Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  But he was squad leader, which made it his job to rally them. I don’t want to let them down. He pushed off and glided through the air to Xante. “Well, fuck, huh?”

  Xante gave him a weak smile. Even that clearly took a lot of effort.

  “Hey,” Dellian shouted, looking around. “Anyone make it out intact?”

  Some shook their heads. Others couldn’t even meet his gaze. The atmosphere in the chamber was worse than they’d known when they’d been stranded in the fake flyer accident all those years ago. The sim had taken them right back down to wrecked little kids again. And he resented that, feeling a spark of anger amid the gloom. “Tilliana,” he called, “that was an eleven on my utter bastard meter. Uret, no sex for her tonight. That’s an order, clear?”

  Uret’s lips lifted a fraction. “Clear.”

  A few halfhearted smiles appeared around the chamber.

  The chamber door irised open five meters away from where Dellian was floating. Tilliana came sliding up through the gap, an arm reaching out to steady herself on Rello’s egg pedestal.

  Dellian had assumed she’d have a sly smile on her face, a few teasing phrases ready about how useless they all were. The banter would flow, camaraderie restored. Instead she looked troubled, which resurrected all his own doubts about what had just happened.

  Ellici air-swam into the chamber, also looking upset. But with that came a degree of exasperation. She had always lacked Tilliana’s patience.

  “All right,” Dellian said to the pair of them. “Tell us that wasn’t a suicide mission.”

  “Of course not,” Ellici said. “You barely got through fifteen percent of the asteroid.”

  “You?” Xante challenged dangerously. “What happened to us? To we? You’re supposed to be our guardian angels. We’re too dumb to figure out what’s happening, remember? We rely on you.”

  “Ease off,” Dellian said, making it as casual as he could.

  “Fucking felt like a suicide job,” Falar grunted. He was plucking medical patches from his neck, his mood dark.

  “So how do we get through the asteroid?” Mallot asked.

  “Come on,” Tilliana said. “They don’t give us cheat sheets. These sim missions are only going to get worse from now on. Better get used to it.”

  “Thanks,” Xante said. “Demoralized—best way to go up against the enemy for real.”

  Dellian gave him a warning glance. “Enough. We’re a team. We go through this together.”

  “I was about to warn you about the passageway organics,” Tilliana said. “I was slow. Sorry.”

  “So you did have a way out?” Uret asked her gently.

  “She still doesn’t get any tonight,” Rello chided.

  At least that brought a few grins, Dellian thought.

  “No,” Tilliana said slowly. “But if the bioluminescence was dimming, it must mean the cells were diverting their nutrient energy for another function. And they were.”

  “Hindsight,” Colian said regretfully. “Always the clearest.”

  “All right,” Dellian said, making an effort to get them all back on track. “We’ll have a full review tomorrow before we go back in. It’s a wash for the rest of today. The Saints know we need a break after that. Maybe a drink.”

  They agreed, their mood lifting slightly. The last connection pads were pulled off bodies. The squad started to air-dive toward the entrance. Uret drifted alongside Tilliana and gave her a soft kiss as they slid past the rim, both of them laughing at the jeers they received.

  Dellian was just about to leave when Xante clamped a hand around his ankle.

  “We’re not a team,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Dellian asked. He certainly wasn’t in the mood for this. He had a pleasant time all lined up, which he knew would ease him over his frustration. Then tomorrow they’d be back up here in the high-orbit station ready to kick the shit out of that bastard asteroid assault sim.

  “Ellici and Tilliana are only two thirds of a team,” Xante said.

  “Great Saints, rest this! It’s been years.”

  “And she’s not coming back. I get it. But we need someone to replace her. Yirella wouldn’t have let us get caught with our asses hanging out like this. Fucking Saints, I thought I was going to die back there!”

  “It’s a sim.”

  “Yeah, like you were all relaxed and calm. We were a fucking shambles in there, all of us.”

  “Overcommitted,” Dellian muttered. “They warned us about that. The sims are so fucking real, you cooperate in suspending belief.”

  “Well, you’d better ask them for training to get over that, or therapy—or something.” He shook his head. “I’m actually nervous about going back in there tomorrow. And that’s ridiculous.”

  “I know.”

  * * *

  —

  After a shower and a change of clothes, Dellian took a portal over to Kabronski Station, orbiting 80,000 kilometers above Juloss. The heart of the old skyfort formation was a rectangular grid, twenty kilometers long, with weapon systems arranged in neat rows on the outer side, all powered up and vigilant for the enemy’s arrival. In the middle of the side that faced Juloss, a gravity anchor pylon extended for fifty kilometers down toward the planet, keeping the whole structure aligned. The pylon ended at a small metal asteroid, where a two-kilometer toroid housed the military crew and construction managers for the battleships being fitted out in the attendant cluster of industrial stations that floated in the grid’s shadow. There were also some other, more specialist, teams resident in the toroid.

  Yirella was waiting for him in the garden section, a chunk of toroid three hundred meters long, with a geodesic roof of thick transparent hexagons. The vegetation was tropical and after two hundred years getting quite overgrown despite the best efforts of the horticultural remotes to trim and prune.

  As always, she bent down and greeted him with a platonic kiss. After that unthinking greeting, she stopped and studied his face. “What happened?”

  “Saints! That obvious?”

  Her smile grew taunting. “Ah, the asteroid base with biowall tunnels.”

  “You know about it?”

  “The sim team has been preparing that for weeks. They’ve been giggling like nine-year-olds telling fart jokes over how you’d all react.”

  “It wasn’t funny, Yi.”

  “I know.” She put her arm through his and walked with him down a path. “That contraction thing freaked me out.”

  “You’ve been in it?” he asked in astonishment, not knowing if he should be angry or impressed with her.

  “Yeah. They needed volunteers for the test runs. I made a few suggestions to improve the effect. The threat of the suit seals failing and drowning you under pressure, that was me.” She sounded proud.

  “You helped make it worse?”

  Now her grin was mischievous. “I know you boys best. The sim crew values my input.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “The enemy isn’t going to go easy on us.”

  “I know, but…you!” He shook his head in mock bewilderment. “Such betrayal.”

  “Hey.” She gave him an affectionate slap.

  It was moments like that, the ease they had between them, that gave him hope for the future. Over the last year they’d regained so much of what they used to have. They met when their schedules matched, talked, sometimes viewed dramas together; several times they’d been to concerts. Not quite like the old times. They hadn’t become lovers again. Yet. But the relationship, whatever it was, had been too much for Xante. “I can’t compete with this,” he’d told Dellian as he moved out of their quarters.

  “With what?” a depressed Dellian had challenged.

  Xante gave him a simple shrug. “Hope. That you’ll get back together with her. That the pair of you will
fly on to Sanctuary after the final battle, and live happily ever after. Crap like that, you’re never here anymore.”

  “I am!”

  “Not in your head, you’re not. You spend all your head time thinking of her.”

  “I tried an electrical discharge,” Dellian now explained to Yirella. “But I panicked and put too much power into it. Fried every chunk of technology in there.”

  “Okay, well, the idea was sound.”

  “Yeah? So—”

  “No, I’m not giving you any clues.”

  Dellian managed a weak smile and put his arm around her. “But it is solvable? We can get to the negative energy loop chamber?”

  “Probably.” She laughed.

  They wandered along to one of their favorite groves, where the trunks of the older trees grew upward in an identical shallow curvature as they followed the camber of the toroid’s rotational gravity, as if they’d all bowed to the same wind. He always found walking underneath them to be slightly disconcerting. Orchids and trailing moss swamped the boughs above, with bright-plumed birds zipping about. On the edge of the grove was a small waterfall emptying into a pond filled with ancient gold and black koi fish. A marble table was perched beside it, inside the ribs of a radial pergola draped with sweet flowering jasmine.

  When they sat down, remotes started to unpack their meal and lay it out for them. Dellian sipped some of the wine they poured and scanned the small slice of star field he could see through the shaggy vegetation. Juloss was always visible just above the lip of the geodesic, while the various free-flying subsidiary stations slipped in and out of view, tracing short arcs.

  “Is that the Morgan?” he asked, as one of the battleship assembly stations appeared.

  She barely glanced up from the plate of seared scallops the remote had put down in front of her. “No, the McAuley. You can’t see the Morgan from here.”

  “It’s nearly finished.”

  “I know.”

  He started eating his own scallops, wishing there were more than just three. Ship assignments had finally come through last week, and the Morgan was going to be carrying Dellian and his squad out into the galaxy. He was desperate to know if Yirella was going to be on board with them, but too terrified to ask. If she wasn’t, then that was it; the end. Relativistic time dilation would ensure their parting would be final. Though perhaps one day in a few thousand years, one of them might read of the other in a history file, when the human race was finally reunited.

  He opened his mouth to ask, but heard himself say: “How’s the lure coming?”

  Yirella’s smile was bright and genuine. “Really good. The enemy won’t be able to resist investigating this civilization when they start broadcasting radio signals. We’re calling them the Vayan. They’ll be quadruped, with a double-section body, like two doughnuts one on top of the other, with legs on the lower section, and arms and mouths on the second, then on the top they’ll have a prehensile sensor neck. They can move in any direction without having to turn around.”

  Dellian frowned as he tried to picture that. “Really? I thought animals evolved to go in one direction. There’s always a front and back.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not an absolute. Wilant had an animal genus that possessed quintuple directionality.”

  “Where’s Wilant?”

  “It’s a cryoplanet, over seven thousand light-years away. A traveler generation starship found it a long time ago. They stopped there for fifty years to study the indigenous species. There was some interesting biochemistry involved.”

  “A cryoplanet?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought everything moves slowly on a cryoplanet.”

  “Their metabolism energy levels are lower, so generally mobile life there isn’t as fast as a standard world. But the species on Wilant had a chemical reserve, so they could move faster if they were threatened. Sort of like us with an adrenaline rush.”

  “Okay, and they had—what? Five heads?”

  “No, they used sound waves to examine their environment. They could process the echo in every direction at once. They had a unique neurology to give them that ability.”

  “So these things were predators, like the morox?”

  She shook her head in amusement and sipped some of the wine. “Not quite. More like starfish. They moved through seas of methane, clogged up with a lot of hydrocarbon slush—hence the sonar.”

  “You’re kidding. You’re dreaming up a sentient species based on blind starfish?”

  “It’s an extrapolation exercise. The Wilant neurology gives us a logical progression to make sentient Vayans appear realistic. We’re already growing full-scale Vayan biologics in molecular initiators. They need refining, but they’re valid. It’s really interesting work, Dellian; very challenging. I love it.”

  He paused as remotes cleared the starter dishes away. “And that’s what you do? Make the actual aliens?”

  “The biochemistry is fascinating, but no. I’m on the worldbuilding team. We’re fashioning their entire culture based on the physiology we created, along with their history, language, art. Deciding how territorial and aggressive they are, and why.”

  “And are they? Aggressive?”

  “Oh, yes. Not quite as much as we were pre-spaceflight, but enough to give them a believably fast technological development. That way we can get the radio emissions up and broadcasting as soon as we find a suitable planet.”

  “The whole history of a species.” He pursed his lips. “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be—well, do. But our job is to design the parameters and plot the overall timeline. Even gentens lack imagination at that level, so it’s still down to good old human creative brainpower. Once we’ve got that framework in place, the gentens will churn out the details, like names and places and micro-politics, scandal and gossip and celebrities. Crap like that.”

  He raised his wineglass to her. “So basically, you’ve become a goddess, creating a whole world.”

  She lifted her own glass and touched it to his. “Yep. So behave, or I’ll start smiting you with thunderbolts.”

  “I believe you.” Without any thought, he leaned over the table and kissed her. “Come with us on the Morgan. Please, Yirella. I can’t bear the idea of doing this without you. No, forget doing this. I just don’t want to be without you.”

  The expression she responded with frightened him. He’d seen it once before: that desperation and loneliness, the night before poor Uma and Doony.

  Her arm stretched across the table toward him. He saw the fingers trembling and instinctively grasped her hand.

  “Do you mean that?” she asked. “Really? After everything?”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve never been more certain about anything.”

  “I’m not sure I deserve you.”

  “Wrong way round.”

  “I am coming with you, on the Morgan. I had them assign me there a month ago.”

  Dellian couldn’t help it; he started laughing. “You are so much smarter than me, aren’t you?”

  “No. I just think things through quicker, that’s all.”

  “If that’s not a definition of smart, I don’t know what is.”

  She came over and sat in his lap, grinning as she twined her arms around his neck. “I want to be honest with you.”

  “Same here.”

  “Dellian, I’m serious. We can’t guarantee a long-term future; it’s wrong to try and tell ourselves that can happen. You and I aren’t traveler generation humans. We exist to fight a war—a fact that haunts me still, and probably always will. We may win, we may not, or we might die achieving victory. The only inevitable part of this is that the Morgan will fight. And the odds are not good.”

  “I know. But whatever time we have, we get to spend it together. That’s all I need.”
>
  Her nose rubbed gently against his. “My Dellian. So noble.”

  Dellian pushed forward and kissed her. It was every bit as good as he remembered.

  THE ASSESSMENT TEAM

  FERITON KAYNE, NKYA, JUNE 25, 2204

  I hadn’t known Jessika had been part of the team the Utopials had brought together to deal with Cancer. She was sitting down at the other end of the cabin, next to Loi. The pair of them had been sharing quite a bit of time since the Trail Ranger had left Nkya’s base camp. And both of them had pasts I didn’t know about. Not covered up, but it would clearly take a lot of digging to provide a full timeline for both of them.

  Of course, you could say the same for Yuri, Callum, and Alik, too. More so, given how many layers of security their records were buried under. But they were my direct route into the real policy makers—the ones who mattered. The ones who logically could be the source of human paranoia toward the Olyix, and the phenomenal resources various human factions had wasted by spying on them. I had been convinced that one of them was working for an unseen malicious enemy who opposed every benefit the Olyix had brought to the Sol system. Kandara had been an outside chance, as well; it had been an odd decision for the Utopial senior council to bring her in to eliminate the sabotage. I thought it might be Callum, but now it seemed he didn’t approve of her at all. Still, that much coincidence was unusual; perhaps God was trying to tell me something…

  Alik nodded ruefully after Kandara finished telling her story. “So that’s what happened to Cancer. I always wondered.”

  “Let me guess,” Yuri said. “Your precious Bureau never found out who had employed Cancer to sabotage Bremble’s industrial stations and Onysko’s research teams.”

  “We looked,” Callum said. “For years. But for all she was a complete bitch, Cancer was good. She left very little trace, digital or physical.”