Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “No,” Danuta said. “We haven’t launched anything.”

  “Then what the hell’s happening?”

  “You told them about our strike ability?” Yuri asked Danuta in surprise.

  “Yes. It’s important Alpha Defense understand every option.”

  Yuri wanted to disapprove. He knew it was stupid, but trusting Callum was still difficult. Which was a poor reflection on himself, he acknowledged grimly. “Good call.”

  “Those cracks are forming up into an exact radial,” Loi said. “They’re opening around the entire circumference near the rear end.”

  “Call Jessika,” Callum said. “She might be able to tell us what’s happening.”

  Loi gave Yuri a desperate look. “She already has.”

  “Just do it!” Yuri snapped. “Map the internal chambers on the image for me,” he told Boris.

  The hologram schematic changed, becoming translucent to show the ghostly ovoid biochambers within the arkship. Everyone could see the cracks were opening around the middle of the undisclosed fourth chamber at the rear.

  “Bloody hell,” Callum spat. “That’s the chamber Jessika said housed the wormhole.”

  “Looks like they’re jettisoning the whole rear section,” Yuri said. “The part that houses the antimatter drive.”

  “Because they don’t need it anymore,” Callum said. “And this action will open the wormhole to space.”

  “Fuck! The Deliverance fleet is going to come out. It’s really happening.”

  “Yuri, I’m giving my authorization for the strike,” Danuta said.

  “I’m adding my code,” Yuri said hurriedly. He almost smiled when he saw all five authority codes were loading into the Teucer armory. Unanimous!

  A text from Ainsley III splashed across Yuri’s tarsus lenses. You’re on the ground, Yuri, take command of the strike.

  “Move to activation stage,” he told Boris as the command icon gleamed indigo in his lenses. “Do we use the missiles or go for a stealth delivery?” he asked Danuta.

  “I’d say missiles,” she said. “Olyix defense capability is an unknown, so speed may be our one advantage. And we have to prevent those Deliverance ships from coming through.”

  Too late for that, Yuri thought. The hologram cube was showing that the arkship’s radial crack was now more than a hundred meters wide on the surface. He told Boris to send the launch codes.

  Deep inside the Teucer asteroid, the first five nuclear-armed missiles slipped out of their storage silos. The asteroid’s G8Turing splashed the sequence across Yuri’s tarsus lenses. It gave him the multispectrum image from the five stealth satellites orbiting two million kilometers out from the Salvation of Life, each of which had a portal back to Teucer. Analysis showed the massive gas plumes gushing from the arkship’s expanding fissure were an oxygen-nitrogen mix: its atmosphere, from the fourth chamber. And the density was dropping off fast. The chamber must have been almost empty. Sensors also started to pick up gravity waves emanating from the arkship. The huge forward section began to accelerate slowly, increasing the separation distance from the discarded antimatter drive.

  “A gravity drive?” he said in amazement.

  “Jessika wasn’t lying,” Callum said quietly. “It’s all true.”

  “Our sensor satellites are detecting negative energy signatures,” Loi said. “Wow, they’re powerful. Off-the-scale powerful.”

  “That’s got to be the wormhole,” Yuri said bitterly. “They’re not shielding it anymore.” He ran through the G8Turing’s tactical projections. The Teucer missiles were only minutes away from launch. They’d be sent through the portals to the satellites, along with five hundred electronic warfare missiles to blind and confuse the arkship’s sensors during their approach. At full acceleration, it would take them ninety-seven minutes to cover the distance to their target. “That gravity drive is going to complete the arkship separation before our missiles get anywhere near. The wormhole will be open to space.”

  “Then some Deliverance ships get through,” Danuta declared. “We can live with that. But we need to finish this. Speed is our advantage here. We must be able to kill that wormhole before their entire fleet arrives.”

  Instinct told Yuri it was never going to be that easy. He held his tongue.

  “Launch in ten seconds,” Boris said.

  “We’re using our nukes,” Danuta announced to Alpha Defense.

  “What fucking nukes?” Alik shouted.

  “Connexion developed a fallback option,” Yuri said, and any other day he would have laughed out loud at the agent’s reaction—exactly the same as Callum’s. “A last resort. Just in case.”

  “Goddamn Ainsley! That paranoid sonofabitch. Do you have any idea how much crap DC would pour over your heads if that news ever broke out?”

  “They’ll pin a medal on Grandfather now,” Loi snapped back.

  Yuri’s ultrasecure link to Teucer dropped out. “Oh shit! What—?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” Danuta said in alarm.

  “That link cannot fail,” Yuri said numbly. “Nothing can interrupt…oh. No. No. No!”

  “Commander, what sensors does Alpha Defense have in Jupiter’s Trailing Trojans?” Danuta asked.

  “Same coverage as the rest of the Sol system,” Johnston told her. “We have everything out to the Kuiper belt under observation.”

  The Trailing Trojan point appeared in a cube in front of Yuri. In reality, the Jovian Lagrange point was an elongated zone over five AUs wide, spread out along the gas giant’s orbit. It contained more than half a million asteroids, each over a kilometer wide. Seventeen of the larger ones hosted industrial complexes with their attendant corporate nation habitats, and a further hundred and twenty had rocksquatter Turings, registered as independent zero-tax nations. Even though it was more than a hundred kilometers in diameter, Teucer was one of them.

  Alpha Defense had thirty-seven sensor satellites in the region, so even at the speed of light visual coverage across the entire zone had a time lag of several minutes. Yuri stared intently at the green digits that tagged Teucer—waiting. Waiting…Fifty seconds later, Teucer flared, a solar-bright cataract like the tail on the devil’s own comet.

  “Motherfucker!” he spat. The rage and dismay triggered by the sight immobilized him for a long moment. When he finally felt his hands clenching into fists, it was inordinately difficult to resist punching something—the archway, Loi…He hadn’t been so close to completely losing it since his conscript days in the Russian army. In the end he let out a snarl of fury. “Feriton! It must have been that shitfucker Feriton. He knew about Teucer and our stockpile of nukes. Motherfucker, we even took one to Nkya in case we needed to shut down the site in a hurry!”

  “It wasn’t him,” Callum said sadly. “Not really. Hell, man, they have his brain in a pickle jar. They extracted every memory, that’s how they knew how to fool all of us into thinking his body was still human.”

  “Yes. Thank you, captain fucking obvious!” Yuri retorted. He couldn’t tear his gaze from the lonely asteroid that he’d invested so much faith in. The irradiated vapor cloud was now dwindling, sublimating away into the solar wind

  “Just saying—” Callum grumbled.

  “Yes.” Yuri got a grip, still straight-backed as he turned to the faces on the screens. “So…I’m guessing when his body became an Olyix quint, it—they, whatever—would have checked out our secret observation base. Fuck, that’s what I would have done. Standard procedure. They discovered our warheads and sabotaged them.”

  “They know what they’re doing,” Callum said. “Jessika told us they’ve done this before. Many times.”

  “We can still beat them,” Alik said. “Jessika and the rest of the Neána came here to help us. They know how to counter all this. And now—now we know she’s been telling the truth. We’ll listen to
her. Properly, this time.”

  “Admirable confidence,” Johnston said. “But unless anyone else has a secret stash of nuclear weapons, and a working delivery system, we’re going to have to fight them on the ground.”

  “Callum?” Yuri asked.

  “No.” Callum shook his head. “The Utopials don’t have secret nukes.”

  Yuri almost said: That you know of. But he knew how pointless that was. “All right, then. On the ground it is.” He took a breath and focused on what needed doing in an ideal situation and what was practical. “Okay. Anne, lock down all company facilities—and I mean all. Everyone inside a Connexion facility is to have their skull deep-scanned, and no one gets in without a deep scan either. If the scan team find someone walking around with a quint brain in their head, eliminate them.”

  “Eliminate…?”

  “Exterminate. Those alien fuckers are to be killed immediately. Are we clear on that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Call in all our off-duty security personnel immediately. I don’t care what they’re doing, they’re to be armored up and ready to deploy as soon as they’ve passed that deep-scan exam. So, initial priority is our own internal hub network. As of now, it is only for use by security personnel—no exceptions; make sure executives and top management understand that. They can be arrogant bastards, but today they join the sheep. Second, the national center hubs. They’re the core of our global network, so that’s first deployment goal for our teams; I want each of them safeguarded. When that stage is complete, start deploying out into the regional hubs. Leave the metro hubs until last.” He paused. Protecting the metro hubs was an automatic procedure, but today’s reality made it unattainable. Every public hub on the planet? No way. He wasn’t securing company assets from radicals and safeguarding the money flow out to shareholders. Not anymore. This was species survival. It didn’t get more simple than that. “Actually, forget the metro hubs; we simply don’t have the staff. We’re going to have to shut them down. If nothing else, it should slow down the sabotage.”

  Anne Groell gave him a startled glance. “Er, sir, do you have authority for that?”

  “Today I have more authority than God.” At the same time he sent Danuta a plain: ?

  FUCKING HELL, YURI, she sent back.

  ? ? !

  “Okay, Ainsley III confirms. Do it.”

  He told Boris to load the day code he’d been given by Ainsley III into the operation center’s G8Turing cube array.

  “Loaded and confirmed,” his altme said. “You have operational control of Connexion’s entire Sol network.”

  “You’re leaving the metrohubs unguarded?” Loi asked.

  “It’s the end of the world, Loi. We can’t protect them, not if we want to keep the core of the network intact. City residents can either take a cabez or actually walk for a change. Exercise will do them good.”

  “Christ almighty.”

  Yuri took a moment and weighed options, still staring at the remnants of Teucer, the one real hope he’d had. “Anne, shut down traffic through the interstellar hubs. I want them physically sealed. Let’s keep any new Olyix agents off the terraformed worlds.”

  “Got it,” Groell said. “The hub glitches are increasing across the network, and dozens are dropping out altogether. Even if you hadn’t told us what’s happening, we’d know for sure there’s a hostile force out there.”

  “How are we responding?” Yuri asked.

  The hologram cubes around Groell began to thicken as their data multiplied, obscuring her face behind a moiré curtain. “Lownet activity is peaking even higher than the ’97 Great NeoCrypto Extraction, but the G8Turings are filtering and blocking when those sonofabitch netheads try to rise up into solnet. Physical sabotage is more difficult to pinpoint. Actual assaults on the hubs is minimal, but incursions against auxiliary equipment are definitely increasing.”

  “Okay, extend the physical security border out from the buildings with interstellar hubs; we have to keep them operational.” He didn’t want to say it out loud, even in here, but Earth was going to need its paths out to the terraformed worlds if they were going to use Jessika’s fly-and-hide option.

  Loi gave the display bubbles in each segment a quick glance. “Damn, it’s getting bad, and we’re only a few minutes in.”

  “Yeah.” Yuri checked with Boris and found New York’s shield hadn’t switched on yet. “Alik, I still haven’t got a shield above me.”

  “I’m on it.” Alik’s image vanished from the screen.

  “Damage reports are increasing,” Anne said. “Our European hubs are dipping into power reserves. Looks like the saboteurs are targeting the planetary power grid.”

  “Crap. That’s outside our security coverage,” Yuri complained. “Time to kick the power companies up the ass and get their security to do its job.” He turned to stare into the petal segment that dealt with Connexion’s European operations. “Who’s in the London ops center?”

  * * *

  Kohei Yamada was due to retire in another eighteen months. It was something he’d been promising his (fifth) wife for the past decade. A hundred and twenty years in Connexion Security was impressive for a single job even in this day and age. Too long by about seven decades, according to those first four wives, who’d all warned number five. Which was why he’d sworn: As soon as the time is right. The first four clearly hadn’t properly understood there’d been a career structure to maintain, promotions to achieve. And now that everyone who could afford it underwent genetic life-extension therapies, significant promotions were fewer and took longer to reach. That made them incredibly valuable—a true measure of a person’s talent. A hundred and twenty years of training and experience had resulted in him achieving Chief of London Station. After all the sacrifice to get there, he wasn’t going to give it up quickly; this job required someone at the pinnacle of their game.

  That self-confidence was currently what was keeping Kohei from diving under the operations center chair and kissing his arse goodbye. The briefing from New York was as terrifying as it was mesmerizing. The Olyix? The fucking Olyix—lumbering, eager to please, god-bothering Olyix—were launching an invasion? If it had been anyone other than Yuri taking charge and telling it straight, he would have suspected someone was off their head on zero-nark.

  But then the incidents started to break out across London: hubs with equipment glitches, hubs with communication problems, Turings forced to enact emergency shutdown to prevent unheard-of failures, Turings reporting extremely sophisticated lownet attacks. Then it started to ramp up, security staff in the national hubs reporting they were under attack, power grids being cut…Plus the one to beat them all: London’s shield came on—ordered by Alpha Defense, no less.

  It’s real. All of it.

  So—there were operational procedures to follow. Some could be done by the file; others had to be modified to cope with unique circumstances. Most required instantaneous judgments based on the time he’d spent in the front line, where lessons were hammered home the hard way.

  All things that only someone with his wealth of decades in Security was qualified to provide, along with respect and command ability—also acquired through equal decades of commitment. Plus, he’d learned from the best: Yuri Alster.

  Now an Olyix invasion was proof that he’d been right to stay in the job. He kept telling himself that only his level of professionalism could secure Connexion’s European organization against a crisis of this magnitude.

  Then the whole Greenwich operations center—the four of them sitting around the display bubble—fell silent to witness the massive bulk of the Salvation of Life separating into two sections. It was being pried apart by an invisible gravity drive that was beyond anything humans possessed. And even Kohei began to doubt there would be anything left to salvage.

  “How’s it going?” Yuri asked over the secure
link.

  “We’re targeting key hubs for level one protection,” Kohei told him. “But we’re going to run into restrictions with personnel numbers. The deep scans you’ve ordered on everyone are going to slow down our deployment.”

  “Trust me. Those scans are essential.”

  “Shit. Okay.”

  “Have you been scanned yet?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Get scanned. Now. Get all of the ops center team scanned. Call me back when you’ve passed.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Kohei didn’t want to do it. There was just too much to organize and oversee. Several hubs had reported physical attacks before dropping out of communication. Nearby civic sensors revealed the buildings with explosion-shattered windows or flames coming through the standard arched entrances. He needed to sort it all out, but Yuri knew that. And if Yuri said it was essential—

  Reluctantly he got up and hurried through the Greenwich tower to the security department clinic, then barged to the front of the queue of discontented employees. Thirty seconds for the sensors to probe deep into his gray matter, allowing the G8Turing to examine cellular structure, biochemical composition, neural map…

  By wonderful, ironic chance he was reviewing the redA files Yuri had authorized him to access while the scanner bar was curving patiently around his head, and saw the image of Feriton’s axe-broken skull. “Sweet Christ,” he murmured.

  When he stepped away from the scanner bars, his nerves were sparking with primal tension. His gaze swept along the queue, seeing the bored, the impatient, the indifferent, and he was truly terrified that one pair of those eyes might be looking right back at him from a coldly calculating alien mind. Any one of the myriad oh-so-human expressions around him could be faked, sculpted to persuade and elicit sympathy, to null suspicion. Hey, I’m just one of the guys.

  “Redeployment, priority one,” he told Nils, his altme, as he left the clinic, half expecting a bullet to the back of the head. “I want tactical team members who’ve already passed the scan, armed and armored, five to each scan in every facility we have running the screening process.”