Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Too true,” Ellici said. “So how do we get it out?”

  “There are no guarantees,” Alimyne said. “But we do have some theories. To start, we are considering inducing a deep coma to see if that will reduce his brain’s activity level. Frankly, anything that slows the rate of absorption would be a victory right now. We need time to solve this.”

  “That’s not neuroscience,” Yirella shot back. “That’s witchcraft! You might as well give him herbal tea.”

  “I have a genten analyzing the patterns. If we can determine the operational mechanism, we’ll be closer to a treatment.”

  “There are designs in the Morgan’s archives,” Yirella said. “Work our ancestors did on brain-processor interfaces. They weren’t optical-based like this is, but an interface should allow us to get a counter-virus into him.”

  “The human brain is not a processor,” Alimyne warned. “And Dellian’s mind is not a program. You can’t load and wipe memories at will. Our worry is that the longer we leave him in his current state, the more the Olyix patterns will merge with his own thoughts and memories.”

  “Then put him into the coma,” Xante said hotly. “Shut his brain down completely; don’t let it overwhelm him.”

  “There are dangers in that procedure, too,” Alimyne said. “I wanted you to understand that before we start that action.”

  “Wait,” Yirella said. “You’re asking for my permission?”

  “If we were back on Juloss, doctors would be obliged to consult with family members in such cases. Here, and with you—and particularly with this case, which is entirely experimental—ethical requirements are unclear. Technically Captain Kenelm has the authority to order or refuse treatment; however, sie wanted you to be consulted. All of you; this squad is effectively Dellian’s family.”

  Yirella glanced at her friends, knowing they would all support her. Their companionship made this almost bearable. “Do it,” she said.

  * * *

  The Morgan was leading a cluster of ten assault cruisers that were flying a defensive umbrella formation twenty kilometers in front of the Olyix arkship. Their overlapping distortion fields created a pale lavender aurora as they rammed the tenuous interstellar gas aside, making sure the badly battered rock didn’t suffer any further abrasion from particle impacts.

  Protecting the arkship and its precious cargo was Captain Kenelm’s sole priority. Back in Bennu, the industrial platforms were in full emergency activation mode, producing equipment to initiate the Neána option. Dozens of refineries and manufacturing stations were being dispatched through an interstellar portal whose twin was currently fifteen light-years out from Vayan. Within a week, they would be followed by entire asteroids selected to provide metals and minerals, along with comets that were ninety percent ice, enough material for the fledgling civilization to build dozens of habitats. While down on Vayan, the fifty-year lure masquerade was over; vast swaths of the mock-farms were harvesting for real now. Big crude tractors were hauling reapers across fields and meadows, gathering up as many seeds as they could from grass and bushes and trees. They would be used to plant the habitat landscapes as soon as they were built. Three fifty-kilometer-long cylinders were planned initially, with the first scheduled to be completed in six months.

  No one knew how long they had before a fleet of Resolution ships decelerated hard into Vayan’s star system. Estimates from the tactical analysts ranged from a month to five years. Kenelm had no choice but to assume the one-month option and ordered an immediate transition operation to insure the cocoons’ safety.

  A full third of Bennu’s initiators were currently producing systems that could support the continuing hibernation of the humans they’d discovered. Working with the initial survey data supplied by remotes exploring all three arkship biospheres, the gentens calculated there were nearly two billion life-support chambers. So far they’d confirmed a quarter of a million cocoons were stored in the first biosphere. It appeared the remaining two biospheres were empty.

  Transfer had already begun, bringing the cocoons from the arkship into Bennu’s main torus, plugging them into the new support machinery as soon as it was installed.

  So far, no one had demanded or ordered Yirella help with the Neána option. But it was her field; the work she’d done designing the Vayan civilization would make her invaluable in turning the existing low-level contingency plans into reality.

  With Dellian now in a deep coma and his brain’s manic activity reduced (but not entirely suppressed), the other implications of the catastrophic Strike had started to add to Yirella’s feelings of dread. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hollow victory of finding the cocoons, some of the universe’s light seemed to have gone out for good.

  She’d been on her way to the main council room, but took just one slight detour. The Morgan’s life-support torus didn’t have windows, not like the much bigger Bennu habitat wheel with its glass sky. But it did have a wide lounge, with walls whose textures were fixed on Earth’s Mesozoic era, placing her on the edge of a Cyatheales forest with a plain of lush grasses stretching out to the horizon, where volcanoes idly exhaled smoke pillars. She and Dellian had come here whenever their schedules kept them too busy for more leisurely outings. If anywhere could help her calm her thoughts, it would be here. She remembered St. Kandara was always scared before combat, and how she would prepare by obsessively checking her weapons and armor. Well, orchestrating industrial station deployment wasn’t exactly going into battle, but what happened over the next few days would decide the fate of those quarter of a million people cocooned by the Olyix. She needed to be thinking rationally—even though the Saints had been unanimous in hating the whole hiding in the dark route.

  But not even the familiarity of the lounge and its warm memories could comfort her today. She shut her eyes and let her thoughts roam where they would, not really caring if that was a dark place.

  The intruder ship.

  The greatest enigma in all of this. After the Strike, it had taken up station a hundred kilometers behind the arkship. It refused to talk to anyone—least of all Captain Kenelm, who had spent hours sending it greetings and questions. The only thing it had done was deploy hundreds of soldier drones into the arkship. They’d been chillingly efficient at hunting down and killing the Olyix quint. They were still inside, because the arkship was huge. Finding and eliminating every quint would probably take months. But Kenelm and the squad commanders were satisfied that the first biosphere was now completely clear. There hadn’t been a firefight for seven hours now.

  Her databud accessed the Morgan’s sensors, and her optik showed her the intruder, its white hull illuminated in the gentle violet glow of dying interstellar gas. After studying it for a long minute she looked around the lounge. Above her, and discreetly woven into the texture of the prehistoric savannah, a lens cluster peered down at her. She gave it a sad smile. “Are you watching me?” she asked out loud.

  A small, pure white icon appeared in her optik, which she opened.

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so,” she said. “Your knowledge of our networks is quite spooky.”

  “They were already old when I was built. If I know them, the Olyix certainly do. You need to reformat and refresh. Maybe come up with something original.”

  “We’ve plateaued. There’s nothing new in the universe.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to the Olyix. The graviton beam they used against your assault cruisers surprised even me.”

  “Thank you for helping.”

  “I had fun. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Couple of thousand years.”

  “Saints!”

  “Not so bad. I wasn’t this conscious until a few weeks ago, and most of the time previously was eaten up by relativistic dilation. In a linear timeframe I’m only a hundred and fifty years old.
”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Some of it, yeah. I’ve got the gateway location. But the onemind made sure it wiped most of its memory of the enclave itself.”

  “Did it tell you why it was coming to Vayan with an arkship full of cocooned humans?”

  “Not exactly. The cocoons are from a generation ship they captured. Then, after that, the arkship was assigned to the Vayan mission.”

  “Saints! They caught a generation ship? How could they possibly do that?”

  “We lured them ourselves, Yirella. They have caught so many of us now; I saw that in the onemind’s memory. I don’t even know if there’s anyone else left free. These ships they send to collect humans, they call them Welcome ships—because they’re creepy old deviants. They’re only this shape and size so they can send them to stars like Vayan that are pumping out signals from a ‘new civilization.’ That way the humans operating the lure think it’s an arkship like the old Salvation of Life.”

  “No!”

  “The Olyix know our strategy, Yirella. They know everything. They know we bioform a planet and live on it for a few centuries, then move onward in multiple ships. There have been thousands of planets, sending ships onward—never back. But the exponential expansion wavefront has a constant: It expands at point eight five light speed. So they know where we are. And their monitoring stations are spread out across the galaxy. There are hundreds of thousands of them, each with a wormhole back to the gateway. I know where they are, too, now. They’re not just behind us, back toward Sol, but ahead as well, which means the Olyix can reach every star before we do. They’re waiting for us now, Yirella. They’re like the skim-feeding whales we used to have in Earth’s oceans. We tiny stupid things fly into their huge open jaws without even realizing it until they close around us.”

  “No,” she cried. “No! The Saints themselves came up with this plan. Because of them there are trillions of us. A third of this galaxy’s stars have been seeded with terrestrial DNA.”

  “That’s how it started. But not anymore. Not for a long time.”

  “It can’t be. They can’t have caught all of us, they just can’t.”

  “The galaxy is a tough place, Yirella. Tougher than we ever knew. Think of it as Darwin going turbo.”

  “Saints! What do we do?”

  “You’re doing it: the Neána option. Hide and thrive in the dark between stars where they’ll never find you. This time, you can make it work. You’ve liberated over a quarter of a million humans. They’ll live properly now, Yirella. That’s a victory on a scale no Strike mission has known for millennia.”

  “If we’re all that’s left, then we’ve lost, haven’t we?”

  “Humans are alive and free. Not just here, but in Sanctuary, too.”

  “It’s real?” she asked in astonishment.

  “I think it will be by now. The people who set out to build it were pretty fucking determined. And the Creator mothership had the technology to make it work.”

  “What’s that? What are Creators?”

  “A race called the Katos. Aliens avoiding the Olyix like all the others in this galaxy who survive an invasion. We just called them Creators because we’re lazy and their technology really was indistinguishable from magic. I mean, come on, it made half of me. And even I don’t understand how me works.”

  “But the Sanctuary, it’s real?” she insisted.

  “Oh, yeah. My own granddaughter took off with them to find a safe place to live, somewhere outside the expansion wave. How’s that for loyalty? But, I gotta admit, looks like she got the last laugh.”

  “So you don’t know where Sanctuary is?”

  “No. That would kind of defeat the object, now wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She pressed her lips together, giving the lens cluster a calculating look. “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I’ll stay here and make sure you’re okay until you transport everyone out to a safe haven in interstellar space. Then I’m going to go pay a visit to the Olyix enclave.”

  “They’ll know you have the gateway location. They’ll be waiting with those whale jaws open wide and inviting.”

  “Maybe. But this is why I exist. And I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time.”

  “There might be another way.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “I’m working on it. And before you sneer, I’m good at that kind of thing. Really good.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Vayan was impressive.”

  “You know a lot about the Olyix, their technology, don’t you?”

  “Is that a question?”

  She steeled herself to ask. As before, she had nothing to lose. “There’s someone on the Morgan who was harmed in the arkship.”

  “This the boyfriend? The one who took the optronic viral right smack in the brain?”

  “Dellian, yes. Do you have a cure?”

  “It’s not quite that simple, sweetheart. There are options available, sure, but the human mind is a funny thing. Good old analogue; you can never quite quantify it, no matter how smart you are. Which gives us a possible window. But I’ve got to warn you, it’s a real small window.”

  “If there’s any chance, I’ll take it.”

  “Okay, I’ll send some files over. Your biomolecular initiators should be able to produce an interface that’ll get you into his mind.”

  “That’s the one thing the Neána said we should never use.”

  “Because it leaves you open to an Olyix neurovirus. Sure. Stable door, locks, and horses are what I’m thinking here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to help him, become part of the cure. It’s risky. For both of you.”

  “I have no reason to carry on without him.”

  “Whoa! Damn, that’s dark. What have you all become?”

  “I’m just a realist. Like Saint Kandara. I always admired her. She never deluded herself about life.”

  “Ha. She’d laugh her ass off if she heard you say that! I guess history has smoothed the facts some.”

  Yirella frowned. “You knew her?”

  “Sure. I liked her, too. She had balls. More than most.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Long time ago, I used to be Ainsley Zangari. Pleased to meet you, Yirella.”

  * * *

  Alimyne and her medical team spent a day reviewing the files that Ainsley had given them. “The interface should work,” sie said. “Physically, that is. It can connect to a human brain’s neurons. And our initiators will be able to produce it; the gentens have run construction simulations.”

  “But?” Yirella asked. She stared through the clinic’s glass door. Dellian was still strapped down on the bed, but at least he looked like he was sleeping. The big hologram projection of his brain wasn’t quite as bright and active this time, either.

  “This routine Ainsley has provided,” Alimyne said awkwardly. “The one that will connect your mind to his. That’s something we can’t check in a simulation.”

  “So hook me up. It either works or it doesn’t. We don’t lose anything, and if it works we get Del back.”

  “Yirella,” Xante said in concern. “It’s risky.”

  “Of course it’s risky. What’s your point? I’m willing to use it. We all want him back. So…”

  “What if that thing the Olyix put inside him gets into your mind through the interface?”

  “Then next time you try something different on both of us.”

  “Saints, Yirella!”

  “He is the reason I keep living,” she yelled at them. “Without him, I am dead. Do you understand?”

  Xante gave her a short nod. “I love him, too.”

  Yirella let him put his arms around her, resting her chin on the top of his head rather than welcomi
ng the embrace. “Thank you. I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”

  “You’re not. Without my gland gushing out suppressors I’d be a gibbering wreck right now.”

  “I’ll get the biologic initiator to make the interface,” Alimyne said. “It’ll take a couple of hours.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Actually”—Xante cleared his throat—“Tilliana asked if you could join her.”

  “Uh, she didn’t call me.”

  “No. Well, she said I was to judge if you were up to it.”

  “Up to what?”

  “I don’t know. Just that it’s important and upsetting. The rest of the squad’s with her.”

  “Oh, for Saints’ sake.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on, let’s go see what’s so vital.”

  * * *

  —

  The interior of the Bennu habitation torus was changing drastically. Remotes were chopping down the parkland’s trees and ripping up the grassland. Plants and soil alike were dumped unceremoniously into waste hoppers that ended in portals, ejecting everything into space. The first line of remotes was followed by a second set, dismantling the ecology maintenance infrastructure. That too was evacuated into space. The refineries didn’t even bother to reconstitute it. All that was left was the metalloceramic floor, cleaned to a dull sheen.

  Conduits and cables were being laid across it in a grid pattern, ready for the cocoon support machinery. Five thousand modules had already been installed, forming long rows. Production was due to ramp up drastically over the next week.

  Xante stood beside Yirella as they walked out of the portal and looked along the torus. Without the overgrown tangle of vegetation, the perspective had sharpened. The way the two-kilometer width seemed to shrink as it curved away somehow made it seem smaller.

  “I know it’s huge,” Xante said, “but are they really going to fit a quarter of a million cocoons in here?”

  “They’re going to have to,” Yirella said. “And when we’ve got them all, the toroid is going straight through the interstellar portal where we’re going to build the habitats.”