Yirella caught sight of herself reflected in the glass. Hunched shoulders, which with her height looked just pathetic; face that was beyond miserable and sliding into broken. She glared at her reflection. ‘Pull yourself together. He needs you.’
The food printers produced some croissants, and she made coffee. Colombian: black, strong, bitter. She held the cup in her hands and slumped back in the chair, eyes half closed, and began to sing.
I saw Earth reclaimed,
Got me a ride back,
An old ship, can’t reach near light.
Earth where once we came,
Earth where we all belong,
Earth where life is strong,
Oh to be—
‘Mind if I join you?’
Yirella squealed as every limb twitched in shock. Her lurch sent coffee splattering over the table and onto her trousers. ‘Saints! I didn’t know anyone else was on this deck.’ And it had to be hir!
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.’ Kenelm hurried over with a handful of napkins and started dabbing at her trousers. That only made it worse.
‘Give me that.’ She scowled and began wiping properly.
Abashed, sie began mopping up the puddle on the table. ‘I haven’t heard that song before.’
Yirella blushed. ‘It’s from back when we were just kids.’ Which was good enough; no need to tell hir she’d gone through a big music phase when she was in therapy. Writing lyrics kept her mind busy and diverted from the problems that jailed her.
‘It’s good.’ Kenelm was standing over the table, looking lost. Sie wore a simple blue-and-green tunic that could so easily have been mistaken for a uniform.
Someone was having trouble adjusting to their lack of status.
Yirella gave up. ‘You’d better sit down. It’s going to be a long day.’
‘Thank you.’ A remote collected the clump of soaking napkins, and sie sat down, leaving an empty seat between them. ‘I’ve spent two thousand years waiting for this, but I know they’d be apprehensive with me on the bridge.’
‘You say bridge, I say comfortable main council room. Sometimes I think our fabulous resources have tempted us down the wrong route. Maybe we should have stuck to the kind of structures our ancestors had. You knew you were going to war in the old ocean navy battleships.’
‘You knew your chances of surviving weren’t too good, either,’ sie countered. ‘Those days are badly over-romanticized.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘Different era, different requirements. The gentens will handle most of the battle.’
‘But it’s reassuring having people in the loop to make the final decisions,’ she insisted. ‘There’s a psychology about facing the enemy. You need to have belief in your own ability, but not one that verges on hubris.’
‘I think the Vayan ambush cured us of hubris,’ Kenelm said.
‘Yes. But I’m worried about Del.’
‘That’s natural. It’s good.’
‘Really? I might have said the wrong things before he left. I should be more . . . empathic.’
‘Oh, please. I’ve never seen any couple more synchronized than you two. It’s like you’re each other’s munc. You know, half the time the pair of you don’t actually speak in full sentences when you’re talking. You don’t need to.’
She frowned. ‘We don’t?’
‘No. It’s funny and endearing. The rest of us are always left playing catch-up.’
‘Oh.’
‘One mind, two bodies. Or a quint missing three.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Sorry. Bad joke.’
‘What was she like?’ Yirella asked suddenly. ‘Emilja, I mean? I can’t believe you knew her. She’s history for me, not something we can ever connect to.’
‘I have trouble remembering that far back, to be honest. Sometimes I think my life before Juloss is just a dream. But . . . she was tired, that’s what sticks the most now. I don’t mean lack-of-sleep tired, but weary. Exodus just wasn’t working as a concept, and it had taken everything she had to make it happen in the first place. So she’d spent eight thousand years watching it fail. Can you imagine that? Eight thousand years seeing hope slowly fade away, being beaten down century after century. All those Strike ships and generation ships we sent out into the galaxy, and all they gave back was silence. But she weathered it, even though she was trapped by her own vision.’
‘That’s why she founded your group?’
‘Yes. She knew we had to change, yet our own rigid cultural stability made that difficult.’
‘So you’re actually a rebel?’
‘Yeah.’ Kenelm smiled wryly. ‘I guess you could say that. In my own way. I was never against you, Yirella. It was just that you wanted to change so much so quickly. It was reckless.’
‘Yet here we are. With the corpus humans’ armada and about to FinalStrike. The first humans ever to get this far.’
‘Yes. A fantastic achievement. But did you ever stop to think what would happen if it went wrong? You gambled with a whole human civilization. You once asked what gave me the right to guide the Morgan’s future away from Strike. That was a modest realignment compared to this.’
‘But it worked.’
‘It gives us a chance, granted. But worked . . .? I hope it does, because I don’t think there will be another human attack against the enclave. Ten thousand years, and this is the only one.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, toying with the coffee cup. ‘If your group’s strategy worked, there are a lot of humans safe in the dark out there. But they won’t hide away forever. It’s not in our nature. As you have discovered.’
‘Touché.’
‘If we fail, there will be others. The Factory ships will give what’s left of the exodus expansion a breathing space to regroup.’
‘Maybe,’ Kenelm said. ‘But for what it’s worth, I think this is the best shot we’ll ever have.’ Sie grinned disbelievingly. ‘A fucking neutron star!’
‘Yeah.’ She ordered the printers to produce a new round of coffee and croissants. ‘Ten minutes.’ There was a nervous tremor in her voice that no amount of willpower could banish.
‘Let’s take a look.’
Yirella used her interface to summon tactical displays into the cafe windows. The cosy mirage of Boulevard Saint-Germain faded away, replaced by bright schematics. More data slipped directly into her mind, adding comprehension.
The wormhole representation was a tunnel made up of white walls, with subtle imperfections as if they were falling through the eye of a hurricane, allowing her to track their progress. Ainsley was the lead ship, slowly rotating as he flew forwards. Behind him were seven specialist ships containing negative energy generators to assume immediate control of the wormhole when they arrived in the gateway system. Chasing them hard were more than a thousand warships and weapons platforms, assigned to defending the wormhole terminus. The armada would need to leave through the wormhole after FinalStrike was over, which meant it would be subjected to a ferocious assault by the Olyix.
The rest of the armada followed, with the Morgan-class ships in the middle. As before, the neutron star was at the rear – an ominous presence that always seemed to be edging closer to the armada.
Yirella opened Ainsley’s icon.
‘Welcome aboard,’ he responded immediately. And she was flush with the sensation of speed leaking down the link into her neural interface – an exhilarating power plunge, spinning around for the sheer joy of it, a kingfisher on its dive. There was also a deeper sensation: the pent-up power of his phenomenal weapons bestowing an urbane confidence.
The end of the wormhole was visible now – a black speck some indeterminable length down the swirling white tunnel, but expanding. Ainsley levelled out his roll, and the speed seemed to increase. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said in perfect contentment.
‘Whatever happens,’ Yirella said, ‘I’m pleased we met.’
‘It’s been too short, kid
, but, oh, boy, did we hit this universe hard.’
Ainsley flew out of the wormhole. There should have been a noise, Yirella thought, like a sonic boom but for when you punctured the fabric of reality to get back in – a detonation of light and sound that hadn’t been known since the Big Bang. Instead: nothing. The utter absence of sound as if her ears were in a vacuum. But there was light . . .
‘Oh, you beautiful Saints,’ she whispered.
Ahead was a huge white-spectrum star, looped by a splendorous ring that shimmered as if it was the child born of two diamond worlds colliding. But behind that was the true majesty of the Olyix home star: the galactic core stretching halfway across space.
Ainsley’s external sensors found the spectral gateway itself, two and a half AUs away.
‘At least it isn’t on the other side of the star,’ Yirella said.
‘Still got to get there,’ Ainsley retorted. ‘That’s going to be fun.’
A second after Ainsley, the generator particles reached the terminus, producing their own negative energy to interface with the existing pattern that held the wormhole open. Just as they’d done back at the sensor station, they established control over the exotic matter structure even as the Olyix cut power to their own generators. The terminus remained open.
Ainsley’s acceleration was so brutal he shone like the sun as the solar wind struck his discontinuity boundary. More than five billion perception fronds burst out from his hull, saturating space to provide unparalleled resolution. Seven Resolution ships were already closing on Ainsley at eighty gees. He selected a degenerator pulse, and a speck of ultradense matter collapsed into pure energy, which was channelled into seven beams. Seven Resolution ships detonated in glorious violence.
A fraction of the overspill degenerator pulse energy transmuted into an omnidirectional radio blast. ‘Hello, motherfuckers,’ Ainsley announced to the entire Olyix system. ‘The humans have arrived. Sorry we’re late. But now we’re here, let’s party.’
As soon as the fronds went active, Yirella’s tactical display started to expand. ‘Oh, hell,’ she grunted. ‘Are you seeing this?’
‘We expected nothing less,’ Immanueel replied calmly.
The fronds were now perceiving a spherical volume of space half a million kilometres in diameter, with the wormhole terminus at its centre – a zone populated with eight hundred and seventy-three Resolution ships. All of them were now in motion. Hundreds closest to the terminus were closing on it, while eighty converged into a battle formation to pursue Ainsley.
Armada ships were swarming out of the wormhole, attack cruisers establishing a defensive perimeter around the generators, obliterating the Olyix systems and nearby ships. Missiles and graviton beams speared out from the incoming Resolution ships, countered by nucleonic barriers and antimatter missiles from the attack cruisers. Ultra-high radiation flooded out from hundreds of matter-annihilating explosions, creating a lethal energy storm around the wormhole terminus that reduced all unprotected mass to its subatomic particles, adding to the radiative deluge. Even the fronds’ perception failed amid the colossal overload. Continuous waves of missiles streaked through the chaos. Defence cruisers died, but still more of the armada poured out of the wormhole, reinforcing any gaps in the protective cordon they were establishing, while squadrons of heavy-duty battle cruisers ploughed through the hypercharged arena to strike at the incoming Resolution ships. Controlled by corpus sub-aspects, they were extremely manoeuvrable and extensively armoured. After the first twenty encounters all resulted in the Resolution ships being destroyed, the remainder of the Olyix ships began to take evasive action. Waves of teardrop-shaped Calmissiles accelerated out from the tightly packed formation of battle cruisers, raking short-lived black contrails in their wake as they devoured the plasma they flew through. Within seconds of being fired, their acceleration wound up to an incredible thousand gees. The closest Resolution ships didn’t have time to react before the first salvo sliced clean through their fuselages. More distant Resolution ships increased their evasion tactics to watch the Calmissiles flash past, their colossal velocity swiftly taking them beyond the outermost shell of Olyix ships assigned to guarding the wormhole terminus. Some Resolution ships used suppression projectors, killing the Calmissiles’ entanglement, exposing the raw structure of the small vessels that were instantly vulnerable to both abrasion from ultra-velocity interplanetary dust and ordinary X-ray laser fire.
‘That’s good,’ Immanueel said as they lost the eighteenth Calmissile. ‘We have the ranging on their suppression technology. Phase two deployment strategy is now being modified accordingly.’
Yirella watched more than five hundred Calmissiles dwindle away out into the star system, difficult even for the sensor fronds to follow. Only their internal communication links allowed the armada tactical network to track them.
After a minute of flight, during which he eliminated nineteen Resolution ships, Ainsley increased his acceleration up to two hundred and eighty gees and vectored around in a massive parabola until he was heading straight back towards the wormhole terminus, powering headlong for the formation of a hundred and seventy Resolution ships that had been chasing him. Even though she knew what was about to happen, Yirella found herself gripping the arms of the cafe seat.
With twenty-five seconds left before he reached the Resolution ships, Ainsley triggered another degenerator pulse. This time, his entire energy output was routed directly into a monster electromagnetic discharge, temporarily blinding the multitude of sensors tracking him, denying his opponents critical data for a couple of seconds.
‘Oh, Saints,’ Yirella moaned. She could see Ainsley’s course vector as he streaked back towards them; he was going to fly past the wormhole terminus with barely two thousand kilometres’ separation distance at a terrifying speed. If this doesn’t work . . .
Ainsley brought the ultradense matter shield up from energized suspension to deployment status. At that point, he was seventeen thousand kilometres from the formation of Resolution ships and closing fast. When he reached fifteen, he triggered the shield.
The shield massed roughly the same as a medium-sized moon. In its phasefolded state, it was a disc thirty metres in diameter and one centimetre deep. It unfolded at point nine five lightspeed, expanding out to eighty thousand kilometres in diameter and one hundred microns thick. Boosted quantum equilibrium ensured every compositional atom shared the same state, unifying them.
The Resolution ships didn’t have any time to vector away; they crashed into what was in effect a two-dimensional moon with a closing velocity in excess of nine hundred kilometres a second. Their impacts were simultaneously distributed and absorbed by the entire mass. Star-hot debris plumes were bulldozed out of the way by the shield’s unstoppable inertia, forming relativistic rivers across its surface before cascading over the edges.
Five seconds after the last impact, Ainsley refolded it.
Yirella let out an involuntary scream as she watched the incredible shield rushing at deadly speed towards the wormhole terminus. It eclipsed the entire galactic core, smothering the blazing star; even most of the glittering ring was obscured. Some animal level of her brain told her such a thing couldn’t possibly be real.
Then it shrank away as fast as it had emerged, and Ainsley swept past the wormhole terminus. Three seconds later, the shield sprang out again. Dozens of Resolution ships inbound towards the wormhole smashed apart as it ploughed through them, graviton beams and antimatter impacts useless against its artificial structure.
‘Told you it’d work.’ Ainsley chuckled. ‘The Katos really know how to manipulate matter.’ He folded the shield away again and performed another three-hundred-gee manoeuvre back to the wormhole terminus. ‘You guys ready?’ he asked the corpus humans.
‘Confirmed,’ Immanueel said. ‘Beginning phase three.’
The generators holding the wormhole open began to accelerate at two hundred and fifty gees, heading for the gateway. The armada cruisers englobing it m
atched their speed. Ainsley took up his point position again. Another salvo of Calmissiles was launched, racing on ahead to form up in a protective umbrella to intercept the incoming Olyix ships.
‘Ten hours to reach the gateway,’ Yirella said. ‘There’s a lot that can go wrong in that time.’
‘Not just for us,’ Kenelm replied. ‘Our attack profile will force the Olyix to divert resources away from us.’
‘I was never sure about this part,’ she admitted. ‘If it was me defending the enclave, I’d throw everything I had into preventing us from reaching the gateway. If we kill the enclave, it’s all over. They can take the other losses.’
‘I disagree. If we destroy their wormholes, the galaxy will have millennia before they can venture out again in their obscene crusades. That will give newly evolving species a chance to become starfaring, and for the Neána to make contact first.’
‘Yeah,’ she mused. ‘About that . . . I’m not so sure being subtly manipulated by the Neána is necessarily the best option for anyone.’
‘It’s an option – which is more than most species get at the moment. Besides which, we’re talking about immediate tactics. The Olyix oneminds will have to decide how badly they want to keep the wormhole network. My guess is: pretty badly.’
‘Saints, I hope so. The more I’m reviewing our sensor data, the bigger their resources seem to be.’ She looked away from the tactical displays to see Kenelm’s tense expression.
‘They’ve been actively running this crusade for a couple of million years,’ sie said. ‘Even if they’ve plateaued or stagnated – whatever you want to call it – they’ve had all that time to prepare for an assault. Because they knew damn well that someone would eventually come here to challenge them.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. If we win, the galaxy will be free of them. If we lose, well . . . we won’t be around to care.’
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 39