The lead stealth ship approaching the enclave wormhole was less than a metre across. It had shed its external layer of molecular blocks in an unsymmetrical sequence, taking on an irregular shape so that any detailed scan would show a natural-appearing lump of asteroidal debris. The course it was on would take it twelve hundred metres south of the generator mechanism, approaching at three thousand seven hundred and nineteen kilometres an hour. Close, but not dangerous. The corpus expected the Olyix structures to have impact protection – a gravity distortion field if nothing else, deflecting space fragments away harmlessly.
Data zipped through Yirella’s mind, delivered by the quantum array that operated at a seemingly instinctual level. The generator was indeed sitting at the centre of an inverted gravity swirl. But there were no other active measures – yet.
The stealth ships flashed in to closest approach, their courses bending slightly as they skipped off the boundary of the gravitational deflection field like spinning stones bouncing along a lake. They curved around the hemispherical wormhole generator, one on either side of the glowing entrance, while the third followed the camber of the machinery. At two kilometres out, the portals expanded.
Five negative energy generators flew through the portals, fast. Defence cruisers corkscrewed around them, ready to ward off any form of attack, be it energy-based or physical. Immanueel wasn’t concerned by that. The only goal was to establish their own grip on the wormhole structure inside a second.
For Yirella, aloof on her digital Olympus, that instant stretched out interminably thanks to the quantum computer’s hyperfast presentation, giving her old brain cells a jolt as she struggled to cope with the massive data input. The event hit her like an ice cream headache, each aspect painfully clear.
As soon as they emerged through the portals, the five generators interfaced with the throat of the wormhole, their negative energy output locking the opening in place and providing enough power to maintain it. Less than a second later, they were buffeted by a severe gravitational distortion, coupled with a ferocious bombardment of energy beams. Simultaneous with that, the Olyix generator cut its own negative energy emission. Without that, the wormhole should have collapsed. It didn’t.
Once the defence cruisers confirmed the wormhole had retained its integrity and was under corpus control, they retaliated. The Olyix generator fractured abruptly as the entire bulk was subjected to a massive graviton pulse, twisting the internal structure into an impossible physical alignment. Then the deformation reversed. The entire generator structure shattered, jagged splinters streaking outwards. Thousands bounced off the copper shells of the corpus ships, ricocheting back wildly. The remainder formed an expanding debris cloud scintillating in the tawny sunlight.
‘We got it!’ she exclaimed.
‘We certainly did,’ Immanueel agreed.
At the heart of the twinkling knot of rubble and gas, the violet glow of the wormhole’s Cherenkov radiation was steadfast.
The remaining ten stealth craft infiltrating the star system expanded their portals. Two lightyears away, the history faction’s copper-skinned armada swarmed through – a deluge that lasted five hours. With Ainsley leading one of the formations, they accelerated in sharply towards the Resolution ships.
Saints
Olyix Enclave
They stayed in the bridge simulation as the Salvation of Life passed through the gateway. Yuri took a puzzled moment to examine the images being fed to him from the sensor clusters on the arkship’s hull. At first he thought it was just a multicoloured smear – an instrument malfunction, or maybe some kind of spatial deformation like the interior of a wormhole. Then his brain finally grasped the scale, and he recognized what he was seeing.
The smear resolved into monumental veils of gas twining around each other in a slow, almost sensual, sashay, fluorescing in spectacular hues as they crawled around their prison. A nebula, then. Caged by the enclave, a spherical zone that gave a good impression of infinity but which the G8Turing measured at about ninety AUs in diameter.
‘Fuck me,’ he grunted. Five AUs away, the star at the centre of this artificial micro-universe, just visible through the thick currents of dust and gas, was a twin of the one outside, over one and a half times the size of Sol, and burning an intense white below a highly agitated corona. Yuri had never seen so many sunspots and prominences contaminating a star. Vast braids of plasma were leaping out of the chromosphere, some soaring up vertically over a million kilometres before twirling down in epic cascades of incandescent rain.
This time the star had five rings wrapped around it. The innermost was spinning around the equator in the same direction as the star’s rotation, while the second one was just outside that, inclined at twenty degrees, and spinning in the opposite direction.
The three outermost rings were also inclined at progressively steeper angles, with the outermost encircling the poles. Unlike the solid inner pair, they were composed entirely of opalescent light that shone brighter than the corona underneath.
‘Exotic matter?’ Callum speculated.
‘That’s not the usual Cherenkov radiation wavelength,’ Jessika said. ‘But given the energy level involved in maintaining temporal flow manipulation across something as vast as the enclave, it’s got to be a variant. The impression I’m getting from the onemind is that they’re the generators, and the inner pair of rings are powering them.’
‘Man, I’m not sure I can get my head around this,’ Alik said quietly. ‘Every stage of this trip we’re seeing something more impossible than the last. Maybe humans shouldn’t have gone down the technology route. Shoulda just stuck to the caves on the savannah. Kept it simple, you know.’
Yuri couldn’t recall seeing such an amazed expression on the FBI agent’s face before. And somehow he couldn’t even snark; he was finding the enclave just as imposing himself.
‘We’re not quite in a vacuum any more,’ Jessika said. ‘That nebula has a measurable density. Take a look aft of the Salvation.’
Yuri called up the correct sensor view. She was right. Behind them the gateway hung motionless like a black version of the spectral bubble outside. As the arkship accelerated away from it, they were stretching out a long tail, like an ocean-going ship of old scoring a bio-phosphorescent wake through night-time water.
‘Why?’ Kandara asked. ‘Is this stuff connected to the temporal flow?’
‘No,’ Callum said. ‘The enclave is very finite. There’s nowhere for the solar wind to escape, so it just churns around in here absorbing all the star’s surplus energy. In a billion years it’ll be a proper atmosphere – one of hydrogen, but pretty bloody thick.’
‘And hot,’ Jessika said. ‘And radioactive. The whole enclave will wind up resembling the interior of a red giant star. But hey, with any luck we won’t be here that long.’
‘A billion years in this time, or outside time?’ Alik asked.
‘No way do we care,’ Kandara said, with a sly grin. ‘Even I never planned on living a billion years.’
‘Inside time – but that was just a guess,’ Callum said. ‘Actually, all they have to do is switch the enclave off for a day and let the nebula blast away into interstellar space, then switch it back on again.’
‘Oh, well, if you put it like that . . . Simple.’
‘It doesn’t matter how things work in here,’ Alik said. ‘No one gives a shit. All we have now is the mission. We stay alive and free for as long as we can. And maybe at the end we get to tell a rescue ship where we are. That’s it. Period.’
‘There must be some way of knowing what speed that time is flowing at in here,’ Yuri said.
‘Only if we can compare it with the outside rate to get a baseline,’ Jessika told him. ‘Which we can’t.’
‘Crap.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alik persisted. ‘Concentrate on the mission. We’re here to guide a human armada to the Salvation, right? Which actually we lucked out on, because fuck knows you can’t see jack in here. Any in
vading ships will need to know where we are. We have a genuine purpose, people.’
The bridge’s main display swept the nebula aside and revealed the inside of the cave. All of them were sitting around on the rock ledges they’d claimed, unmoving.
The perspective was odd, Yuri thought, affecting him like a mild dose of vertigo. He was in the simulation looking out at himself, whereas in reality the image he was seeing only existed inside his head. The schizophrenic version of standing between two mirrors and seeing an infinity of yous.
Jessika had centred the camera on the transmitter the Avenging Heretic’s initiators had built, a simple black disc a metre wide, strong enough to blast a message across a solar system, with power reserves to last for an hour.
We’ll never get that long.
But a few minutes should be enough. Any armada that slammed its way into the enclave would have sensors capable of picking up a human broadcast.
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘So we work out the best way to get it to the hangar entrance.’
‘That’s a fluid situation,’ Kandara said. ‘We don’t know what will be in or around the hangar when the armada arrives.’
‘So start with worst case,’ Alik said. ‘It’s got armoured quint standing guard in there.’
‘Standing guard?’ Yuri snorted. ‘What is this, a medieval castle?’
‘Quint in one of those flying spheres is way more worst case, anyway,’ Kandara said.
‘There won’t be anybody paying any attention to the hangar,’ Callum said. ‘The Salvation of Life is going into some kind of storage. No invasion force is going to get here for thousands of years. The Olyix already think we’re dead, so the onemind won’t be looking for us. Actually, if we get really lucky, the onemind will have let the hangar’s biological systems die off by then. It doesn’t need them; it doesn’t need the hangar. All the Salvation has to do now is keep the cocoons alive.’
‘Congratulations,’ Alik told him. ‘That is the biggest crock of shit I have heard since we left Earth. In fact, since I don’t know when.’
Yuri bit back on a laugh as he saw Callum’s pale face darken from petulance; even his freckles had vanished in the flush. ‘All right.’ He held up a hand to Alik. ‘That’s the option we’d like to happen. But, Callum, we plan for worst case, okay? It’ll give us something to do, if nothing else.’
‘Sure, whatever.’
‘I should be able to track down the physical location of this area’s nexus,’ Jessika said.
Yuri frowned. ‘The what?’
‘Nexus. It’s like a network junction in the neuralstratum. Take that out, and the onemind can’t perceive or control the whole zone.’
‘Won’t it just use entanglement with its quint and service creatures to see in?’ Callum asked.
‘Yes, but those are restrictive viewpoints. Taking out the nexus will give us a big tactical advantage.’
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘See if you can find the nexus. If we can reach it, then we’ll have it as an option. Otherwise we need to consider the easiest way to position the transmitter.’
Kandara pointed at the black disc. ‘Put it in some kind of drone, one that can fly, and fly fast. We can get it outside before the Salvation’s onemind can react.’
‘More than one drone,’ Callum said. ‘We need some redundancy here.’
‘We need to know the armada’s here first,’ Jessika said. ‘That means keeping track of the onemind’s thoughts.’
Yuri grimaced at that prospect. ‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s see where we’re heading before we start making any plans,’ Kandara said. ‘If it’s inside some kind of big storage warehouse, we are truly screwed.’
‘A warehouse?’ Callum said. ‘For arkships?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m not getting that intimation from the onemind,’ Jessika said. ‘Just a sense, kind of like a contentment, that it’ll be joining others.’
‘We’re definitely heading somewhere,’ Alik said. ‘And the Salvation is still accelerating.’
It took a day for their destination to become apparent. Orbiting seven AUs out from the sun was a gas giant planet. Not that the sensors could obtain a visual image of it to start with; all they could see was a bright patch lurking deeper in the nebula where they were heading. But it had a tail that curved elegantly along ten per cent of its orbit – a strange blemish in this mini-cosmos that was suffused with light. It was as if someone had taken a knife to slice through the nebula, cutting open a vein of inner darkness.
‘How?’ Alik asked simply.
‘Impact,’ Callum replied, studying the small amount of data the G8Turing was extracting from the images. ‘The gas giant is ploughing its way through the nebula, and its magnetic field is acting like a buffer, bending the clouds around it. Then, when ions and electrons hit the field, it accelerates them, which heats them, so the plasma expands away – which is why it’s a darker zone relative to the surrounding nebula. It’s basically a version of the Io plasma torus around Jupiter, but the magnitude here is something else again.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Hell yes, if you don’t have radiation shielding. And thermal baffles. You need to watch for electrical discharges, too. The worst part is that sparkle at the tail’s extremity. See it? That’s basically lightning forks about the same size as a moon. Get zapped by one of those brutes, and it’s terminal game over.’
Alik brightened. ‘So it’s a potential weapon?’
‘Nah, the arkship is big and solid enough to weather it even if you could somehow lure it inside the tail. The static would make your eyes water, mind.’
‘We don’t want to disable the arkship,’ Yuri reminded the FBI agent gently. ‘There’s a billion humans living on board.’
‘Call that living?’ Alik retorted.
‘Wait till we get close enough to see the buffer effect,’ Callum said happily.
They were eleven million kilometres out before they could see through the enhanced glow of the nebula surrounding the gas giant.
‘A super-Jovian,’ Jessika announced as the figures started to resolve. ‘Two hundred thousand kilometres in diameter. But only forty times the mass.’
‘Failed star,’ Callum said. ‘Not quite big and dense enough to ignite. But hot.’
‘So, is the nebula going to slow it down enough to crash into the star?’ Kandara asked.
‘Given time,’ Jessika said. ‘But the nebula is only technically not a vacuum. For all the resistance it puts up, the gas giant has the same inertia as god. That really would take a hundred billion years to brake it out of orbit.’
‘Maybe,’ Callum muttered quietly.
Yuri could see he was studying the astronomical data intently. As they drew closer, the image improved. The gas giant had acquired wings. Vast elliptical arcs of bright rose-gold plasma currents curled around its phenomenal bulk – the result of a potent planetary magnetic field interacting with the mist of elementary particles that it was slamming though.
‘It’s like a science text illustration,’ Callum said. ‘You can actually see the magnetic flux.’
‘The planet’s ring is wrong,’ Jessika announced.
Yuri checked the display. The gas giant had a single ring, two and a quarter million kilometres above its highly agitated cloudscape, which put it just outside the fringes of the magnetosphere’s illuminated bow wave. Normally gas giant rings orbited above the equator; this one was polar, and shepherded by a rosette of five small moons. The gaps between them were filled by thousands of individual light-grey motes. They were big – relatively – for a ring. There were none of the gravel-sized particles and dust grains that made up the rings of Saturn.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ Yuri asked.
Jessika just nodded.
‘Je-zus,’ Alik said. ‘They can’t all be arkships, can they?’
‘Looks like it,’ Callum said.
‘How many?’
‘The G8 is esti
mating fifteen thousand, assuming placement is constant. We’ll be able to get a more accurate count as we approach.’
‘Fifteen thousand!’
‘Yeah.’
‘That has to be a mistake.’
‘Why?’ Jessika said. ‘Because you think it’s too high?’
‘Well . . . I don’t fucking know. Fifteen thousand!’
‘The Olyix have been doing this for a long time,’ Jessika said. ‘Consider, the sensor outpost we came through is approximately fifty thousand lightyears from here. That means it took the Olyix at least that long to fly a wormhole-carrying ship to it. And that’s assuming they didn’t expand their outposts in stages. Then there’s the unknown of how long it’s been there. Do you really think it’s likely to have picked up Earth’s radio signals the first year they arrived?’
‘Holy shit. Fifteen thousand species taken captive?’
‘It won’t be that many,’ Yuri said.
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘The human race wouldn’t fit into one arkship; there’s too many of us. And even a species as arrogant as the Olyix will need redundancy. So say they spread a captive race over two or three arkships . . .’
‘Why so low?’ Alik demanded. ‘Why not ten, or why not jam five species into one? Why—’
‘Hey, calm the hell down, okay? This is just a what if. Let me have five, okay? It’s a starting point is all I’m saying. So five ships per species, that gives us maybe three thousand different types of aliens.’
‘Three thousand evolutions cut short,’ Jessika said flatly. ‘Three thousand species denied their future. Three thousand destinies destroyed. It doesn’t matter what ethics you have; that ring is the greatest crime it’s possible to commit in this universe.’
‘Do you think your people will be in there?’ Kandara asked.
‘You’re my people,’ Jessika snapped with uncharacteristic anger. ‘But my creators, the Neána? Yes, one of those ships will be the prison for those of them that didn’t escape in time.’
Yuri almost smiled at Kandara’s little flush of awkwardness. ‘Jessika nailed it. The Olyix have been doing this a long time. Maybe a hundred thousand years, and maybe a lot longer than that. It would take them time to expand across the galaxy. They didn’t go from this one star all the way out to the rim in a single surge.’
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 33