Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Busted,” Alik declared.

  “Get out!” Yuri cried. “I’m triggering the kamikaze. You can survive it, but it’ll make them withdraw.”

  Kandara didn’t hesitate. She charged for the door at the back of the food hall, the armor suit smashing through. Four kilometers above her, the six small MHD chambers that technicians had taken out of McDivitt’s industrial stations and installed around the axis spindle opened. Plasma direct from the sun’s photosphere seared into the habitat. The MHD chambers had been reprogrammed to defocus the streams from narrow spears that would have punctured clean through the opposite endcap into wider torrents that merged to slam down the cylinder as an incandescent wave. It hit the opposite endcap and ricocheted back. Within seconds, the habitat’s entire carpet of vegetation burst into flame, and the atmospheric pressure began to rise drastically, sending tornados of superheated air roaring down the holes through the shell and into the Deliverance craft that had cut them. The plasma wasn’t just hot, it carried a phenomenal electrical charge. Massive lightning bolts erupted within the cylinder, lashing around in all directions as the devastated atmosphere sought to establish equilibrium. Spheres out in the open were flung around helplessly as their fuselages instantly turned silver in an attempt to reflect the energy deluge. Dozens were caught by savage lightning forks, exploding in a hail of actinic debris. The million windows of the habitation section shattered, turning into molten droplets as they pounded into the big ornate rooms behind, igniting every piece of furniture and fabric. Lightning stabbed in through the gaps, clawing at the burning walls to ground out through structural girders.

  Around the root of the axis spindle, the energy rampage battered the MHD chambers, and the plasma streams failed as the small portals feeding them disintegrated. Total elapsed time since they were switched on: nine seconds. But it was enough to annihilate the habitat’s interior.

  Kandara’s universe turned from a gloomy cavern of shadows to a reality constructed entirely of pure white light as her suit sensors struggled to interpret the photonic overload. Scarlet warning icons splashed across half of her tarsus lenses display as the ionized atmosphere buffeted her. But her suit could resist the appalling barrage for at least a minute, or so they had calculated during the worst-case scenario stage of planning.

  Zapata framed the corridor in a grid of navigation graphics, showing her the way. Sparks and smoke turned the air to a gale of dragon’s breath, while rivulets of molten metal slithered down the walls and across the floor. Geysers of hypercharged atmosphere whorled around her suit as the deadly electrical storm raged.

  “Keep going,” Yuri demanded. “You’re doing fine. We’re ready for you.”

  In the vast public hall, three of the drones had survived being pounded into walls, their fan blades sagging and melting as they dropped to the floor. But some of their combat-hardened systems remained functional. Sensors saw the massive crystalline canopy shatter as a quint sphere crashed through it. The sphere came to a halt twenty meters above the smoldering floor as balconies and staircases crumbled, flinging clouds of embers into the hazed air. Every particle danced with static that spun out slim strands of lightning, filling the hall with a cascade of furious electrons. The silver sphere hung resolute at the center of the cataclysm, reflecting the terrible light like the devil’s own Christmas ornament.

  “Mary! You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Kandara said numbly. The door ahead of her was already buckled and melting as she knocked it aside. She swore she could hear the lightning savaging her suit—the same sound a T. rex’s claws would make scouring the carapace segments.

  “Run!” Alik implored.

  The sphere shifted position in a smooth, curving motion, coming down level with the floor of the collapsing food hall. It powered forward, trailing a massive vortex of lightning through the livid air.

  Kandara used a forearm gaussrifle to blow apart the door ahead of her. Electromorphic muscles punched the fiery wreckage aside as they accelerated up to a sprint speed she could never have achieved with her own flesh and blood. She took one corner so fast that her suit grazed the sagging wall, fracturing it to igneous chunks.

  The quint sphere hit the back of the food hall where the door to the corridor was now a charred puddle on the floor. It started to plow through the narrow corridor like a bloated chainsaw, ripping the walls, floor, and ceiling apart in violent fantails of sizzling rubble as it forced its way through the structure.

  The measured discharges of Kandara’s gland did absolutely nothing to stop the animal panic that threatened to overwhelm every rational thought. Her gaussrifle shots pummeled any and every remaining solid surface ahead, saving precious milliseconds she would otherwise have spent breaking through them. Behind her the sphere was a cyclone of destruction smashing its way relentlessly onward through rooms and corridors. She just knew it had weapons powerful enough to take her down, but that wasn’t its purpose. Oh, no. The Olyix wanted her, alive and entombed in her own mutated flesh, preserved for the rest of eternity until their diabolical God emerged to subsume her soul.

  The floor was shaking furiously as she reached the last room. Cracks multiplied in the surfaces around her as the sphere hurtled across the last few meters, the roar of its destruction trail making her armor vibrate. The portal was dead ahead, a dark circle amid the inflamed atmosphere. She powerdived for it, yelling in relief as she shot through the gap, pulling a writhing glob of ruined air with her. A yell that turned into a scream as she came to a bone-snapping halt in midair. Something had wrapped itself around her lower legs, suspending her—

  Gravity abruptly took over, and she crashed to the ground, thick fronds of static drilling into the concrete while the suit discharged its colossal load. She was scrabbling around manically on the floor of the high-security cell as the light levels changed and her sensors pulled everything into focus. A slim, glowing tentacle was coiled around her ankles, attached to nothing. Behind her, the portal had become an inert circle of solid-state circuitry. Six heavy-duty military drones were poised overhead, each with several ominous muzzles extended toward her. Thin spurts of smoke were rising from the blackened points where her armor was touching the floor. A fast wind of cold air jetted over her from vents in the ceiling. She reached down gingerly and gripped the tentacle. It didn’t put up any resistance as she unwrapped it and flung it across the room, now nothing more than a length of exotic rope. She didn’t trust it for an instant.

  “You okay?” Yuri asked quietly.

  “Mother Mary, just get me the fuck out of here!”

  “Your suit’s cooling nicely. We’ll open the door in a minute.”

  She sat back, feeling the tension slackening—slightly. Glad she was wearing a helmet, that there was no way the others could see her face right now. The post-combat shakes would hit her any minute; they always did. They’d fade soon enough, but not the paranoia, not even with the gland turned up to maximum. That terrible sphere was an irresistible force that would hunt her for the rest of her life. “We don’t stand a chance, do we? Not against that. I was kind of bulling it out before, but…”

  “Jessika and Soćko may have a point about building those exodus habitats,” Alik said.

  “How long before the Deliverance ships reach Earth?”

  “Couple of days.”

  Kandara clasped her heat-tarnished gauntlets together. “Sweet Lord, save us when those things get loose down here.”

  I am composed of many advanced technologies, but not even my drive units can defy the light speed barrier. If I were to accelerate up to my cruising speed of point nine C, it would take me nearly forty days to reach the incoming Olyix ship. That would make me very late for the party.

  I’m going to have to hitch a lift.

  I accelerate at two hundred gees, reaching Sasras in seventy-two minutes. The gas giant is beribboned in saffron cloudbands, interspaced with moon-sized rivers
of white ammonia cyclones, the two locked together by ever-shifting curlicues. Comparative association brings up memories of Saturn; I remember having a banqueting suite on Titan, whose windows looked out on a ginger sky with the pale gas giant looming above the horizon. Jupiter was impressive simply because of its size, but Saturn’s rings were an incomparable beauty.

  My perception fronds are a gentle rain upon Sasras’s upper atmosphere. They provide accurate coordinates to the two hundred variable portals the Morgan has seeded across the upper atmosphere. Flood mines are dropping out of them, thousands of them freefalling for hundreds of kilometers through the thermosphere then stratosphere, and farther still, down to the incredible pressure at the bottom of the troposphere, where they finally achieve neutral buoyancy and float above the boundary layer.

  I hang high above one of the variable portals, shielded from its sensors, until the last mine has come through.

  Three hours later, the expansion portals in every flood mine open a kilometer wide, and Sasras’s super-pressurized atmosphere screams through the multitude of holes into the hard vacuum on the other side. The torrent lasts for twelve minutes.

  When it is over I descend. The base routines of the genten that controls the variable portal are completely familiar to me. There have been many layers of additional procedures built on top by all the generations of humans that have fled deep into the galaxy, adding sophistication but not expanding its primary rationality. Nor do they prevent me from taking full control of the operating system.

  I command the portal to expand and slip through.

  * * *

  Dellian was already in his armor when the Morgan went through the portal to interstellar space. They’d emerged thousands of kilometers away from the Olyix arkship, but Captain Kenelm insisted they be prepared and ready for immediate combat.

  It was bull, Dellian knew. If the Olyix were capable of detecting and engaging the Morgan right after it emerged, then it wouldn’t be any kind of fight that squads wearing armor suits were going to be taking part in. Nor were they likely to survive such an encounter. But he complied without protest and made sure the rest of the squad was sealed up tight and snug. The longest they’d ever remained in their armor was five days straight; it had been a bitch of a training simulation. But apart from seriously needing a shower afterward, it wasn’t that uncomfortable. Besides, being inside the tough suits right from the start was as reassuring as any neurochemical squirted out by his gland. He just hoped Fintox could cope with the physical isolation.

  Dellian’s databud played the tactical display from the Morgan’s command network across his optik. The Strike fleet’s emergence deployment was good, with everything well inside the positioning error margin. Three thousand flood mines were strung out twenty kilometers apart in a line that stretched ahead of the arkship’s course, while the Morgan’s attack cruisers were poised waiting in a circular formation five thousand kilometers out from the arkship. But the delivery portals they’d come through had spent days maneuvering to match the alien’s course and speed, delivering the cruisers on a parallel vector. The Morgan itself was another thousand kilometers farther out.

  When the arkship was one light-minute from the first flood mine, Sasras’s atmosphere began to vent out into interstellar space from the entire formation. As it emerged, each colossal jet was semisolid matter, held in its uneasy state by the gas giant’s crushing pressure. Once through the portal into the freedom of the vacuum, it expanded at an incredible rate. A cloud of molecular hydrogen billowed out where seconds before there had been only clear space. It dispersed rapidly, but thanks to the continuing jets at its core, it retained the same high density.

  Traveling at point one three C, the arkship would now take less than ten minutes to reach the flood cloud. If its sensors did manage to detect the dense blot of hydrogen swelling across the stars directly ahead, it probably had no way of determining that it was actually end-on to a mass of vapor sixty thousand kilometers long. As the seconds wound down, Dellian could see it was making no attempt to change course. The gravitational distortion it was generating was sufficient to deflect any natural nebula of dust and gas adrift between the stars, allowing it to fly straight through the tenuous wisps of atoms unscathed. Then with a minute to go, the arkship began to change its vector. Even with a gravitonic drive, shifting a multibillion-ton mass took a long time.

  “It’s going to hit,” Dellian declared, grinning inside his helmet. A cheer went around the squad. The induction sheaths entwined with his muscles trembled in patterns he could instinctively read; his combat core cohort was sharing his excitement and satisfaction.

  “Wait,” Ellici said. “They might switch on the antimatter drive. If that exhaust hits the flood cloud, it will weaken the impact.”

  Dellian let out a silent sigh. She always assumes the worst.

  “It’ll take too long to activate the antimatter rocket,” Tilliana said. “It’s not something the onemind will just flick a switch for. Not with forty seconds to go.”

  Dellian watched the feed with anxiety and exhilaration. The arkship continued its slow deviation away from its original course. Less than two million kilometers ahead of it, the flood cloud continued its wild inflation as the mines fed it with billions of tons of hydrogen every second. It was now too broad for the arkship to avoid.

  Space was besieged by a micronova flash of ultrahard radiation as the arkship tore through the entire length of the flood cloud in little more than a second. Its protective distortion effect was completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of mass impacting its boundary. For all that the hydrogen was nothing more than a nebulous fog, at that velocity the outcome was the same as if the arkship had struck a solid wall. The radiation from molecular hydrogen converting to pure energy from the collision stabbed into the arkship, penetrating the rock to a depth of over a hundred meters. It annihilated any machinery or biological components it struck, while the corresponding electromagnetic pulse sent vast electrical currents surging through metal structures, melting the larger mechanisms and burning smaller items to slag.

  Milliseconds after the energy cascade, the physical shockwave manifested down the arkship. Along with everyone else, Dellian held his breath. If the flood cloud was too thick, or too long, the resulting quake would be violent enough to pulverize the huge ship, and everything they’d done since leaving Juloss would have been for nothing.

  The arkship emerged from the irradiated miasma of the flood cloud with its own coma of ionized gas elongating behind it. As the distortion generators were now so much cooling lava, there was nothing to protect the arkship’s surface from genuine interstellar gas and dust crashing into it at point one three light speed. The blunt forward section of the massive cylinder crawled with dazzling collision sparks that began to chew their way through the dark nickel-iron rock.

  “Drive systems are off,” Captain Kenelm announced. “As is the gravitational deflector. Overall physical integrity is holding. And we’re picking up a negative energy signature, so the wormhole is still intact. The interstellar medium here is giving it a good kicking, so let’s get this over with before the damn thing starts to fragment.”

  The squad cheered so enthusiastically Dellian thought he was hearing it through the suit insulation as well as their secure channel. His optik’s tactical feed showed him the assault cruisers accelerating hard, closing in on the crippled alien craft. Then the Morgan was moving, following the assault cruisers inside its own protective formation of eight heavily armored escort vessels.

  Dust abrasion created a glowing violet halo around the front of the arkship, providing an easy visual target as the Strike fleet closed in. When they were a thousand kilometers away, the first of the Olyix ships launched to fight back. The flood cloud impact was calculated to destroy between twenty and thirty percent of the arkship’s systems, leaving enough mechanisms intact to make the boarding operation worthwhile. Any m
ore damage and they wouldn’t be able to extract the vital gateway information. Any less, and they’d have a serious fight on their hands. And of course without the gravitational distortion, dust impacts at point one three light speed would eventually reach a crescendo, resulting in the whole rock shattering, which put them under the clock.

  “Stand by,” Wim announced over the general channel. “We’re seeing activity around the forward end.”

  The craft that came sliding out of the openings around the arkship’s forward rim were a kind Dellian knew well, they were so familiar from the ancient files of Sol’s invasion. Deliverance ships: their sleek, rounded-delta-shape fuselages so dark out here between the stars they were barely visible in the erratic aurora engulfing the flailing arkship. Seeing a whole squadron of them maneuvering with easy grace as they accelerated toward the incoming assault cruisers made Dellian smile in welcome. It was an odd feeling, as if they were back in history, fighting for Sol all over again.

  “The Salvation of Life never had hangars full of Deliverance ships,” Ellici said. “They’ve changed the design. They’ve definitely been lured before.”

  “How bad is it?” Dellian asked as the sensor images played across his optik.

  “We know the Deliverance ships,” she replied in a soothing tone. “Our assault cruisers outclass them.”

  Dellian wondered what had happened at all the other lures. The Olyix were still sending out arkships, so they hadn’t been defeated yet. But they’ve never had a Neána board them and snatch the gateway coordinates from the onemind. We can do this. We can be the turning point in the whole war!

  Both sides might have been hurtling toward Vayan’s sun at thirteen percent of light speed, but their relative velocities were matched. And there were more than five hundred assault cruisers against a hundred fifteen Deliverance ships. They closed on one another at heavy acceleration. Coherent radiation beams pulsed, crosshatching the void like short-lived rapier stabs. Deliverance ships launched a barrage of missiles armed with antimatter, some of which detonated hundreds of kilometers from their targets. The explosions had two functions—first to channel and focus the energy release from mutual mass eradication into a single coherent beam of gamma rays, and secondly to create a lethal shrapnel cloud expanding so fast the Morgan’s assault cruisers couldn’t possibly change course in time.