She steeled herself for the lie. A white lie, though. The squads cannot have distractions when they get into the arkship. ‘Yes, they’re okay. Tactical’s really busy right now, so I took this job.’
‘Thanks, Yi. So is FinalStrike over? Are we retreating? We can see the armada ships being destroyed.’
‘No, Del, we’re not retreating. The corpus humans are going to start fighting back. We know how to beat the Olyix weapon. Our ships will be liberated.’
‘Thank the Saints for that. After all this, we can’t back out now. We can’t.’
‘I know. I’ll call you back.’
‘Sure. Thanks for stepping up. I get how stressful this must be for you.’
‘No problem.’ She closed Del’s icon. The relief from hearing his voice was profound. She granted her original body a moment while her corpus personality finalized strategy. They really did need to liberate the armada fast. Otherwise this freedom wasn’t going to last long.
The Morgan’s generators were nearly all back online, providing close to a full power output – enough to power a whole continent back on old Earth. Her lips twisted into a smile. ‘Fire on those Saints-damned twinkles,’ she ordered the Morgan’s network. ‘Every graviton beam we’ve got.’ She needed to see what impact the weapons would have. The twinkles were just loci within the enclave’s slowtime continuum. There was nothing physical there to be blown up, but she was fairly confident they could be distorted, their temporal effect broken.
Graviton pulses swiped through shoals of twinkles, scattering them like a tornado hitting a pile of leaves. The troop carriers swept in through the scintillating lightstorm, returning to their hangars. As soon as the last one was back on board, Yirella accelerated the Morgan at eighty gees, streaking towards the closest battle cruiser. They came alongside fast, graviton pulses bombarding the dense throng of scintillating blemishes that surrounded the long copper-sheathed shape. ‘It’s working,’ she said gleefully, as fractured auroral curlicues scythed away from the battle cruiser’s hull.
Immanueel’s communication icon appeared, routed through the armada’s secure links. ‘What just happened?’ they asked. The battle cruiser was only a single aspect, but the contact was profoundly reassuring. She sent the file she’d composed. A second later the battle cruiser’s negative energy conduit fins were sliding up through the copper hull.
‘I’ll get Ainsley,’ she said. ‘You clear the rest of the armada.’
‘At once,’ Immanueel replied.
The battle cruiser speed-blurred in her sensor images as it shot away. The Morgan accelerated again, driving through the armada at three hundred gees, heading straight for Ainsley.
The Olyix had made a mistake, she thought, by not targeting Ainsley first. But as the Resolution ships coming through the gateway had caught up with the tail end of the armada, they’d started attacking the helpless ships there. Bad strategy.
By the time the Morgan reached Ainsley, Immanueel had lifted four more warships out of the disjointed time flows. They had each gone on to unshackle more; freedom was now growing geometrically. Judging by the rising intensity of the twinkles, the Olyix recognized the inevitable outcome.
At two kilometres long, Ainsley was shorter than the Morgan. That made Yirella extremely confident they could rip it clear of the distortions. But the Olyix had obviously realized the same thing. When they rendezvoused, the white hull was almost invisible behind a cloud of the diabolical sprites. The Morgan was firing gravitonic pulses almost continuously; Yirella’s corpus personality had assumed direct command of the ship’s systems from the genten arrays and diverted every watt from the generators into the negative energy conduits.
It wasn’t a battle many sensors could see, let alone interpret. But the counters the Morgan was deploying methodically peeled the clashing continuum disfigurements away from Ainsley, creating a dark zone around the pair of them.
Finally, Ainsley’s white icon appeared.
‘Motherfucker! Those sneaky little shits. Parts of me lived for a thousand years. Nothing worked. It was like being smothered for eternity. That . . . Goddamn. I’m having to delete entire memory clusters. It’s too painful. Fuck them! They crippled half of my mind, and the other half didn’t even know. I’m going to rip them a new one bigger than their star. I am going to neurovirus every quint and make them eat the onemind neuralstrata—’
‘Ainsley.’
‘—when I am finished with them they won’t even be a boogieman legend in this galaxy. I’m going to—’
‘Ainsley.’
‘Jesus fuck. What?’
‘Ainsley, we need you. Please.’ She watched negative energy fins telescope smoothly out of the white fuselage. The ship’s winglike structures were briefly sketched by a complex web of glaring scarlet and turquoise lines that swiftly softened to a subliminal tessellation.
‘Right. Yeah. Fine. I’m realigning my mentality. I’ve got most systems under control. Fuck! Even some of my units have time ablated. Hell, if that’d gone on much longer, they could’ve compromised the phasefolded systems. Performance is returning.’
‘Ainsley, the Olyix are going heavy on targeting the neutron star with this temporal distortion crap. I think they’re trying to slow it down. So I need you to take out the power rings. We have to kill the enclave. Now.’
‘Got it. Yirella?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I went corpus. It was the only way to overcome multiple time flows.’
‘Okay. Well . . . uh, thanks, kid.’
‘You’re welcome. Ainsley . . .?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Tilliana and Ellici got trapped in a fast time flow. It finished them. They’re alive, but they lived in it for ninety years.’
‘Oh, Jeez, no. What about the boyfriend?’
‘He’s good. He’s alive and back on board the Morgan.’
‘Okay. I’m going to take down the power rings. See you at the arkships.’
‘Yes.’ She watched Ainsley depart, scoring a long, dark line through the nebula. When she checked, the total elapsed time since she’d rendezvoused with him was two point eight seconds. So there are some benefits to elevation, then.
The tactical display showed her the rate armada ships were being recovered was increasing dramatically. Ten minutes later the liberation was complete, even though she felt sick at how much glowing wreckage was clotting this whole section of the nebula – a swirling radioactive monument to their hubris. So many
