“Good thinking, son,” Ainsley said. “We just have to hold them off here long enough to rig up direct feeds.”
“We’re going to start losing MHD chambers in about forty-eight hours,” General Johnston said. “That’s when the first of those missiles will pass Neptune orbit.”
“I have an idea how to counter the first wave of missiles,” Callum said. “After that, it’ll be down to how cooperative the terraformed worlds are.”
Kandara pressed down a smile. Callum’s basic decency made him such an easy read for her.
“You’ll have Delta Pavonis’s support, of course,” Emilja said. “We’ll start diverting our solarwell output to Earth.”
“There’s enough political and financial clout in this room to push this through,” Ainsley III said. “Among us, we can make things happen.”
“I know you don’t want to consider this,” Jessika said reluctantly, “but you’re concentrating on the short term. You haven’t thought this through.”
“Enlighten me,” Ainsley said in a low, angry voice.
“Don’t try to save Earth.”
“Fuck off!”
“There are twenty billion people living on your homeworld,” Soćko said. “Even if you had ten times your current industrial capacity, you wouldn’t be able to build enough exodus habitats to evacuate them all.”
“Saving a billion humans from the terraformed worlds is not a victory,” Emilja said.
“This is not a binary problem,” Jessika said. “You don’t win or lose. Preserving the essence and spirit of your species is the only goal here.”
“Please remember,” Soćko said, “those humans the Olyix take back to their enclave for elevation won’t die.”
“You’re right about that,” Alik said. “What they do to us is a fuck ton of a lot worse. I’ve seen it.”
Kandara gave Jessika an unwavering stare. “So you’re saying all we can do is hang on in the terraformed systems for a few years before we flee like you? Seriously, that’s the best advice you’ve got?”
“However hard you fight them, you cannot win. I understand your impulse to strike back, but the enclave can send through a million Deliverance ships or Resolution ships if that’s what it takes to subdue planet-dwelling humans. You need to face up to the hardest choice of all. Whom do you save?”
“The cold equation,” Emilja said in disgust. “When the Titanic sank there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, so they put the women and children on the lifeboats first.”
“Yeah?” Alik snapped. “And how many women and children my color got put on the lifeboats? How many third-class passenger women and children?”
“That’s the choice we’re trying to avoid here.”
“Well, there’s only one way to do that,” Kandara said.
“How?” Soćko asked.
“It’s not entanglement science: we take out the Olyix enclave itself. No Olyix, no problem.”
Jessika gave Kandara a sad smile. “If that were possible, we would have done it.”
“You don’t know that,” Kandara said. “You know nothing about your species and what they have done. You aren’t Neána, you’re walking memories of them. Maybe they tried. Tried a thousand times. They certainly seem sneaky enough. Or how about this: We are your doomsday weapon.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did this abode cluster you came from deliberately choose humans to fight their war by proxy? You give us the information we need—new weapons, a decent method of attack—and we go blitzkrieg Olyix ass for you.”
“We’re here to save you!”
“You think you are. That’s your conscious thought, your true belief. But face it, you don’t know. Not really.”
“I want to save you,” Soćko said. “I risked my life to save you!”
“There.” Kandara grinned right back at him. “Right there. That’s what I’m talking about. The sincerity you’re so good at projecting. I’m calling bullshit on that. Tell me this. If we do try to go head-to-head with the Salvation, will you help?”
“No,” Jessika said. “Because you cannot destroy the Salvation of Life.”
“What? Why not?”
“The Salvation of Life is where the cocoons will be stored before they’re taken back to the enclave. The Olyix always modify their arkship biospheres into giant cargo chambers. That’s what their biotechnology systems will be busy doing right now. It’s one of the reasons they arrive in an arkship: because it’s big. Something that size has the volume to hold billions of human cocoons.”
“So now we’re just cargo?”
“Gotta admit, it’s pretty apt,” Alik said grudgingly. “Considering what cocoons are, and all.”
“Fuck that, Alik,” Kandara stormed. “Jessika, if we can do it now, destroy the Salvation of Life right now, before they start piling up cocoons inside, would you help?”
“Yes. But such an endeavor can only be a part of your overall effort to evade the Olyix crusade. You must prepare to leave your planets and stars behind.”
“I’m glad you said that, because you’ve already got the method, haven’t you?”
“What?”
“No ship we have is ever going to get near the Salvation of Life, right?”
“That’s right. I’m sorry.”
“But destroying Salvation of Life is the key to this. If we take out the wormhole, we cut off their supply line. You said it yourself, their station is probably fifty light-years away. It would take them fifty years to fly a Resolution ship here and resume the invasion.”
“Less,” Jessika said. “We told you, there will already be several Resolution ships flying through this section of space to reach the terraformed worlds.”
“Okay, so five years. Maybe even ten. That’s got to be worthwhile.”
“Yes,” Soćko said. “But to do this you would have to build warships, a lot of warships, more powerful than the Deliverance ships. We can certainly help with that; we have the design for the same gravitonic drive that the Olyix ships use. But it will take time—at least a year, I fear. Many of Earth’s cities will have fallen by then. The Salvation of Life will have hundreds of millions of cocoons on board, if not a billion.”
“I’m not talking about using a human ship. We turn the Olyix nice-guy camouflage tactics right back at them. We capture one of their ships and: Boom. Kamikaze.”
“Capturing one of their ships would be extremely difficult.”
“Are you sure about that? You did it. You hijacked that transport ship’s onemind somehow. Forced it out of the wormhole, then made it fly to Nkya. How did you do that?”
“A neurovirus. It allows me to infiltrate and infect an Olyix’s thought routines.”
“Great. I’ll take a dozen.”
“But…you can’t use it. It is embedded in my mind. It is part of me.”
“That’s convenient—for you. Oh, wait, you just said you’d help in any way you could. Are you beginning to see the problem with trust I’ve got here?”
“My mind contains the neurovirus as well,” Jessika said levelly. “I will go with you on your mission, Kandara. I would like to work with you again, one last time.”
“Mother Mary!” She hadn’t expected that. “For real?”
“Yes, absolutely for real. After all, I’m just an android. It’s not like my life matters. You don’t even think I am alive, do you?”
“Ouch, so burned, man,” Alik chortled.
For the first time since forever, Kandara found she was blushing. “You’re biological, so you’re alive,” she told Jessika. “If that’s simplistic, I apologize. It’s your purpose I struggle with.”
“Occam’s razor. If we’re not here to help, then what are we doing?”
“To be continued just as soon as I’ve filled in the blanks.”
&n
bsp; “Enough of this bullshit,” Ainsley said. “Jessika, can you steal us one of their ships or not?”
“You would not be able to force your way on board an Olyix Deliverance ship,” Soćko said. “It must be done subtly.”
“You mean get yourself captured again?” Callum asked.
“No,” Jessika said. “They know we are here now, which means they’re going to be cautious when they initiate cocooning on captured humans. Repeating a maneuver simply because it worked once before is a fatally bad tactic. If we’re going to steal a Deliverance ship we need a different approach.”
“So?”
“Stages,” Jessika said confidently. “We need to do this in stages. Okay: First I will require a quint prisoner, alive and intact. That is going to be the mother of all challenges.”
“You know me,” Kandara said. “I love a challenge. And I’m getting seriously bored sitting around here just watching you.”
“Do you think they can do it?” Johnston asked.
“Steal an Olyix ship and go kamikaze?” Callum replied. “I don’t know. Crazy idea. But if anyone can do it, then I guess it’ll be Jessika and Kandara.”
“And in case it comes to naught, we have you.”
“Er…yeah.”
“Is your idea any less crazy?”
Callum took a moment before he answered. It had been so frustrating listening to the two Neána humans. Unlike Kandara, he didn’t have much doubt concerning their motives, but, boy, were they depressing about everything. No hope. No chance. Run away. Cower in the dark and cold where the monsters can’t find you. He’d been surprised by how much that angered him. A century spent in the serenity of Utopial culture, and all he felt was the same anger that’d screwed up plenty of his life back in Aberdeen as a teen down on the streets. In those days, he and his pals had just been directionless kids, in awe of the big-city gangs whom they thought they were matching. So they staked out their turf to defend against the other forsaken lads that the new Connexion portal hubs were leaving behind along with the city’s collapsed oil economy. When you got threatened, you hit back hard and fast. It was primitive and dumb, and fired him up for all the wrong reasons. But now that same type of chance was there with the MHD asteroids. He couldn’t ignore it.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “But this is exactly the kind of problem-solving I did back in the day. Twist the system into something it was never designed for.”
Johnston smiled faintly. “Sounds half-arsed to me.”
“Yeah, but half an arse is better than no arse at all, which is what Alpha Defense has now. We’ve got three and a half thousand MHD asteroids to protect. I know we can’t hold the Olyix off forever—especially if the Neána are right and they’ll just keep resupplying their forces through the wormhole—but let me try this. If we can keep the electricity flowing until the terraformed systems can supply power to the shields, it’ll be a victory. The only one we’re going to see in our lifetime, by the look of things.”
“All right. We assigned General Xing to Quoek as soon as the power grid sabotage started; he’s running security for the MHD asteroids. Get yourself out there and coordinate this with him.”
“There’s been sabotage at the asteroids, too?” a startled Eldlund asked.
Johnston gazed at the Command Center’s big hologram bubble, now agleam with a nest of red vector lines where the Olyix ships and missiles were expanding out from the Salvation of Life. “Not really. We’ve had some attempts to break the asteroid control networks from the lownet, but the MHD industry has always enjoyed some of the strongest protection on solnet. Right now, Xing and his team are watching for any attempt at physical assault. The attacks on Earth’s power grid relay stations have been disturbingly successful. It’s already down seventeen percent, and the supply companies are going to be struggling to repair all the damage before the Deliverance ships arrive.”
“Good luck,” Danuta Zangari said.
“You’re not coming with us?” Callum taunted.
“No. I’m staying here as liaison for the family.”
When Callum checked Johnston’s face, it was unreadable. As he and Eldlund left the Command Center, all he could think of was rats deserting a sinking ship. Falling into the cold sea to drown.
* * *
For four billion years Quoek asteroid, a mud-red lump of insignificance, traveled along a mildly elliptical orbit an AU farther out from Sol than Neptune. Classed as an M-type, its nickel-iron mass was the heart of what had once been a much larger astronomical body. Its outer mantle had been pulverized by micrometeorite impacts over geological ages to leave the harder, dense core. It had been destined to continue its pointless existence for another five billion years as one more piece of solar system junk until one day a telescope array focused on it and performed a spectrum analysis.
And suddenly, Quoek acquired value.
M-type asteroids were the ones favored by solarwell companies. Given the colossal radiant heat expelled by the plasma jets that fed electricity to an energy-hungry Earth, their metallic composition was less susceptible to thermal ablation.
The China National Sunpower Corporation, which had pioneered solarwells, had chosen Quoek as its first anchor asteroid back in 2069. With an irregular diameter of eighty-seven kilometers, Quoek offered perfect stability for the first MHD chamber: a two-hundred-meter-long funnel of superconductor rings surrounded by the rigid silver wings of cryostat heat-dump panels. Once a perfectly spherical well portal had been dropped into the sun’s corona, incandescent plasma stabbed out from its twinned portal at the throat of the MHD chamber. The huge magnetic coils that the plasma passed through sucked power out of the relativistic stream, instantly shunting it back to distant Earth through a small portal carrying ultra–high voltage cables. Four hours later, official street celebrations across China witnessed that very same intense white flame appear in the sky, visible to the naked eye as the brightest star in the firmament. Half a billion people cheered in unison at the advent of cheap, clean energy—though, for a minority, it was a death knell. Solarwells did to the existing power companies what Connexion’s hubs had done to the transport industry six years prior.
Quoek was the proving ground. A month after the first MHD chamber began producing power, a second went active. The CNSC technicians assembled it on the other side of the asteroid from the first. Essentially, the MHD chambers were the greatest rocket nozzles ever built. Even with their induction coils siphoning power out of the plasma stream, the chambers still produced a colossal thrust. Enough to shift a multitrillion-ton asteroid if it was applied over decades. So the chambers were set up in opposing pairs, their thrusts cancelling each other out.
Experience that the CNSC crews gained over the next few years found that you should never have fewer than six MHD chambers per asteroid to maintain its original stability, and preferably a minimum of ten providing balance continuity when a pair were taken offline for maintenance or replacement. In 2204, Quoek itself had eighteen actinic plumes flaring out for thousands of kilometers, turning it into a Christmas star brighter than anything that could’ve guided wise men across the desert. And it was only one of 3,082 anchor asteroids that formed a dazzling speckled halo around the outer solar system, hemorrhaging the sun’s radiance across interstellar space. They were all smaller than Quoek, while the MHD chambers themselves had grown larger over the decades, until they’d topped out at five hundred meters long, generating an average of twenty gigawatts of electricity. Thousands of habitats, each with their own industrial stations—along with Earth’s megacities and billions of portals—consumed a phenomenal amount of energy.
Callum tensed himself for the gravity change, stepping into Quoek’s point three Earth standard. Most of the industrial asteroids stations he’d visited during his life, both those in Sol and Delta Pavonis, had zero-gravity stations: simple spheres dotted about the surfac
e, linked by short tubes. Quoek was different. Buried half a kilometer below the surface was a toroid containing the CNSC’s primary control center, overseeing the company’s 852 MHD asteroids. Apart from the lack of windows, they could easily have been in a standard Beijing office block. Walls of synthetic-bamboo panels alternated with big guóhuà paintings, doors printed out of carbon to mimic slate. The vaulting arrivals foyer was dominated by stone mined from Quoek itself, which had been sculpted into a spire twisting up the center, with trailing plants growing out of its artistically pocked surface, their leaves the insipid autumnal yellow fated by a life lived under artificial lighting.
General Xing was waiting for them, wearing the dark-green type fourteen uniform of the National Armed Forces, with the blue-and-white sleeve insignia of the Space Garrison. Callum just managed to avoid a double take. After so long living on Akitha, he’d grown accustomed to tall humans, but General Xing was only a diminutive one-meter-sixty high. Nor, it seemed, did he bother with cosmetic anti-aging treatments on top of the basic organ, muscle, and bone therapies. Apollo splashed the general’s information, putting him at ninety years old, which Callum could have guessed from his bald head and deep wrinkles.
Eight fully armored soldiers stood behind him, arm-mounted weapons activated. Callum gave them an edgy glance, aware of how still Eldlund had become.
“Welcome to Quoek station,” the general said as they shook hands. “I wish it was under different circumstances.”
“Me too,” Callum agreed. He indicated the soldiers. “Has there been much trouble on the MHD asteroids?”
“Plenty of lownet attempts to break into our management network, but the Ministry of State Digital Security G8Turings have prevented any real damage. There have been no physical assaults yet, which I consider a cause for worry, given the current level of sabotage on Earth.”
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