‘Maybe we still can be. Who knows what the Olyix are capable of? In that respect, going to face them now is no different than before. It was never going to be the Morgan alone. The Strike plan was always for humans to gather at a neutron star and combine forces to attack the enclave. And that’s what we’ve done.’
‘What you’ve done.’
‘I armed us with hope, that’s all.’
‘Saints! How about we go living those four thousand years, Yi? We could do that, you and me, have that life. Then after we’ve lived everything there is, we go kick down the enclave door.’
‘No, Del. However wrong Alexandre’s generation were to create us. Here we are. And we have a purpose, even if we had no choice. And we’re hardly the first humans to be in this position.’
‘Well, here’s hoping we’re the last.’
*
The squad gathered around a couple of big tables in deck thirty-three’s canteen, which someone had textured to resemble a Parisian Left Bank cafe circa 1920, all high arched ceilings and flickering gaslights inside frosted glass shades, with a long polished wooden counter along one side – an effect only spoiled by having food extruders instead of stewards wearing stiff white tunics. The tall windows, which ostensibly opened out onto the city’s famed Boulevard Saint-Germain, had clouded over with tactical displays of the neutron star system.
Dellian sipped his hot chocolate as he watched the history faction prepare to depart the neutron star. Like everything in the disc around the star, the wormhole generator was a big nondescript particle with an undulant copper surface protecting whatever machinery was within. As he watched, the covering peeled back with a sinuous flourish to reveal a maw glowing with the distinct violet radiance of Cherenkov radiation. He was moderately disappointed that the shimmer didn’t curve back into an infinite vortex.
‘How far does it extend?’ Xante asked.
‘The history faction launched their carrier ship towards the Olyix sensor station twenty-two years before we arrived,’ Tilliana said. ‘And we’ve been here twelve years, so the ship is already thirty-four lightyears away, give or take. It’s only got another thirty-two to go.’
‘I’m finding it hard to believe there were only ever two factions here,’ Ellici said. ‘History and egress. Out of a hundred thousand people? Come on, that’s not realistic.’
‘Their factions are a broad church,’ Tilliana said. ‘And don’t forget there was a whole bunch of naturalists, the ones who didn’t elaborate up to corpus level.’
‘Oh, hey, the ring particles are moving, look,’ Uret said.
Dellian glanced over at the displays. The particles closest to the wormhole were accelerating towards it, with more following. The whole movement reminded him of a shoal of playful fish smoothly following the leaders.
After an hour they could see the entire ring was on the move, every particle heading for the wormhole.
‘So the whole ring is coming with us to invade the enclave?’ Janc said.
‘Every particle, yes,’ Yirella confirmed. ‘They’re either warships or specialist weapons. It’s an armada, and our little fleet is a part of it. Finally!’
Alexandre’s icon appeared in Dellian’s optik. ‘Stand by,’ sie said. ‘We’re launching towards the wormhole terminus.’
Data in the optik showed him the Morgan was under acceleration. He frowned when he saw they’d passed ten gees. The gravity felt absolutely stable, as if they were on a planet.
‘Maybe we should have had a test flight or twenty first,’ Uret said. ‘I mean, what would’ve happened if the compensators didn’t work?’
‘All the fleet ships were extensively tested while we were taking our break in the domain,’ Yirella told him. ‘They ironed all the bugs out.’
‘Er . . . what bugs?’
Her lips lifted into a faint smile. Dellian watched her closely. She was sitting with Ellici and Tilliana at the other end of the table from him, a distant expression on her face, eyes closed.
It was a pose he was seeing a lot more lately. She was otherwhere half the time, her body a spirit that moved through this world without any real grounding. While her mind . . . He knew she was using the neural interface to link directly into the Morgan’s network. It gave her a much greater perception of the digital universe than any databud could. His own interface had remained unused since his treatment. Several times he’d gone down to the Morgan’s clinic, ready to have it extracted. Each time he’d paused at the door and walked away. I want to be her equal . . . or at least not be regarded as inferior.
The visual displays filling the cafe windows were showing all one hundred and fifty of the very large particles, the ones with the powerful gravity wave emissions. They were starting to move in closer to the neutron star itself. More than half of them were changing orbital inclination, rising out of the ecliptic plane so that they were evenly dispersed above the dark surface.
‘They’re forming the cage,’ Yirella said.
Dellian didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He picked up his almond croissant and took a bite. ‘What cage?’
‘The major particles are high-power gravitonic systems that are going to contain the neutron star during transit. They’ll also act as negative energy conduits, same as every ship that flies inside a wormhole.’
‘Transit?’ Uret asked.
Yirella opened her eyes and smiled at her friends. ‘So I’m guessing none of you bothered to access the full mission plan?’
Tilliana grinned. ‘Of course they didn’t.’
‘Takes a lot of power to hold a wormhole open across sixty-odd lightyears, let alone all the way to the enclave,’ Yirella said. ‘Really, a lot.’
‘Oh, great Saints,’ Dellian blurted as mission data finally zipped across his optic. ‘It’s coming with us. They’re bringing the neutron star to the enclave.’
‘To be more accurate,’ Yirella said, ‘they’re going to attack the enclave with the neutron star. It’s the ultimate magic bullet.’
‘Against what?’ Falar demanded. ‘I know everyone keeps saying we
