Exodus

by Alex Lamb

Genres: Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Photurians - a hivemind of sentient AIs and machines - were awakened by humanity as part of a complex political trap. But they broke free, evolved, and now the human race is almost finished. Once we spanned dozens of star systems; now only four remain, and Earth is being evacuated. But the Photes can infect us, and among the thousands rescued from our home world may be enemy agents. Tiny colonies struggle to house the displaced. Our warships are failing. The end of humanity has come. But on a distant planet shielded from both humanity and the Photurians, one hope may still live. The only person who might be able to intervene. The roboteer. He is trapped in a hell of his own making, and does not know he is needed. And so a desperate rescue mission is begun. But can he be reached in time? Or will he be the last remnant of humanity in the universe?

Release date: July 18, 2017

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 320

Sample

1: RISING

1.1: WILL

Will Kuno-Monet woke with a start to find himself half-buried in white soil. He struggled to his feet, blinking while his heart pounded. A meadow of black poppies stretched in either direction, lining the bottom of an enormous tunnel. Bluish light came from dangling chains of luminescent kelp suspended from the pale, arched ceiling fifty metres overhead. The strands wafted gently like a glowing field of wheat. A moist breeze brought scents of ozone and fresh coffee. Somewhere nearby, a stream trickled.

His body felt wire-taut, flushed with fear for no reason he could remember. Will glanced quickly about, his breath coming in heaves. In the tube’s undulating distance, a dense thicket of short, black trees jutted out of the snow-white earth. In the other direction, a sideways kink in the tube blocked further sight. He looked down and found himself wearing a one piece ship-suit, but grown from some soft, grey, organic material. It had no obvious fastenings. He didn’t remember putting it on.

What the hell was this place? And why did he feel so afraid? His memory was a terrifying blank. But as he stood there, anxiously scanning the tunnel, answers began to assemble themselves in his mind like shadows revealed by parting mist.

Will was on Snakepit – a world covered with millions of kilometres of overlapping habitat tubes just like this one. It was the greatest extraterrestrial discovery the human race had ever made: an engineered biosphere capable of hosting billions of living beings. And it had been left empty and unused for the last five million years.

He also remembered that he’d been lured here aboard his ship, the Ariel Two. Yes, he owned a starship. He was investigating some sort of threat, utterly unsuspecting of what lay ahead. Because Snakepit had been kept secret. And once he arrived, he’d been betrayed.

He frowned as he tried to remember who’d cheated him and how. The answer wouldn’t come. Was it his friends or allies in government? He knew he worked in politics. There had been all those dull, difficult meetings with bright-robed men and women with frowning faces. He was part of something called IPSO – the Interstellar Pact Security Organisation. But he felt sure the betrayal ran deeper than that. He’d trusted someone with his life and his future, and it had killed him.

Will frowned in confusion at that last memory. If he’d died, how come he was still here? Yet the image burned vividly in his mind. He’d watched helpless from a distance while his body melted into slime. Except that didn’t make any sense, either. How had he watched his own death from a distance?

Then Will recalled another vital fact about himself. He was a roboteer – one of a tiny minority of people engineered before birth to interface with thinking machines. How could he possibly have forgotten that? It had defined his entire life. Any camera linked to a Self-Aware Program could serve as his eyes. Watching himself from outside his own body was as simple as thought, so long as a suitable network was available.

Something about that explanation didn’t strike him as adequate, either, but it occurred to him to check for a local pervasivenet. With access to the digital realm, it would be a lot easier to figure out what had happened.

He reached inwards, summoning the visual for his home node – the virtual environment that served as the access point for his internal systems. However, instead of the familiar image of his childhood home, a dark sensation swam up through him, vivid and overpowering. An ancient place that felt at once like a deserted museum and a crowded train station loomed in his mind’s eye, where crowds of ghostly figures flickered and darted. From grey stone walls hung immense rippling banners of orange and black, bearing alien runes too dense and twisted for human eyes to read. He knew this place. He dreaded it.

Will fought to clear his head of the smothering vision and found himself kneeling, bent over on the pale clay and wheezing for air. He’d practically passed out. As his strength returned, a cold sense of certainty settled on him. He hadn’t just been cheated, he’d been changed.

How or why he’d been rescued from death he had no idea, but one thing he knew for certain: he couldn’t stay in this tunnel. He needed to get off Snakepit while he still could. For reasons that escaped him, he knew this place was dangerous.

Will struck out hurriedly in the direction of the black trees, the peculiar flowers crumpling beneath his feet as he strode through them. They bled ink when crushed, he noticed – a brilliant blue that soaked into the soil almost immediately. He remembered this world being strange, with a bewildering variety of life forms inhabiting the tunnels, all of them petite and too perfect to be natural. Now, though, they smelled wrong. There’d been no coffee odour last time. And something about its presence worried him deeply.

At the edge of the miniature forest, Will stopped to stare. Pale, rubbery faces grown from parasitic fungus jutted from the trunks like masks. Each one bore the likeness of someone he knew. And with each face, a fresh memory bloomed in his head.

Here, for instance, was the elegant, sculpted visage of Parisa Voss. A friend and a traitor – the woman who’d derailed his life. She’d brought him here. He felt a rush of loathing. And there was Ann Ludik, another traitor. Except, in the end, she’d been a friend. She’d saved his life and he’d died trying to save hers. Beside her lay the hard, compact features of Mark Ruiz, Will’s half-son. Mark was someone Will had aspired to protect, though he’d fallen far short of that goal.

Will regarded the masks with crawling unease. Had these faces been carved? Had they grown like that? He glanced about, anticipating a trap. Somebody with both time and knowledge of his life had put these things here, ready for him to see when he awoke. That must have taken hours. How long had he been out of the picture?

The fourth face he saw made him freeze. It belonged to Rachel, his wife – the woman he’d loved all his life. Yet her face conjured an unexpected emotion – a sense of deep, boiling hatred that made Will break out in a spontaneous sweat. He could remember nothing Rachel had ever done to justify such a reaction. In fact, so far as he recalled, she’d been gone from his life for years. His own obsession with trying to fix the politics of IPSO had finally driven her away. She’d boarded a ship to explore the edge of human space – a ship lost beyond reach before he had a chance to apologise. He fumbled to master his rage. Understanding eluded him like a handful of smoke.

Will stalked between the trees, keeping his eyes open and his guard up in anticipation of a punchline for this sickening joke. A few dozen metres further on he came to a clearing. There, beside the swirling brook, a tiny diorama of his childhood home had been rendered in purple moss. It depicted the exact location of his home node – the very place he’d reached for inside himself just minutes earlier. Grey bulbs of mushroom took the place of furniture, each item rendered in unlikely detail.

Will glared at the weird scene. Whoever had tinkered with this place didn’t just have knowledge of his life. They’d seen inside his mind. He walked warily around the unnatural growth, giving it a wide berth only to find it repeated dozens of times along the banks of the river on a variety of scales.

Will waded downstream, trying to stay away from the moss without knowing why. Panic clotted his thoughts. Somebody was playing with him, trying to frighten him – but to what end? Were they the same people who’d brought him back to life? Will’s mouth curled in a bitter snarl. If he’d been resurrected as a plaything simply to be teased and tortured, his tormentors would need their wits about them. Will had experienced treatment of that sort during the Interstellar War. His captors had not died pleasantly.

He froze as voices carried to him on the moist air. A man spoke somewhere beyond a line of trees up ahead. A woman answered. They sounded powerfully familiar, though Will struggled to place either of them. He heard laughter.

Will searched the stream’s banks for a weapon – a rock or a bone, perhaps – but found nothing in the artificial landscape that would serve. He strode across to the nearest tree to rip free a branch, only to have the wood bend like rubber in his hands.

No matter. He’d fight unarmed if need be. He edged closer to the last line of trees, keeping to the shadows, and peered out.

Beyond the wood lay a small café. A line of bar stools faced away from him, arranged before a covered counter with a large yellow espresso machine and racks of brightly coloured cups. A woman in a dirndl with blonde, braided hair worked there with her back turned, pulling a fresh shot while two patrons chatted on the stools. One customer had vivid green skin. The other had small antlers and legs that ended in hooves. Both wore embroidered tuxedos with high, padded shoulders like characters from a Martian Renaissance drama.

Will regarded them with blank astonishment. Now he knew where the smell had come from, though the explanation offered little comfort. When last he’d walked these tunnels, Snakepit had been a new discovery fraught with microbial dangers. There was no human population, and it certainly hadn’t featured coffee stands. The woman turned to place espresso cups before her guests. Will blinked at the sight of her face. It was, without doubt, his own. Her features were smaller than his, more prettily proportioned, but she might have been his twin sister.

She looked up and caught him staring dumbly from the edge of the trees.

‘Are you here for coffee?’ she asked, then saw his confusion. ‘Dabbling in shyness, perhaps? We don’t bite, honest.’ She gestured for him to approach.

Will, rather uncertainly, stepped out from the cover of the forest. His hands flexed, ready for a fight.

‘Do you have scrip?’ she said, and then waved the comment away when he didn’t answer. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m in it for the conversation, not the acumen. What can I get you? It’s on the house.’

The two patrons swivelled on their stools to face him. Will saw his own face on both of them. He struggled to speak as he realised why their voices had sounded so oddly familiar – he’d heard himself.

‘I …’ he started.

‘You look like you could use something calming,’ said the woman. ‘How about a nice cup of tea? I’m going to hazard a guess that you like Assam.’

‘Good guess,’ said Will uncertainly. ‘My favourite.’

‘No shit,’ said the antler clone, chuckling into his coffee.

‘What size?’ said the woman.

‘Come on, he wants a large,’ said the green clone. ‘You can tell by his face.’

‘Why don’t you bring that baseline palette of yours over here and have a seat, Will,’ said the antler clone. ‘And tell us – whatever brings you out to a lonely spot like this one?’

1.2: ANN

From the helm of the Ariel Two, Ann Ludik watched shuttles lift from the surface of the Earth, bringing up the last of the population. They appeared in her display as a hundred bright sparks rising over the arc of the world, a planet still stubbornly blue despite all the abuse it had taken. One by one, the sparks left Earth behind, streaming out into the velvet night.

Despite the irretrievable mess their ancestral home had become, it was impossible not to feel the poignancy of that moment. And, deep down beneath her layers of emotional scar tissue, Ann felt a weak stirring of sadness. However, besides the anticipation that had been twisting her insides for the last nine hours, it barely registered. There would be time for wistfulness later, if they survived.

Someone in the cabin let out a short, tense sob at the sight. Ann declined to open her human eyes to find out who’d made it. Her crew knew how to do their jobs. And they’d all seen moments more tragic than this. After all, they weren’t being forced off a planet this time. Unlike most of humanity’s retreats in its long war with the self-styled Photurian Utopia, this one had been their own choice.

Forty-one years had passed since the Photes’ first attack. During the decades that followed, the Photurians had evolved from near-mindless machines into a sophisticated and dangerous civilisation. Meanwhile, the human race had fallen from its peak of twenty-seven occupied star systems to a less-than-majestic five. The rest of mankind’s colonies had been claimed or destroyed. After today, they’d be down to four. Temporarily, they hoped.

In all that time, Sol was the first star system to be deliberately conceded. Mars and the other home system colonies had shut up shop years before as effectively indefensible. And for a while after that, it looked like the consolidation of forces on Earth had worked. Then, just weeks ago, they’d received word of another attempted takeover.

The planet’s surface had been seeded with a fresh wave of Phote spores and some of them had made it down into the Pacific Warrens. The number of spontaneous bacterial conversions was rising and the infected were gathering to form terrorist cells faster than the local death squads could root them out. So Earth’s government had called for immediate evacuation.

Ann’s team had sent a diplomat down to liaise with the government heads, to calm the authorities and try for a new approach. The Earthers, though, were already too deep into panic. Something had changed in Phote strategy, they insisted. Transport lines were being choked off again. The frequency of raids kept climbing. Everyone was talking about a Third Surge.

After what they’d all seen during the Suicide War a decade ago, Earth’s leaders weren’t about to take any chances. So, with great reluctance and no small amount of bitterness, the Galatean military had coordinated an extraction.

‘I have the signal from shuttle command,’ said Cy, Ann’s communications officer. His voice cracked as he spoke. ‘Earth is cleared. Ready to commence Phase Three.’

‘Initiate,’ said Ann. ‘Let’s get it done.’

Moving thirty million people out of the gravity well in nine hours had not been easy. To facilitate the operation, the population of Earth had been issued with personal coma-kits and packed into bunker-boxes the size of sports stadia. Then they’d been foamed in situ with a fast-setting hyper-elastic matrix almost as light as a modern aerogel.

There’d been panic, of course, and some resistance. But the warrens were due to be gassed to ensure that no human hosts remained for the Photes to exploit. The threat of imminent death had served as an effective incentive to cooperate.

During Phase One, the massive container stacks had been brought out of habitats on macrotracks and handed off to superlifters originally designed to relocate whole arcotowers without disassembly. The process had run surprisingly close to schedule. Nevertheless, Ann had hated every gruelling minute of the wait.

In Phase Two, fleets of industrial scoop-shuttles on strat-scraping dives had coupled and seized the superlifter loads. The lifters’ LTA envelopes had been trashed in the process, of course, but with nobody going home, cost wasn’t an issue. The operation would be one of the most expensive the human race had ever conducted.

‘What’s our attrition rate?’ said Ann.

‘We’re running at less than sixty parts per mil,’ said Phlox grimly. ‘Better than the model mean. About as good as we could hope for.’

In other words, the impact-foam approach had worked. About eighteen hundred deaths had resulted from almost drowning everyone in aerated smart-polymer, followed by the bone-smashing speed of shuttle intercept. Only eighteen hundred human lives snuffed out before even leaving their home. Probably only a few hundred orphaned children. A great result by any rational measurement.

In Phase Three, the scoop-shuttles handed off their precious cargos to vast, purpose-built evac-arks so that they could be ferried to the out-system for carrier pickup. And that was where it got difficult.

Human worlds never faced direct attack. It was too easy to trash them and the Photes needed their converts alive. Consequently, the Utopia subverted colonies instead, or absorbed them wholesale once support lines were cut off and defences knocked out.

A population on the move, though, invited a very different kind of fighting. Arks made easy targets for direct, violent absorption. Hence, Phase Three was when the Photes were most likely to strike.

Unfortunately, evac-arks weren’t fast. They lacked warp, which meant that even with tap-torch engines and constant acceleration as high as their human cargo could handle, exit would take days. And there were so many spies embedded within Earth’s population already that the likelihood of word of their timing having leaked was high.

The Photes might intercept at any moment. For all Ann’s team knew, the out-system they were headed for might already be crawling with stealthed enemy drones. So at some point over the next seventy hours or so, the pace of events would likely go from interminably dull to horrifyingly fast. Human minds didn’t operate well under those conditions. Without artificial support, her team were likely to burn themselves out worrying before any trouble hit.

Fortunately, Ann hadn’t been human for years. She didn’t get lonely or impatient the way other people did – not since her change. Which was why her ship was taking point for the hardest part of the mission. Still, her team would probably need a little encouragement.

Ann opened her eyes and partially decoupled her mind from the Ariel Two’s helm-space. Her shadow took up the slack while she surveyed her crew at work.

There wasn’t much to look at in the Ariel Two’s main cabin these days. Simple grey wall-screens running neon agitation patterns lined the dimly lit spherical chamber. Set in a ring around the floor were six military-grade support-couches. Each resembled a cross between a recliner and a coffin designed by a committee of art nouveau enthusiasts and paranoid survivalists. Besides Ann’s, only three others were occupied.

Cy Twebo, a muscular, soft-faced young man, ran communications. Phlox Orm, a svelte little herm with dark, intense features covered data aggregation. Urmi Kawasaki, a quiet woman from the lower levels with a giraffe pigment-job, managed their unruly stable of threat models. Ann didn’t know any of them well.

For years now, the Galatean government had been handing her these tightly knit triples to work with, specially trained to pilot the nestship in the supremely unlikely event of her demise. They never stuck around for long. This bunch, at least, accepted the way Ann ran things. Or perhaps they’d simply been briefed to not get in her way this time. There was too much at stake.

‘Team,’ said Ann.

All three opened their eyes in surprise.

‘I’m proud of you all,’ she said. ‘What we’re doing here is beyond difficult. And Phase Three is going to be a bitch. So remember that I admire you all, and that I have the utmost confidence in your abilities. Any comments or recommendations before we go to slow-time?’

They regarded each other with tense, sad eyes.

‘No,’ said Cy, their unofficial spokesperson. ‘We’re good.’

‘Okay,’ said Ann. ‘And does everyone have their amygdala-gating on max?’

Her crew nodded.

‘Good,’ said Ann. ‘Because you’re going to need it.’

She thought about adding, Don’t worry, we’ll get the Earth back. But nobody would have believed her.

‘Let’s get to work,’ she said instead and shut her eyes.

From time to time, someone claimed that the Ariel Two was undermanned or that Ann’s leadership style was too remote. They didn’t know what they were talking about. The cellular augmentation she’d received on Snakepit enabled her to run the entire ship on her own. It was hard enough just finding things for her mandatory three backup officers to do. Having more people aboard only made things worse. They got in the way and reduced her acceleration thresholds. And after all, Ann wasn’t there to chit-chat. She was there to atone. She’d only made one big mistake in her life, but that choice had unleashed the Photes against humanity. As fuck-ups went, hers had been galaxy-class.

She brought up an immersive view of local space to watch the shuttles creeping out to their respective arks. There were three of them in all, each guarded by an attendant battle cruiser. Accompanying the Ariel Two were a couple of new Orson-class planet-busters armed to the teeth with grater-grids and boser canons. They loomed like sinister moons.

‘Cy, signal Angels Two and Three,’ said Ann. ‘Prep for departure. We’ll be going silent in ten. Tell them good luck.’

To minimise risk, Ann’s team had brought dummy arks. Three separate ships would head to different extraction points in the out-system. Only one of them, though, would be carrying people – the one Ann was watching. The other two were decoys, turning the entire operation into a shell game.

As soon as all the shuttles had docked, Ann made her next move.

‘Engaging stealth-cloak,’ she told the others.

For a ship as large as the Ariel Two, a cloak only bought you so much. With two hundred and forty kilometres of elastoceramic alloy hull to hide, they’d still be visible by virtue of their gravity footprint. But that was part of the point. With luck, the escorts would draw attention from the far smaller arks. Their enemies, unfortunately, would be operating under stealth, too. If battle commenced, it would be fought mostly blind.

With stately deliberation, the arks all left orbit and headed out. Ariel and the other two escorts took up position beside their respective charges and left alongside them.

‘Commencing mine-drop sequence,’ she told her crew.

After all, if you were abandoning a habitat world, what was the point of not turning it into a deathtrap on your way out?

‘Okay, everyone,’ she said, ‘we’ll be running in shifts from here to Jupiter orbit. Somebody take a nap.’

Ann handed off as much control to her shadow as she dared and put her mind on slow. There was no point burning mental cycles on dead time when half her brain could be resting.

Their progress appeared to accelerate dramatically. As the Earth shrank behind them, Ann watched it through electronic eyes and whispered goodbye to the famous cradle of humanity.

As she did so, a memory sprang to mind: the moment years ago when she left her flat on Galatea to move to New Panama. She’d stood on the threshold and looked back across the scruffy floor-turf at the soft marks where her furniture had so recently stood. That moment had filled her with an unexpected wistfulness even though she’d been madly keen to leave. This moment had a lot in common with that, once you factored in the dread of impending combat.

She bit back a sigh. It was at times like this that she missed Poli and the kids the most. They probably weren’t missing her, thankfully. Nobody missed weird Aunt Andromeda that much. She was gone too often.

[It’s ridiculous,] she told her shadow. [Why should I feel sad? The Earth’s been barren for decades. The ocean trenches host more life than the surface. It’s just another colony.]

[Symbolism,] it replied. Ann still heard it speaking in Will’s voice, though her shadow had long since become more an echo of her own mind than his. [Plus, it’s depressing. If you don’t look too close, it’s hard to tell that intelligent life was ever here. We didn’t exactly make much of a mark on this system in the end. Ceres is a mess, of course, but that’s been true since the first war. And Saturn’s rings are all fucked up, but they were delicate in the first place. They weren’t even doing well before the Photes arrived.] These days, the planet only had a band of haze. [Even Mars looks practically untouched,] her shadow said bitterly. [The bomb craters are just like all the others.]

[Wow, you’re a comfort,] she told it.

[I’m part of you. What did you expect?]

Ann snorted in amusement. Her sadness was blurring into optimism as the minutes raced past without attack. Amazingly, no one had fired on them yet and fifty hours had passed already.

On cue, her ship made its last pseudo-random course-correction and emitted another decoy drone designed to leak a dummy engine signature. Then it began its final deceleration. As the time since Earth departure closed in on three objective days, Ann approached their rendezvous point.

They were two hours behind schedule by then. Which meant that things were amazingly quiet. In fact, now that she thought about it, they were too quiet. On the upside, nobody – barring the inevitable attrition victims – had died. On the downside, it suggested that something sinister was going on that they hadn’t accounted for. Again.

Ann reluctantly swapped to normal time.

‘Cy,’ she said. ‘Any sign of a signal?’

She had to wait a moment for her communications officer to return to undiluted awareness. She listened to him groan. Ordinary humans didn’t take well to radical changes in mental pacing, not even those with military-grade shadow support.

‘Not yet,’ he croaked. ‘Resampling now.’

Ann scowled. Given the immense areas involved and the horrific difficulties of arranging schedules over interstellar distances, some slack in the system was to be expected. Particularly with Mark Ruiz as the carrier pilot. The delay, though, was not welcome.

Ann lay scowling for an hour or so, checking her systems and surveying the dark, knowing full well it was pointless. Reluctantly, she slid her mind back into a slower gear to wait. She regretted it almost instantly as the blinding flare of a carrier burst appeared.

Ann kicked herself up into combat time, cursing. The flash had originated relatively close to where Mark was supposed to show, but was still light-minutes away from the expected target. That far out, it was hard to tell the difference between a friendly carrier and a deadly one.

‘Cy,’ she said. ‘Scan it. Everyone on full alert.’

The ship’s main audio chattered briefly as Cy’s signal-processing SAPs scrambled over their EM buffers. Then a soft voice started oozing through the cabin’s speakers.

‘In Photuria, there is no fear, no pain, no death,’ it whispered. ‘Instead, there is perfect love and perfect joy.’ Images appeared on the wall-screen of blissed-out couples walking hand in hand through soft, white tunnels, tears of happiness running down their handsome faces.

‘Fuck,’ Ann snarled. The Photes always sent a love letter before they started harvesting. They didn’t seem able to prevent themselves from announcing their arrival. So, these days, they did it as quietly as they could.

Light was slow. In the time it had taken the message to reach them, the Photes had no doubt been stealing out across the system with warp-enabled munitions, locking it down. The question was where to head for. Ann selected Mark’s backup coordinates and prayed he wasn’t already dead. She tight-beamed the course-correction to her ark and fired off a fresh set of decoys. Then she woke the titan mechs slumbering in her outer mesohull and prepped them for close-quarters combat.

Unless Mark showed up soon, they were screwed. All their careful planning would be for nothing. They’d be dead. In fact, they’d be worse than dead. The Photes would have thirty million new bodies to play with.

1.3: MARK

Mark Ruiz paced the drawing room, hands clasped tightly behind his back. His eyes darted to the grandfather clock in the corner every few seconds. From the antique sofa near the bay window that looked out across the grounds, his wife Zoe eyed him anxiously as she sipped her tea.

‘Marching about won’t get us there any faster, you know,’ she said, rearranging her skirts. ‘Why don’t you come and sit with me? We can play cards.’

‘I can’t sit,’ said Mark. ‘Not even virtually.’

She set her cup down. ‘Fine. Do you want to drop back into physical? Would that help? We have to be down to minutes, anyway.’

Mark shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, we’ll have to be fully dunked the moment we drop warp.’

Zoe sighed and stared off across the lawn to where a flock of geese were alighting on the lake. In truth, their shared fiction was doing as little for her mood as it was for his.

Their butler stepped in bearing a silver tray and another china teapot. ‘Would sir and madam like a second cup?’

‘Not now, Shaw,’ said Zoe and offlined his program with a click of her fingers. ‘Honestly,’ she muttered, ‘you can’t get the help these days.’ She rubbed her virtual eyes.

Beyond the imaginary confines of his home, Mark reclined on an immersion-couch in the tiny main cabin of the GSS Gulliver, a forty-kilometre-wide starship. Surrounding the Gulliver lay the immense, filigree-delicate warp-envelope of the embership Kraken, which Mark was urgently piloting with an army of subminds.

The Kraken was more soap bubble than starship. Six insubstantial strands of rotating ion-deployment cable maintained a sphere of tailored pseudo-vacuum about six nanometres thick and nine hundred kilometres across. While he fretted, they tore across space at several kilolights, on their way to rescue the population of Earth. And they were late.

Mark hated that he’d missed his arrival window. But the fury he felt at the Galatean