The shape stopped moving for a moment.
‘An interesting assessment,’ Immanueel’s voice said. ‘In the time the Olyix crusade has been active, they have invaded and captured over three thousand alien races. The exact number is unknown to us, as details like that are not important to quint. They do so lack our unquenchable curiosity about the universe. Perhaps if you are born, or created, into a society that has been unassailable for so long, you no longer feel the need to ask questions, for all have been answered already.’
‘Yeah. That would certainly account for their arrogance, the belief that they’re right. I just can’t stop thinking about how much damage they’ve caused in cosmic ecological terms. It’s devastating.’
‘Unlike our own expansion, which has been scattering terrestrial DNA across a sizeable portion of the galaxy.’
‘Touché.’ She watched Immanueel’s outline resolve as their biophysical body reached the base of the wall. ‘So you don’t think it was a god then, sitting up there in the future?’
‘I consider it extremely unlikely. Which I admit sounds like an agnostic answer rather than a definitive atheist assertion. More likely it is some remnant of the Olyix trying to reinforce a temporal loop to bolster its own position.’
‘More paradox.’
‘Not entirely. The fate – or destiny – of the Olyix is undoubtedly linked to this entity. Consider this: who else would know where to aim the tachyon beam? This entity would have to know both where the star is in that time, and that there is someone there to receive it. Not to mention using a language that the pre-crusade era Olyix will understand.’
‘Gods are omniscient,’ she mused.
‘Indeed, so why do they need captives from the past to be brought to their altar?’
‘You mean, why does a next-generation Olyix need them? That’s likely what this is. We will need to ask it.’
Immanueel’s biophysical body straightened up as they detached themself from the wall. Their tail was the last part to be free, and flicked around in celebration. ‘Ah, I always enjoy taking my first breath. It is an experience I associate with my old singlebody waking from slumber.’
She gave their tall body a bemused grin. Talking about gods . . . ‘You’ve scheduled departure for seventeen hours.’
‘We have, yes. Is there a problem?’
‘No. I just wanted to check you think you have everything you need. We can wait here as long as you like while your manufacture systems build more weapons.’
Immanueel’s urbane face produced a beatific smile. ‘If Final-Strike cannot be accomplished with what we have now, it cannot be accomplished at all.’
‘Okay, then. I just wanted to ask. I’m officially here to tell you the advisory council think four days is enough flight time for us.’
‘A day for each year, then. Very well, we will manipulate the time flow inside your ships accordingly. May I ask what you intend to do during that time?’
‘The squads will have one final day of training. Then it’s just going to be gym work and contingency planning. It should bring the squads to peak efficiency when we reach the gateway star.’
‘Commendably efficacious. However, I was referring to you, dearest genesis human. What will you do during FinalStrike?’
‘I’ll watch. There’s nothing else I can do by then. We either win or we don’t. I’ve done everything I can now.’
‘Indeed you have.’ Immanueel reached down and took her hands. ‘There is no need for you to come with the armada to the enclave.’
‘No! Don’t even go there. I am not abandoning my friends and my Dellian. I never will.’
‘The genesis human would consider every rational proposal.’
‘Good luck finding her.’
‘You haven’t even heard what I’m suggesting.’
Hating herself, she said: ‘Go on.’
‘A subgroup of my aspects could break away and become independent.’
‘Wait, what? I thought that was . . . not exactly illegal, but frowned upon. Corpus humans don’t divide up, do they?’
‘Not normally, no. But one way or another, we face the end of an era. We have done everything we can to ensure the survival of our species, and the egress faction has guaranteed that some humans will remain forever free. If this armada of ours fails to defeat the Olyix, then we will not survive the weapons that are being deployed in the last battle.’
Yirella took a shaky breath. ‘Okay, I wasn’t expecting you to be quite that blunt. But that’s not how we should venture into this. Pessimism never won any battle.’
‘Ah, yes, a Dwight D. Eisenhower quote, I believe.’
‘You believe right.’
‘I do not go into this with pessimism, Yirella. Objectivity is my creed. And given the odds, a fallback would be prudent. You could create a secondary version of yourself as well.’
‘Fuck! No way. Absolutely not.’
‘If FinalStrike is successful, we would simply remerge with our originals. If not, you live.’
Yirella squeezed their hands warmly. ‘Without anything to live for. No, Immanueel, I see you are kind and sweet, but no. Whatever fate has waiting for us at the enclave, I will embrace it with the people I have shared my life with. And I’m glad you’re now one of them.’ She stood on tiptoes and kissed them gently on the cheek. ‘Thank you.’
*
Ainsley’s android was waiting outside the deck thirty-three canteen like a forlorn statue. Yirella slowed as she saw him and produced a mournful smile. She knew why he was there.
‘Join us,’ she said. ‘The whole squad’s inside. Your friends.’
‘Your friends, you mean.’
‘Fire-forged friends, and all that. They’d be glad to see you. We’re watching the armada form up. It’s becoming something of a tradition.’
‘Another reason I can’t stay.’
‘Yeah, I accessed the formation plan. You’re taking point.’
‘Gotta have someone at the front who’ll shoot first and ask questions later.’
‘A later that’s never.’
‘That’d be me. You got an argument against it?’
‘No.’ She shook her head, studying his blank white face for any intimation of expression. ‘Immanueel told me there are some of your weapons they can’t replicate.’
‘Yeah, the part of my armamentarium that came from the Katos. I don’t remember much of them from the Factory era; I guess that was edited out of my memory for security. But they’ve taken the understanding of phase matter up to the celestial level. Trust me, these are the swords gods use to smite the unrighteous.’
‘Interesting. So why didn’t they ever go head-to-head with the Olyix?’
‘Same problem we have, I guess. If we lose, the Olyix gain the technology. Makes it a fuck of a lot harder for the next guys who come along.’
‘That makes no sense. Why give it to you, then?’
‘I’m supposed to be running a guerrilla campaign, remember. Factory ships like me were supposed to hassle the Olyix in this portion of the galaxy so the exodus descendants can finally catch a break. Out here in the big dark, they’d never be able to catch me, like they never caught the Katos mothership. I’ve got evasion techniques like you’ve never seen. See what I did there?’
‘Oh, dear.’ She grinned fondly even as she winced. ‘So we’re not likely to ever find Sanctuary?’
‘No.’
‘Well, thank the Saints for that. If we can’t, neither can the Olyix.’
‘Yeah.’ His white lips crinkled up, head nodding slightly, an imitation of awkward.
Yirella let the pause drag on until she shared the moment. ‘So . . . I’ll see you on the other side.’
‘That’s a date.’
‘You take care, point man.’
‘I will. Yirella, you know he’s crazy about you, right? The boyfriend.’
‘Yes.’
‘Just checking. Sometimes you start to take things like that for granted without e
ven realizing what you’re doing. And I was married fifteen times, so I really do know what I’m talking about here.’
‘Saints, Ainsley Zangari – a romantic. That’s not in any history files I’ve ever accessed.’
‘Seeing high-school sweethearts always makes me happy. And there ain’t much happy in this galaxy right now. I’d hate to see another little bit die.’
‘I think I get the high-school reference, but it’s okay; you don’t need to worry about me and Del.’
‘Good. I’m going to go now. I’ll see you in a week or so. When this is all over.’
She fought the hardening muscles of her throat that were making talking so difficult. ‘I’ll see you in a week.’
*
‘You all right?’ Dellian asked when she walked into the cafe with its arched windows letting in the warm Parisian sunlight of late spring.
‘Sure.’ She gave him a reassuring smile, as real as the canteen’s textured environment, and sat at the table with the rest of the squad. ‘So what’s happening?’
Saints
Olyix Enclave
Kandara hadn’t made a list. Not exactly. But . . . if she had, then the way Callum made a gurgling, sucking sound every time he concentrated would be right up there at the top. Or the food. After twenty days of cold, bland food, her stomach ache was nearly constant. Then there was Alik’s slow-boiling anger. Yuri’s sullenness. Only Jessika seemed relatively unchanged.
So perhaps she is just a sophisticated AI after all.
It wasn’t just the crap food and the confined space and the boredom that was preying on everyone. The news from outside the enclave had been getting progressively worse – not helped by the slowtime inside the enclave, which meant that news from outside arrived in bursts, with centuries of activity compressed into dense updates.
They’d all been horrified when they learned how the Olyix had started to capture the ships and worlds humans had thought they were building in secret as they fled across the galaxy. Privately, Kandara started to suspect that it was over; that they’d lost. And after a few days it was obvious she wasn’t alone with that thought; everyone’s mood was darkening further, flames burning up the last of the air. The only thing keeping them going now was routine; building the drone transmitters had come to resemble a workfare scheme in her mind. It was pointless but kept them occupied. Three fucking weeks, and we’ve completely lost our shit. Mother Mary!
‘Guess who’s turned up again?’ Jessika exclaimed.
Kandara didn’t bother to look up. She and Callum were running tests on the latest transmitter drone before they knitted up the casing. The initiators had produced all the components, but without an assembly bay they had to be put together by hand. Precision work – which was difficult even with the small manipulator rigs the initiators had provided first. On the plus side, she reflected, it kept Callum busy, so that was less moaning they all had to listen to.
After a couple of false starts, they’d refined the design of the transmitters to the shape of a streamlined manta ray, a metre long with a sharp intake grid on the front instead of a mouth, and twin ion drives at the rear. With its flexible-camber wings it was designed to manoeuvre fast once it reached the passage outside, then flip into some elusive acrobatics in the hangar in case anything hostile was waiting there, before streaking out to freedom through the main hangar entrance. Once outside, the drones would call the invading human armada, revealing the location of the Salvation of Life in its storage orbit.
Except time outside had stretched and stretched until it had become an abstract. As far as they could make out, close to ten thousand years had passed. That figure didn’t connect with her at all. She’d begun to wonder if her glands were malfunctioning and she was living in some kind of dream state.
When Zapata, her altme, did shift the test data to one side, Kandara accessed the hangar’s remaining sensor feeds. Jessika was right; Odd Quint had returned. It began its lumbering walk around the hangar, a black stonelike orb held upright in a protuberance of its manipulator flesh, like a priest with an offering. Or maybe an Olyix with a hard-on.
‘What the fuck is it doing this time?’ Alik asked.
‘Same as it always does – nothing,’ Callum replied.
‘No,’ Kandara corrected him. ‘This is the second time it’s brought that orb. That has to be significant.’ Over the last couple of weeks, a quint (or the many bodies of a quint) had returned eight times to perform its strange examination of the hangar, its behaviour singling it out and earning it the nickname. Every time, Odd Quint had neutralized the neuralstratum’s receptors so it remained unseen by the arkship’s onemind. If they’d been on Earth, she would have said it was engaged in some type of criminal activity. Smuggling human artefacts, maybe? Or could it be an alien nark dealer? But despite knowing ridiculously little about Olyix culture, she didn’t believe that. There was a purpose behind its constant appearances. And a covert one at that, which made her very uneasy.
‘The orb has to be some kind of sensor, or recording gadget,’ Yuri said.
‘But Odd Quint doesn’t apply it to anything to analyse,’ Callum complained. ‘It can’t be a Geiger counter, can it?’
Kandara studied the way the quint was holding the orb up, the manipulator flesh shifting it from side to side, a motion that was partly obscured by its tilting walk. ‘It’s waving it,’ she said. ‘Mary, you might have been right about the food smell, Cal. I bet that gadget takes air samples.’
‘Shit.’ Alik gave the cavern’s jagged entranceway a guilty glance. ‘How sensitive can it be? I mean, like, bloodhound good? If it is, we are royally screwed.’
‘Anything we can do, so can they – and then some,’ Yuri said.
‘If that sensor was as good as a bloodhound, Odd Quint would be here already, along with the rest of its bodies,’ Kandara said. ‘So maybe we’ve got some time.’
‘Oh, here it goes,’ Jessika said.
Kandara watched as Odd Quint started to walk along one of the smaller tunnels leading away from the hangar. They didn’t have any sensor clusters hidden in the tunnel’s trunk pipes, so all they could see was the quint slowly enveloped by the thickening shadows, the orb still upheld.
‘Definitely smelling for us,’ Kandara said.
‘I can buy that,’ Alik said. ‘But why doesn’t it want the onemind to know?’
She gave him a troubled glance. ‘I don’t know.’
‘There are eleven tunnels and corridors out of that hangar,’ Yuri said. ‘So it’s only a matter of time till it passes the entrance to our cavern. If that orb has any decent level of sensitivity, it’ll smell us.’
‘We should kill it,’ Kandara said.
‘That’s a real dumbass idea,’ Alik said. ‘You step out here and shoot that mother, the rest of us’ll have ten minutes max.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Kandara said. ‘There’s still no neuralstratum coverage of the hangar, right?’
‘No,’ Jessika agreed reluctantly.
‘So?’
‘So? It’s a fucking quint. One of five,’ Alik snapped. ‘You shoot it, the other four are sure as shit going to know about it.’
‘Yeah, but are they going to tell?’ She gave him a grin that was pure taunt – very superior. It was a mean tease – especially if you knew all Alik’s buttons, which she did. But being cooped up in this rock jail was driving her loco.
Alik’s mouth opened then shut; he looked at Yuri for help. ‘We’re not doing this, right? Tell me we’re not.’
‘We don’t know if whatever Odd Quint is doing is illegal,’ Yuri said slowly, ‘or heretical, or whatever brings down the local gestapo. But it’s obviously not totally above board.’
‘You cannot gamble our lives on that. Je-zus! We still got us the mission.’ Alik gestured at the four completed transmitter drones, their sleek stealth-grey shapes soaking up the cavern’s low light. ‘Getting these outside is our priority, right?’
‘I wasn’t planning on going man
o a mano, asshole,’ Kandara said. ‘We rig up a creeperdrone and use a stinger. The biotoxin Alpha Defence worked up from Soćko’s formula will kill a quint, right, Jessika?’
‘It should do, yes. I can’t give absolutes.’
‘And if we use a creeperdrone –’ she gestured at the row of inert spider creatures – ‘we can get an entanglement suppressor up close. Then the other four bodies won’t even know for certain it’s dead.’
‘So then what? You know they’ll just come down and investigate.’
‘Bad news for them.’
‘You cannot be fucking serious?’
‘Have you seen where we are?’ she shouted, both arms flung out to deride the cavern. ‘Do you have any idea how deep this shit is? Drowning depth, okay? The Olyix are scooping up every generation ship we fly now. We’re losing. Has that even registered with you? We are losing! This does not have a good ending, not for us. We are not walking off into the sunset, Alik. There is no sunset, because there is no Earth any more to have a sunset on. They killed it – they murdered our world! All we have left now is our righteous vengeance. And in Mary’s name, I swear I will make them fucking pay. Before I am done, they will curse their god for ever sending them its message.’
Alik looked at her in shock, a diminutive twitch bending the corner of his mouth. She’d never seen that before. On anyone else, it would have been a full jaw drop.
‘Hey.’ Jessika put her arm around Kandara’s shoulder. ‘Take a breath. It’s okay.’
‘Oh-fucking-kay? This? This is okay?’
‘Absolutely. Get this: a ship’s just arrived from one of the Olyix monitor outposts along the expansion wavefront. The fullmind is startled. It’s never been startled before, not like this.’
‘What about?’ Yuri asked.
Jessika closed her eyes. ‘Something’s happened out there. They thought humans had set up another lure planet, Vayan, so they sent a Welcome ship with a batch of Resolution ships. The wormhole collapsed as soon as they got to Vayan. Someone hit them hard.’
‘Finally,’ Kandara breathed. For a second the tension in her thoughts actually slackened.
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