The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.]

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She went back out into the corridor and looked down at the floor, seeing worn tracks. There were several cabins that had been used. The first she went in was dark, its texture walls inert; the same with the second. As she approached the third, she could hear orchestral music. When the doors opened, it was so loud she hesitated on the threshold before she went in. The cabin’s texture had reproduced Turin’s splendid Teatro Regio opera house in its original eighteenth-century form. The auditorium was full of men and women in formal attire, while a full orchestra played in the pit and ostentatious players in authentic costumes bestrode the stage. A subroutine identified the performance as La Bohème.

  Sitting in the front of the stalls was an old woman wearing an extravagant lace-embellished gown Yirella associated with the kind of cantankerous dowager always to be found in a Jane Austen novel. If it hadn’t been for that fanciful gown, Yirella could’ve easily imagined the woman had walked onto the Morgan straight out of the Neolithic age. A visual subroutine gave a forty-three per cent probability it was Tilliana. When Yirella really concentrated, she could pick out the characteristics she’d known all her life, aged and worn by nine decades.

  She sank to her knees beside Tilliana. ‘Till? Till, is that you?’

  An aghast Tilliana looked at her and began a pitiful wailing. ‘Who are you? You’re not part of the cast. I didn’t texture you. Are you Olyix? Have you come for us?’

  ‘No, I’m not Olyix. I’m very human, I promise.’

  The orchestra stopped playing, and up on the stage the actors became still. Yirella tried to ignore the way the whole audience was now staring at her.

  ‘It’s been so long,’ Tilliana said. ‘I know this is your punishment, making us suffer for coming to the enclave.’

  Yirella reached for Tilliana’s clawlike hands, only to have them jerked away. ‘No, Till. I’m not Olyix. I’m Yirella, but I’m riding the Ainsley android. Do you remember me? Do you remember the android? We thought it was so funny when we arrived at the neutron star, so childish of Ainsley, not wearing clothes.’

  ‘Ainsley? Ainsley was so fine. A ship that could’ve been built in heaven itself.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he is a fine ship, the best. And me, Tilliana, do you remember me? Yirella?’

  ‘I remember Yirella. We lost her when we came to the enclave. We lost everyone. They all froze outside; unmoving forever. The Olyix are making them wait until the end of time while they punish us. But they’re making us live through all of those billions of years. It’s because we were in tactical, you know. That’s what we decided. We were in charge, so they blamed us. We’re the only ones left.’ Tears began rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘I’m not lost, Till. I’m still here. The Olyix have screwed with time inside the Morgan. You’ve lived so much longer than us. But I am Yirella. We grew up together on the Immerle estate. Alexandre was our mentor, remember? Is Alexandre here? Is sie okay?’

  ‘Oh, no, dear. Alexandre has been dead since that very first day.’

  ‘No!’ She couldn’t help the cry of dismay. For an array that struggled to perform emotional routines, that was a blow so raw she knew she must be trying to cry. It was useless; those particular impulses went nowhere. Ainsley hadn’t included tear ducts in the android. ‘How? How did sie die?’

  ‘Sie tried to walk into another section. We didn’t understand. Sie just fell over dead, but sie never decayed. Hir body’s still there. I think so, anyway. I haven’t visited for years, now.’

  ‘And Ellici? Is she still alive?’

  Tilliana gave a mournful nod. ‘She’s still alive. But it was all too much for her. She hasn’t been herself for a while now. It’s been hard, you know. Life can be such a burden when there is nothing you can use it for. Sometimes I think I should just let it end, but she needs me to look after her. So I have my shows and my music stored in what’s left of the network. Perhaps that was a mistake.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t. I’m here now. We’re going to get out of this.’

  ‘I don’t think so, dear. I don’t know who you really are, but there’s no way out of the enclave. It is eternal.’

  ‘Can I see Ellici, please? I’d be very grateful.’

  ‘I suppose there’s no harm.’ The Teatro Regio and its phantom audience of opera enthusiasts slowly faded away into neutral textured cabin walls. ‘Help me up, dear; my arthritis is quite troublesome now. The clinic’s pharma dispenser stopped working a while back. I couldn’t repair it any more. There aren’t any initiators in this portion of the ship.’

  ‘I know.’ She helped Tilliana get to her feet. It was easy enough; the old woman was so thin. Yirella was surprised and a little disturbed by how little she weighed. Once she was upright, Tilliana continued to grip the android’s arm for support. By the time they reached Ellici’s cabin, the exertion was causing her to tremble continuously.

  ‘You go in,’ Tilliana said. ‘I’m a bit tired. She can be exhausting.’

  The doors opened, revealing a dimly lit room. It wasn’t textured in a way Yirella recognized. No cultural classic home, no historical city vista just outside. The walls were a thick silver-grey cushion, as was the floor, and even the ceiling, apart from a few inset strips that radiated the diffuse light. There was a toilet basin – also padded, inside and out – and a small sink alcove that appeared to have been scooped out of the wall.

  The only other thing in the room was the bed, a raised rectangular slab. Thickly padded. Ellici lay on it, dressed in a dreadfully filthy, thin one-piece suit that Yirella recognized: a spacesuit’s skin layer, a garment designed to keep body temperature stable and extract human waste. Her knees were drawn up against her stomach and her hands were drawing invisible pictures on the padding. Not that she seemed to be looking at them; her eyes were unfocused.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Yirella moaned. The sight of her vibrant friend reduced to this was too much. She’d always accepted that they’d stay together for ages yet, staying the same thanks to the ability to rebuild and rejuvenate their bodies. Maybe in time, perhaps back on Earth reclaimed, they’d eventually go their separate ways. But there would be decades of warning. This, though – this was the cruellest weapon the Olyix had ever attacked the humans with. There had been no warning, no time to prepare. ‘We’ll make it better,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll fix the Morgan. The clinics will work again. They’ll heal you.’

  Physically, perhaps – but she knew more than any of them how deep the mental scars reached. The Ellici and Tilliana she’d known were gone forever now.

  She backed out of the room, saying nothing as the door slid shut again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tilliana said. ‘It was too much for her. The waiting, the emptiness. They broke her.’

  ‘I understand.’ Yirella faced her old friend. ‘What about the other tactical stations, the other squads? Are you in contact with any of them?’

  ‘No. Every way in and out of this part of the ship has time boundaries.’

  ‘Okay. I want you to sit tight. I’ll do what I came here for.’

  ‘Oh. Why are you here?’

  ‘To fix this. It might take me a while, but I’ll be back, I promise.’

  She helped Tilliana back to her cabin, then pulled up a status display from the worn-out sub-network. Good news and bad news; there was plenty of processing capacity and a decent reserve in the power cells. The negative energy conduits on the fuselage remained functional; they just needed operating instructions.

  What she still didn’t have was a working initiator. There were three on deck twenty-two, but the sub-network didn’t extend there. It was on a different time flow. She ran an inventory check for remotes and found three cargo trolleys available. Two worked.

  A minute later she was in a different stairwell shaft, sitting on the trolley as it clamped itself to the central column. Looking down past her dangling feet, sight switched to infrared, she saw the billowing air currents scudding about at what appeared to be a slower rate. She ordered the trolley to rise at maximum sp
eed so she’d get through the gradient as quickly as possible.

  This time the discontinuity didn’t seem so bad. She wondered if deck twenty-two had a slow or fast time flow.

  The lights were in standby mode, giving off a dim green glow. And there was something wrong with the air; it carried a musty scent. Her infrared vision showed her the grilles were barely pumping out any fresh air at all. Another standby mode.

  She connected to the sub-net and reviewed the logs. The nodes had been isolated from the network for sixty-three years. So, slower than the section incarcerating Tilliana and Ellici, but still fast compared to the one she’d started in. The gradient would be enough to kill a biological body trying to cross over.

  When she reviewed the log data, she saw the sub-net had waited for a year, during which there had been no power demand from any equipment. The atmosphere had remained unchanged with no carbon dioxide to scrub; no doors had opened; no movement was detected. The management routine had put everything into full stasis mode and waited for further instructions.

  Yirella provided them.

  The engineering compartment was already brightly lit, with fresh air blowing hard out of the grilles when she arrived. The three cylindrical initiators were running internal pre-commencement checks. Yirella connected to their management arrays and loaded in the android design, then began to modify it. Some raw material simply wasn’t available, so she verified substitutions. After that there was Ainsley’s unnecessary anatomical fixation to . . . smooth over. Also, if this was her first shaky step elevating to corpus, the new androids shouldn’t have Ainsley’s profile.

  Once the design was finalized, she activated the initiators. Fabrication took eight hours. One of the initiators glitched halfway through the procedure – when she opened the cylinder’s lid it looked like a burned corpse was inside – but the remaining pair kept working.

  Five days later they’d produced thirty androids of herself. It was a strange sensation when each of the new aspects came online and started sharing her thought routines. She could feel her awareness expand as her mind acquired additional processing capacity – which wasn’t quite the equivalent of a greater intellect, but certainly helped problem solving – in particular, quantifying the negative energy patterns that the Morgan’s conduits would have to direct. With that determined – in theory – she set about formatting the routines to load. The new androids also came equipped with a quantum logic clock, accurate enough for her to synchronize the channel activation across differing time flows.

  She dispatched twenty of them across the ship, with two primary missions. The first was to make contact with any other surviving tactical teams, while the second was to track down working initiators that could build more of herselves. The Morgan’s sleek conical profile was five kilometres long, which she estimated would now be subject to at least two hundred and fifty different time flows. At least the androids didn’t need spacesuits to move through the sections in a vacuum, so they should be able to position themselves evenly throughout the ship.

  Two of them remained with the initiators to keep on producing more aspects. Eight accompanied the Ainsley android aspect back to the deck where Tilliana and Ellici lived, where four stayed, providing companionship and practical help to her two friends. The remaining four went back with the Ainsley android to where the original Yirella was waiting . . .

  *

  . . . She swayed about as if caught in a blast of wind, the experience of living so much in the space of seconds almost taking her to her knees. ‘Fuck the Saints,’ she moaned. But at the end, all she could see was Ellici and Tilliana – her smart, funny friends reduced to age-ruined shadows of the amazing people they used to be.

  When she blinked the sticky moisture out of her eyes, she saw her own mournful expression on the Ainsley android’s face. The rest of the knowledge it had brought back was sloshing about inside her head like storm waves hitting a rocky shore. ‘The conduits?’

  ‘We’ll activate them in another three minutes,’ the Ainsley android said.

  Of course. The memory was there; she just had to concentrate. If those first twenty androids she’d sent into the ship had found more initiators, then there should be more than a thousand of her aspects positioned across the Morgan by now, all ready with their operating instructions loaded into conduit managers, and emergency power rerouted. If not, the two of herselves she’d left behind on deck twenty-two would have produced more than two hundred more androids by now, which should just be enough to activate all the conduits. It was all down to timing, governed by the quantum logic clocks.

  As she absorbed the situation she became very aware of how her attention was struggling to cope with the six aspects now on deck thirty-three that were linked up into one personality. It wasn’t that the images from six different pairs of eyes, and other more extensive senses, were confusing. It was rather that she couldn’t quite process all her aspects’ thoughts in unity. Her brain simply wasn’t wired for it, despite the corpus routines doing their best to smooth the perception and thoughts into one.

  ‘I think Immanueel and the others modified the neural structure in those biophysical bodies of theirs,’ she said out loud. ‘This is going to give me a headache despite all the filtering I’m applying.’

  ‘Hang on in there,’ her Ainsley android aspect replied. The other four aspects signalled their support and sympathy, reducing their own input to the common personality to help.

  She was starting to worry just how she’d cope if the Morgan did liberate itself from the time flows and hundreds of aspects joined her personality.

  There are worse things.

  And she wasn’t quite sure where that thought originated – her organic brain or the multi-aspect personality that she had elaborated up to.

  I’ll take it, though. Because it is mine.

  A countdown in her optik told her there were ninety seconds left. She accessed the hull cameras just in time to see the negative energy conduits rising up out of their recesses in the Morgan’s shiny copper fuselage. As she looked at the lean curve and menacing point of the spurs, all she could think of were the ears of the morox that had attacked Del after the flyer crash back on Juloss. The shape triggered way too many nerves.

  There were twenty seconds left on the count, with the aspects loading the pattern format into local management routines, when awareness burgeoned into her mind, deriving from the plural personality – a gentle mental nudge to a weak biological brain. It wasn’t just the spurs on their section of the fuselage that were rising. The cameras were showing them standing proud across all of the Morgan.

  ‘Saints,’ she gasped. ‘It worked. I worked.’ The countdown reached zero. A tremor ran through the deck, and her optik was deluged by icons detailing node status and recovery routines going active. Her personality aspects expanded at a phenomenal rate as the network reintegrated, elaborating her to seventeen hundred aspects. Corpus level! She was scattered throughout the ship: in cabins, engineering bays, hangars, the dark spaces between tanks, wedged into machinery modules, airless interzones pressed against the fuselage, clinging to structural beams. All of her aspects interfaced with arrays and power systems, supervising the conduit patterns, scanning the nebula, arming weapons. Alarmingly, she could see the power drain from the conduits was absorbing almost all of the Morgan’s generating capacity to repel the time flows. They’d have to operate at redline limits just to accelerate, and as for beam weapons . . . She had to order them to power down. They couldn’t fight – not if they wanted to stay clear of the time flows.

  Thirty-seven hers were tending to ancient tactical personnel who had endured decades of miserable imprisonment in their isolated decks, while another fifteen were trying to calm squad tacticians who’d been in normal time flows or slow ones and who hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong yet.

  Operationally, the Morgan was running at about seventy per cent capacity, with machinery that hadn’t been powered up for decades taking time to get back
online, while some equipment was so worn it would need replacing entirely. But it was a warship, designed to keep functioning and fighting when it was damaged.

  ‘Armada status!’ Yirella demanded. The main tactical display refreshed as the network reacquired the full sensor suite. For some reason she could analyse it calmly, no longer the Yirella who used to quail at the thought of taking an active part in advising the FinalStrike itself. Probably because only one aspect suffers hormonal stress, while the other seventeen hundred are pure analytics. That’s what I call a decent balance.

  The armada was besieged by photonic disfigurements, every ship the centre of a shimmering cyclone of flickering microstars. ‘The squads,’ she gasped in relief as she saw the troop carriers were in plain sight, still holding position a thousand kilometres out from the Morgan. None of them were being accosted by twinkles. Too insignificant. The thought angered her. Just you wait.

  Her comms were receiving calls from every squad leader – including Dellian. All of them were desperate to know what was happening. She talked to all of them simultaneously, ordering them back to the Morgan, where they’d be safer inside its hull, protected from errant time flows.

  At the same time she was also monitoring a squadron of eighty Resolution ships picking off the armada ships quickly and easily. More Resolution ships were flooding through the gateway behind them, accelerating towards the armada to add to the carnage. Nothing could fight back; the corpus warships were paralysed by the different time flows twisting through their structure. They were being struck by graviton pulses and nuclear missiles and energy beams, detonating into vivid swirls of incandescent vapour that expanded out like a distorted cluster of weird tumours as their destruction times varied.