Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Well done, people. Final scan, please. I don’t want any more surprises.”

  For the next couple of seconds the life-support chamber once again filled with the shrieks of more metallic hydrogen bullets being fired into the largest surviving sections of tanks. There were no more huntspheres camouflaging themselves within.

  “Move out,” he said. “Tilliana, I need a new nexus location.”

  “If Motaxan is right, there’ll be another life-support chamber about a kilometer spinward. Take SR b-five from the junction outside.”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh, and Del—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Great supervillain laugh.”

  * * *

  —

  Yirella had nowhere to go, no one to be with and talk to, to share the worry. So she sat cross-legged on the grass of the habitat torus and watched the Strike play out across her optik. She never realized it would be so hard. Those first hours were an endless empty wait as ships and flood mines assumed their positions in the cold emptiness out beyond Vayan’s cometary belt with the unsuspecting arkship heading straight for them. Time stretched to torment.

  Then when it came, the Strike was sudden and brutal. So much so she felt her databud was accessing some kind of weird time-lapse feed. The arkship was devastated by the flood cloud, Deliverance ships bursting out like furious wasps from a broken nest. Assault cruisers charging in, confident in their superiority.

  Then came the troop carriers, nosing carefully into the arkship’s entrance caverns. Her breath came hard as she drank down Del’s suit data, reveling in her role as his invisible guardian angel. Yet her wings were clipped; she could say nothing to him. She had sworn that above all things. Tilliana and Ellici were the true tacticians now, rich with data from multiple sources, all perfectly analyzed by the remnant thoughts of their muncs, their years of training and experience guiding the squad with care and skill. They would make sure no harm came to them.

  Trust them.

  “The tanks,” she said in exasperation as the squad crept into the vast life-support chamber. Her voice rose in anger. “Come on, check the cryo tanks, idiot!” She focused on the emergency comms icon, which would give her direct contact to Ellici and Tilliana—which was the last thing they needed. They’ll see the tanks are the only possible hiding place. They will!

  Her gasp of relief was almost a sob when Tilliana began her warning. Seconds later Dellian went tumbling through waves of liquid nitrogen. Suit schematics splashed across her optik, checking the temperature resistance levels. Okay, they can handle liquid nitrogen immersion for three hours before degradation creep.

  Then Del was fronting it out with the huntspheres, all stupid, fearless bravado.

  “For the love of the Saints, just shoot!” she implored.

  But then her wish came true, and she squealed and whimpered as the firefight raged, hating herself for every pathetic sound coming from her throat.

  Get a grip.

  The last huntsphere was blown apart by the squad.

  Thank the Saints.

  She clambered to her feet and stretched as the squad began to make their way to the next potential nexus. Her body was convinced she’d been in the arkship right alongside her friends, enduring all the physical stress of the firefight. There was way too much nervous energy churning through her; fingertips tingling, random tremors in her legs and arms.

  The torus parkland was almost black, with only a few safety lights glowing along the edges of the paths. So she did some fast running on the spot, then shadow boxing—which made her feel silly, especially with her long, spindly arms, which was a good climbdown.

  Better.

  She exhaled, forcing herself to return to that calm analytical state that might actually be of some use. She squared her shoulders resolutely, ready to sit back down and return her full attention to the squad.

  A wan cobalt blue light shone through the curving roof of the torus so far above her. She knew that shade of blue: the expansion rim of a portal.

  Out there in the unsettling blackness of their cryoplanet’s central cavity, a portal was enlarging. Yirella knew the Strike plan by heart, and none of Bennu’s portals were supposed to be opening right now.

  Her optik tactical display confirmed she was correct: No portals were active during this phase of the Strike.

  “Huh?”

  She gazed dumbly at the radiant blue circle, her optik zooming in. Something was coming through. Something huge, and bizarrely elegant. A tower of cubes and pyramids encased in a cage of glittering white helixes—with wings.

  “Oh, Saints, we have a problem.”

  As soon as Callum walked out the door, the wind ruffled up his thick hair. He zipped up his jacket against the predawn chill. “I didn’t think there’d be any wind left here,” he muttered.

  “Thermals probably,” Eldlund said. “The shield does let some sunlight through in the day.”

  Callum glanced up at the shield covering Manhattan. Its haze boundary seemed to be reflecting the grid of streets, where block-long laser and neon ads blazed as if there were no power supply issue and every solarwell was still pumping electricity into Earth’s grid at full capacity. Looking down was an altogether more cautious act. They were on the roof of Connexion’s headquarters, a full hundred and twenty floors above the ground. He never suffered from vertigo, but still…

  The rest of the assessment team was waiting for him on the West 59th Street side. Huddled together in a gloomy group, their faces were pale in the city’s multicolored nightlight. Callum knew his treatment-heavy skin would suppress most of the surprise he felt at seeing Jessika with them. Loi walked over, nodding respectfully at Callum. “Come on,” he said to Eldlund. “Let’s go grab a coffee.”

  “But—” Eldlund started to protest.

  “See you later,” Callum told his aide.

  Eldlund’s face was unreadable as sie left. Callum went over and joined the others as they looked down on Central Park, his tarsus lenses zoomed in. Some kind of vigil was being held on the Bethesda Terrace, with hundreds of candles being held aloft.

  “What are that lot protesting about?” Callum asked.

  “They’re not. It’s a multifaith gathering,” Alik said. “Praying away the aliens.”

  “Which is about as much use as anything we’ve tried so far,” Yuri said.

  Callum gave the security chief a wry grin, then turned to Kandara. “You okay?”

  She shrugged. “Still alive.”

  “Good. Why are we meeting up here?”

  Yuri indicated the crowd on the terrace far below. “They make a good metaphor. We, the five of us, have to put everything aside—every quarrel, every moral—and work together to defeat the Olyix.”

  “I already know how to defeat them,” Callum told him.

  “Yeah,” Yuri said. “We know. It’s a neat idea, I’ll give you that. Fire one of our starships into the Salvation of Life. There are no weapons they can attack it with, because it’s essentially a giant hole in space. And when it hits, it’ll punch straight through. If you aim it right—along the axis—it can take out the biosphere caverns and the wormhole in less than a second; hit it with three or four starships, slicing strategically along the length, and the bastard will probably break up from the spin stress.”

  “Well…yes.” Callum really didn’t like Yuri’s flat voice. Too many memories about that unforgiving determination the old Russian possessed. “You got a problem with that?’

  “Several,” Jessika said. “Starting with, it won’t defeat them.”

  “All right, it won’t destroy their enclave. But you said yourself it’ll buy us years before they return. We can begin the whole exodus habitat project.”

  “So our descendants can be hunted across the galaxy,” Yuri said harshly.

  “Well,
fuck you all. Sorry for bringing good news.”

  “It’s great news, Callum,” Kandara said. “But we have to be smart about how we apply it.”

  “We apply it fast and hard. Our window to destroy the Salvation of Life is closing fast. They’ll already have everyone from the Lobby cocooned and onboard. The people they caught in the habitats are on their way back there. If we turn this into a crash priority project I think we can launch it in fifteen hours, twenty max. Get the council or Ainsley or whoever to give me the go-ahead.”

  “Yet even if it works perfectly, all we do is buy some of us some time,” Alik said ruefully. “We have to do better.”

  “You as well?” Callum asked in dismay. “Bloody hell. Are all of you Neána or something?”

  “Fuck you,” Alik sneered.

  “The Neána are here to advise and to help you,” Jessika said. “It’s why we exist.”

  Callum always considered that out of all the assessment team, he was the one who had the most trouble accepting Jessika was an alien. And with good reason. They’d worked together several times over the decades he’d been Emilja’s trouble-shooter. She was the essence of human, with her sense of humor and her insights and a decency that practically shamed him. The idealized human—like something a machine would make if you gave it the right parameters. Hindsight is such a bitch. “So you’re advising us not to kill the Salvation of Life?”

  “Yes. The four of us have come up with a different strategy. One with a greater chance of success.”

  “What?”

  “We have an opportunity here, Callum,” Yuri said. “POTUS and the general secretary have asked Ainsley and Emilja to produce a plan for our species to survive. All of us.”

  “Typical asshole politicians,” Alik groused. “They want someone else to do the dirty work so they keep their hands clean, especially if it’s successful. Because to work—really work—it’s going to have to be dirty on a scale the devil would turn his back on.”

  “Oh, shit,” Callum muttered under his breath.

  “Yeah,” Kandara said. “And Ainsley and Emilja’s fancy committee take advice from us, because, like it or not, we’re the experts. We also have Jessika and Soćko.”

  “What—?”

  “The neurovirus,” Jessika said. “I can take over an Olyix ship’s onemind.”

  Callum wiped a hand across his forehead. “I hate that I’m even asking this, but…if we’re not going to destroy the Salvation of Life, why do we still need to hijack an Olyix ship?”

  “To get to the enclave, of course,” Yuri said.

  “But…I thought you said the enclave was too big for us to defeat.”

  “It is.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Callum’s anger was rising to match his bewilderment. He resented missing out on everything the team had been discussing while he was away. Trying to save our arses. “I thought finding the gateway and spying on the enclave was what’s going to happen in the future.”

  “It was,” Alik said.

  “But the Olyix know anyone who survives their invasion wants to fight back,” Jessika said. “And the only way to do that is by finding the gateway. The fact that the Olyix are here in Sol shows the Neána still haven’t located it yet. But—”

  Callum winced. “Yeah?”

  She smiled at him. “Right now we have a perfect opportunity to obtain the gateway’s location.”

  “How the fuck do we do that?”

  “The Salvation of Life has a wormhole that leads directly back to it.”

  “So?”

  “So we take our hijacked ship and fly it down the wormhole to the gateway.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “No. As soon as we have the gateway’s coordinates, we broadcast them loud and strong. A signal that can be picked up clean across the galaxy.”

  “Won’t the Olyix just move the gateway if you do that?”

  “By its nature, the gateway has to occupy the physical space of the enclave. It’s like a dimensional trapdoor. Open it up and you’re inside. Find the gateway, and you find the enclave.”

  “Christ.” Callum said. “Then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What happens to the hijacked ship after it sends the signal? Do you fly back here? To Sol?”

  “Certainly not,” Yuri said. “We stick to the plan, we carry on through the gateway and into the enclave. We become the greatest motherfucking Trojans in the galaxy, gathering intelligence.”

  “What intelligence?”

  “On the conditions inside,” Alik said. “Because even Jessika and Soćko don’t know squat about that. We also keep track of the Salvation of Life when the Olyix bring it back to the enclave. Ready.”

  Callum closed his eyes. “Ready for what?”

  “Everyone who comes in after us.”

  “Everyone who?”

  “The exodus habitats. Generations of them, who will spend the next thousand years developing doomsday weapons that’ll make the Olyix shit themselves. Who will grow and build armies of super soldiers who are going to invade the enclave and rescue our whole species.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “It’s actually quite elegant from an emotionless technocrat point of view,” Alik said. “We find the gateway. The future human armada invades the enclave, wipes out the Olyix, and flies the Salvation of Life back here. Endgame!”

  “I warned you,” Yuri said. “This is going to get dirty.”

  “We’re going to lose the Sol system,” Alik said bluntly. “Even if we use your starship missile idea in fifteen hours and take out the Salvation of Life before they start stacking up cocoons inside, they’ll just send another, backed up with a big fleet of warships.”

  “Resolution ships,” Jessika said. “And you don’t want to be facing those.”

  “There is no war for the Sol system we can win,” Yuri said. “Not now, not in a year or two when our plan will be ready. We cannot save all twelve billion people on Earth from this. So we don’t try. We go tactical, and play our endgame right from the start.”

  “Oh, no,” Callum said bluntly. “No, no, no, no.”

  “If we convert all the existing habitats, then combine the manufacturing capacity of every terraformed system for the next ten years, we can possibly produce enough interstellar-capable habitats to carry half a billion of us if we really cram them in,” Kandara said. “That gives us a good base to build that future armada.”

  “And we leave the rest for the Olyix,” Alik said.

  “No! We have to fight!”

  “This is the fight,” Yuri growled back.

  “The humans they cocoon are still alive, Callum,” Kandara said. “And they stay alive for…ever, if you believe the Olyix. That’s the point of all this madness. And anything Olyix biotechnology can do to them, we’ll ultimately be able to undo. That’s why we have to keep track of the Salvation of Life.”

  Callum gave Jessika a stricken look. “Is that right?”

  “Neána biologics can probably reverse a cocoon already. With a few years of research, I can practically guarantee it. In a thousand years, it’ll be a walk in the park. Soćko has already started examining the process.”

  “Jesus fucking wept!” He hated it, hated how they blocked every protest with logic.

  “Right now, we’re too small,” Alik said. “Too unprepared. Too primitive. We gotta play the long game here, man. It’s the only way.”

  Callum didn’t trust himself to say anything. He nodded. Yuri’s beaten me again.

  “Of course, this might all become irrelevant in a couple of days anyway,” Kandara said cheerfully.

  “Why?”

  “If the city shields don’t hold, we’re going to be seriously screwed,” Alik said. “We need governments to hold society togeth
er, at least in the short term, so we can organize the hijack and the exodus habitats project. If Earth falls this week, then the odds of getting a decent fraction of settled worlds’ residents launched into the galaxy shrinks like a naked dick at the North Pole.”

  “And we’re back to that initial problem of hijacking an Olyix ship for ourselves,” Jessika said. “Which is going to be tough.”

  “But it’s going to have to be done,” Kandara said grimly. “Without that Olyix ship, there is no plan. And step one is securing us a quint body so we can take it over with the neurovirus. And yours truly fucked that up big time in McDivitt.”

  “Nobody could have done better,” Alik said quickly.

  “Thanks. But if you’re right about that, then we are seriously up shit creek. I had a good armor suit, a good plan, and good backup. I still lost. Those fucking hunting spheres the quint fly around in are bad news.”

  “She’s being very self-deprecating.” Alik grinned. “She’s already come up with a solution.”

  “What?” Callum asked.

  “Simple. We need to find us a quint that isn’t riding around in a hunting sphere. One like Feriton Kayne. There’re God knows how many of those shits walking around Earth overseeing their sabotage attacks.”

  “It’ll be different next time,” Kandara said. “I swear on Mother Mary’s grave. Just point me at one.”

  “Yeah,” Yuri said. “Working on that.”

  Times like this, Ollie wished he had an off switch. He’d slept through most of the come-down; but even now, sitting up on the cushions littering the lounge floor, he felt nauseated, cold, hot, sweaty, grossly tired, and not entirely sure where he was. Claudette’s house in Richmond, sure. But where, in this uncertain reality that was twisting so badly out of alignment, did that leave him? Taking zero-nark continuously hadn’t given him what he wanted; instead of mellowing everything out nicely, it had started soaking him in fear until he felt he was drowning in it. You’re not paranoid if everyone really is out to get you. And in this universe, on this planet, at this moment, it seemed everyone was. He just couldn’t quite remember all the details. The nark’s legacy was a jumble of confused thoughts hosting whispering voices in the distance that might have been demons nesting in his skull or the vanishing memories of a dream.