Soćko turned to Jessika. “How much do they know?”
“Everything. I had to eliminate a quint segment in front of them.”
“So the Salvation onemind knows we’re here?”
“Yes.”
“Have the Olyix started to invade?”
“Ten hours ago.”
“The Salvation of Life split in two,” Kandara told him. “Deliverance ships are still coming out of the wormhole; your colleague here told us they’ve been stacked up in the wormhole waiting for the right moment to begin the invasion, but their hand was forced when the quint spy was exposed. There have been widespread sabotage attacks on Earth to disable our city shields. The Zangari family’s secret attack force was taken out before it could launch a first strike. So right now, we’re understandably touchy about alien spies.”
His gaze swept around to Captain Tral and the squad. “So I see. But have you accepted us, the Neána mission?”
Kandara gave him a dangerously sweet smile. “Let’s just say Jessika here predicted what would happen, which gives you some credit. Exactly who you are and what your genuine purpose is…The jury’s still out on that.”
“So we have to provide proof for every statement,” Jessika said.
“That’s fine,” Soćko said. “As we’re here to help, everything we tell you is true.”
“Sure,” Kandara said. “Glad we cleared that up. Open-arms welcome for you, comrade.”
He plucked at his medical gown. “Any chance I can have some proper clothes?”
“Why? Going somewhere?”
“You just said you’d listen to what we have to say. We need to get started.”
“You’ve just come out of a thirty-seven-year coma.”
“And if I were human, that would be a problem. But I’m not, so it isn’t.”
* * *
—
The only change Kandara could see in Kruse Station’s conference room was the flowers; tall sprays of dark purple orchids had replaced the white lilies. That and the fact that Alik, Callum, and Yuri were only present on large screens this time, with General Johnston sharing Callum’s splash. The humans joining her in the flesh were all the same as before: Emilja with an aide and Ainsley with his clump of family advisors. Tral was commanding the security squad that stood behind Soćko and Jessika, which allowed Kandara to take a seat opposite the aliens—giving her an excellent target vantage. Lankin claimed the chair next to her, seemingly oblivious to the tension she knew she was projecting.
“So?” Ainsley said as soon as he sat down. “Welcome back. What have you got for us?”
“Me?” Soćko inquired lightly. “Advice, the same as my colleague here.” He tilted his head back to stare at Yuri’s image. “Good to see you, chief.”
“That’s debatable,” Yuri replied.
“Advice?” Ainsley snapped. “That’s it?”
“Our ship only created four of us,” Soćko said reasonably. “We’re not an army.”
“Four that you’ve admitted to,” Kandara said. “And we’re still trying to locate Lim Tianyu and Dutee Gowda, the remaining two Neána androids.”
Soćko raised an eyebrow as he turned to Jessika. “Did she just call us androids?”
“You’re very personable,” Lankin said, “but you have abilities that no human possesses.”
“Interesting that the form we have been given to integrate ourselves into your society has now become heavily divisive.”
“And completely irrelevant,” Yuri said. “You claim to be our allies, yes?”
“It’s why we exist.”
“Good. Then we appreciate your information. However, your human side will understand our mistrust.”
“I do.”
“Right, then,” Callum said. “You can start by telling us what these are.” A screen lit up with the image of a cylindrical Olyix spaceship, its pale green fuselage wrapped in a glowing red spiral. “They came out of the wormhole before the majority of the Deliverance ships—of which there are now over three thousand.”
“Jesus wept,” Alik muttered.
“They’re fast,” Callum said. “And heading out across the whole Sol system.”
“Have you projected their flight vectors?” Jessika asked.
“Difficult. Their thrust keeps fluctuating, only by a few percent, but enough to negate any accurate trajectory projection.”
“They’re missiles,” Soćko said. “Type seventeen, in our classification. Intersystem range, with multiple short-range hypervelocity warheads, armed with fusion bombs or antimatter. In other words, whatever they’re aimed at is now a dead target walking.”
“Bloody hell, they must be going for the habitats.”
“No,” Jessika said. “I can’t stress enough that the Olyix don’t want to kill you; your value to them is in your elevation. I expect these missiles will be going for the MHD asteroids.”
“Without power from the solarwells, you can’t keep everything going,” Soćko said. “You’ve only got fusion generator backup for the shields.”
“Which saboteurs are going balls out to kill,” Alik muttered. “The Bureau is stretched real thin safeguarding those shields right now.”
“It’s the same globally,” Tobias said. “Every city shield is being subjected to some kind of sabotage, be it physical or darkware assault. Thanks to Jessika’s warning, we are just about holding our own.”
“You’re welcome,” she said demurely, and grinned at Kandara.
“But without the solarwells, everything else will fail,” Soćko continued. “There certainly aren’t enough fusion generators to supply power to the portal hub network and keep the city systems going, let alone domestic appliances. People will be safe under the domes, but they’ll be back in the Stone Age. And that’s going to be short-lived, too, because the food printers will have no power. The Olyix will starve you out. You will have no alternative but to submit.”
“Do us all a favor,” Alik said. “Next time, don’t sugarcoat it for us.”
“The habitats will also die,” Jessika said. “They have fusion generator backup for critical systems, including shields. But the power that provides heat and light for the biospheres comes from solarwells.”
“Thanks, much better without the sugar,” Callum muttered.
“General?” Emilja said. “Do we have anything that can intercept those missiles?”
“Negative,” Johnston said. “The MHD asteroids don’t even have shields. They’ve never needed them; all the major systems are buried under the regolith, not that there’s a lot of equipment involved anyway. The largest single components are the MHD tubes themselves, which channel the plasma our portals transfer in from the sun. And those jets vaporize anything that gets too close to them; that plasma comes direct from the sun’s convection zone and reaches close to a million degrees.”
Kandara was pleased with herself for spotting it: Callum turned to regard the general, his ancient face lifting in a thoughtful expression.
“So what have other civilizations done?” Ainsley III asked. “You said we’d have to abandon Earth. But even if we reopened the interstellar portals, we’d never get everyone off in time. Besides, the terraformed worlds don’t have the infrastructure to absorb and support twenty billion people even if you could convince or force them to go.”
“I never said your whole species would survive,” Jessika said slowly. “I would regard a billion escaping Earth as the most significant victory against the Olyix we know about. Frankly, if just the current population of the exosolar planets and habitats escape it will be a miracle.”
“Again with the sugarcoating,” Alik said. The rest of the conference room was silent.
“That’s it?” Emilja said. “We’ll be lucky if a few of us escape? That’s the hope you’re offering? I’ve already told you, cow
ering between the stars in dark habitats is not a valid course of action for us.”
“Emilja’s right,” Callum said. “There has to be something better. We still have the industrial capacity of the entire Sol system available, at least until those missiles blow up our power supply. There must be some kind of ship or weapon you can tell us how to build that can hold them off, at least for a while. If we can buy some time, just a year even, we’ll be able to evacuate decent numbers of people out to the terraformed worlds.”
“They will come for the terraformed worlds,” Soćko said relentlessly. “Their Resolution ships are probably already on their way to those stars; I expect they started years ago so the invasion crusade could begin on every human world simultaneously. It’s only Jessika exposing Feriton Kayne to you that has made them act prematurely. She forced their hand.”
The two aliens shared a smile.
“Motherfucker,” Yuri said. “So the terraformed worlds aren’t much of a refuge?”
“Not really,” Soćko said. “The Resolution ships will bring a wormhole terminus with them. What’s happening here will be repeated in every star system you have settled.”
“Resolution ships?”
“Warships, plain and simple. We called them Resolution ships because they resolve any problem. Pray you never encounter one. They are big, and they have the firepower to blast a small moon apart.”
“How long until they arrive at the terraformed worlds?”
“Difficult to say, because I don’t know where the nearest Olyix monitoring station is. That’s where they will come from.”
“The Olyix have monitoring stations?”
“Yes. We believe they’re distributed all over the galaxy, with a wormhole connection from each one back to the gateway. That’s how they spot emerging civilizations, by the radio waves they broadcast. And sometimes the em pulse from atom bombs, which is how we found you.”
“Damn, that’s like the ultimate SETI observatory setup. The whole galaxy? Are you sure?”
“It must be by now. If we assume they started their crusade only a quarter of a million years ago, their starships will have spread the wormhole terminuses right across the galaxy by now.”
“Just like we spread out to the stars with Connexion’s portal starships,” Ainsley said.
“Yes,” Jessika said. “Same principle. So as soon as they detected signals from Sol, they sent the Salvation of Life to the monitoring station along its connecting wormhole from the gateway. From there it flew to Sol at sub–light speed; and we know their arkships can reach point two five light speed. The fact that they took nearly two hundred and fifty years to get here after you started using radio makes me guess the monitoring station is about fifty light-years or more away from Sol.”
“How fast do Resolution ships fly?”
“They can reach point nine five C,” Jessika said. “So the terraformed planets on the other side of Sol from the monitoring station will have the longest breathing space.”
“All this assumes they can’t use our own portal technology against us,” Callum said. “We all know how easy it is to take a portal door through an interstellar hub. They could be threading up their own portals to the thirty-eight terraformed worlds right now.”
“Actually, no,” Yuri said. “And that’s down to you, Callum.”
“Huh?”
“After your little stunt rescuing Savi from Zagreus, all Connexion hub portals have had a quantum entanglement detector system built in. Nobody can take their own portal door through one of our portals without us knowing, especially interstellar.”
“It’s a simple commercial safeguard,” Ainsley said. “You want to provide transport to another star, then you license us or you send your own starship there. No son of a bitch gets to make money by cheating us out of our investment.”
“There have been a number of attempts to take a twinned portal through our hubs,” Yuri said. “Mainly by political advocates who want to set up a free nation state on a new world with constitutions based on their ideology. The number has been rising over the last seven years, which we wrote off to general political dissatisfaction with the lack of ideological variance here in Sol. Now I’m thinking the Olyix were behind those efforts—or some of them, at least.”
“Quantum spatial entanglement is not something we have any record of,” Jessika said. “That may be to prevent the Olyix from acquiring the technology, or it may be genuinely unique to your species. Either way, it is an uncomfortable development. If the Olyix have succeeded in establishing a spatial entanglement to a terraformed world, you can be sure they’ll be threading up as we speak.”
“We’ve had no reports of Olyix activity beyond the Sol system,” General Johnston said. “Certainly no sightings of Deliverance ships.”
“That’s some good news,” Soćko said. “But you need to be particularly vigilant, especially with the hubs that are open between stars.”
“You mean the Connexion network,” Ainsley III said. “Yuri?”
“Trans-stellar pedestrian and commercial cargo routes have already been shut down. Nobody is leaving the Sol system.”
“Delta Pavonis has also been isolated,” Emilja said.
“So we’ve shut down all interstellar traffic apart from data,” Ainsley said. “Good! That stops the bastards from spreading. What do we do about the Deliverance ships and the Salvation of Life?”
Kandara watched Soćko casually touch Jessika’s hand. An unremarkable gesture of reassurance, so typical between good friends, especially ones who’d been separated for so long, not knowing their fate. She didn’t believe it for a second.
“What we recommend is a course of action in two stages,” Soćko said. “Your habitats have relatively weak shields, certainly in comparison to the cities. They’re just a cloud of low-density fog held in place by the binding generator field—more than sufficient to ward off interplanetary dust and the occasional high-velocity pebble, but not weapons. The Deliverance ships will cut through them in seconds.”
“What are those ships armed with?” Johnston asked. “Nukes and antimatter, like the missiles?”
“No,” Jessika said. “WMDs would kill humans. They’re equipped with energy beams. Precision strikes will allow them to kill the generators as soon as they’re in range. Probably five hundred kilometers.”
“Bloody hell,” Callum said. “Haven’t they heard of the inverse square law?”
Emilja pushed her hand back through her hair. “So we’re going to lose the Sol habitats?”
“Yes. All of them.”
“We have to get the people out.”
“Between them, the habitats have an extremely large industrial capacity. You will need that. The manufacturing facilities should be evacuated, along with their populations.”
“Evacuated?”
“Yes. Outsystem, to the settled stars.”
“Those industrial modules are kilometers in diameter,” Callum said. “Connexion’s biggest portal is, what, fifty meters?”
“Forty-eight point two meters,” Tobias Zangari said. He shrugged. “Everyone just calls it fifty. But we only have seven pairs of them. They’re fabulously uneconomical.”
“We have produced forty-meter portals,” Emilja said, “but not in significant numbers.”
“The effort should be made,” Soćko said. “The critical sections of machinery can be removed and sent through the large portals.”
“So the first thing we do is reopen interstellar transport?” Ainsley said. “For fuck’s sake!”
“This interlude will allow us to implement proper security measures,” Yuri said. “When we use the hubs again, they will be safeguarded to my satisfaction. If they are not, they do not get reopened.”
“I urge you very strongly to make the effort,” Soćko said. “You will need everything you have to star
t constructing habitats that can fly to safety. And your portals have given you one massive advantage in this respect.”
“The starships,” Jessika said. “You currently have ninety-seven in flight. They can offer immediate access to interstellar space; you decelerate them then thread up their internal portals. Once the route is established, you can send through industrial stations and as much material as you need—entire asteroids, even a moonlet if you want. Your exodus habitats will never have to fly to deep space, they’ll be built there. Much safer. Then you shut down the portals behind them, which leaves no trace of where you went. The Olyix will never be able to follow.”
“Exodus habitats,” Alik drawled. “You’ve even got a name for them already?”
“Call them whatever you like,” Soćko said. “It’s what they do that is important. This is the way the heart of a species survives. It always has been.”
“It’s the way your species survived,” Emilja countered. “And many others you’ve warned, I’m sure. Us? No.”
“I’m with Emilja on that,” Ainsley said.
“Look,” Callum said. “This all boils down to how much of the solarwell power we can hang on to. You’ve written off Earth because you think we’re going to lose the MHD generators, so we won’t be able to maintain civilization trapped under the shields.”
“That is what’s going to happen,” Soćko said. “The resources the Olyix will dedicate to eliminating the MHD asteroids will be phenomenal. If these missiles don’t get through, the next wave will be orders of magnitude greater. They will launch whatever it takes.”
“But you and the Olyix have never encountered a species with portal technology before.”
“I have no knowledge of it. However, the Olyix have a very sophisticated technology base; if they didn’t have quantum spatial entanglement before Salvation of Life arrived in Sol, they certainly have it now.”
“Yeah, sure,” Callum agreed. “But if we keep the settled worlds free of Olyix, we can use the interstellar portals to bring power in from solarwells in those stars once they take out Sol’s MHD asteroids. Hell; Delta Pavonis, Trappist, and Eta Cassiopeiae probably have enough solarwell generation capacity among the three of them to power half of Earth. Even if we only divert ten percent of the power from the remaining thirty-five terraformed worlds, we should easily be able to keep all the essentials going under the shields.”
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