‘One,’ Kandara said. ‘We send one. And the instant it gets outside we send the others.’
‘We send them all,’ Yuri said, ignoring Callum’s mildly surprised expression. ‘Today is not the day for pussying around.’
‘Eggs,’ Kandara said. ‘Basket. One.’
‘I’m with Yuri on this,’ Alik said. ‘We need to get out there and shout. It’s why we’re here, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Fucking testosterone,’ Kandara grumbled.
‘Jessika, how far away are the ships?’ Yuri asked. In his mind he could see what the fullmind perceived: a vast swarm of intruders in a neat formation, flowing smoothly through the nebula. There were several different types, which the Olyix were slowly categorizing.
‘They’re in a big cone formation with that white ship, the one the fullmind is nervous of, at the front. It looks like they’re accelerating on a course towards the gas giant. They’re coming to us.’
‘Time to arrival?’
‘The fullmind estimates a couple of hours.’
‘Hours?’ Callum asked. ‘It took us days to get here after we arrived in the enclave.’
‘They’re warships,’ Jessika said. ‘I wasn’t kidding when I said they were fast.’
‘And they’ll be pointing a lot of sensors our way,’ Alik said.
‘Okay, then,’ Yuri said. ‘Let’s do this.’
‘Nexus first,’ Kandara said. ‘The fallback. You must always have a fallback.’
I know! ‘Yes,’ Yuri said. ‘Alik, could you pilot them, please?’
‘Sure.’ Alik settled onto his rock ledge and closed his eyes. Five of the creeperdrone spiders stood up and flexed their legs.
‘No server creature activity in the tunnel outside,’ Jessika said. ‘And Odd Quint is still blocking neuralstratum perception around the hangar. Clear to go.’
The creeperdrones lined up and scuttled out of the chamber.
‘How long?’ Yuri asked. The neuralstratum nexus Jessika had identified was along one of the other corridors leading from the hangar, so the creeperdrones would have to go back there first. In total, the chamber with the nexus was nearly two kilometres away.
‘As long as it takes,’ Alik said through gritted teeth, his eyes still shut.
Callum held a hand up towards Yuri. ‘Let’s just stay calm, shall we?’
He almost said: I am calm. But he made an effort to stay quiet. His one comfort was that the others would be equally stressed. Just a few hours now, and this is going to be over – one way or another.
‘The fullmind is doing something,’ Jessika announced.
‘What?’ Yuri and Kandara asked simultaneously.
‘Some kind of weapon.’ A frown creased Jessika’s forehead. ‘But not a weapon. No. The enclave is a weapon. I don’t understand. It thinks it can stop the fleet.’
‘We need to warn them,’ Callum said. The remaining three transmitter drones rose up.
‘Wait!’ Yuri said. ‘Nothing we can say will make any difference. If they get attacked, they’ll fucking know about it, okay? We need to concentrate on telling them where we are. And to stand any chance of that, we need to be able to take out the nexus. Alik, how long?’
‘Ask me that again, motherfucker, and I swear I will bring them back here and burn your ass to ash!’
Yuri shrugged at Callum, then he closed his eyes and got Boris to pull up a tactical map. The gossamer strands unwinding from the back of the creeperdrone spiders provided high-quality images from their eyes. They were already approaching the hangar.
A burst of shock emanating from the fullmind broke his concentration. He tried to focus on the thoughtstream, only to be overwhelmed by what looked like a . . . blob? It was moving through the enclave’s nebula. Instead of brushing aside the vast curlicues of multicoloured gas, it seemed to be sucking the strands in. ‘What the hell?’
‘Fuck me!’ Jessika exclaimed.
Yuri didn’t know which surprised him most – the fullmind’s alarm or hearing Jessika swear. ‘What is that thing?’
‘A star.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s a neutron star! The invaders have brought a neutron star with them. It’s going to hit the enclave star.’
‘No way,’ Callum said. ‘That’ll . . . Bloody hell!’
‘That’ll what?’ Yuri asked in a tightly controlled voice.
‘Nova,’ Jessika said. ‘If we’re lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Technically, it’s a smart move,’ Callum said. ‘It’ll destroy the power rings on its way into the star, which will kill the enclave. So we’ll be dumped back into spacetime.’
‘Oh, Mother Mary,’ Kandara said. ‘We’ll be right next to the gateway star.’
‘Next is a relative term,’ Callum said. ‘But yeah, it’s a binary system. And if a star this size is going nova . . .’
‘It’ll trigger the other one,’ Yuri realized.
‘We may wind up in the middle of a supernova.’
‘But these invaders must know that, right?’ Alik said. ‘They’ll have an escape route planed out.’
‘Of course they have,’ Jessika said. ‘The invasion ships are heading here, where all the arkships are. So they’ve got to have a strategy.’
‘All right,’ Yuri said. ‘So let’s help them. Alik?’
Alik glared at him, then immediately shut his eyes again, his hardened skin crunching up into a frown of concentration. When Yuri checked, he found the creeperdrone spiders were leaving the hangar now, heading up the corridor that would take them to the chamber where the nexus was. Two of them were scurrying along the floor while the rest were racing along the web of trunks that covered the walls and ceiling, travelling almost as fast. Yuri had to admit, Alik had quality piloting the things.
When he checked the sensor clusters in the hangar, they peered up the corridor where Odd Quint had gone – nothing moving there.
‘Do we go?’ Callum asked. His body was quivering, as if he were about to start a race.
‘This invasion is going to take hours to play out,’ Yuri said. ‘And Alik will have the creeperdrones in place in just a few minutes. So let’s not screw this up because we can’t wait, okay?’ He ignored Callum’s groan of disappointment.
‘The fullmind is rallying,’ Jessika warned.
When he tried to make sense of the thoughtstream, all Yuri could grasp was pressure. Somehow the fullmind was squeezing the enclave – a process that was absorbing a phenomenal amount of energy and placing a dangerous strain on the star’s power rings. He didn’t understand any of it. So . . .
Concentrate on what can be achieved.
The creeperdrones had finally arrived in a huge cavern that was filled with machinery, living pipes and large city-block-sized tanks. A grim throwback to the time of Earth’s oil refineries, complete with dank puddles, dripping junctions and thin layers of grubby mist. All five of the creeperdrones swiftly scaled a weird, twisting glass and carbon pillar, clambering around bulges where fresh green fronds merged with the tightly packed fibres inside.
‘Okay, I got this,’ Alik said. ‘I can blind the neuralstratum in this whole section as soon as you give the word.’
‘Callum, Kandara,’ Yuri said. ‘You’re on.’
The drones headed out of the cavern in an easy sashay, their tiny blue ion plumes soaring up the spectrum towards a near-invisible violet. A soft gust of air marked their flight, but they were almost silent. They swept into the tunnel beyond and arrowed towards the hangar. In that huge empty space, they seemed utterly inconsequential. It took them seconds to cross the floor and pass into the open entrance.
Then they stopped, simply hanging in the air, ion jets throttled up to maximum, not moving.
‘What the fuck?’ Yuri exclaimed.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Callum said. ‘They hit the membrane. It’s turned solid.’
‘But we flew in easily,’ Alik said in protest. ‘All the transport ships did; and back out again.’
‘That was when there were ships using the hangar,’ Callum said. ‘The onemind must’ve kept the membrane looser then. It’s hardened now to prevent any atmosphere leaking out. That means the drones can’t get through it. Nothing can.’
‘What do we do? We have to get those transmitter drones outside.’
Yuri glanced over at Kandara. Judging from her expression, she already knew what he was going to say.
‘We go into the hangar and physically take out the membrane generator.’
*
None of the Olyix ships in the enclave were flying on a course to intercept the armada. Some had, right at the start, then the neutron star punched through the gateway, and they’d swiftly altered course.
‘Are they waiting for reinforcements, do you think?’ Yirella asked.
‘We are uncertain of their tactics,’ Immanueel said. ‘None seem to have followed us through the gateway. That is strange, given the number of ships they have in the system outside. There may be a large presence of Resolution ships in the enclave that we have not yet detected.’
‘But they have to know Ainsley will take out the power rings, just like he did in the gateway system. They have to deploy against us fast if they want to try and stop that. Unless . . .’ No, surely not. ‘Have they accepted they’ve lost?’
‘From what we understand of the Olyix character, that is extremely unlikely.’
‘Yeah.’ She reviewed the neutron star again and tried not to let it chill her. The cage generators had performed their last course correction manoeuvres and had disengaged, leaving the neutron star to fly along its final trajectory. At its current speed, it would take two days to reach the enclave’s star. ‘I always thought bringing the neutron star was overkill, but now that I’ve seen what the Olyix have built here, I think you made the right call.’
‘It is our guarantee should Ainsley fail; it will destroy the star and the enclave. Whatever the outcome for us, this will ensure the Olyix cannot rise again.’
‘Well, let’s just hope we can accomplish more than that.’
‘Thirty minutes to deceleration point,’ Alexandre announced. ‘Stand by for troop ship deployment.’
Yirella opened the squad’s icon. ‘Good luck, you guys. May the Saints be with you.’
They replied with cheery comments. As soon as she accessed the sensors inside the troop ship, she realized how meaningless the visual feed was. Dark, lumpy machinery gripped by industrial-grade clamps, hanging in a gallery jammed with a profusion of cables so tangled they could have been shat out by a giant diarrhoeic spider. Nothing human visible; no emotional connection to be made. No last images of faces.
But I remember them. And that’s what counts.
She switched to the Morgan’s external cameras, watching the troop ships launch out of their tubes – fat ebony wedge shapes with twin spears extending out of the prow that cut a sharp profile against the meandering gyres of the iridescent nebulascape. They accelerated away to take up a bracelet formation a thousand kilometres out.
That was when she saw the twinkles fading in and out of existence, as if the Morgan were flying through a sparse galaxy of microstars.
‘Hey, did we find out what those things are?’ she asked. ‘They look like some kind of blemish in the enclave continuum, something that twists the light.’
There was a long pause, then she heard Immanueel say: ‘Finding what those things are.’
‘What?’
‘Confirming aspect integration.’
‘Immanueel?’ She turned to frown at Kenelm, who seemed equally puzzled. The Morgan’s network began to run analysis on the armada’s secure communication links.
‘Ainsley, are you in contact with Immanueel?’
‘Partial contact. There’s some kind of glitch. The Olyix are jamming our links. Running analysis.’
Yirella checked the tactical status display. ‘Ah, okay. I’m having trouble accessing your fronds, too.’
The cafe lights flickered, then stabilized. Yirella gave the glowing strips a puzzled glance. Part of her tactical display froze, then the figures and graphics accelerated, becoming nonsense blurs. ‘What the hell? Are they virusing our network?’
–
‘Ainsley?’
–
‘Saints!’
‘The Morgan’s genten isn’t responding,’ an alarmed Kenelm said. ‘The local management array is running this section of the ship. It looks like the network nodes have dropped out. There was some kind of massive data transfer generated internally, so the safety routines activated and isolated each physical sector of the network.’
‘Saints! How are they doing that? How did they get a virus into our systems? The corpus completely rebuilt the Morgan.’
The look sie gave her said all she needed to know. They were both thinking the same thing – that somehow Olyix agents had infiltrated the expansion. And I know one person who’s been with us a long time, so long no reliable records exist. Just a picture in a book . . . She used her interface to check where the nearest personal weapons were – the deck below. So if I have to improvise? The cafe had plenty of cutlery.
Stay calm. I don’t have any proof. Yet.
‘I don’t know,’ Kenelm said. ‘But the genten will counter and purge any virus.’
‘Right.’ She nodded, hoping sie couldn’t read her doubts. ‘Ainsley, we think the Morgan’s been virused.’
Ainsley’s icon remained on, but there was still no reply. She used the deck’s sub-network to acquire feeds directly from any hull sensors it could reach. The view was restricted, but several troop ships around the Morgan were visible, keeping position a thousand kilometres out. They looked okay. In the distance was the white dot that was Ainsley. She could see the swirls of disturbed gas it had created as it ripped through the nebula. Directly behind it, their motion had arrested in mid-churn. But around the big white ship, the outer fronds of the turmoil looked as if they were still fluctuating. It was hard to be certain. The curious warped lightpoints had thickened and multiplied around Ainsley; there were so many they were disrupting the view.
‘Oh, Saints!’ She brought the focus back. The twinkles within the armada formation were appearing in greater numbers, their vivacity brightening. ‘This isn’t a network virus. They’re doing something to us.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. It’s like . . . Oh, shit! Tilliana?’
There was no answer.
Yirella hurriedly activated the general communication icon. The ship’s internal secure links were hardened against any form of electronic warfare. ‘Anyone? This is Yirella. Is anyone on the Morgan receiving this?’
The displays told her the links were open, but no one was responding.
‘What’s happening?’ Kenelm asked.
‘That twinkling we can see, it’s a lensing effect from blemishes in the enclave’s continuum,’ Yirella said. ‘The Olyix are changing something in here. I think they’re slowing time around the armada.’ But why is that affecting our internal network?
‘Hellfire.’
When she used the sensor feed to check on the neutron star, it was enveloped by a shimmer of distorted light. Here, though, the glimmers seemed warped and fuzzy, fluttering like living things in torment. The nebula around them was fluorescing brighter than she’d seen it before.
‘I need to talk with Tilliana and Ellici. We have to get to their tactical command cabin.’
Kenelm nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s on deck twenty-five. Let’s go.’
They left the canteen together. As they walked, Yirella tried to examine the ship’s network diagram. ‘I don’t get this,’ she complained. ‘The safety routines are blocking inputs from some decks where the data rate is extreme, while some are dead.’
They arrived at a portal hub. Yirella stared around in dismay. The edge of every portal was glowing red, while the centres had become black and solid-looking. She’d never seen them in that state before.
/>
‘That sucks,’ Kenelm said.
‘Right.’ Her interface pulled up a schematic of the Morgan’s decks. She knew the general layout of the life-support section, but the exact details were vague. That’s what happens when you use portals all the time.
The life-support section had three main service-support shafts running its full height up through all the decks, providing routes for pipes, ducts and cabling, along with a spiral stair winding around the wall, and a central column that remotes could ride up and down. They started off towards the nearest one. Yirella used her interface to check if there were any available connections to a transmitter on the hull. It was possible; she had to route power from an emergency cell to a backup communication module and use alternative data cables to give her a solid connection.
She stood still and concentrated on setting up the procedure.
When she did reach the transmitter management routines, it didn’t have any navigation feed, so she couldn’t use a direct beam, because she didn’t have a clue where Dellian’s troop ship actually was in relation to the Morgan. So general broadcast it was. I will help you. I will be the guardian angel you need me to be.
‘Calling squad leader Dellian. This is Yirella in the Morgan. Are you receiving?’
There was no reply. She loaded in discrimination filters and ordered the unit to expand the reception spectrum. Her reward was a flurry of static. She overrode the safety limiters to increase the power to the transmitter as high as she dared.
‘This is Yirella on the Morgan. We’re suffering communication difficulties. I think the Olyix might be changing the time flow. Is anyone receiving me?’
Still nothing. She called a few more times, with no result. The nebula, one giant field of ionization, must have been blocking the signal. So she left her message on repeat and loaded a monitor routine to review the receiver output.
‘I can’t get anything,’ she said dejectedly.
Kenelm wasn’t there.
She frowned and looked around. ‘Kenelm?’
Sie was nowhere to be seen. Yirella told her databud to send out a ping. Kenelm’s databud didn’t respond. That’s not possible. A ping was databud to databud, with a kilometre range. But sie was here a moment ago.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 41