Data blossomed across the basic displays surrounding his seat like leaves surging into life along a tree’s branches after a long winter. The information deluge was as bad as the visual one. He ignored the factual summary the ship’s genten was assembling as a smile of wonder grew across his face. His eyes were slowly making sense of the sensor feed, revealing a large star in the foreground. Behind it, the galactic core was a vast jewel blazing white-gold across space. He couldn’t believe that many stars actually existed, never mind in a single congregation. ‘Je-zus wept. Where the fuck are we?’
‘A long, long way from home,’ Yuri said quietly.
Despite the grandeur of the galactic core, Alik was startled by the star they had arrived at. Tables of numbers multiplying around him confirmed how exceptional it was. ‘That is one big-ass star,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jessika agreed. ‘About twice the size of Sirius. The sensors haven’t found any planets – not on this side, anyway.’
‘Not even a gas giant?’ Alik asked, running through the information.
‘No. But that ring is something else,’ she said.
Alik focused on the thin band orbiting one point five AUs out from the star. Unlike the usual mucky grey of asteroidal regolith, this ring gleamed with refracted light from the brilliant star, as if quartz dust had settled like frost to coat every particle.
‘The particle density is crazy,’ Callum said. ‘That can’t be natural.’
‘It’s definitely not an accretion disc,’ Jessika said. ‘So I guess we know what happened to the planets.’
‘Why the hell would you do that?’ Yuri asked.
‘Because you can?’ she replied.
‘No,’ Callum said. ‘Check out those knots in the ring. They’re alive with activity.’
Alik directed his sensor feed to expand the area Callum had mentioned. The resolution wasn’t great – there was only so much you could do with sensor clumps the size of a pinhead – but each of the knot particles was slowly rotating around a vast artefact in a slow-motion hurricane whorl. ‘Olyix industrial stations?’ he wondered out loud. The main bulk of the things were spherical, with dozens of tapering spires radiating out. On the surface below them, a web of precise lines of purple and amber light cast multicoloured shadows up on the summits. Spaceships – a lot bigger than the Deliverance ships – were holding formation nearby. As he watched, another ship rose up from the station to join them.
Alik shifted focus to the next knot, where a similar station was surrounded by a flotilla of Deliverance ships. As he pulled the focus back, he could see a series of similar knots stretching right around the ring; there must have been thousands of them. Which means tens of thousands of spaceships – more like hundreds of thousands. Je-zus. One of the stations further along seemed to be clamped to a big rock particle, shaping it into a cylinder. An arkship! So that’s why Salvation has caves like you get on a planet: It used to be a part of a solid world.
‘They must have broken the planets down into digestible chunks,’ Jessika said. ‘Now they have the entire mass of the solar system as raw material to manufacture warships and arkships.’
‘Found the radio telescopes,’ Kandara announced.
Alik switched to the zone her icon was indicating. Three AUs outside the ring, glowing bright in the glaring starlight, were pentagonal dodecahedrons, big brothers to the ones they’d seen orbiting the star of the Olyix sensor outpost. If their positioning was constant all the way around the star, there would be a hundred and fifteen of them. ‘That’s good. We can use them to help boost the Signal from our transmitters,’ he said. ‘We just need the ones aligned on the section of space where Sol is.’
‘The genten’s nearly finished star mapping,’ Jessika told him. ‘But judging from the apparent size of the core, we’re about fifty thousand lightyears from home.’
The number didn’t really resonate with Alik. At some point in the last four years, he’d resigned himself that he’d never return to Earth. In reality, he probably wouldn’t even last more than a few hours after they reached the enclave star system. Setting up their fallback refuge had driven that point home. Even so – fifty thousand lightyears!
‘How the hell is any human armada ever going to get here?’ he asked. ‘If they pick up our Signal, which is going to be unlikely verging on fucking never, they’ll have to fly fifty thousand lightyears. Which – and correct me if I’ve screwed up the maths – will take them fifty thousand years.’
‘For a neutral observer it’ll take that long,’ Callum said. ‘But relativistic travel will make it a lot shorter for anyone on board the armada ships.’
‘Yeah? Well, we’re going to be those neutral observers, so we’re looking at a hundred and twenty thousand years before anyone turns up. Goddamn! This is insane!’
‘Are you saying we don’t send the Signal?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t fucking know. This whole mission was one giant mistake.’
‘We send the Signal,’ Kandara said. ‘The Avenging Heretic is going to get ordered to fly to some kind of dock for repair, or maybe they’ll want to scrap it and recycle the mass.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Alik sneered. ‘The Olyix are known the galaxy over for their environmental credentials. Recycling, my ass.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said with icy patience. ‘The Avenging Heretic will leave this hangar soon. That’s why we put the refuge together. One way or another, the Olyix will know we are here. So we send the Signal, and if it isn’t humans who detect it, maybe someone will. The Neána perhaps. Someone who can do something other than run and hide. We will have accomplished something. I did not come all this way just to walk up to the onemind and surrender like a fucking coward.’
‘I’m not talking about surrendering,’ Alik said angrily.
‘Then why don’t you tell us exactly what the hell you do want to do?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t know, man. Send the Signal, I
