‘It certainly is.’
‘The evacuation is starting.’
Expansion portals opened in front of every arkship, bathing them in a lush sapphire light. Yirella’s personality was still operating within the Salvation of Life neuralstratum – albeit with a great many protective routines and cutoffs in case the onemind had left behind any darkvirals. She had given up trying to activate its gravitonic drive. Whole sections had been decommissioned, with components fed into the Olyix equivalent of disassembly reactors, ready for the mass to be recycled. Some of the older arkships didn’t even have the chambers that housed the drive any more; they’d all been repurposed to help support the cocoons.
All she could do now was ensure the power supply to the massive cocoon vaults was maintained, keeping over a billion human brains alive. As responsibilities went, she hated it.
An attack cruiser positioned itself a kilometre in front of the arkship and established a wide distortion boundary. The portal itself began to move backwards, swallowing the Salvation of Life.
I’ll never see the neutron star hit. We’re going to outrun the nova light all the way back to Earth. Shame. It should be pretty spectacular.
The remaining attack cruisers and the Morgan followed the Salvation of Life through the portal. Yirella took a last look at the elegant nebula clouds framed by a thin blue rim. Once the ships were all through, Immanueel deactivated the portal.
Yirella rearranged the feed from the Morgan’s sensors. A coma of flaring interstellar dust was forming around the Salvation of Life as the lonely molecules collided with the attack cruiser’s protective boundary and disintegrated into their elementary particles. A hundred thousand kilometres ahead, the wormhole was open and waiting.
‘So now you have one decision left,’ Immanueel said. ‘Do you tell him?’
Yirella rose to her feet, her original body and her new clone standing facing each other. ‘I can’t. He deserves the life we were promised. I refuse to deny him that. I love him.’
Twenty-seven decks below, in one of the Morgan’s cargo chambers, she’d gathered all her android aspects together. She withdrew from them now, feeling them turn quiescent, their functions shutting down. Immanueel took over the Morgan’s network as she left that, then she handed over control of the Salvation of Life to them.
And then there were two.
Double vision – both images of herself, both aspects utterly identical, even wearing the same clothes. Because I cannot afford to be honest with him. Out of all the eeriness that came from being a host of corpus aspects, this was the most poignant.
A portal expanded at the end of the reception room. Immanueel’s biophysical body came through, ducking down sharply, their tail quivering to maintain balance. ‘We’re ready,’ they told her.
‘Thank you.’ She gave their dark, mottled body a gentle hug.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Yes. I have to. He will never understand. Nor forgive.’
‘He might. He loves you.’
‘No. I know my Del. His war is over now. After everything he’s done, everything that’s happened to him, I cannot ask him to do more.’
‘What about you? Is this what you deserve?’
‘Deserve? That simplicity no longer applies. As I learned long ago, if you are in a position to make the choice, you have the right to make it.’
‘You are the true genesis human.’
Yirella in her original body straightened her back and accompanied Immanueel into their centrex ship. Her mind twinned and separated. She looked back at her clone through the glowing rim of the portal and lifted a hand in parting. ‘Take care of him.’
*
It was quite a party that had developed by the time Yirella got back to the cafe. Nobody could resist just dropping by to meet the Saints, who after an almost believable show of reluctance had bravely settled into accepting their idol status. Talk was loud, and the Latin music louder.
Yuri was still at the table, facing down Janc and Xante; a pile of sticky shot glasses had piled up between them, along with two empty bottles of vodka so cold they were still covered in frost. Yuri poured a fresh trio of shots from a new bottle as he explained some heroic mission he and Kohei had run once upon a time to save the world from terrorists or revolutionaries or mad ideologues. Yirella was seriously impressed how steady his hand was, while Xante could barely see his shot glass, let alone pick it up.
Callum was having a terribly earnest conversation with Ovan about the Dons’ last amazing season in the Scottish first division before he’d left Earth, while Kandara was teaching Uret and Falar how to samba – really samba – much to their audience’s whooping approval.
Dellian was chatting enthusiastically to Jessika, the pair of them looking up at a window’s tactical display. Yirella slid her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder where it belonged. ‘Hello, you.’
‘Finally!’ he exclaimed and kissed her happily. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’
‘It’s been a busy time.’
‘Yeah!’ His smile faded. ‘Tilliana and Ellici?’
‘Alive. We can rejuvenate their bodies, the same way we recovered everyone on the Calibar.’
‘Great!’
‘Their bodies, Del. Their bodies will recover. But there’s not much of them left.’
He nodded despondently. ‘Right.’
Yirella smiled at Jessika, who was giving her a calculating look. Almost as if she knows. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise. And thank you.’
‘I have to ask: Did you know, when you arrived on Earth? Did you think we’d be the ones who beat the Olyix?’
‘Nothing is certain. But I had confidence.’
‘Right. Well, and here we are.’
‘So what happens next?’
Yirella gestured at the window and brought up a visual image of the wormhole terminus. Arkships were sliding into its open throat one after the other. ‘In about three minutes we go into there, and four years later we come out at a small star that used to be an Olyix sensor station. It’s not any more; the armada saw to that. Then it’s a
