The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.]

the corpus aspects were smart enough individually to solve this. They had mastered time-flow technology back at the neutron star, creating the domains, but the enclave was on such a colossal scale they would need to combine again to counter it. The obvious – in fact, the only – solution was to destroy the power rings around the star. Without them, the enclave would fall. But the contrasting time flows were a plague that stopped any of them from acting, let alone flying to the star to attack the rings.

So . . .

She needed to reunify the Morgan somehow, to banish all the different time flows. Once it was operational again, she could start to fight back.

The life-support section had its own time flow unit; they’d spent the journey through the wormhole inside it. If I can switch that on, it could shield us from the Olyix’s temporal distortions. But of course she couldn’t switch it on, because the Morgan’s network was down – and even if she did, that would just protect the life-support section from the attack. I need the whole ship, everything inside the hull unified.

Visualizing the ship like that, surrounded by a protective envelope that repelled the distortions, triggered an idea. At a fundamental level, the internal continuum of the enclave was no different from that of the wormhole. They were both a manipulation of spacetime by a complex pattern of exotic matter. The Morgan’s negative energy conduits also channelled that pseudofabric, allowing the ship to fly along a wormhole. And there were hundreds of conduits all over the fuselage. If she could activate them, and realign their function to deflect the temporal distortions, the Morgan would contain a single time zone again.

But it was a chicken-and-egg problem. You had to provide the ship with a single time flow in order to activate the conduits – which would give the ship a single time flow.

‘I hate paradox,’ she announced to the canteen.

The fuselage conduits had to be activated simultaneously. That might just be possible if each section’s sub-network knew when to switch them on. But to do that would mean having to get a message into each section and load the instructions into the local sub-net. Trying to move between time flows was a death sentence. ‘For humans,’ she shouted triumphantly.

She immediately sent a ping to her cyborg. ‘Oh, fuck the Saints.’ It was no use; the cyborg was in storage in a compartment down on deck forty-six, three time zones away. Completely out of reach. So she pulled an inventory of every remote device on deck thirty-three. More than a dozen small janitor remotes were available, and even three small maintenance units, plus . . . ‘YES!’

She almost ran, but forced herself to keep a sensible pace while using the optik interface to watch for any sign of a boundary she hadn’t plotted. The unused cabin was five doors down from the quarters she and Dellian shared. Makes sense.

The door opened, and she peered in. Lights came on. There, sitting inertly on the untextured raised rectangle of the bed, was the Ainsley android. Her interface immediately connected her to it. The chest cavity contained a huge neural array, which was in standby mode. She carefully selected the routines she’d used before, when she’d elaborated her consciousness out into the Morgan’s network. This time it would be different; this time she wouldn’t stay connected to the android.

The process to elaborate up to corpus level, to become more than one, was complicated. Part of the time she was impatient for it to run, while the rest of the process was spent fearing her personality pattern and memories weren’t just being duplicated, they were being methodically stripped out of her biological brain to be absorbed by the android’s array. Stupid to think that, of course, but still very much her own foible.

In the end, there she was – two Yirella minds, held together in perfect harmony by a single high-capacity link. She cut the link.

She opened her eyes to stare at . . . the android. Thank the Saints, I’m the original me, the real one. She saw the android turn down the corner of its lips.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘I’ll be you again,’ it said. ‘When this is all over.’

‘That’s down to you now. Maybe you won’t want to be.’

‘You know the answer to that, and you know you’re just voicing a concern to have it denied, thus gaining reassurance.’

‘Yes.’

‘So I won’t. Corpus is clearly not for us.’

‘Not now. But you and I are asunder. Every instant from now on, the divergence will widen. And in the fast flow sections, you’re going to exist for years – decades, possibly. The difference will become . . . extensive,’ she said.

‘As soon as our aspects rejoin, there will be no difference.’

‘I am not an aspect. I am Yirella.’

‘We are.’

‘No. You’re an artificial personality operating in an array that was never designed for you.’

‘Yet here I am.’ The android stood up, then glanced down at itself and grinned. ‘And it’s not just the array that’s different.’

‘Oh, Saints.’ But there was nothing she could do to stop her own grin; her lips quirked in exactly the same fashion. Maybe thoughts have an entanglement all their own, more spiritual than quantum?

‘We’d better get on with this,’ the android said.

‘Yeah. I thought you should go through riding on something. I’m not sure even you are capable of coordinating yourself while transiting through a gradient.’

‘I know. A chair might work.’

‘Yes.’ There was no point in her saying anything else. She’d spent the time her memories were being copied thinking about the practical aspects of getting to the stairwell. Therefore: it had.

The android picked up a chair from the canteen, one with casters, and carried it effortlessly. When they were back at the junction, it sat down, facing Kenelm’s corpse. The decay had progressed. Hir skeleton had obviously fallen apart as the joints detached from each other, subsiding into a jumble with the tunic deflating around it. Hir skull had rolled to one side, empty sockets staring up at the ceiling.

Yirella gripped