‘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
