‘There must be some way of knowing what speed that time is flowing at in here,’ Yuri said.
‘Only if we can compare it with the outside rate to get a baseline,’ Jessika told him. ‘Which we can’t.’
‘Crap.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alik persisted. ‘Concentrate on the mission. We’re here to guide a human armada to the Salvation, right? Which actually we lucked out on, because fuck knows you can’t see jack in here. Any invading ships will need to know where we are. We have a genuine purpose, people.’
The bridge’s main display swept the nebula aside and revealed the inside of the cave. All of them were sitting around on the rock ledges they’d claimed, unmoving.
The perspective was odd, Yuri thought, affecting him like a mild dose of vertigo. He was in the simulation looking out at himself, whereas in reality the image he was seeing only existed inside his head. The schizophrenic version of standing between two mirrors and seeing an infinity of yous.
Jessika had centred the camera on the transmitter the Avenging Heretic’s initiators had built, a simple black disc a metre wide, strong enough to blast a message across a solar system, with power reserves to last for an hour.
We’ll never get that long.
But a few minutes should be enough. Any armada that slammed its way into the enclave would have sensors capable of picking up a human broadcast.
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘So we work out the best way to get it to the hangar entrance.’
‘That’s a fluid situation,’ Kandara said. ‘We don’t know what will be in or around the hangar when the armada arrives.’
‘So start with worst case,’ Alik said. ‘It’s got armoured quint standing guard in there.’
‘Standing guard?’ Yuri snorted. ‘What is this, a medieval castle?’
‘Quint in one of those flying spheres is way more worst case, anyway,’ Kandara said.
‘There won’t be anybody paying any attention to the hangar,’ Callum said. ‘The Salvation of Life is going into some kind of storage. No invasion force is going to get here for thousands of years. The Olyix already think we’re dead, so the onemind won’t be looking for us. Actually, if we get really lucky, the onemind will have let the hangar’s biological systems die off by then. It doesn’t need them; it doesn’t need the hangar. All the Salvation has to do now is keep the cocoons alive.’
‘Congratulations,’ Alik told him. ‘That is the biggest crock of shit I have heard since we left Earth. In fact, since I don’t know when.’
Yuri bit back on a laugh as he saw Callum’s pale face darken from petulance; even his freckles had vanished in the flush. ‘All right.’ He held up a hand to Alik. ‘That’s the option we’d like to happen. But, Callum, we plan for worst case, okay? It’ll give us something to do, if nothing else.’
‘Sure, whatever.’
‘I should be able to track down the physical location of this area’s nexus,’ Jessika said.
Yuri frowned. ‘The what?’
‘Nexus. It’s like a network junction in the neuralstratum. Take that out, and the onemind can’t perceive or control the whole zone.’
‘Won’t it just use entanglement with its quint and service creatures to see in?’ Callum asked.
‘Yes, but those are restrictive viewpoints. Taking out the nexus will give us a big tactical advantage.’
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘See if you can find the nexus. If we can reach it, then we’ll have it as an option. Otherwise we need to consider the easiest way to position the transmitter.’
Kandara pointed at the black disc. ‘Put it in some kind of drone, one that can fly, and fly fast. We can get it outside before the Salvation’s onemind can react.’
‘More than one drone,’ Callum said. ‘We need some redundancy here.’
‘We need to know the armada’s here first,’ Jessika said. ‘That means keeping track of the onemind’s thoughts.’
Yuri grimaced at that prospect. ‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s see where we’re heading before we start making any plans,’ Kandara said. ‘If it’s inside some kind of big storage warehouse, we are truly screwed.’
‘A warehouse?’ Callum said. ‘For arkships?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m not getting that intimation from the onemind,’ Jessika said. ‘Just a sense, kind of like a contentment, that it’ll be joining others.’
‘We’re definitely heading somewhere,’ Alik said. ‘And the Salvation is still accelerating.’
It took a day for their destination to become apparent. Orbiting seven AUs out from the sun was a gas giant planet. Not that the sensors could obtain a visual image of it to start with; all they could see was a bright patch lurking deeper in the nebula where they were heading. But it had a tail that curved elegantly along ten per cent of its orbit – a strange blemish in this mini-cosmos that was suffused with light. It was as if someone had taken a knife to slice through the nebula, cutting open a vein of inner darkness.
‘How?’ Alik asked simply.
‘Impact,’ Callum replied, studying the small amount of data the G8Turing was extracting from the images. ‘The gas giant is ploughing its way through the nebula, and its magnetic field is acting like a buffer, bending the clouds around it. Then, when ions and electrons hit the field, it accelerates them, which heats them, so the plasma expands away – which is why it’s a darker zone relative to the surrounding nebula. It’s basically a version of the Io plasma torus around Jupiter, but the magnitude here is something else again.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Hell yes, if you don’t have radiation shielding. And thermal baffles. You need to watch for electrical discharges, too. The worst part is that sparkle at the tail’s extremity. See it? That’s basically lightning forks about the same size as a moon. Get zapped by one of those brutes, and it’s terminal game over.’
Alik brightened. ‘So it’s a potential weapon?’
‘Nah, the arkship is big and solid enough to weather it even if you could somehow lure it inside
