There was an outbreak of whispering over by the cafe’s counter, a heated discussion just below comprehension threshold. Yuri refused to look around, but Kandara did. She leant in across the table. ‘The kids are home from school,’ she muttered in amusement.
When he did deign to glance in that direction, Yuri saw Dellian and a group of other young men clustered together, their argument stalled as soon as they saw him looking at them. Despite the obvious ethnic variances between them, they had a peculiar sameness – all of them squat and broad-shouldered, not so much Olympian-fit as carrying the kind of excess muscle Earth’s bodybuilders used to get from embracing a full illegal tox development. They also shared the same vaguely guilty expression as they stared at Yuri’s table.
‘Join us,’ a grinning Kandara said before Yuri could object. But then, after so long spent with just the five of them, some fresh company wasn’t such a bad idea.
Dellian’s squad and several more of their friends hurried over.
‘This is an honour—’ Janc began eagerly.
‘Don’t,’ Yuri said, holding up a finger in warning. ‘Just don’t. And we’re not Saints, either.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He let that one go.
‘So what state is the Salvation in?’ Callum asked.
‘Secure,’ Dellian said. ‘Yirella eliminated the onemind, so we have continuity in maintaining the cocoons. And we’ve eliminated a lot of quint.’
‘Yeah,’ Uret said glumly. ‘But as we know from the Vayan ambush, it’s going to take months to track down the last of them. Those arkships are the biggest three-dimensional maze in the galaxy; there are a million places inside where you can hide unnoticed.’
‘Look who you’re telling,’ Jessika said.
Uret blushed.
Kandara raised her glass of wine, regarding it intently. ‘So, you organize hunting parties?’
‘There are teams of marines on specialist tracking duty,’ Xante said. ‘And remotes will install a comprehensive sensor network throughout every chamber and corridor. But we’re scheduled for duty rotations to that detail. It helps keep us fresh.’
‘It’s going to take most of the flight to be sure we got them all,’ Janc said. ‘Last time, we transferred all the cocoons over to our habitat and got out of there fast, but we can’t do that this time.’
‘Last time?’ Yuri asked.
‘Yeah. We got ambushed.’
‘Right. We knew the Olyix were raiding the expansion wavefront. There are five more ships here storing human cocoons.’
‘And thousands of other species,’ Jessika said. ‘I understand from the Yirella androids that they’re all coming with us?’
‘Away from here, yes,’ Dellian said. ‘They’ll be flown to the other end of the wormhole, then we’ll see what we do. Yirella was saying she thinks we should all settle stars close together, form some kind of grand inter-species alliance, in case the Olyix ever come back.’
‘Bold move,’ Yuri said. ‘But suppose some of those species are even crazier than the Olyix?’
‘Please excuse Yuri,’ Callum said. ‘He always thinks the worst.’
Half of their rapt audience nodded eagerly. ‘We know.’
For once, Yuri was lost for a rebuke.
‘It’ll take a lot of work,’ Dellian said. ‘We need to find out all about them. But statistically, there will be some we’d want as neighbours.’
Callum raised his glass and finished the beer in a couple of gulps. ‘Time will tell. In the meantime, what kind of beers from the future do you boys recommend for an old-timer?’
Yirella
Morgan
Yirella’s corpus personality observed the deck thirty-three cafe through sensors. She still hadn’t used her original body to meet the Saints. It was sitting quietly in the captain’s formal reception room along with a clone of herself. Immanueel had spent the last hour growing it for her inside a fast-time domain that was barely larger than the womb-vat. An initiator growing her a biologic body would have been a simpler solution, but she didn’t want to be that cheap. This body had to be perfect in every respect; he deserved that much.
Both aspects were anxiously watching corpus ships and machines racing to install exotic energy conduits around the outside of all the huge Olyix ships they’d captured. Simultaneously she kept a great deal of her attention focused on the progress of the neutron star. It was less than an hour out from the corona now. Vast rivers of nebula dust were flowing into it, flaring like solar prominences as they sank into the oblivion of its black horizon. As lightstorms went, it should have been spectacular. Yirella found it ominous.
‘We’re cutting this fine,’ she said.
‘We are on schedule,’ Immanueel said calmly.
‘Assuming nothing goes wrong. Don’t fall into the hubris trap. We’re not the Olyix. We need to leave now; you can finish fixing conduits to the arkships later.’
‘Very well. We concede your point, genesis human.’
Yirella didn’t quite know what to make of that. Immanueel only used that honorific when they were being formal. ‘Did I just annoy you?’
‘No. The opinion of the genesis human is always treated with respect – even more so now you have chosen to elaborate.’
‘It’s not a full elaboration. I’m not ready for that.’
‘We understand. We remember when we began the process. It takes considerable mental adjustment.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We are flying the portals into place now.’
Yirella concentrated the majority of her aspects on the feeds from across the armada. Another advantage of being many: you could really appreciate the bigger picture.
Far away, the wormhole terminus was englobed by more than a thousand corpus attack cruisers. Unable to match its initial acceleration, the Resolution ships chasing it had fallen a long way behind. Most of them seemed to be decelerating. It was hard to tell; they only just registered on the billions of sensor fronds the wormhole had scattered in its wake. She read the distance in surprise. ‘How long were we in the enclave?’
‘A relativity question that has no correct answer – especially given how the Olyix fullmind manipulated the enclave time flow.’
‘The wormhole terminus is three-quarters of a lightyear away,’ she said. ‘We must have been in there for months.’
‘Yes,
