Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton
“It’s daytime,” Xante said. “They’ll be back in their lair.”
Dellian saw Yirella shaking her head, but she didn’t say anything. He looked at the three dead moroxes. The first one, which he’d caught with the axe, had crawled fifty meters away before collapsing from blood loss. The other two were closer.
“We could eat them,” Ellici said.
“Can we?” Dellian asked. “They’re alien. Doesn’t that make them enati-…enty-…enamo—”
“Enantimorphic? No. We can eat them if we have to. Their biochemistry is different, but not by much. Their flesh contains nutrients we can use. I’m not so sure about the taste, though.”
“We’ll hold off for now,” Dellian said with as much authority as he could summon. “First we need to build a bigger fire. Maybe burn a whole tree and then add more. Yeah.” He nodded, staring at the biggest sleeper tree, standing a hundred meters away. “We’ll light that one, and chop down others, add them to it. We can do it, all of us. A fire that’s going to overload the skyfort sensors, it’s so big.”
He had them. He knew that. They were all gathering courage and hope from his determination. Even Yirella agreed.
“No walk down the hill then,” she mumbled as he divided them up into three teams, each with a weapon.
“It makes no sense, exposing ourselves to more unknowns. The clan know we’ve been alone overnight now. Alexandre will bring back the Saints themselves to help find us. Sie will. We all know that.”
“I suppose so.” She stared at the closest morox corpse. “I need to know something,” she said, and picked up a rock half the size of her own head.
“What?” he asked, then recoiled as she brought the sharp edge of the rock smashing down on the morox’s head. Two more blows and she’d cracked the skull open. She shoved the edge of the rock through the fissure and began to prise it farther apart.
“Yirella!”
He had to fight back nausea as she began examining segments of the gore that was its brain.
“Why didn’t it get eaten?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“They were so ravenously hungry they ignored a fire to try and kill us. Yet here they have three fresh corpses of their own kind, and they ignored them to carry on attacking us.”
“Do they eat their own?” he asked, trying not to look at the way her carrion-slicked fingers were probing the brain tissue so enthusiastically. Yet there was something horribly fascinating about the scene.
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose we should judge them like they’re terrestrial animals. Although you’d think basic instincts would be almost identical.”
“I guess,” he said. “So what are you hoping to find?”
“Don’t know till I find it,” she answered grimly.
“Okay.” He knew that tone; she wasn’t going to be stopped by anything he could say.
Cheering broke out around the sleeper tree. His clanmates had piled scrub bushes up around the trunk, which were now burning hot and fierce, their smokeless flames shooting vertically into the tree’s boughs above, which were starting to smolder.
Dellian was glad of the excuse to look away from Yirella’s gory task. Despite the fresh air gusting across the slope, he was feeling sluggish. Lack of sleep and his throbbing arm seemed to be making his body intolerably heavy. Which was strange, given he was very aware of his empty stomach. With growing dismay, he knew it wouldn’t be long before they’d have to start using the hand pump filter…
Falar and Uret were taking it in turns to attack another sleeper tree with the axe, the thuds reverberating through the crisp air. More boys were dragging bushes back to the rapidly expanding blaze. Dellian looked up at the invitingly empty sky with its flotilla of artificial stars. “Why can’t the skyforts see us?” he murmured.
“Why fill Juloss with alien predators?” Yirella said. She’d risen to her feet, wiping jelly-strings of clotted morox blood from her hands. “I mean, seriously! Sure, keep some in orbital xenohabitats, and store their genetic molecule for study. But release them into the wild? That makes no sense at all. Our ancestors put in a century’s effort just terraforming this world up to habitable status so a whole civilization of humans could flourish and expand. Now we can’t even set foot outside our clan compound, it’s so dangerous.”
“Dangerous to the enemy, too.”
“Like they’re ever going to set foot here. The only landing they’ll ever perform is with a dozen apocalypse-event asteroids.”
“So what, then?”
“So I don’t know!” she shouted bitterly.
Dellian was surprised. It hurt him to see her like this, so wound up and frustrated. Close to tears, too, if he was any judge. Yirella was always the cool, rational one. But then this situation was extreme. Without thinking, he put his arms around her. Her whole body was held as rigid as steel. “I remember someone telling me there are always answers; you just have to know where to find them.”
She nodded, slowly and very reluctantly. “I know.”
“Did you find anything in the morox’s brain?”
“No.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Not sure. Something that would make it act the way it did.”
“They all behaved the same.”
“I know. And that worries me. I’m scared, Dellian.”
“Me too,” he said softly. “But we’ll get through this.” He kept hold of one of her hands as he turned to face the sleeper tree, which was now a giant column of flame, burning with the aggression of rocket exhaust. The boys who’d lit it were having to stand well back, the heat was so strong. “The skyfort sensors will think we’re zapping them with a laser when they pass over, the infrared emission is so strong.”
“Yes.” Yirella bent down and kissed him again. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“What?”
“This place is our Zagreus. So you know what that makes us?”
“Up shit creek without a paddle?”
“No! You and me. Look at us. You with your red hair, you’re Saint Callum.”
“And you’re my Savi.” He laughed. “Yes!”
“They escaped, didn’t they? They got back home.”
Dellian heard the urgency in her voice, the desperation. “Yes. They did. They even lived happy ever after for a couple of decades on Nebesa.”
“If they can do it, so can we.”
“Callum was always my favorite Saint,” he confessed.
“Really. Yuri’s mine.”
“How come? I’d have you rooting for Kandara.”
“Oh, no. She used violence to solve everything. Not as bad as Alik, though. But Yuri used to think through his problems. Remember the missing boyfriend story? He investigated properly and made decisions based on facts, and he never stopped until he finished the case. That’s what I aspire to.”
“He could be pretty ruthless, too. A lot of people died when he was hunting for Horatio.”
“That wasn’t his fault—well, apart from the matcher. And people like that deserved to be sent to Zagreus.”
“Yeah—” He frowned at the latest outbreak of shouting, glancing around to see the boys yelling his name and pointing wildly. Xante had brought up the knife pole he was carrying, pointing it toward Dellian and Yirella. But the expression on his face…Dellian slowly turned around, fear turning his skin to ice.
Standing on top of the flyer’s fuselage was a cougar. It shook its head, staring down at them. A small growl emerged from the back of its throat. The forelegs bent, taking it down into a pre-pounce crouch.
“Move back toward the flames,” Dellian said, barely moving his lips, shifting slightly so his body was between the cougar and Yirella.
“Del—”
“Now!” He began his own slow backward creep, pushing her along,
The cougar leaped, powerful muscles flinging it vigorously through the air toward them. Then it exploded. One instant a perfectly evolved killing machine…the next a cloud of flame and tatters of meat. Stinking steam belched out. The charred mess splattered down two meters from a paralyzed Dellian.
He dropped to his knees and vomited hard. Yirella was screaming. Clanmates ran toward them en masse, yelling and shouting.
A shadow fell across all of them. A shivering Dellian raised his head, watching in total incomprehension as the big flyer descended silently out of the clean morning sky.
THE ASSESSMENT TEAM
FERITON KAYNE, NKYA, JUNE 24, 2204
I was fascinated by the way Yuri and Callum resurrected their ancient conflict, shouting over each other, bickering with barrages of obscenities about trivial points and who was responsible for what, with neither giving ground. When the whole uncensored account was finally aired, I’d learned very little that I hadn’t already accessed in Connexion’s secure files.
From my tactical standpoint, Callum had always been a good suspect for an alien agent. I’d wondered about the whole “died in an Albanian chemical plant explosion” 2092 death certificate, along with the rest of his Emergency Detoxification crew. The Berat “disaster” was on the British government’s official births and deaths registry for all of them. Then he and Savi officially popped up again in 2108, in the Delta Pavonis system, with their kids in tow, as if nothing untoward had happened and his death had been an unfortunate bureaucratic misunderstanding. He was listed as being a senior technical manager for the Nebesa habitat construction project.
That discontinuity was precisely the kind of record-keeping mistake I was looking for. Undercover agents assuming the identity of the recently deceased had been standard practice within the intelligence community dating all the way back to the twentieth century. And Callum is well placed. Ainsley recognized his drive and ability a century ago; since then he’d worked his way up the Utopial ladder to personal technology advisor to Emilja Jurich herself, one of the original Utopial movement founders. It put him in a perfect position to feed their senior council’s growing xenophobia toward the Olyix, had he been an alien agent.
The hostile policies of the human elite toward the Olyix have been growing steadily, ever since the Salvation of Life arrived at Sol in 2144—fifty-two years after Callum’s supposed death. Suspicion of an alien species is part of the human condition, and relatively understandable. What cannot be explained by logic is the rising paranoia people like Emilja Jurich and Ainsley Zangari have exhibited over the last couple of decades. Somebody, somewhere, has to be feeding that paranoia with a whole load of damaging bullshit.
The conclusion we came to is that a very different alien species—an ancient enemy of the Olyix? No one knows for sure—arrived undetected at Sol (time uncertain), and has been busy insinuating their way into positions of influence. And my real task in the Connexion Exosolar Security Division is to expose their possible agents.
And now, with his “death” explained and even confirmed by my boss, Yuri, it’s likely not Callum. Obviously, no Earth company or Sol system habitat would employ him after 2092. But the emergent Utopials with their ideological goal of a pure and decent post-scarcity society, with a correspondingly technology-heavy infrastructure, were an ideal choice. Delta Pavonis welcomed everyone who rejected the Universal culture that dominated Earth and their terraformed planets. Which, actually, made the Utopial society his only choice.
“Did Savi recover?” Loi asked. He was sitting at a table with Jessika and Eldlund, where the three of them had remained silent the whole time.
Callum stirred from his sojourn into the bitter past, and it took his heavy gray-green eyes a moment to focus on his old adversary’s assistant. “Yes, thank you. Savi recovered. We were together for over a quarter of a century, even had a couple of children. So yes, it was worth it.”
Yuri merely grunted and downed another shot of arctic-cold Tovaritch vodka. The stewards had been providing him with a steady supply of the tiny frosted glasses all evening. I was beginning to think my boss had a special peripheral to filter out alcohol toxicity. He certainly didn’t betray any signs of being drunk, apart from his ever-shortening temper.
Alik seemed to have the same resilience—or peripheral. He was sitting back in his chair, on his third glass of bourbon. His eyes were almost closed, but that didn’t fool me; he’d been deeply absorbed by the confrontation.
Kandara, by contrast, was sitting straight-backed, fearsomely attentive from start to finish. “I had no idea Zagreus was a dark rendition site to begin with,” she said.
“History,” Yuri grunted. “The Conestoga asteroid went public with the penal colony’s existence three years later. Exactly as the project’s instigators always intended. And as a registered independent government, Conestoga couldn’t be penalized in any international court the way corporations could.”
“Government, my arse!” Callum said gruffly. “Conestoga was a chunk of valueless rock a hundred meters in diameter, in a trans-Jupiter orbit, with an automated industrial base that had a dormitory module bumped on. Total population: fifty.” I watched him eyeing the three assistants in the lounge, anxious for them to understand, to take his side. “Every one of them was a corporate lawyer.”
“Conestoga offered other Sol governments an exile destination for undesirables,” Yuri said. “Everyone agreed on an improved standard for the survival packages, and bam, the queue of convicts was suddenly six months long. It’s a tough life on Zagreus, but it works. The surveillance satellites show an expanding civilization. They’re even venturing beyond the canyon now, building pressurized domes out on the surface. We tamed the bastards.”
“Hoo-bloody-rah,” Callum said. “Do the satellites tell you how many people died in the process?”
“If it bothers you, offer them a new terraformed world. Or maybe open up one of your precious Utopial planets to the poor misunderstood princesses. No? There’s a surprise.”
Callum stood up. “Zagreus is not the way we should judge civilized progress. It’s a bloody disgraceful throwback. Education and a dignified standard of living is the true solution to elevate the poor and disenfranchised. Utopial society produces so few of what you class as exile-level criminals we don’t even exile them. They are removed from the general population, given a comfortable residence, and supported. That is our society’s triumph.” His glance swept around the Trail Ranger. “I don’t know what time zone you’re all from, but I’m off to bed.”
Yuri waited until he’d disappeared into the rear compartment. “Our judges don’t have to hand out so many exile sentences because the threat of Zagreus keeps people in line. Actually!”
Loi nodded, making sure his boss saw his approval.
“No, actually, it’s despicable,” Eldlund said, and sie stalked off back into the rear compartment. I wondered how sie was going to fit into a sleeping pod. They were all standard size, so…Slight oversight on our part there. Maybe sie’d stick hir legs out into the aisle for the night, and no doubt complain about bias and anti-omnia discrimination tomorrow.
“I think that’s it for me, too,” Kandara said.
“Not a bad idea,” Yuri conceded.
The others all made their way back to the sleeping pods. Sandjay connected me to the drivers. Bee Jain assured me we were making good time, and the Trail Ranger was running smoothly toward the alien ship. With that, I went to bed.
* * *
—
Loi, Eldlund, and Jessika were all awake and sharing a table for breakfast when I got up. At least they seemed to be bridging the deep ideological chasm between Yuri and Callum, but that’s youth for you.
&
“Yeah. Really sorry about that.”
He laughed and ordered coffee and toast from the steward. “Quite a showdown your boss had last night. I felt like I had a front-row seat into some real history.”
“I knew the basic facts, but, yeah, some of the details they spilled were something else.”
“Surprised they’re both on this trip.”
“It’s important.”
“Sure, I get that. But do they maybe have a little extra data to go on?”
I raised an eyebrow, scanning that handsome face with its immobile flesh. Alik Monday would make the perfect poker player; he lacked the ability to produce a single tell. The voice, though—that could convey a lot of emotion. I’m guessing he must practice that. “Connexion didn’t play favorites here, Alik,” I chided. “The Utopials were extremely keen for representation on the assessment team.”
“And Callum is their prime troubleshooter.”
“He’s a grade-two citizen.”
“If you think he’s here to produce a technical assessment, you’re fooling yourself. He might have been technical back in the day, but he’s got his young acolytes for that now.” His hand waved discreetly at Eldlund and Jessika.
“What are you saying?”
“He reports directly to the Utopial Senior Council, and maybe not even that. I expect it’s going to be Jaru and Emilja themselves who’ll have first access to his opinion. And that opinion will be entirely political.”
“I concur,” I told him. “As does Ainsley. That’s one of the reasons he had me include representatives for all the truly important interested parties.”
“Really?” It came out a challenge—old interrogation technique. Back up what you just said.
“There’s an interesting parallel in history,” I explained.
“Go on.”