Logically, of course, he had no reason to be suspicious of her. She had been created to help humans – a real-universe version of an angel dispatched to Earth. The final proof being that she was here, supporting this crazy-stupid mission. Which left him looking like the petty one for harbouring doubts. He probably overreacted, trying to compensate with excessive politeness, and laughing a little too hard at her jokes. To the extent that after ten days together she asked: ‘Are you okay?’
Shamefaced, he’d diverted by replying: ‘It was just Kandara’s crack about the Neána being a splinter group of Olyix.’
‘It got to me, too,’ she admitted. ‘But there is the counter-argument: how come we didn’t know the enclave location?’
‘There’s a lot of things your group of Neána humans weren’t told. What your species actually is, where the abode cluster is. Security.’
‘Fair enough. But if I were you, I’d be more worried about Kandara’s other belief.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That I’m not in charge of my destiny. That I have subconscious orders to betray you, or something worse.’
‘Thanks. Way to reassure me.’
‘But on the bright side, what could I actually do at this point to make it worse?’
‘Uh . . .’
‘Quite.’
Callum admitted she’d won that one. It made the rest of their watch go smoothly.
Then six months later when he and Yuri began their watch together, he was prepared for weeks of grumpy avoidance and barely civil grunts when they did encounter each other. But it turned out Yuri was actually far too professional for that. Not that he was a big talker.
‘I was thinking about something Jessika said,’ Callum confided to Yuri at breakfast during their second week.
‘Which is?’
‘If she was a Neána, some kind of double agent, how could she damage the mission?’
‘Yes. And?’
‘Well, I don’t think she has a hidden agenda.’
Yuri rolled his eyes as he ate some syrniki. ‘Glad we got that sorted out.’
‘But it did make me think about what might happen. You know, worst-case scenarios and such.’
‘Ah. So?’
‘We know more about the Salvation of Life now; even I can understand some of its thought routines. The basic ones, anyway.’ It had taken a long time, and plenty of coaxing from Jessika, but these days he could make a degree of sense out of the impulses flowing into his brain from their entangled cell nodule. The Salvation of Life’s onemind was surprisingly sedate. He’d always had the belief that any entity fanatical enough to embark on forceful conquest would be deranged – an opinion enforced by the human viewpoint. Earth’s history was crammed with examples, from individuals like Hitler and Pol Pot to the popularism that had damaged so much in the so-called democratic nations from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. The realization that the onemind was methodical and composed in its beliefs and purpose had proved unnerving. Basically, that cold intent frightened him more than he’d expected.
‘It can’t see us, Callum,’ Yuri said in a reassuring tone. ‘Jessika made sure of that. The visual routines for the hangar simply edit our creeperdrones out of its perception.’
The fact that Yuri knew exactly what to say suggested to Callum that the old security chief had been thinking along similar lines.
‘No, it doesn’t see anything amiss,’ Callum agreed, ‘because right now its observation is autonomic. There is no problem; therefore it isn’t looking for a problem. But if it really starts to look, do you think the glitch we’ve introduced into its local routines will hold?’
‘And it will start to look hard,’ Yuri concluded.
‘Bloody right, pal. Once we trigger the Signal transmitters, the whole Olyix star system is going to know humans somehow piggybacked a ride to the enclave. They will tear the Salvation of Life apart to find us.’
‘Remaining here with the Salvation, and maybe calling to any future human attack force, was only a secondary aspect of the mission. Our absolute priority is to broadcast the Signal, to let humans know where the enclave is. You knew that when we began. We have to accept the inevitable. Once broadcast, the Signal cannot be cancelled.’
‘I do accept it, man. But it doesn’t mean we can’t take some precautions.’
Yuri sipped some tea from his oversized mug. ‘Such as?’
They spent the next ten weeks cheerfully shooting down each other’s wilder ideas, developing the concepts that did survive until they had something to bring to the others at the next watch changeover month.
Jessika’s revival was always immaculate; she awoke from the tank as if she’d been dozing for a couple of hours. Alik and Kandara took a lot longer, and Callum identified with their crabby resentment as they were helped out of the tanks. His own body still took way too long to recover every time his period in suspension ended.
In what was becoming tradition, twenty-four hours after they were out of the tank, everybody gathered around the table for a big Chinese meal. Callum even got the printers to provide therm-foil containers, so it looked like they’d ordered takeaway.
‘A bunker?’ Alik asked as he tried to use his chopsticks to hook a prawn out of his fried rice.
‘A fallback refuge,’ Callum said. ‘They’re going to come hunting us after we trigger the Signal. There aren’t many places we can be. They’ll figure it out eventually.’
‘Figure it out, or search the entire arkship,’ Yuri said. ‘Callum’s right. We need to be ready
