‘There’s only one target,’ Ellici said, ‘and it doesn’t get any bigger. The enclave has to have a star to power it. If you kill the star, you cut the power. Best way to kill a star—’
‘Hit it with a neutron star,’ Yirella finished for her, smiling gleefully. ‘Boom! Nova. Probably followed by collapse into a black hole if the enclave star is big enough.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Uret demanded.
Yirella’s index finger sketched a circle around her head as she smirked. ‘Is this my kidding face?’
‘Saints!’
‘This is a war, people. Win or lose, it’s the last one humans will ever fight. And it’s not one we’re going to win with half measures.’
*
It took a day and a half for all the corpus particles to fly into the wormhole. Once the majority had entered, the Morgan’s fleet – all seventeen remaining ships – slipped in after them.
Dellian was in the cafe again, watching the displays showing a feed from external sensors. When they were a thousand kilometres from the wormhole terminus, the Morgan’s negative energy conduits – small, blade-like spurs – slipped out of their recesses across the fuselage. Acceleration dipped down to point one gee, guiding them along their course. The other ships of the fleet took up position behind them. Then Ainsley came gliding in behind the formation, its white fuselage reflecting the wan violet light of the wormhole’s Cherenkov radiation.
The Morgan slipped past the wormhole’s throat, and every visual image died simultaneously.
‘What the Saints . . .?’
‘We’re not in natural spacetime any more,’ Tilliana told him as she tucked into a breakfast of pancakes, maple syrup and fruit. ‘Whatever’s outside the hull doesn’t propagate photons.’
‘So how do we know where the other ships are?’
‘Their mass shows up as distortions in the Morgan’s exotic mass detectors.’
Dellian changed his optik’s input feed, so he was looking along a simple white tube leading away to vanishing point, with grey smears ahead and behind, like dense clots of mist. Then the tube surface deformed, with ripples running along it. His imagination filled in a judder as they passed the Morgan. Behind them, a black sphere was filling the narrow tunnel, forcing it to warp around its bulk. All he could think of was a snake swallowing a big rat, the bulge slowly working its way along.
‘The neutron star,’ Yirella announced in satisfaction.
Something about having the neutron star racing along right behind them was deeply discomforting. But then he hadn’t quite been prepared for the whole wormhole experience. Looking around the table, his friends hunched in their seats, nursing various cups of tea, coffee and juice, that concern was something they all seemed to be sharing.
‘We need to start training,’ Dellian announced. Anything to take his mind off what was outside. Not that there was anything outside, not even a vacuum. Which is the whole problem.
Tilliana smirked. ‘Good. We’ve been working up new scenarios for you boys. The Welcome ship at Vayan gave us the basis of some realistic environments to simulate for you when you’re in the egg. This’ll be fun.’
‘Fun?’ Xante asked cautiously.
‘For me and Ellici.’
*
The corpus armada emerged from the wormhole half a lightyear away from the Olyix sensor station. All the squads were on alert as the Morgan dropped back into spacetime. They’d joked and grumbled as they suited up three hours before passing through the terminus, blustering through the knowledge that if the Olyix were waiting, it would be over so fast they’d probably never know. But if there was a delay, a skirmish between evenly matched ships, there was a remote chance they’d be needed to play a part.
So Dellian led them onto a troop carrier, where they waited, and waited . . . Tilliana and Ellici were in their tactical situation room on deck twenty-four, with a dedicated munc-interfaced genten feeding them prodigious amounts of real-time sensor data.
Once again, Yirella had nothing to do. She waited in her cabin, lying on the bed, with the walls detextured. Her neural interface connected her directly into the Morgan’s network. The corpus humans who’d refashioned the warship had built in a full-capacity union for her. Riding the network channels was a seriously liberating experience, especially as she used a quantum array as a buffer to the vast quantity of available information. It was similar, she supposed, to the way the muncs’ neural instinct filtered data for Tilliana and Ellici. Except the processing power in the array also boosted her consciousness.
In this state it was hard to justify remaining as a single flesh body, the advantages of elaborating up to corpus status were so obvious.
There’s still time. All the time I want.
She began to compartmentalize her newly expanded mind, each segment monitoring a separate block of information – the wormhole, the corpus armada ships, the neutron star’s cage, the squad’s troop carrier, Dellian in his new utterly lethal armour suit, his cohort at ease in their new attack body casings. Her primary attention flicked effortlessly between them. I really am a guardian angel this time.
Immanueel’s presence impinged on her cognizance, a phantom hello, acknowledging her presence in the network.
‘Can I observe in concert with you?’ she asked.
‘I would welcome your company,’ they replied.
She shifted her focus, moving into several (but not all) of the particles that housed aspects of Immanueel’s corpus. Some were little more than carrier craft for warships whose weapons could devastate whole moons. Others had more complex mechanisms.
‘I didn’t realize you were this . . . I was going to say big, but it’s more like: expansive.’
‘I am what I want to be,’ they replied courteously. ‘Perhaps after FinalStrike I will reconjugate into something less aggressive.’
Together they watched as the armada began to emerge from the wormhole terminus. As they passed the throat, their copper surfaces pared back, exposing the ships within and allowing a greater range of sensors to examine their new environment. They were six lightmonths from the Olyix signal station – a modest L-class star
