covered residents for emergency accidents and basic medicine. Anything serious and you had to have insurance. Gran didn’t have any. Her coverage had ended ten years ago when her employer, a council finance agency, made her whole department redundant. The G8Turings that were coming online turned out to be cheaper and more efficient than an office of humans.

  And the new generation of customized biotech glands that secreted anti-Alzheimer drugs into the patient were ball-bustingly expensive. Enough so that Ollie couldn’t raise it—at least, not while he was still running his current debt. Jade had made that very clear when he’d asked her. So confirming his suspicions about Gran would be utterly pointless. There was nothing he could do to help her at the moment, other than make her as cozy as possible.

  He told Tye to order up the food. Bembé’s promised it would be there within twenty minutes.

  Bik was in the cramped downstairs lounge, his back to Ollie, stuffing something into a small backpack.

  “What’s up?” Ollie asked.

  Bik was good, Ollie had to admit that. Didn’t give a guilty flinch or stop what he was doing, just finished tightening the pack’s straps. Then he straightened up and turned around to smile at his big brother. “Goin’ out with the équipe, man.”

  Ollie stared down at the kid, trying to keep it together. Sure they were half brothers, but there were times when even he didn’t think that was possible, they were so opposite. Bik was small: twelve years old and only about 130 centimeters tall—and skinny with it. His skin was so much darker than Ollie’s paler North African tone. There was a vague memory in Ollie’s head of Bik’s father, who had the same deep ebony shade—a man who’d only featured in their lives for about six months. But where that man had a bald head with glowing magenta tattoos, Bik had a huge aurora of wild black hair that flopped about with every motion. People said it made him the cutest kid on the street. All that meant was he could get away with a whole load of crap others couldn’t.

  “Where?” Ollie asked, but he knew. With Bik, he always knew.

  “Dulwich Park.”

  “Just—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be careful. Cuz that’s how you really practice the art.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” Ollie hissed in exasperation. Bik lived for parkour. He was solid with a whole équipe of local kids who swarmed the area’s dilapidated buildings, performing extreme tumbles, flips, rolls, and somersaults as they careered around walls and rooftops. Now they’d added parkour in the trees to their catalogue of crazy. Humanotang, the équipe called it. Their heroes were orangutans, and some of the serious stars of the variant were body modifying toward that simian ideal.

  Two months ago, when Bik was zipping between branches, he’d missed his hold and fallen five meters. At least his fractured arm had qualified for immediate London Civic Health Agency treatment, and the sheath of Kcells they wrapped around his humerus had knitted the bone back together quickly, leaving it at least as strong as before.

  The Health Agency hadn’t cured his dumbarse brain, though. To Ollie’s dismay, nothing could stop Bik rejoining his équipe and leaping through the huge old London plane trees that now dominated the city’s roads. It was the reason the area’s older kids had started to use the équipe for deliveries. Never anything major yet, just small packets of nark traveling down a route no drone could follow.

  “Only the park,” Ollie insisted.

  “Yeah, mum. It’s practice, innit?”

  Then what do you need the backpack for? But Ollie didn’t ask. He wanted to believe—very badly—that Bik really was just heading out for fun and thrills with the équipe, that the humanutan kids would spend the evening swooping around the park in a glorious gymnastic exhibition that made everyone else smile and point in delight. Same as he wanted to know Gran’s ApoE composition. Why am I so scared the whole time? I run with the Legion, for fuck’s sake. “You done your schoolwork?”

  “Piss off.”

  “Hey! I’m serious, okay? You need to do that crap. It’s the only way out of here.”

  “That’s bollocks. You did it. You went to university. You’re still here, though, int’cha?”

  “Because I screwed up, okay? Happy?”

  Bik’s expression went blank; he hadn’t been expecting raw honesty. “No way, you ain’t a screw-up. You run with the Legion.”

  “That’s not how you measure it, Bik. Come on, you’re smart. You’ve got to be ready for when we get out of here. You’ve got to have decent coursework scores.”

  “I don’t want to leave. That’s all you, innit?”

  “You think this is a good place for Gran? Wake up and take a good look at her.”

  “That ain’t fair. I don’t want to split from me équipe is what. You can take Gran out. I’ll be okay here; there’s so many trees. They’re taking back the streets, ain’t they? Did you know, this whole area used to be a forest before it was a city? It’s true history, see.”

  “We’re a family. We watch out for each other, and we go together.”

  “This is your house-by-the-sea kick, innit?”

  “You seriously want to stay in this hovel all your life?”

  “What’s an ’ovel?”

  “Hovel. H! Access a dictionary for once. Fuck!”

  “Oh, fuck off!”

  “Bik, it’s coming, okay? I’m going to get us out of here. We’re going somewhere decent where you haven’t got to make drops for bad boys. Be ready for that, you grab? There’ll be trees where we’re going, I promise. Better than any growing here.”

  Bik did a perfect teenage shrug of indifference. “Whatever.”

  Piotr’s icon flashed up in Ollie’s tarsus lenses. He let the call through.

  “You need to get your arse down here,” Piotr said.

  “What?”

  “Jade’s here. This is it.”

  “What is?”

  “The one, dumbarse!”

  Ollie shook his head as he realized what Piotr was talking about. “You’re fucking kidding me!”

  “No. And, Ollie, it’s a short timetable.”

  “Crap. Okay, I’m on my way.”

  “Ten minutes, max.”

  “Got it.” He cancelled the connection.

  “What’s up?” Bik asked.

  “I’ve got to go out. There’s a deliverez coming in fifteen minutes. Make sure Gran eats the meal, okay? That’s important.”

  “Sure. Is it pizza?”

  “No. Chicken roti.”

  “Oh, Ollie! I hate that stuff, man. Why didn’t you order pizza like a real person?”

  “Yeah? Real sorry about that, princess. Think on this: After we leave, you’ll be able to eat whatever you like.”

  Bik tipped his head to one side, hair shifting in a galactic swirl. “Yeah, right.”

  * * *

  —

  Ollie used his boardez to slice over to Consort Road, the quickest way from his house. He arrived at the crumbling railway viaduct at the same time as Gareth, who turned up in a two-seat cabez. Ollie pushed the gate open as the cabez trundled away down the road, eyed belligerently by a group of kids. Younger than Bik, Ollie thought. At least they weren’t hanging from the overgrown trees.

  “That is some weird shit going down,” Gareth said.

  “Huh?”

>   “On solnet. All the news streams are carrying it. The allcomments are going apeshit.”

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you accessed?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  Gareth smirked. “Sure.” He did a mock glance behind Ollie. “How’s Lolo?”

  “Fuck you. What’s happening?”

  “Twenty-four cities have powered up their shields,” Tye answered.

  Ollie paused on the threshold of the muddy yard, regarding the news stream images Tye was now splashing. Daytime cities saw blocks of skyscrapers immersed in an umbra from an invisible eclipse, the sky dimmed to a pallid gentian blue. While across Earth’s nighttime, the stars had vanished from the sky, leaving city grids glimmering brightly underneath an eerie emptiness. “What the fuck?” He couldn’t help but glance up. The azure sky above London was starting to drift into twilight. It all looked perfectly normal.

  “Dunno,” Gareth said cheerfully. “The government says it’s a global exercise, nothing to worry about. So that’s fucking scary. Allcomments are saying it’s either a dinosaur-killer rock that no one saw—”

  “We know all the asteroid orbits,” Ollie said in immediate exasperation.

  “So? This one could be interstellar, coming in at ninety degrees to the ecliptic.”

  “Really? Is that possible?”

  “Anything’s possible. Other thing allcomments is banging on about is an invasion.”

  “A what?”

  “The Olyix are invading.”

  “Bollocks.”

  Gareth laughed. “Right.”

  “It’ll be a scam,” Ollie decided. “A Wall Street scam. That many shields use a shitload of power. The solarwell companies can jack up prices. Boards and bankers walk away with a billion-wattdollar bonus.”

  “Makes sense.”

  The rest of the Legion were already in the old metal container, all smiling tightly, nerves visible in tics and taut muscles. Their excitement hit Ollie like a slap of pheromones, heightening his expectation.

  “What’s going down?” he asked.

  Piotr gestured at Jade Urchall. Ollie hadn’t seen her when they came in. Now she was suddenly a dominant figure, commanding attention.

  “Your trip to Klausen really impressed my friends,” she said. “We’d like you to visit the Croydon power grid relay station and disable it for us. Cut off all the power; shut down the whole district it supplies.”

  “Yes!” Ollie hissed, hands clenching into hot fists. This was it, the big job Jade had been dangling before them for months. And the money she’d talked about would clear his debt. His clifftop home was so close now he could smell the salt water.

  “I want you to hit it in two hours.”

  Ollie blinked. “What? You’ve gotta be shitting—”

  “We can do that,” Piotr said, giving Ollie a warning look. “But it will cost extra.”

  “Piotr,” Jade mocked, “are you trying to negotiate? With me? Are you sure that’s the right thing to be doing?”

  “You have to admit, this is sudden. And unexpected.”

  “Unexpected? So you aren’t prepared?”

  “Oh, we’re prepared,” Ollie blurted. “Are we ever!” He’d been studying the plans of the relay station ever since Jade had mentioned the place, doing his thing; running through angles of attack, coming up with a bunch of ideas, dismissing some, refining others. Tye didn’t even need to splash the layout, he was so familiar with it.

  “No, actually, we’re not,” Tronde said.

  “Hey!” Ollie shot back. “We can do this. I got it all worked out.”

  “Sure, we can do it,” Tronde admitted, “when we have all the systems we need for Ollie’s plan. I haven’t printed everything yet. And we don’t have any explosives; storing them here is way too risky.”

  “Anything extra you require will be delivered,” Jade said. “Give me a list.”

  “That sounds like desperation,” Piotr said.

  “It’s all down to timing,” Jade said. “Unfortunately, some factors came together earlier than we expected, but this job never had a fixed moment. That’s why I’ve had you working out how to handle it.”

  “What factors?” Adnan asked.

  “Someone has been preparing to use the Commercial and Government Services hub on Purley Way in Croydon,” she said. “Every non-portal function in the hub is supplied with power by the relay station. If that power goes off, the hub will essentially be unusable for a while. The goods that are going to be routed through the hub tonight are vital to several companies. Delays make them vulnerable to certain market forces. That’s all I can say.”

  “That can’t be right,” Gareth said. “There’s a dozen C and G hubs around Croydon that companies can use.”

  Jade shrugged and smiled slyly. “That depends on the value of the items you’re transporting, and the pre-approved security route.”

  “But—”

  Piotr’s hand rose up, shushing him. “It’s still going to be expensive.”

  “We have a small contingency fund,” Jade said, “but I’d urge you not to be greedy. We’d like to continue this relationship after tonight.”

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “Four.”

  “We’ll argue for a while so no one loses face, and agree on ten.”

  “Nine,” Jade said.

  “Deal.”

  It was all Ollie could do not to punch the air in victory.

  I watch.

  I process therefore I am.

  I have no designation. I may name myself if the correct events occur and I upgrade.

  For now I am the watcher.

  My current form is my eighth level.

  The first six levels of my activation facilitated my interstellar flight: acceleration, astrogation, deceleration.

  I arrived at this G9 star 1,567 (Earth) years ago.

  Upon arrival I went into a high polar orbit around the star’s main gas-giant planet.

  I activated level seven, disbursing a shower of perception fronds, which then ride the solar wind, out toward the stars. Their infinitesimal omnipresence allows me to observe local space far beyond the cometary belt.

  Fifty-seven years ago I detected a ship decelerating out of interstellar space.

  The starship contained no sentient biological entities.

  I determined the starship was of human origin.

  The starship contained von Neumann systems that multiplied exponentially, then bioformed the planet.

  I determined it was a human trap to attract the Olyix.

  Five years ago another starship arrived.

  It is called: Morgan.

  There are binary and omnia humans on board.

  I now detect a small mass decelerating toward the bioformed world.

  The mass has sophisticated shielding. I did not detect it approaching the star system.

  I activate level eight.

  A new type of perception fronds are released.

  They are still minute, a chain of molecules. But longer than before.

  My risk of detection is correspondingly higher.

  I determine the new arrival is a Neána insertion ship.

  It is not hostile.

  I watch six Neána metavayans land on the bioformed world.

  A human greets them.

  I watch.

  I wait.

  It is what I do—until they come.

  They will.

  * * *

  The urban citadel was called Igsabul, nestling on the confluence ridge where two wide rivers flowed into one. In a history that never existed it was born a port and trading center, swelling over the centuries as the trader clans expanded their reach. Territorial wars were fought with neighboring citadel-states, with Igsabul
always victorious, until its domain became an empire that dominated half a continent. Increasing wealth and technological progress saw skyscrapers rising above the elegant buildings of earlier times. Cool blue-green strands of light wove out of the citadel to web the rugged countryside as the transport rails linked up with other citadels. While down on the coast, rocketships rose on intense spears of chemical flame.

  Dellian directed the small plane to fly a tight curve around Igsabul’s central buildings so their passenger had a clear view of the towers. Outwardly, the plane was the same technology level as late-twentieth-century Earth, with afterburning turbojets and a lean delta planform allowing it to reach Mach 3.5. Authenticity was the mantra of the lure. However, no twentieth-century plane ever had a fuselage that was half transparent, made from a crystal that could only be produced in a molecular extruder. Nor was any autopilot ever as sophisticated as the genten that controlled the flight systems. There weren’t even any manual controls, which put Dellian in mind of the flyers back on his homeworld, Juloss.

  “Quite something, isn’t it?” he said. The translator wand produced a flurry of high-pitched pulses, like sped-up birdsong.

  Fintox, one of the male metavayan Neána, was sitting on a mushroom-shaped chair halfway along the fuselage, next to Yirella. He whistled out a fast response. “It looks substantial.”