He scurried down the ramp, where she bobbed about excitedly and flung her arms around him, kissing him exuberantly. Smiles and happy jeers encircled them, and Yirella extended her welcome-home grin to take in the rest of the squad.
‘You’re all safe,’ she said. ‘Thank the Saints.’
Dellian saw the uncertainty flicker behind her happiness and knew what she was thinking. This is just a sensor station, a tiny outpost that was taken by surprise and superior numbers. Next time it’s going to be real. Next time nobody can know who’ll be coming down the ramp after – if there’s even going to be a ship with a ramp. Like her, he hid the worry deep.
They hurried back to their cabin like the overeager kids they’d once been – too long ago now. Fucked hard and fast on the bed. Had a meal and a bath and fucked again. Slept. Spooned, less frantic teens now, more loving and sensual.
‘Did you watch us?’ Dellian asked as they headed for the shower together.
‘Yeah,’ she said as the warm drops rained over her scalp, running together in soapy streams down her back. ‘Tilliana and Ellici are good. Plus, your training helped. You’re tight now, not like back at Vayan.’
‘Not so naive?’ he teased.
‘That too.’
‘Yeah. I was pleased with everyone. Though I still think we’re surplus to the armada.’
‘They’re not patronizing us. They are so elevated now I doubt they take hurt feelings into account.’
‘Right.’ He said it, but didn’t believe he’d sounded convincing. Then hands slippery from soap gel came sliding over his chest, and he could banish his doubts again.
*
Dellian watched the feed in his optik as fragments of the Olyix power ring reached the rocky world. Silent blooms of their impacts peppered the dayside, sending gouts of debris shooting upwards for tens of kilometres, obscuring the ancient landscape that had remained unchanged for a hundred million years. As the dust began to settle, nothing was left of the ancient canyons and dry mares and worn mountains; they’d been replaced by overlapping craters whose centres still glowed as their new lava lakes slowly cooled and solidified.
The devastation made him clench his stomach muscles in reflex as he and Yirella walked around deck thirty-three’s main corridor to a portal hub. Outside the Morgan, in the shelter of the Lagrange Two point, the armada ships increased power to their gravitational deflection effect and waited for the lethal swarm to pass. He knew they were safe – technically. Nonetheless, that level of destruction chilled him; it was so much greater than anything the squad did.
A portal took them into a xenobiology research facility housing one of Immanueel’s aspects. They walked straight into a huge central chamber constructed out of translucent pearl-white walls that broke it up into a wide spiral of hemispherical cells. To Dellian, it looked a little too much like the biological technology the Olyix used. When he got close to any of the curving walls, he could just make out a burgundy filigree of veins below the surface. The similarity made him uncomfortable.
‘Engineering always provides one definitive solution to a problem, right?’ he asked as they walked in. ‘We work through methods and prototypes until we find how to do the job properly. I mean, there aren’t two ways to build a generator or a processor junction.’
Yirella gave him a glance that conveyed mild puzzlement. ‘As a general rule, yes.’
‘So . . . eventually corpus humans are going to wind up with the same technology as the Olyix? It’s the plateau theory, isn’t it, that some things just can’t be improved any further, so it becomes universal, never changes?’
‘As a general rule, yes. What’s your point?’
‘Well, if everything we do drives us in the same direction, doesn’t that mean we might wind up like them? The Olyix?’
‘No! Whatever made you think that? Why would we want to go around the galaxy enslaving other species?’
‘It kind of adds a purpose to life, doesn’t it? I’m not saying it’s a good purpose,’ he added quickly. ‘But it’s infected them; it gives them something to build their immortal lives around. I mean, look at Kenelm and all the others like hir. This cause they had, to maintain Utopial philosophy down the generations, it kept hir focused, gave hir something to live for. Causes are dangerous, Yi.’
‘I know that. But, really, Del, we don’t think like the Olyix. They’re alien, remember. Not just in their biology and culture, but the way they think, too.’
‘Are they, or did they just shape themselves to fit the crusade that the God at the End of Time gave them? That’s what you can do if your biotechnology is so advanced it allows you to morph your own body for convenience. And that’s what we’ve got now, isn’t it? We’ve got the potential to live forever if we want to. But I’m not sure we’re built for that, not as we are. Our minds can’t cope with us lasting that long, so we’d have to change them. Just like the corpus humans have done. Our outlook will have to evolve to cope with extreme lifespans. And what about all the people we’re
