Callum felt the onemind’s concern deepening. It was analysing the attack vectors the Calmissiles had flown, seeing how humans were targeting the arkship’s engineering systems – and, more important, the wormhole terminus mechanism. Amid it all was a faint reply to Jessika’s request, an acknowledgement that was one of utter insignificance, simply an inclusion to the general orchestration of hundreds of Olyix transports that were damaged but still flightworthy.
‘We have a hangar assignment,’ Jessika confirmed.
The first wave of retreating transport ships was arriving at the Salvation of Life. As they closed in, each ship activated its negative energy regulators – hundreds of small fin-like protrusions bristling up out of the smooth fuselage like porcupine spikes reacting to a threat. In the centre of the Salvation’s aft section, the open throat of the wormhole glimmered with the signature violet sparkle of Cherenkov radiation. It was only just smaller than the diameter of the arkship. Looking down it, there was no funnel-like perspective, no distant vanishing point at the end of a tunnel through spacetime. The wormhole’s throat was simply a place where the real universe ended.
Callum shivered as he accessed the sensor image. What if the nothingness escapes?
The transport ships dived into the glowing emptiness, their manoeuvres as elegant and agile as a shoal of fish, instantly vanishing from view. Then the Avenging Heretic was only a hundred kilometres away, soaring along amid its own kind. No longer decelerating, but aligning themselves on the scintillating target. Seventy kilometres. Forty.
‘Er . . .’ Callum managed.
Behind her console, the unreal Jessika had her eyes closed, her face composed in perfect concentration. She even had perspiration glinting on her brow. The Avenging Heretic glided smartly out of the flow of transport ships, elevating itself away from the wormhole. Then they were skimming over the surface of the arkship, its dreary rock a blur of mottled grey, fluctuating wildly in brightness as the nuclear-tipped missiles chasing the transports continued to detonate behind them. A surface far too close as Jessika flew them in a tight, twisting trajectory. Even in this state, Callum perceived the shadow impulses of hard gravity variabilities tugging at his suspended physical body, as if they were riding an out-of-control roller coaster. Sensors revealed the Avenging Heretic’s own shadow flowing over the rock like a fluid ghost, flickering in and out of existence with every flash of light from the explosions.
Blackness eclipsed them so fast he yelled in shock. They’d streaked straight into a hangar entrance in a perfectly measured deceleration burst. Jessika’s piloting ability was phenomenal. He couldn’t imagine a transport’s onemind being so agile and precise.
Did the Salvation onemind notice we’re too good?
He took a breath, wondering if he should conjure up some tranquillizers from the suspension tank’s support modules, because that kind of thinking was where healthy paranoia bubbled over into outright crazy.
‘Holy shit!’ Alik exclaimed. ‘Damn, that was a ride.’
Sensors focused on their new surroundings. They were in a vast cavern whose rock walls were threaded with crinkled black roots, as if they’d dropped into the underground grotto of Nordic elementals. The floor was already home to more than twenty transport ships in various conditions, from little visible damage to those with fuselages warped and split from close proximity to nuclear blasts. The Avenging Heretic slipped smoothly among them, searching for a space to land. Jessika steered them towards the rear of the hangar where several badly damaged ships were parked, and slowly settled the Avenging Heretic amid them.
‘Oh, sweet mother Mary,’ Kandara said. ‘I don’t believe this. We made it.’
*
‘They’re in,’ Johnston exclaimed as the density of tactical data expanded towards solidity in the air around him. A single frozen image hung poised to his left – the tail end of the Avenging Heretic disappearing into the darkness of a hangar entrance at the middle of the arkship. Other icons splashed, confirming the entanglement communication channel with the ship had gone, deactivated in case the Salvation of Life was able to detect it.
He focused on the ring formation of twenty stealthed portals surrounding the Salvation of Life six hundred kilometres out. ‘Initiate phase five,’ he ordered.
The portals expanded. Calmissiles flew out of them, volley after volley curving sharply to hurtle in towards the arkship, lining up on the aft section where the wormhole glimmered. Long lines of Olyix transport ships were still racing into it.
Johnston wanted to start praying. This was the moment – the greatest gamble of all time. The Neána had assured them that the arkship was capable of travelling down the wormhole, even though it carried the terminus generator on board. If it didn’t – if they were wrong, or the onemind refused to retreat – the combined punctures of eight hundred Calmissiles would obliterate the Salvation of Life.
Alpha Defence estimated there were now more than a billion human cocoons on board.
‘Come on,’ he implored. The lead Calmissiles were twenty seconds out. Fifteen. ‘Run away, curse you.’ Ten.
The strange wavering lilac light of Cherenkov radiation flooded out past the arkship’s rim. Somehow, the vast cylinder of rock was sinking into it. The light vanished, and with it the Salvation of Life.
Johnston searched every data splash for information, but there was none. Hundreds of Calmissiles were criss-crossing the zone of space where their target had been moments earlier. The command centre coordinators began directing
