Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “But…technically that’s what the human body is anyway.” And Kohei also badly wanted to ask: What source? But if anyone had a source inside an alien species, it would be Yuri Alster.

  “Think of this as the budget version,” Yuri said. “It’ll keep your soul intact until the end of time, ready for when the Olyix God comes out to play.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes, I know, it’s—”

  “No. Boss, the drones have picked up an infrared source. It’s moving. Two sources. Three! Human size and matching thermal emission. They’re in the Western Concourse annex.” As he spoke, he watched the image that a counter-insurgency drone had picked up through a second floor window. It showed him three figures fleeing through the building—then they vanished into an internal stairwell.

  “Get them alive for me!” Yuri said. “Full priority.”

  “We’re on it. Volk?”

  “Engaging now.”

  The annex was a brick building that predated the geodesic cavern of the Western Concourse—an old railway hotel that had been converted into offices and a nightclub, with a restaurant and bar fronting the plaza side. Two fighter drones smashed the doors apart to enter. They slowed immediately. They were built to operate in open air, but the corridors they found themselves navigating through were narrow, restricting speed and maneuverability. Each of them deployed a swarm of sparrow-sized subdrones, weaponless but equipped with plenty of sensors. They slipped through the building’s convoluted layout without trouble, heading to the point where the three fugitives had been detected.

  Four of Volk’s team landed seconds behind the drones and ran in, gaining ground on the struggling fighter drones. Another fifteen drones encircled the building, muzzles of magrifles, masers, and nerve-block generators tracking back and forth across the wall and windows.

  “Where the hell do they think they’re going?” Kohei asked out loud. “That building is detached. The only way out is through the doors.”

  Volk himself was closing fast on the annex, swooping low through the archways that separated the Western Concourse from the rest of the old station building. The windows of the annex blew out, flinging glass across the concourse floor and the plaza outside, followed by horizontal pillars of smoke and dust. Inside, the intense blast pressure wave sent drones slamming into walls as furniture disintegrated around them. Kohei saw the whole building shake. A wide section of roof buckled, then slowly bowed downward, forming an irregular crater. Dust surged up into the sky.

  “What the bloody hell was that?” Kohei demanded. “Did they suicide?” He was getting some telemetry from the four team members who’d gone inside the building; they were alive. Two were under piles of rubble from collapsed walls, but their armor was strong enough to push it aside, allowing them to free themselves. Dust and smoke was clogging the air, restricting the sensors on the other suits, and the drones were struggling to orient.

  “I’m on it,” Volk said. The blast had punched him several meters through the air to crash into the station wall, but now he was flying forward again. Plenty of panels in the geodesic canopy had blown out. He zipped through one into the open and overflew the annex’s ruined roof section. Sensors probed down through the bellicose dust.

  Kohei watched the radar image build. “That hole goes down below ground level,” he exclaimed in surprise. Three urban counter-insurgency drones dropped down into the chasm, twisting around broken structural beams and shattered floors. Subdrones streamed out of their silos, forming thin mumurations that slithered through the narrow gaps of the lower floor.

  “What the hell?” Kohei grunted. The explosion had fractured the concrete foundation of the annex, leaving a rough crack into some kind of cavity below. The gap was just big enough for a human to wriggle past. Subdrones shot into it and spread out, pushing through the thick dust that veiled all the visual sensors. They found a broad corridor that opened into a large vestibule, where the dust thinned out to reveal tiled walls and floor covered in grime and cobwebs. A row of turnstiles, metal corroded by age and moisture, stood silent guard across the top of escalators that dived down into absolute darkness.

  “I know what this place is,” Yuri said. “It’s the old tube station. London had underground trains before Connexion’s metrohubs were established. They sealed it all off over a century back.”

  “Picking up infrared,” Kohei said. The subdrones had found footprints on one of the lifeless escalators, a faint thermal glimmer amid dislodged dirt. “Volk, get after them.”

  “On it.”

  Volk and two of his team dropped vertically down the shaft that the explosion had blown through the annex. Two smart missiles pulverized the fissure in the concrete foundations, widening it. Kohei winced as the missiles triggered another avalanche of debris, but Volk and his team were through before it tumbled down around them.

  They flew down the corridor and into the hallway, jet exhausts kicking up a flurry of dirt that’d lain undisturbed for more than a hundred years. Two urban counter-insurgency drones took up point duty, and together they soared down the escalators.

  The infrared signature split at the bottom, one set of footprints heading left down a long corridor, the other two tracking forward to the next set of escalators. Volk took the left-hand trail, and the other two armor suits went straight on. Subdrones raced ahead. They finally caught sight of the two Olyix agents at the bottom of the escalators. Powerful energy beams stabbed up, slashing at the subdrones. Kohei’s squad members reached the top of the escalators and opened up a barrage of railgun kinetics. The bottom third of the escalators and the floor beyond disintegrated in a furious maelstrom of splinters and dirt. Both suits dropped in freefall then curved around to chase their targets.

  Something came spinning out of the gray swamp of shards toward them—a web of dark strands, spinning like a bolo throw. It sang a single soprano note, the climactic end to a death chant. Maser beams slashed at it from both suits. Strands were sliced apart…but kept coming. They splattered down on the suits. Sticking.

  Integrity alerts from their suits splashed across Kohei’s vision, flaring straight into crimson. The strand fragments were cutting or burning or drilling through the cremetal armor as if it were plastic. Urban counter-insurgency drones came flying in fast under G8Turing control, targeting the suits with wide-beam masers, trying to scramble the molecular structure of whatever made up the active component of the strands. Kohei watched in horror as the strands kept burrowing inward. Then the screams started, flooding the communication channels. He didn’t turn them off, or down. Penance.

  “Volk, stay back from your target,” Kohei ordered. “Your suit can’t take that stuff.”

  “Motherfucker!”

  A fighter drone swept past the doomed thrashing figures and fired eight smart missiles. They pirouetted around corners and angled fast down staircases, chasing the weak infrared traces on the floor like visual bloodhounds. Sensors caught three more of the web things whirling out of the darkness, their lethal aria reverberating off the confined walls. The lead missile detonated, focusing the blast forward. The explosion pulverized the webs, hurling the lethal strand fragments into the ancient tiles of the corridor walls and ceiling, clearing a route for the remaining missiles.

  Out they streaked onto the platform, roaring over the carpet of rat shit. A stream ran sluggishly over the tracks, greasy water almost invisible below a crust of putrid decaying trash washed up from previous centuries. Most of it seemed to be an undulation of slick, wet fur as big rats scurried frantically for the tunnel mouths, alarmed by the abrupt violation of their domain.

  The Olyix agents were running in opposite directions, skidding about on the disgusting surface. The last Kohei saw of them was their outlines expanding fast as the missile exhaust went turbo and streaked in for the kill.

  Volk flew down an escalator. His speed was slower now, sensors alert for the
lethal web things. A trail of infrared streaks glimmered on the ground, leading deeper into the abandoned maze of tunnels and stairs and shafts. The G8Turing re-formed the subdrone formation ahead of him, creating an airborne shield. It was needed.

  Twice the gossamer ghoul webs came shrieking toward him. Twice the subdrones clumped into a tight shoal, allowing the web to catch them instead of Volk. Each time it snapped shut like jaws clamping down on prey, quickly butchering the metallic flock it constricted around. Sparks spat out as the strands cut effortlessly through the casings of the little machines, then fan engines failed, and the whole glowing, disintegrating mass dropped out of the air to seethe and shimmer its way into the floor tiles.

  The last of the subdrones zipped out onto a gently curving platform. At the far end, a figure jumped down into the rat-infested water covering the tracks and disappeared into the tunnel. The subdrone sensors focused on a small circular device fixed to a London Underground map halfway along the platform wall. Its magnetic field was implausibly strong.

  “What’s—”

  The explosion obliterated the subdrone. A hundred meters behind, and around two corners, the blast knocked Volk onto his ass. The whole corridor shook as a deluge of dust and shattered tiles splattered down all around him.

  “Christ,” Kohei shouted. “What is that explosive they’ve got?”

  “I don’t know,” Volk said dryly, “but I wish we had it.” He walked forward cautiously until he reached the top of the stairs that led down to the platform. It was full of rubble.

  “Do you think she’s still alive?” Kohei mused.

  “Most likely. They knew what they were doing. But…she?”

  “I think so. The G8 is cleaning the image. Hang on.” Kohei waited while the G8Turing prepared the fuzzy infrared image, enhancement algorithms refining the face that had turned so briefly toward the subdrone. A sharp monochrome image was sent to the Sol citizenship archive for identification.

  Two seconds later her identity splashed across Kohei’s tarsus lenses, but it had been supplied by the London Metropolitan Police, organized crime division. “Jade Urchall,” he read. “Well, congratulations, Jade, you are now officially the number one enemy of the human race.”

  I have finished watching, for now I behold what I have waited for all these long centuries.

  The Olyix are coming. Oh, yes.

  I activate my compressed systems.

  All of them.

  My metamorphosis begins. I will no longer be defined as a numbered level, a mere subset of something greater.

  First to decompress are the nul-quantum patterns. They hang in space, phantom sketches of nucleonic machinery, lacking even the density of the vacuum that supports them, stretching out from my core as if I possess the wings of an angel.

  Thought routines issue forth from my mentalic vault, enhancing my mind. What I do now will not only be precise, but it will have a purpose that was absent before. I have regained the righteousness that was my human soul.

  Metaviral spawn begin to digest and process the icy planetoid upon which I sit. Gusts of atoms flow into the nul-quantum patterns, and the faint images gracefully acquire solidity. With that cohesion comes function. Many functions.

  Converter nodules transform mass directly into energy. I possess enough power now to reach into the cleverly fashioned nowhere folds of space-time. Enough to transfer the armory of complex and utterly lethal ultradense mechanisms out into the real. They retain their integrity during and after the process. If I still had lungs I would let out a breath of relief. Ultradense matter is, by its nature, supremely volatile. The suspension structure I hold them in will require constant power to maintain their stability.

  I am made from confluence. Human, of course, is my original essence and continues to drive my resolve. The technology that gives me physical form has come from many sources: bold Human, quiet scheming Neána, aloof Creator, dangerous, powerful Angelis. All of their finest offerings coming together in a potent mélange that will never be repeated.

  I do not have the knowledge or ability to manufacture or replace my component parts. I suspect that is the Neána influence upon my composition.

  For one brief, beautiful century, all were allied. Together this coalition built the Factory—a synergy that produced hope, that produced me.

  I may be alone. There may be a million of me infesting the galaxy. I do not know.

  It is the Neána way.

  I was born to challenge the supremacy of the Olyix, to destroy their ships and their enclave and eradicate their treachery from the galaxy. I am the most formidable weapon the Factory alliance could envisage, combining the vengeance that lurks at the heart of each valiant species.

  A century of effort, unity, and peace.

  It ended the way it always would, as the flaws of the living deepened in proximity to the other. Bitterness, lies, and mistrust brought it to dissolution.

  The Neána fading back into the darkness.

  The Angelis war fleet flying onward to another galaxy where they could be free.

  Rebel humans embarking on the Creator mothership, defiantly striking out to establish a sanctuary.

  Generation ship humans scattering in silence amid the myriad stars, quickly and angrily terraforming then abandoning planets in their wake.

  Folly. But I forgive them all, for without them I would not exist.

  I am whole. My nul-quantum patterns replete, their birthed nucleonic structures active. Weapons withdrawn from the nowhere, armed and ready. Mind fully cognizant, remembering all I was, all I have had taken from me. Drive units energized.

  My perception fronds reveal the entire Vayan star system to me.

  I watch, proud as any father, as the humans of the Morgan prepare to do battle with the indomitable foe.

  I launch myself into space.

  Do the devout Olyix scream as they are rent asunder? Will they weep as their god-bestowed dream burns to radioactive ash around them?

  Oh, how I am going to love finding out.

  * * *

  The development chamber always made Dellian think of a medical clinic. He didn’t know why; its purpose was never healing. Perhaps it was the cleanliness. Walls and floor and ceiling were all the same opalescent material, flowing together to provide an infinite perspective. Human eyes could never work out how big the space was; all the surfaces were so flawless there was nothing to focus on.

  Bizarrely, the impression of unlimited space made him feel mildly claustrophobic. The only break in the uniformity of the glowing chamber was provided by the apparatus in the middle of the floor—three gray initiator cubes and a versatile integration gantry.

  Yirella stood beside it, the corners of her lips raised in a small expectant smile. “Well? What do you think?”

  He approached cautiously, staring down intently at the armor suit in the center of the gantry, held in place by spindly robot arms. Its surface had the same black crocodile hide texture as his own armor. Different anatomy, of course; this suit was for a Vayan body. The design team Yirella headed had given the four legs and eight arms plenty of flexibility, enhanced with artificial muscle. There was no backpack—understandable given the Vayan didn’t technically have a back. Instead ancillary equipment and small zero-gee thrusters had been wrapped around the middle of the Vayan’s two main body sections, creating a ring halfway up what passed for its torso. However, it was the top part of the suit that caused Dellian to frown in disapproval. Instead of giving it a helmet atop a necessarily long neck segment, a fat cylinder protruded upward, crowned by a sensor band. It didn’t even have the same tractability as the limbs. In his opinion, a serious mistake. A Vayan neck was very elastic, allowing it to bend in every direction.

  “The neck—” Dellian began.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s counterintuitive. But we were worried about how much force Finto
x might be subjected to on the mission. Even a Vayan neck can break if it’s twisted far enough, so we gave it plenty of protection. They can look in every direction at once, and the visual sensors have a decent zoom function, so keeping it rigid doesn’t matter.”

  “Okay.”

  She shot him a shrewd glance. “Trust me. Listen, Fintox is going with you to do one job. He’s not got combat duties; he’s cargo. This will protect him so you can get him into position.”

  “Not arguing.” He walked right up to the suit, examining it closely now. “Where’s the interface?”

  She bent down and tapped a circular iris on the top of the neck cylinder. “It goes here. Fintox is bringing it. That’s why I called you.”

  “Can we make one now?” he asked.

  “The biologic initiator they used to build it can replicate as many as we want. But—”

  “It connects directly to a Neána brain. And even if we could adapt it for human use, we don’t have the neurovirus.”

  “Quite. Like a starship without a drive unit.”

  “But having a tool that can interface with Olyix nerve structures must give us a better idea about the principles involved in coding a neurovirus, right?”

  “Maybe. Just don’t expect me to derive them instantly.”

  “Humans must have worked on the idea in the past.”

  “Sure. The Morgan has whole archives full of research data. A couple of centuries ago, on Juloss, they even built some prototype brain-genten interface units. The volunteers who got the implant were impressed by how well they worked. Coding analogue routines that a genten could interpret was the most difficult part. Everyone’s thoughts are different and unique, so every interface has to run customized routines. Once they got that right, the test subjects could receive sensory signals they understood and communicate directly with the gentens.”

  “Sounds just like a databud.”