‘Not bad,’ Kandara admitted. ‘A bit Old Testament, but . . .’
Yuri flashed her a grin and shrugged.
Nine Deliverance ships were still in pursuit of the Avenging Heretic. One fired an energy beam. The power was reduced from the colossal output it was capable of – intended to damage, to weaken.
The Avenging Heretic exploded in fury as Jessika released the magnetic confinement holding half a kilogram of antimatter. The radiation flash overwhelmed the fuselage of three Deliverance ships, which ruptured in a near-synchronous cascade of ultraviolence. Two more tumbled away, ruined. Dead.
The brutal plasmasphere expanded, momentarily rivalling the galactic core’s luminosity. Then it began to fade.
Alik watched it dissipate in silence, awed and disturbed by its force. Yet it was nothing compared to the power of the Olyix ships.
‘Sweet enough, as funeral pyres go,’ Kandara said. ‘I couldn’t wish for a better one.’
‘Jessika?’ Yuri asked.
‘I’ve switched the cell nodule’s entanglement to purely passive. We’ll still be able to perceive the onemind’s thoughts, but that’s all. There’ll be no more loading our own quiet queries into the neuralstratum.’
When Alik reached for the onemind’s persistent background stream of thoughts, he found them muted. It didn’t entirely displease him; having the massive alien’s deliberations and memories weaving through his own brain had always left him on edge. Now all he could feel was the Salvation of Life directing a scan of the cooling ion cloud that was the remnants of the Avenging Heretic, its own puzzlement at how they had eluded it for so long, self-examination of its thought routines. A flicker of annoyance as it purged Jessica’s neurovirus contamination from itself, restoring full perception to the hangar.
‘Are we clear?’ Callum asked nervously.
‘I think so,’ Jessika said. ‘I can’t sense much suspicion in its thoughts. Of course, it’ll have analysed the neurovirus and formatted countermeasures, so we’ll never be able to use it again.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Yuri said. ‘Once we trigger the Signal transmitters, our mission is over.’
‘You mean: successful,’ Kandara said.
‘Yeah. Then we just have to keep our heads down and wait.’
Alik let the bridge simulation dissolve and sat up. The cavern was a bleak contrast to the clean elegance of the bridge; even the Avenging Heretic’s too-small cabin was preferable. He hadn’t been anywhere near a non-urban environment for decades, not since his last mandatory Bureau survival training course in Alaska’s Denali Park – an area seemingly immune from the anthrochange warmth that had gripped the rest of Earth. A week shivering in a sleeping bag at night, cooking on a thermal block that either burned the food or left it raw, making snares that caught nothing, no showers, waterproofs that weren’t, colleagues trying to be jolly, which made him want to punch them, and thick snow covering everything. Snow, he’d discovered, was not the white Christmas ideal everyone loved; it didn’t make the excursion a fun-laden ski break. Snow halfway up a steep mountain was cold. It oozed through clothing, it made walking difficult, it hid treacherous ground that could twist ankles and break legs. It interred any dead branches that might have been used for a fire. Snow was shit. Now here he was, camping in a cave for what could be years; with a closed-loop waste recycling/food printing system that he really didn’t want to think about. But at least there was no snow.
He walked over to the stack of equipment and switched on the food printer. ‘Who wants breakfast?’
*
They took it in turns to monitor the Signal transmitters as they flew towards their allocated radio telescopes. Each of the targets had been chosen because they had a dish that was aligned on the section of space where Sol was located. Positioned correctly, the vessels could use a dish to focus their broadcast back towards Sol – though by the time it had travelled fifty thousand lightyears, it was doubtful it would have the strength to be detected. Interstellar gas and the inverse square law would be severe debilitating factors.
Whether anyone would ever detect it became their main talking point. Alik shouldered the monotony of such a circular argument of unknowns as inevitable. He treated it like a stakeout. You didn’t know the outcome, nor even when it would come, so you just waited patiently and tolerated your partner’s bullshit. That was provided by Callum, who’d decided their mission was now pointless.
‘Fifty thousand lightyears,’ he complained. ‘We expected it to be two, maybe three thousand at the most. We’re past the bloody galactic core here. We can’t even see Sol.’
‘The longer it takes, the more powerful humans will become,’ Kandara said. ‘Think how much progress we made in the last five hundred years. And we’ll have numbers on our side. The exodus habitats will expand exponentially.’
‘If they’ve got any sense, they’ll head out in the opposite direction. I would.’
‘Great idea.’ Yuri laughed. ‘And how do they know what the opposite direction is?’
Callum gave him a glum look.
‘We’re committed,’ Jessika said. ‘All we can do now is wait it out.’
‘We planned on waiting for a year maximum,’ Callum said.
‘Before we knew where the enclave star system actually was,’ Alik reminded him. ‘Now we just have to make the best of it.’
‘Bloody hell, man, we can’t even go out of this cave.’
‘What do you suggest?’ Kandara asked sharply. ‘Go and surrender to the Olyix?’
‘We still have a mission,’ Yuri said. ‘Not just a mission – a purpose. When the human armada gets here, we have to show them where the five of us and all the cocoons are. That’s what we focus on; that’s all we focus on. Anything else is crap.’
‘A-men to that,’ Alik agreed – even though he knew it was all hopeless. A hundred thousand years! Je-zus.
After ten days, the Signal transmitter spheres were closing on the giant radio telescopes. They were just in time.
