Salvation

  “We’re going to do all those things. You. Me. All of us. The clans are what’s left, we’re the pinnacle of Juloss, the best and greatest of all.”

  Dellian sighed. “I thought the Five Saints were the greatest?”

  “Their sacrifice was the greatest. We have to live up to that.”

  “I’m never going to make it.”

  Yirella laughed. “You will. Out of all of us, you will. Me? I just dream the Sanctuary star is real.”

  “You think it is? Marok is always saying that Sanctuary is just a legend, a fable that the generation ships carry with them between worlds.”

  “All myths start from a truth,” she said. “There must be so many humans spread across the galaxy now; it isn’t hard to think they found one star that’s safe from the enemy.”

  “If it is real, we’ll find it together,” he promised solemnly.

  “Thanks, Del. Now come on, I want to hear what Marok has to tell us about the Saints.”

  * * *

  —

  Five Saints Hall was the most ornate building in the estate—a long entrance hall with glossy black-and-gold walls leading to five big chambers. Hot sunlight was diffused to a pervasive glow as it shone through the gold-tinted crystal roof.

  The fifteen boys and three girls of Dellian’s yeargroup filed into chamber three. It contained plump sprawling chairs of faux-leather that they could flop into, the cushions undulating to take the weight like sluggish liquid. Up above them, the crystal roof was etched with monochrome images of the Saints themselves, while softboards around the walls had dozens of pictures pinned to them, drawn by the younger clan kids, the phosphorescent parchments glowing gently. This wasn’t a classroom in the usual sense. They didn’t make notes, there would never be an exam. The tutors wanted them relaxed, eager to take in the stories of the Five Saints. This was to be something they wanted to know, to learn.

  Marok, the estate’s Sol historian, came in and smiled. Sie was in female cycle, so sie’d grown hir chestnut hair down to hir waist. Hir face was composed of long, thin bones, giving hir a very attractive if somewhat delicate appearance. Dellian always thought if he’d been lucky enough to have a parental group like the people who’d left on the generation ships had, he’d want Marok to be part of it.

  “Settle down,” sie told the kids. “So then, has everyone recovered from the arena?”

  There was some giggling and plenty of glances thrown in Dellian’s direction. He bore it stoically.

  “I ask because violence isn’t something we’ve really talked about concerning the Saints,” sie continued. “Up until now we’ve only dealt in generalities. Today, I’m going to start filling in formative events. To put the Five Saints in context, and appreciate what they did, we need to examine their activities in greater detail. Just what motivated them? How did they come together? Did they really get on so perfectly as the tales you’ve heard said? And most importantly, what was going on around them? All these things need to be looked at properly.”

  Xante stuck his hand up. “Weren’t they friends, then?”

  “Not necessarily, no. Certainly not at the start. Remember how Callum and Yuri had parted a hundred years earlier? It wasn’t on the best of terms, was it? So who can tell me the two reasons they were brought back together?”

  “Politics and treachery,” everyone chorused.

  “Well done.” Sie smiled softly. “And where did that happen?”

  “New York!”

  “Quite right. Now, New York in 2204 was a very different city from anything you know, even from Afrata. And Nkya was even stranger…”

  THE ASSESSMENT TEAM

  FERITON KAYNE, NKYA, JUNE 23, 2204

  When the Trail Ranger was an hour out from Nkya’s base camp, the stewards started serving dinner. The gourmet food packets were microwaved, but they still tasted pretty good to me. I chose seared scallops on mint-pea risotto for a starter, followed by minute steak and fries with red wine sauce. The wine was a three-year-old Chablis. Not bad. I finished with lemon crème brûlée drizzled in raspberry sauce. I ate mostly in silence; everyone else was running through the files, consuming every piece of data we had on the derelict ship. It wasn’t enough to draw any definitive conclusions. I know. I’d been trying to work out what had happened for ten days.

  “Have you identified any of the humans on board?” Callum finally asked as he finished off his salted almond truffle tart.

  “No,” Yuri told him tersely. “We can’t do that.”

  “Can’t, or won’t? An identity check is one of the easiest search requests to load into solnet. Nobody can hide in our society, right, Alik?”

  The FBI agent gave him a soft smile. “It’s difficult,” he conceded. “Government keeps an eye on people.”

  “For their own good,” Callum sneered.

  “How many terrorist attacks have there been in the last fifty years? The last seventy-five, even?”

  “Not many,” Callum agreed grudgingly.

  “Your infamous preemptive rendition,” Eldlund said sharply. “Arrest people because a G8Turing thinks they might do something based on behavior and interests. What sort of justice is that?”

  Alik shrugged. “What can I say? Pattern recognition works. And FYI, every National Security removal warrant has to be signed off by three independent judges. Nobody gets exiled without a fair hearing.”

  “That must make your citizens feel so much safer. What is it every authoritarian government says? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.”

  “Hey, you want them to be free to immigrate to Akitha or one of the Delta Pavonis habitats, pal?”

  “That’s not a justification, that’s a threat.”

  Alik’s stiff mouth managed to crank out a self-righteous smile, and he poured himself a shot from the vintage bourbon bottle he’d brought in his luggage.

  “Why haven’t you tried to identify them?” Callum asked. His gaze had never left Yuri.

  “The same reason there is no solnet out here, and that Alpha Defense insisted we keep a very secure separation distance between portal and ship. Security.”

  “Man! You’re still fucking doing it, aren’t you? Still claiming everything you do is the right way, the only way. Anyone who says or thinks different isn’t just wrong, they’re evil with it.”

  “Because this happens to be the right way. Try thinking about this—because that’s what you’re actually supposed to be here for, to produce an impartial informed opinion. Though fuck knows why Emilja and Jaru sent you.”

  “Because I’m actually capable of having a rational thought, not just paranoid ones.”

  “You’ll give it away,” Kandara said in a weary voice. She’d taken her jacket off, exposing heavily muscled arms as she sat in the recliner, picking at the vegetarian meal on her fold-out tray.

  Yuri and Callum both turned to stare at her.

  “What?” Callum asked.

  “Sorry, but Yuri is quite right,” she said. “The aliens, whoever they are, are going to know who those people in their ship are. So if we start loading their image or DNA sequence into solnet, they’ll know we found the ship. And as keeping this discovery secret is our one advantage…” She shrugged.

  “Thank you.” Yuri grinned. “What she said. Which is what I was trying to explain.”

  Callum growled and held up his empty tumbler. A steward came over to pour him a shot of malt whiskey.

  Alik sat back, swirling his bourbon around the glass. He looked at Yuri, then Callum, came to a decision. “Okay, I gotta ask. What did happen with you two? Even the Bureau doesn’t have files on it, but I heard rumors. And now here you are, both of you trying to make nice—and screwing that up.”

  “This is bigger than us,” Yuri said sourly—a tone that would have made anyone else stop like they’d run smack into a stone cliff.


  “Showing some humanity now, are we?” Callum said.

  “Fuck you,” Yuri spat back.

  Jessika, Loi, and Eldlund watched the scene intrigued, and maybe a little nervous. Understandable; you don’t often see two powers of this magnitude go head-to-head.

  “You’re a corporate robot,” Callum said. “You were back then, and nothing’s changed. You’re not just employed by Connexion, you’re its high priest, leading the worship.”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Am I supposed to be grateful?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt!”

  “Really?” Callum sneered. “You want me to tell them? Let them judge? Because it’s not just my story, is it?”

  “Go ahead,” Yuri said belligerently. He reached for the bottle of iced vodka.

  Callum looked around the rest of us in turn. Uncertain.

  “Do it,” Kandara said with a small smile, daring him.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Ha!” Yuri snorted. He downed his vodka shot in one. “Was it a dark and stormy night, too?”

  “You didn’t know where it started. That was a huge part of the problem. And you didn’t know because you don’t fucking care about people!”

  “Fuck you! I cared—about her. Not you. Nobody cared about you. Asshole.”

  “The real beginning was in the Caribbean,” Callum said, his expression softening at whatever ancient memory he was reliving. “That’s where Savi and I got married.”

  “Illegally,” Yuri countered. “If you’d told us like you were supposed to, it would never have happened.”

  “It wasn’t illegal. For all its size, Connexion is a company, not a government, and we didn’t need your fucking permission! Just because Ainsley paid our salary doesn’t mean he owned us. So screw your fucked-up corporate policy! And it did happen.”

  “We have those policies for a reason. If you’d told us you were in a relationship, if you’d been honest, everything would have been different. You created the problem. Don’t try and make me out as the bad guy.”

  I couldn’t have planned it better. I wanted their stories, especially Yuri’s. It had taken me a while to convince him he should come along on the mission in person, rather than just rely on my reports.

  And now here they were, angry but uncensored, with something to prove. All they could use against each other now was the truth, because it was truth that could inflict damage more accurately than any smart missile strike, and their animosity hadn’t even begun to heal over, not after 112 years. It always amazes me how long humans can hold on to grudges.

  I glanced around as unobtrusively as I could, saw Kandara and Alik holding back smiles, enjoying the show they’d provoked. Yuri and Callum reheated their old war, ready to say anything, spill any secret.

  “So it wasn’t a dark and stormy night,” Callum began. “Quite the opposite.”

  CALLUM AND YURI

  HEAD TO HEAD, AD 2092

  The beach was perfect. That was a major part of Barbuda’s appeal. The tiny Caribbean island had a single Connexion portal door, which led to its larger and more prosperous neighbor, Antigua. In 2092, a solitary portal serving an entire population made it almost unique on Earth, where quantum spatial entanglement had brought everywhere “one step away”—as Connexion’s tag line ran.

  The resorts spaced along Barbuda’s southern coastline depended on that exclusivity. The prices they charged for a week of privacy and seclusion were phenomenal. Callum Hepburn considered it entirely worthwhile. The Diana Klub just north of Coco Point was a sprawl of thirty boutique cabins set a few meters back from the top of the pristine white sands. By day it was gorgeous, a tropical sun searing down out of a cloudless azure sky to enhance the verdancy of the palm trees that ran along the top of the beach, turning the white sand into a dazzling slope that by midday was too hot for bare feet to walk on, while the turquoise water with its languid waves was clear enough to reveal the colorful shoals of fish that flittered playfully through the shallows.

  At midnight it was equally lovely. The silver light of the crescent moon poised above the horizon bathed the warm sands in a spectral radiance, while deepening the lapping water to a dark and mysterious expanse. Atop the beach, the crowded border of trees cast a ragged ebony silhouette along the base of a starry sky.

  Two figures in white terry cloth robes held hands and giggled as they scampered along the path from the cabins and down onto the sands.

  Callum let out a gasp as his feet touched the hot surface.

  “What’s the matter?” Savi asked in concern.

  “Hotter than I was expecting,” Callum admitted.

  “This?” Her feet slid through the sand then flicked some up. “This is nothing. You’re a wimp.”

  “I’m from Aberdeen,” he protested. “You put your bare foot on the beach there, and it’ll freeze to the pebbles. That’s just in summer.”

  “Wimp!” She let go and ran on. “Wimp wimp.”

  Laughing, he sprinted after her. He caught her and swung her around with a loud, happy howl.

  “Shush! Callum. They’ll hear.”

  He glanced back at the tall trees with their long palms swaying in the gentle night breeze. The shadows amid the smooth trunks were an impenetrable black, deeper than the gulf between stars. Anything could be hiding in there; he’d never know. “Who’ll hear?”

  “Them,” she said with a snicker. “Our fellow vacationers. The staff. All the Peeping Toms.”

  He put his arms around her, pulling them together, and kissed her. “Would that be naughty for you?” he asked, nuzzling her throat. “Being watched?”

  “No.”

  But there was that familiar edge to her voice that made him smirk. Savi had no inhibitions when it came to exploring her sexuality. “No need to worry about them telling anybody,” he said. “They’d die of envy before we finished.”

  Savi licked her lips. “Promises, promises,” she murmured hotly. “Now take your robe off.”

  “Yes, wife.”

  She smiled broadly. “You’re the one that wanted to have sex on the beach. So, get on with it, husband.”

  Callum shrugged out of his robe and spread it out on the sand, the very same sand they’d stood on that afternoon, him in a t-shirt and swim trunks (plus trainers with soles thick enough to stop his feet catching fire); her in a white bikini and a scarlet sarong. The ceremony had lasted barely five minutes. Only four other people were there: the padre from the local town, who performed the ceremony, the resort’s assistant manager, and two of their fellow guests, somewhat bemused to be serving as witnesses.

  Savi giggled again, eyeing the tree line defiantly. “Lie down,” she told him. “I get to go on top.”

  Callum heard the rising excitement in her voice and did as he was told. Savi stood above him, her feet planted outside his hips. She made a show of slowly undoing her belt, then let the robe fall open.

  He gazed up in wonder at his wife, her lithe body gleaming in the pastel moonlight. My wife! “You’re a goddess,” he said hoarsely.

  She slipped the robe from her shoulders and tossed her long, ebony hair. “Which one?” she taunted.

  “Parvati, the goddess of love and feminine energy.”

  “Clever boy.” She grinned down hungrily.

  Thank you, internet, I will never curse you again, Callum promised.

  “Did you know she bestows a woman’s skill and power to the whole universe?” Savi murmured as she sank to her knees.

  Callum whimpered helplessly.

  “And prowess.” Her eyes flashed wickedly.

  In the sky above Savi’s head, a shooting star scorched a silent, scintillating tail across the heavens. Callum made a wish.

  It was granted.

  * * *

  —


  Callum woke to find strong morning sunlight filtering through the cabin bedroom’s wooden shutters. The air-conditioning was humming softly, but the temperature in the bedroom was already warmer than midsummer in Scotland. He turned his head to see Savi lying naked on the mattress beside him.

  “Morning, husband,” she said drowsily.

  He gently brushed thick strands of tangled black hair from her face. All he could do was smile at how lovely she was.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d had the best dream of my life,” he said softly. “Turns out it’s actually a memory.”

  “Oh, Cal!” She reached for him, and they began kissing ardently.

  “I’m a married man,” he said, and there was no way to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “I can’t believe you said yes!”

  “I can’t believe you asked!”

  “I was always going to ask.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yeah. From the moment I saw you. But I knew I’d have to wait. You know—actually say hello first, maybe find out your name.”

  “Silly man.”

  “I thought I’d blown it yesterday.”

  She stroked his cheek. “You didn’t.”

  “We’re married!” Callum started laughing.

  “Yes. Now we just have to work out how to tell everyone.”

  “Oh. Crap. Yeah.” He frowned; just the thought of it was a real passion killer.

  Savi gave him an interested look. “You’re not worried about that, are you?”

  “No. No, it’s fine.”

  “You’re scared of telling my father,” she decided shrewdly.

  “Am not.”

  “You are! Fine husband you make; you’re supposed to fight demons and dragons for me.”

  “I’m not scared of your father. Your mother, on the other hand…”

  “Mummy likes you.”

  “She’s very good at hiding it.”