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
