‘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.
‘Wait,’ Jessika said, and her hand rose in an involuntary reflex. ‘A neutron star. That’s weird.’
It was all Kandara could do not to scream at her. ‘What’s weird?’
‘The rotation speed changed.’
‘You can’t change a neutron star’s rotation speed,’ Callum protested.
‘It’s changed,’ Jessika insisted. ‘The Olyix sensor outpost made careful observations. Something is out there at that neutron star. Something powerful. The fullmind knows the plan is for humans to assemble at the nearest neutron star once the Signal has been received. It’s dispatching a harmony fleet.’ Her eyes opened, showing puzzlement. ‘But we’re too far away. Our Signal couldn’t possibly have gone that far yet.’
‘We need to be ready,’ Yuri snapped. ‘Callum, get that last transmitter drone finished. Kandara, we might have to deal with Odd Quint.’
‘I am so ready for that!’
‘Come on, man,’ Alik said, ‘they’re forty thousand lightyears away. Even if these neutron star people crush the harmony fleet, it’ll be forever until they get here.’
‘Twenty-five years – their ship time – if they travel at point nine C,’ Callum said. ‘For us, that’s probably six months to a year. But it gives the Olyix outside the enclave forty thousand years to build up their defences.’
‘And the same time to track their progress,’ Yuri said. ‘And intercept them.’
‘They changed a neutron star’s rotation,’ Jessika said with a lot of emphasis. ‘That’s Kardashev Type Two right there – probably the high end of it, too.’
‘And the Olyix aren’t?’ Alik asked. ‘Do you even remember what’s powering this enclave? Generator rings around a fucking star.’
‘I’m just saying it won’t be that easy to intercept them.’
‘If you ask me,’ Callum said, ‘this is the first piece of good news we’ve had since Feriton called us together for the assessment mission to Nkya. I’m with Yuri; we need to be ready.’
Kandara grinned softly at that miracle. She and Callum finished running diagnostics on the transmitter drone components and instigated the casing knit. They usually ran more tests, but decided there was no point. If the tests showed a problem, there wasn’t time to correct it. So just finish up and hope it worked.
‘This is what you call a real all-up test,’ Callum muttered as the upper casing segments closed up and fused together along the drone’s dorsal spine.
Kandara was about to reply when she felt a frisson of surprise within the Salvation of Life’s onemind. When she tried to read it raw from the thoughtstream, instead of clarity, she felt a backwash of alarm.
Jessika looked around with an incredulous smile on her face. ‘They’re here.’
FinalStrike
Dellian knew there was no way he could tell he was in a slow time flow, yet some annoying little instinct kept telling him there was something subtly wrong with his universe. The armada’s journey down the wormhole would take four years, real time – depending on how you define real. But for the Morgan, it would only be four days. His brain kept searching for signs that something was wrong.
‘More like portents than signs,’ Yirella said with cheerful mockery on the first night. ‘Portents are imaginary, after all. Time is always constant to the observer, Del. Forget about it.’
He couldn’t, of course. Every paranoiac little sense he had, the hair-trigger responses he’d developed in combat training, were constantly alert. Being vigilant for so long was draining. He also stubbornly refused to use any of his glands to clear the nonsense away chemically, earning another eye roll from Yirella.
And now here they were, only a couple of hours out. His anxiety had made him rise early, needing to be ready. Because if their artificial time had been misjudged somehow . . .
Yi’s right, I am an idiot.
With its long storage racks stretching away under gloomy lighting, the cohort hiatus facility on deck seven put Dellian in mind of a warehouse. As he walked down one of the aisles he could feel the resonance in the floor from all the support machinery.
After the last training simulation, his cohort had been resting up for two days. He almost wished he’d been doing the
