Callum was sitting at the central table, eating scrambled eggs and salmon, with a mug of tea steaming beside his plate. ‘Morning,’ he said, waving a fork in her direction.
She gave him a mildly awkward smile and went over to the food printer. Her altme, Zapata, splashed a reassuring green medical icon; her gland was working fine, keeping her neurochemistry stable. Not that there’s been any trauma to trigger schizophrenia. And if the gland packs up, I’ll just use Alik for stress relief. It was all she could do not to laugh out loud. Ah, the romance.
‘I’m going to stay out another twenty-four hours,’ she announced as the printer squirted out her smoothie. ‘One more aerobics session.’
‘I haven’t got a clue why you think you need that,’ Callum said. ‘It’s us truly old crocks that should be hitting the treadmills.’
‘Treadmills? Am I the only one who uses the exercise apparatus?’
‘I used one of them a couple of days ago. My legs are still on fire with DOMS.’
‘Sweet Mary, I thought the docs fixed us all up. What kind of state were you in before? We were only in the tanks for three weeks. That was just a kindergarten trial run. The real slog doesn’t start until we reach the sensor outpost, or whatever it is.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She collected her smoothie and sat down beside him. The gloom in his tone was one she shared. It had been a huge blow to discover the Salvation of Life wasn’t flying directly back to the enclave. Instead, as they came to comprehend more of the onemind’s thoughts, they realized the wormhole ended at some kind of local observation base. The Olyix had built thousands of them scattered across the galaxy, each one watching for the emergence of sentient species in their own particular sector. That was where the wormhole back to the enclave star system waited.
It was a perfectly logical set-up. Just one they hadn’t anticipated. She almost wanted to break cover so they could send Alpha Defence a message: You smartarses didn’t think of everything after all.
‘You know what bothers me about it?’ she said.
‘Tell me.’
‘The Neána didn’t know.’
‘About the outpost?’
‘Yeah. We are completely dependent on their knowledge and their technology. And the first time we use it . . . Pow! Instant problem.’
‘Pessimist. I’d say issue, not problem. So the Olyix enclave is further away than we expected. It doesn’t change the mission profile, or what we’re dealing with. And to be fair, when they arrived on Earth, Jessika and Soćko weren’t expecting us to do anything as fucking stupid as this mission. Deliberately abandoning every planet we have so our descendants can have a crack at the enclave? When you look at it the morning after, it’s really not a good idea.’
‘I know. But really, this ship: it’s just a tiny part of the whole exodus plan. Whether we live between stars like the Neána or go for Emilja’s migratory option and hop between planets while we build up an armoury of the universe’s most dangerous weapons, there will be a time when we have to face the Olyix. All you and I are doing really is giving our species a fractionally better chance to succeed. If we fail, then they’ll find the enclave by themselves eventually.’
Callum raised his mug of tea. ‘Great pep talk. Thanks.’
‘Sorry.’ She chuckled. ‘What can I say? I’m a pragmatist.’
‘I’ll take that. At least it means we have a slightly better chance of pulling this off.’
Kandara raised her glass of smoothie. ‘And in the meantime, enjoy the view.’ She sipped the green slush and wrinkled her nose at the taste. It wasn’t quite right, not like the one she used to blend at home, with real fruit and horrifically expensive organic yogurt. Did knowing it wasn’t real emphasize the taste difference? If there is one.
Alik came out a couple of minutes later. He wore a white T-shirt and shorts. It didn’t look right. Kandara had become so used to seeing him in a suit that having him walking around in his underwear unsettled her world almost as much as knowing they were inside an alien arkship, which itself was inside a wormhole.
‘Gonna get a shower,’ he announced and headed up the ladder to the mid-deck.
Kandara watched Callum struggle to keep his face composed. ‘Just don’t.’ She sighed wearily.
‘I’m not judging. But you kids make sure you use protection, okay?’
‘Oh, fuck off!’
He started laughing. Despite herself, Kandara found she was grinning happily. ‘It’s a long flight,’ she said defensively.
‘And getting longer.’
‘Oh, Mary, forgive me.’ She walked over to the food printer and ordered up a bacon sandwich with mashed avocado and a tiny dash of spiced tomato sauce, plus a warm pain au chocolat. Add black coffee and an orange juice, and she was truly the child of international resort cuisine. One way of keeping the lost Earth alive.
Yuri came out of his cabin as she was sitting down again. He was wearing an FC Dynamo midfield shirt and black shorts. Somehow the choice suited him. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d get back into the tank today.’
‘Impatient for action?’ she asked.
‘Bored.’
‘The creeperdrone fake is making progress,’ Callum said. ‘We’ll soon have something to see.’
*
During the first week of the Avenging Heretic sitting in the hangar, all they did was observe, and absorb as many of the arkship onemind’s thoughts as they could. Once they established that the onemind had essentially zero interest in individual ships, Jessika set about infiltrating the local neuralstratum and gently deflecting its scrutiny. The perception cells on the thick trunk-like pipes that webbed the hangar surfaces still saw everything; it was just that the interpretation routines that received those images didn’t care.
With a zone of out-in-the-open concealment established,
