‘Yeah. This timeshifting is hard to get your head around, isn’t it?’
‘Sure. Me. With my thick head.’
‘Don’t be like that. You have a beautiful head. I know. I’ve been inside it.’
‘Oh, crap. We really are going to do this, aren’t we?’
‘Well, the corpus weapons will do most of it for us, but yes.’ She inclined her head solemnly. ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to face the enclave.’
‘We were too cocky before. Even if we’d won at Vayan, can you imagine us going up against the enclave with ships like the Morgan used to be? We would have been cocooned in the first minute.’
‘Maybe we still can be. Who knows what the Olyix are capable of? In that respect, going to face them now is no different than before. It was never going to be the Morgan alone. The Strike plan was always for humans to gather at a neutron star and combine forces to attack the enclave. And that’s what we’ve done.’
‘What you’ve done.’
‘I armed us with hope, that’s all.’
‘Saints! How about we go living those four thousand years, Yi? We could do that, you and me, have that life. Then after we’ve lived everything there is, we go kick down the enclave door.’
‘No, Del. However wrong Alexandre’s generation were to create us. Here we are. And we have a purpose, even if we had no choice. And we’re hardly the first humans to be in this position.’
‘Well, here’s hoping we’re the last.’
*
The squad gathered around a couple of big tables in deck thirty-three’s canteen, which someone had textured to resemble a Parisian Left Bank cafe circa 1920, all high arched ceilings and flickering gaslights inside frosted glass shades, with a long polished wooden counter along one side – an effect only spoiled by having food extruders instead of stewards wearing stiff white tunics. The tall windows, which ostensibly opened out onto the city’s famed Boulevard Saint-Germain, had clouded over with tactical displays of the neutron star system.
Dellian sipped his hot chocolate as he watched the history faction prepare to depart the neutron star. Like everything in the disc around the star, the wormhole generator was a big nondescript particle with an undulant copper surface protecting whatever machinery was within. As he watched, the covering peeled back with a sinuous flourish to reveal a maw glowing with the distinct violet radiance of Cherenkov radiation. He was moderately disappointed that the shimmer didn’t curve back into an infinite vortex.
‘How far does it extend?’ Xante asked.
‘The history faction launched their carrier ship towards the Olyix sensor station twenty-two years before we arrived,’ Tilliana said. ‘And we’ve been here twelve years, so the ship is already thirty-four lightyears away, give or take. It’s only got another thirty-two to go.’
‘I’m finding it hard to believe there were only ever two factions here,’ Ellici said. ‘History and egress. Out of a hundred thousand people? Come on, that’s not realistic.’
‘Their factions are a broad church,’ Tilliana said. ‘And don’t forget there was a whole bunch of naturalists, the ones who didn’t elaborate up to corpus level.’
‘Oh, hey, the ring particles are moving, look,’ Uret said.
Dellian glanced over at the displays. The particles closest to the wormhole were accelerating towards it, with more following. The whole movement reminded him of a shoal of playful fish smoothly following the leaders.
After an hour they could see the entire ring was on the move, every particle heading for the wormhole.
‘So the whole ring is coming with us to invade the enclave?’ Janc said.
‘Every particle, yes,’ Yirella confirmed. ‘They’re either warships or specialist weapons. It’s an armada, and our little fleet is a part of it. Finally!’
Alexandre’s icon appeared in Dellian’s optik. ‘Stand by,’ sie said. ‘We’re launching towards the wormhole terminus.’
Data in the optik showed him the Morgan was under acceleration. He frowned when he saw they’d passed ten gees. The gravity felt absolutely stable, as if they were on a planet.
‘Maybe we should have had a test flight or twenty first,’ Uret said. ‘I mean, what would’ve happened if the compensators didn’t work?’
‘All the fleet ships were extensively tested while we were taking our break in the domain,’ Yirella told him. ‘They ironed all the bugs out.’
‘Er . . . what bugs?’
Her lips lifted into a faint smile. Dellian watched her closely. She was sitting with Ellici and Tilliana at the other end of the table from him, a distant expression on her face, eyes closed.
It was a pose he was seeing a lot more lately. She was otherwhere half the time, her body a spirit that moved through this world without any real grounding. While her mind . . . He knew she was using the neural interface to link directly into the Morgan’s network. It gave her a much greater perception of the digital universe than any databud could. His own interface had remained unused since his treatment. Several times he’d gone down to the Morgan’s clinic, ready to have it extracted. Each time he’d paused at the door and walked away. I want to be her equal . . . or at least not be regarded as inferior.
The visual displays filling the cafe windows were showing all one hundred and fifty of the very large particles, the ones with the powerful gravity wave emissions. They were starting to move in closer to the neutron star itself. More than half of them were changing orbital inclination, rising out of the ecliptic plane so that they were evenly dispersed above the dark surface.
‘They’re forming the cage,’ Yirella said.
Dellian didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He picked up his almond croissant and took a bite. ‘What cage?’
‘The major particles are high-power gravitonic systems that are going to contain the neutron star during transit. They’ll also act as negative energy conduits, same as every ship that flies inside a wormhole.’
‘Transit?’ Uret asked.
Yirella opened her eyes and smiled at her friends. ‘So I’m guessing none of you bothered to access the full mission plan?’
Tilliana grinned. ‘Of course they didn’t.’
‘Takes a lot of power to hold a wormhole open across sixty-odd lightyears, let alone all the way to the enclave,’ Yirella said. ‘Really, a lot.’
‘Oh, great Saints,’ Dellian blurted as mission data finally zipped across his optic. ‘It’s coming with us. They’re bringing the neutron star to the enclave.’
‘To be more accurate,’ Yirella said, ‘they’re going to attack the enclave with the neutron star. It’s the ultimate magic bullet.’
‘Against what?’ Falar demanded. ‘I know everyone keeps saying we don’t know what’s inside, but there’s got to be thousands of different Olyix structures. All the arkships storing cocoons, for a start.’
‘There’s only one target,’ Ellici said, ‘and it doesn’t get any bigger. The enclave has to have a star to power it. If you kill the star, you cut the power. Best way to kill a star—’
‘Hit it with a neutron star,’ Yirella finished for her, smiling gleefully. ‘Boom! Nova. Probably followed by collapse into a black hole if the enclave star is big enough.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Uret demanded.
Yirella’s index finger sketched a circle around her head as she smirked. ‘Is this my kidding face?’
‘Saints!’
‘This is a war, people. Win or lose, it’s the last one humans will ever fight. And it’s not one we’re going to win with half measures.’
*
It took a day and a half for all the corpus particles to fly into the wormhole. Once the majority had entered, the Morgan’s fleet – all seventeen remaining ships – slipped in after them.
Dellian was in the cafe again, watching the displays showing a feed from external sensors. When they were a thousand kilometres from the wormhole terminus, the Morgan’s negative energy conduits – small, blade-lik
e spurs – slipped out of their recesses across the fuselage. Acceleration dipped down to point one gee, guiding them along their course. The other ships of the fleet took up position behind them. Then Ainsley came gliding in behind the formation, its white fuselage reflecting the wan violet light of the wormhole’s Cherenkov radiation.
The Morgan slipped past the wormhole’s throat, and every visual image died simultaneously.
‘What the Saints . . .?’
‘We’re not in natural spacetime any more,’ Tilliana told him as she tucked into a breakfast of pancakes, maple syrup and fruit. ‘Whatever’s outside the hull doesn’t propagate photons.’
‘So how do we know where the other ships are?’
‘Their mass shows up as distortions in the Morgan’s exotic mass detectors.’
Dellian changed his optik’s input feed, so he was looking along a simple white tube leading away to vanishing point, with grey smears ahead and behind, like dense clots of mist. Then the tube surface deformed, with ripples running along it. His imagination filled in a judder as they passed the Morgan. Behind them, a black sphere was filling the narrow tunnel, forcing it to warp around its bulk. All he could think of was a snake swallowing a big rat, the bulge slowly working its way along.
‘The neutron star,’ Yirella announced in satisfaction.
Something about having the neutron star racing along right behind them was deeply discomforting. But then he hadn’t quite been prepared for the whole wormhole experience. Looking around the table, his friends hunched in their seats, nursing various cups of tea, coffee and juice, that concern was something they all seemed to be sharing.
‘We need to start training,’ Dellian announced. Anything to take his mind off what was outside. Not that there was anything outside, not even a vacuum. Which is the whole problem.
Tilliana smirked. ‘Good. We’ve been working up new scenarios for you boys. The Welcome ship at Vayan gave us the basis of some realistic environments to simulate for you when you’re in the egg. This’ll be fun.’
‘Fun?’ Xante asked cautiously.
‘For me and Ellici.’
*
The corpus armada emerged from the wormhole half a lightyear away from the Olyix sensor station. All the squads were on alert as the Morgan dropped back into spacetime. They’d joked and grumbled as they suited up three hours before passing through the terminus, blustering through the knowledge that if the Olyix were waiting, it would be over so fast they’d probably never know. But if there was a delay, a skirmish between evenly matched ships, there was a remote chance they’d be needed to play a part.
So Dellian led them onto a troop carrier, where they waited, and waited . . . Tilliana and Ellici were in their tactical situation room on deck twenty-four, with a dedicated munc-interfaced genten feeding them prodigious amounts of real-time sensor data.
Once again, Yirella had nothing to do. She waited in her cabin, lying on the bed, with the walls detextured. Her neural interface connected her directly into the Morgan’s network. The corpus humans who’d refashioned the warship had built in a full-capacity union for her. Riding the network channels was a seriously liberating experience, especially as she used a quantum array as a buffer to the vast quantity of available information. It was similar, she supposed, to the way the muncs’ neural instinct filtered data for Tilliana and Ellici. Except the processing power in the array also boosted her consciousness.
In this state it was hard to justify remaining as a single flesh body, the advantages of elaborating up to corpus status were so obvious.
There’s still time. All the time I want.
She began to compartmentalize her newly expanded mind, each segment monitoring a separate block of information – the wormhole, the corpus armada ships, the neutron star’s cage, the squad’s troop carrier, Dellian in his new utterly lethal armour suit, his cohort at ease in their new attack body casings. Her primary attention flicked effortlessly between them. I really am a guardian angel this time.
Immanueel’s presence impinged on her cognizance, a phantom hello, acknowledging her presence in the network.
‘Can I observe in concert with you?’ she asked.
‘I would welcome your company,’ they replied.
She shifted her focus, moving into several (but not all) of the particles that housed aspects of Immanueel’s corpus. Some were little more than carrier craft for warships whose weapons could devastate whole moons. Others had more complex mechanisms.
‘I didn’t realize you were this . . . I was going to say big, but it’s more like: expansive.’
‘I am what I want to be,’ they replied courteously. ‘Perhaps after FinalStrike I will reconjugate into something less aggressive.’
Together they watched as the armada began to emerge from the wormhole terminus. As they passed the throat, their copper surfaces pared back, exposing the ships within and allowing a greater range of sensors to examine their new environment. They were six lightmonths from the Olyix signal station – a modest L-class star with an airless, rocky planet orbiting two AUs out, and a Neptune-sized ice giant huddled away in the cold thirty-two AUs distant.
When the wormhole carrier ship had decelerated into this location two years ago, the history faction had dispatched a squadron of stealthed ships on towards the Olyix outpost, each one holding an expansion portal. They’d flown into the star system undetected. Now Yirella watched through dedicated links as they slowly glided into position, closing on their targets.
‘That is impressive,’ she murmured grudgingly. Sensors on the stealthed ships were showing her detailed images of the Olyix structures. They locked onto the station itself as it orbited two-thirds of an AU from the L-class star. It was a nest of seven concentric bands, spinning slowly. Their surfaces shone an intense purple in the sun’s lemon-tinted light, as if they’d been milled from a solid block of metal.
‘So that’s an Olyix habitat?’ she said. The outermost ring was two hundred kilometres in diameter.
‘It would seem so. Given their technology level, we’re surprised they need something this large to operate an outpost like this. Perhaps it is related to how many biological server constructs they appear to use.’
‘So it’s a home for a onemind, and . . . what? A stable of constructs?’
‘Possibly. But there is no question there is plenty of activity here.’
Yirella followed the station’s orbital track. Eleven huge radio telescopes were visible, pentagonal dodecahedrons that put her in mind of a clump of symmetric sunflowers, but two thousand kilometres wide. They were spaced equidistantly around the star, allowing them to scan interstellar space for any innocent radio broadcasts from emerging civilizations.
Those she ignored. Her concern was spiked by the number of Resolution ships holding position fifty thousand kilometres from the big multi-ring station. The squadron had adopted a protective formation around a Welcome ship, a rocky cylinder thirty-five kilometres long.
Her perception enclosed it, magnifying the sight until it hung in the centre of her conscience like a detailed ghost. Its profile was unpleasantly familiar from their encounter with a near-identical ship at Vayan.
‘I wonder how many humans are cocooned on board?’ she mused.
‘Unknown,’ Immanueel said. ‘We conclude it was assigned to the new war fleet en route to us. They thought they could capture us.’
‘Most likely,’ she agreed. After examining the Resolution ships, confirming they were the upgraded version, her main interest was the star’s equator, where a loop of matter was spinning around the seething corona, partially occluded by an unnatural storm of prominences that its presence whipped up. ‘That’s got to be the generator to power their wormholes. Saints! The energy they’re producing!’
‘Indeed.’
She switched focus to the wormholes that circled lazily around the station. Thirty-seven active ones, presenting as pools of Cherenkov radiation gleaming sharply against the blackness of interstellar space. T
railing further along the orbital path, and drifting out of alignment, were eleven dead hemispheres of cold machinery, their delicate exposed elements fraying with vacuum ablation over the decades. Behind them were another two inert hemispheres slowly circling around each other in a ghostly dance.
‘Those eleven in the first clump have to be the termini for the wormholes you destroyed,’ Yirella said.
‘Yes. And presumably the remaining pair were the termini for Vayan, and the lure world where they encountered the Lolo Maude.’
‘And the active wormholes? We’re assuming the largest is the one that leads back to the enclave.’
‘The others presumably lead to the ships currently flying to the neutron star and the Signal star. They’ll want to eliminate all sources of resistance.’
‘Yeah.’
She watched as three stealthed corpus ships drifted in towards the largest of the Olyix wormholes. After their two-year flight, they were now within ten thousand miles. Dark puffs of inert molecules effervesced gently out of them, performing final course corrections.
‘No indication the Olyix have detected us,’ Immanueel said. ‘Everything is going to plan.’
Yirella had to wonder how much anxiety she was subconsciously leaking through the neural interface. Or perhaps Immanueel just knew her too well. She pulled her attention back.
All around the Morgan, specialist systems and armada warships were converging on the expansion portals that were entangled with their twins in the stealth ships. They began to form up in their designated assault sequence, and she concentrated on the five negative energy generators that would target the wormhole that led back to the enclave. If they didn’t get through, or if they failed to take control of the wormhole, the armada would have to take the long way around. They were utterly critical.
She finally understood why humans on old Earth had assigned deities to the constellations. It was pleasing to believe there was a higher power you could beg to circumvent fate. Useless . . . but pleasing.
Saints, but I wish I wasn’t so smart.
‘Here we go,’ Immanueel said.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 32