She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but the study certainly didn’t contain it. Her principal fear was that anything that might verify that Kenelm had a hidden agenda would be contained in deeply encrypted files buried somewhere in the Morgan’s network. Given how much data was stored in the ship’s memory cores, they would be almost impossible to find unless a genten ran a full content analysis through each individual file – a task that would likely take centuries.
The remotes were directed into the formal reception room. After all, wasn’t it Saint Yuri who said the best way to hide something was in plain sight? She frowned. Or was that Saint Callum?
The bedroom was next. When the remotes finished that, she lay down for a short rest . . .
Lounge.
Dining room.
Spa.
By the time the remotes scampered en masse into the entertainment room, Yirella had been in the captain’s quarters for nearly two days – eating, sleeping, fretting. The antique book she was flicking through almost dropped through her fingers when the remotes told her they’d completed their scan. Everything was normal. Nothing was out of place, nothing was hidden behind false panels, there were no concealed alien gadgets.
‘Shit.’
She got up and slid the book back into the shelf with all the others after a quick check of the images she’d taken to confirm it was in the right place. Kenelm had twenty volumes detailing the complete history of Falkon’s terraforming process. They’d been printed on that planet, according to the title page. Her hand rested on the spine. She didn’t move it away.
Kenelm clearly valued the books. And why not? They were important, a part of their heritage.
But why these?
Her brief flick through a few pages showed her they were spectacularly dull scientific papers. Even the illustrations were boring: bacteria, genetic sequences, three-dimensional graphs, a clone tank, laboratory equipment, assessment team expeditions, skyscraper-sized biologic initiators, orbital geological surveys.
She remembered Saint Yuri’s story, how he doggedly followed Saint Callum’s desperate hunt for his wife, Savi. How every good detective understood that people could be defined by what they considered important.
‘What am I not seeing?’ she asked, and pulled out volume one.
The Avenging Heretic
Week Four
‘Gotta admit,’ Alik said. ‘This is my idea of exercise.’
Kandara just rolled her eyes in derision at male hormones as she pulled on her ubiquitous black singlet. There was barely enough elbow room for that in the tiny cabin. ‘Very flattering. You need to use the gym more. We don’t know how long we’re going to be doing this.’ She started hunting around for her sneakers. She saw them under the cot, beneath a tangle of his clothes.
‘I was hoping for quite a while.’
‘Idiot.’ She shoved his legs out of the way and sat on the edge of the cot to get her shoes on. ‘I mean the whole mission.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Alik’s stiff features compressed into a sulky frown.
‘Seriously? Second thoughts already?’
‘No. Just waking up to the sharp end of reality. Time is an abstract, you know. People don’t really grasp it properly. I think it’s because we’re all in denial about growing old.’
She gave his solid face with all its reprofiled muscle and plastic-sheen skin a weary glance. ‘Well . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t rub it in. Someone in my position has to go with the flow. Everyone on the Hill has more clone parts than original these days.’
She patted his legs. ‘Not any more.’
‘Hey, DC survived. Well . . . its shield was intact when S-Day started.’
‘I bet Rio’s a mess.’ For a moment she was back there, running along Copacabana’s hot sands with the young and exuberant, strutting their stuff under the sun. The smell of street stall food and suncream in the breeze, the bands playing along Avenida Atlantica living the daydream a viz-u producer would stop and beckon them over. Nightlife: the football supporters going crazy in bars, sirens of emergency bikes bulldozing revellers off the clear routes. Marches of pride, marches of protest, lovers alone in their world, families thronging the parks, everybody living good under the sun. The Carnaval – a beautiful, wild, joyous party of laughing maniacs winding its way along the streets like an earthbound rainbow.
No more.
And now this sterile, modified alien spaceship was the rest of her life. Probably coffin, too.
‘Sweetheart.’ Alik snorted. ‘The whole fucking world’s a filthy mess now.’
‘Yes.’ Sweetheart! Oh, Mary.
‘Hey, on the bright side, we’ll get to see it made new when this is over.’
She grinned in bemusement. ‘That is so not you.’
‘What?’
‘Optimism. That we’ll get to complete any stage of this insane mission, let alone finish it.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Somebody has to be. What use am I back there? Now that the Salvation of Life is retreating, there won’t be another one-on-one fight on Earth until the Olyix reinforcements turn up – in twenty, maybe thirty, years’ time. I’ll be too old by then.’
‘Never!’
‘Now you’re just trying to get inside my pants.’
‘Can’t blame a guy for trying.’
‘You can stop. Both of us are practical adults.’
‘Okay. Tonight?’
‘Sure.’
His narrow smile tightened as his gaze slid across the shallow bulges on her forearms. ‘Hey, I thought you’d got rid of your peripherals . . .’
‘I did. The originals.’ She winked. ‘Then I got myself some new ones.’
‘Je-zus. But Lim said they might be dangerous when we’re in the tank. No one knows what long-term immersion will do to them.’
‘Yeah. Which is why Lim made these tank-proof ones for me in an initiator.’
‘Why the hell wasn’t I told they were available?’
‘Did you ask?’
‘Fuck’s sake!’
A grinning Kandara stepped out of his cabin into the main lounge. It was the lower third of the ship’s main cylindrical chamber, ringed by the tiny personal sleep cabins they used when they weren’t in their suspension tanks. That didn’t leave much floorspace, and the table occupied most of it. At least the mid-deck had room for the exercise machines, along with the washroom and a G8Turing-run medical bay, which she prayed she’d never need. Prejudice – but she preferred human doctors. Top deck housed the suspension tanks and their support systems. Her initial hope that they’d each get one of the other chambers for personal quarters was quickly dashed when the engineers started filling them with drones and printers and a batch of Neána-technology initiators. The old Olyix bio-gunk tanks were now full of raw materials the human machinery used. Everyone on their mission strategy team swore the trove of equipment would cover most contingencies. Kandara didn’t believe that for a second; they were corporate denizens who just didn’t grasp the maxim that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Callum was sitting at the central table, eating scrambled eggs and salmon, with a mug of tea steaming beside his plate. ‘Morning,’ he said, waving a fork in her direction.
She gave him a mildly awkward smile and went over to the food printer. Her altme, Zapata, splashed a reassuring green medical icon; her gland was working fine, keeping her neurochemistry stable. Not that there’s been any trauma to trigger schizophrenia. And if the gland packs up, I’ll just use Alik for stress relief. It was all she could do not to laugh out loud. Ah, the romance.
‘I’m going to stay out another twenty-four hours,’ she announced as the printer squirted out her smoothie. ‘One more aerobics session.’
‘I haven’t got a clue why you think you need that,’ Callum said. ‘It’s us truly old crocks that should be hitting the treadmills.’
‘Treadmills? Am I the only one who uses the exercise apparatus?’
‘I used one of them a couple of days ago. My legs are still on fire with DOMS.’
‘Sweet Mary, I thought the docs fixed us all up. What kind of state were you in before? We were only in the tanks for three weeks. That was just a kindergarten trial run. The real slog doesn’t start until we reach the sensor outpost, or whatever it is.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She collected her smoothie and sat down beside him. The gloom in his tone was one she shared. It had been a huge blow to discover the Salvation of Life wasn’t flying directly back to the enclave. Instead, as they came to comprehend more of the onemind’s thoughts, they realized the wormhole ended at some kind of local observation base. The Olyix had built thousands of them scattered across the galaxy, each one watching for the emergence of sentient species in their own particular sector. That was where the wormhole back to the enclave star system waited.
It was a perfectly logical set-up. Just one they hadn’t anticipated. She almost wanted to break cover so they could send Alpha Defence a message: You smartarses didn’t think of everything after all.
‘You know what bothers me about it?’ she said.
‘Tell me.’
‘The Neána didn’t know.’
‘About the outpost?’
‘Yeah. We are completely dependent on their knowledge and their technology. And the first time we use it . . . Pow! Instant problem.’
‘Pessimist. I’d say issue, not problem. So the Olyix enclave is further away than we expected. It doesn’t change the mission profile, or what we’re dealing with. And to be fair, when they arrived on Earth, Jessika and Soćko weren’t expecting us to do anything as fucking stupid as this mission. Deliberately abandoning every planet we have so our descendants can have a crack at the enclave? When you look at it the morning after, it’s really not a good idea.’
‘I know. But really, this ship: it’s just a tiny part of the whole exodus plan. Whether we live between stars like the Neána or go for Emilja’s migratory option and hop between planets while we build up an armoury of the universe’s most dangerous weapons, there will be a time when we have to face the Olyix. All you and I are doing really is giving our species a fractionally better chance to succeed. If we fail, then they’ll find the enclave by themselves eventually.’
Callum raised his mug of tea. ‘Great pep talk. Thanks.’
‘Sorry.’ She chuckled. ‘What can I say? I’m a pragmatist.’
‘I’ll take that. At least it means we have a slightly better chance of pulling this off.’
Kandara raised her glass of smoothie. ‘And in the meantime, enjoy the view.’ She sipped the green slush and wrinkled her nose at the taste. It wasn’t quite right, not like the one she used to blend at home, with real fruit and horrifically expensive organic yogurt. Did knowing it wasn’t real emphasize the taste difference? If there is one.
Alik came out a couple of minutes later. He wore a white T-shirt and shorts. It didn’t look right. Kandara had become so used to seeing him in a suit that having him walking around in his underwear unsettled her world almost as much as knowing they were inside an alien arkship, which itself was inside a wormhole.
‘Gonna get a shower,’ he announced and headed up the ladder to the mid-deck.
Kandara watched Callum struggle to keep his face composed. ‘Just don’t.’ She sighed wearily.
‘I’m not judging. But you kids make sure you use protection, okay?’
‘Oh, fuck off!’
He started laughing. Despite herself, Kandara found she was grinning happily. ‘It’s a long flight,’ she said defensively.
‘And getting longer.’
‘Oh, Mary, forgive me.’ She walked over to the food printer and ordered up a bacon sandwich with mashed avocado and a tiny dash of spiced tomato sauce, plus a warm pain au chocolat. Add black coffee and an orange juice, and she was truly the child of international resort cuisine. One way of keeping the lost Earth alive.
Yuri came out of his cabin as she was sitting down again. He was wearing an FC Dynamo midfield shirt and black shorts. Somehow the choice suited him. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d get back into the tank today.’
‘Impatient for action?’ she asked.
‘Bored.’
‘The creeperdrone fake is making progress,’ Callum said. ‘We’ll soon have something to see.’
*
During the first week of the Avenging Heretic sitting in the hangar, all they did was observe, and absorb as many of the arkship onemind’s thoughts as they could. Once they established that the onemind had essentially zero interest in individual ships, Jessika set about infiltrating the local neuralstratum and gently deflecting its scrutiny. The perception cells on the thick trunk-like pipes that webbed the hangar surfaces still saw everything; it was just that the interpretation routines that received those images didn’t care.
With a zone of out-in-the-open concealment established, they watched the biological creatures that tended to the Salvation of Life’s basic maintenance tasks. She’d seen recordings of the arkship’s three caverns – not dissimilar to a human habitat’s interior. The variance came from the way the environment was sustained. Humans used machines in their space habitats; the Olyix chose a menagerie of creatures instructed by the onemind.
Very few Olyix quints ventured into the hangar. Some had appeared in the first days, performing inspections on the transports that showed the worst damage. Other than that, there had been very little activity. Things like giant slugs slid slowly across the gently curving floor and up the black bark of the pipes in a routine that seemed completely unaffected by the arrival of the transport ships. Smaller spidery organisms skipped about on five legs, tending to specialist cell patches. It was one of those that Jessika constructed in the Avenging Heretic’s biologic initiator, like the creeperdrones black-ops teams used to use to spy on their targets. They had detailed files on all the creature types humans had encountered during their visits to the arkship before the invasion – size, weight, colouring, speed and manoeuvrability, even a guess at the autonomous intelligence level.
The fake spider creature had been released into the hangar three days ago. Jessika had directed it, slowly taking it around the base of the walls, avoiding the genuine Olyix service creatures. As it went, it spooled out a single long-molecule fibre that conducted data. She stopped the creature every few hundred metres and emplaced a sensor clump the size of a pinhead, opening up their view of the hangar.
Kandara approved of that. Nothing could sneak up on them now. Not that there was ever going to be much they could do if the Olyix did spot them.
Now the remote had reached the big entrance to the hangar. An invisible force membrane covered it, holding the air in – similar to Earth’s shields, although this one had permitted the transport ships to pass through. Jessika walked the creeperdrone fake forwards. The force opposing the remote was similar to walking directly into a hurricane. It edged forwards, exerting itself at the top end of its power. When it broke through, it was in vacuum. The downward curving passage beyond was devoid of the pipe trunks that covered the hangar; naked rock walls continued all the way to the hole that broached the arkship’s surface. The creeperdrone stood on the edge and looked out.
‘Has it glitched?’ Alik asked.
They were back in their tanks, which put them back on the simulation bridge. It had changed since their initial flights back in the Delta Pavonis system. Now there were split levels and curving rails. Walls had unoccupied crew stations, with chairs; consoles had rows of switches and keyboards between small screens filled with slim, colourful graphics. Instead of the original display that had hung between their consoles, they now had a panoramic wall screen ahead of them. Kandara suspected either Yuri or Callum was oozing memories of old sci-fi shows into the simulation template. But she did have to admit, the bridge felt a lot more like a real spaceship now.
Everyone stared at the main screen. It showed nothing. When she reviewed the
direct feed from the remote to confirm its location, the lip of rock slipped into her vision. It was in the right place. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t we see the wormhole?’
‘Technically, you can,’ Callum said. ‘It’s the part of the image that doesn’t exist. At a guess, I’d say the interior of the wormhole is a continuum that doesn’t permit photon propagation.’
Kandara had forgotten Callum had a physics degree. Sure, it was a century out of date, but still, it was the only one on board. ‘You mean it’s dark?’
‘No. There is no visuality. It’s a structure composed entirely of exotic matter, so it probably doesn’t even qualify as an open space. It’s not surprising the creeperdrone’s sensors see nothing. I’m guessing our poor old animal brains interpret that as black.’
‘What about Cherenkov radiation?’
‘Not in here. Though now you bring it up, there should be somewhere the arkship’s physical structure intersects the exotic matter. Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘So what you’re saying is we’re not going to see the end of the tunnel approaching?’ Yuri said.
‘That’s about it.’
‘The Salvation of Life will certainly be aware of it,’ Jessika said. ‘From what I can make out, there’s only a couple of days’ travel remaining until we’re at the sensor base.’
‘We need to finalize our actions,’ Yuri said. ‘Do we try and release a Signal transmitter there?’
‘It’s not the enclave,’ Alik said quickly.
‘Yeah, but we both know now the enclave is a lot further away than anyone was thinking. The pulse those Signal transmitters are going to put out have a limited range.’
‘I thought detection was limited by the size of the radio telescope humans use to find it.’
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 18