The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Read online

  Ahead of them, Juloss split open, revealing the end of the universe, where the silver remnants of stars formed elegant rivers of twilight and fell into the nothingness at the heart. Beside it, a golden light was shining, calling him onward.

  Yirella landed on the surface of the huntsphere, legs apart, ebony skin alive with scarlet hieroglyphs. ‘This is going to hurt,’ she said sternly.

  ‘What? Yi, don’t—’ Somehow Dellian was looking down on himself, the huntsphere, with Yirella balancing perfectly on him, reaching down. Her hand punctured the shell, and the pain was incredible. His scream made the dying universe tremble.

  The damage she’d caused had opened up long cracks in the sphere. She tore at them, prising up jagged sections and sending them spinning off into the void. He began to struggle, writhing frantically to escape her merciless fingers.

  ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Don’t fight this, Del. I’m stripping out the neurovirus.’

  ‘What?’ He was sobbing now, the pain was so intense, burning along every nerve to punish his quaking brain.

  ‘I love you, Del, you know that. Nothing can take that out of you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then say it!’ she demanded.

  ‘I love you.’

  Her hands ripped apart the last of the huntsphere shell to reveal his Olyix quint body.

  ‘I can’t be that,’ he wailed.

  ‘I love you, Del. Forever. No matter where that takes us.’

  ‘Help me,’ he pleaded.

  The end of the universe was curving around them, its final fragments forming a fetid vortex that was pulling them down into the death of eternity and the golden god at its side – the one waiting for them. Yirella’s hands sliced into the quint flesh.

  Dellian felt fingers closing around his arm. She pulled. Quint flesh stretched like slippery rubber, clinging to him, merging to give him strength. Now he was struggling against it, the foreign thoughts of devotion to the God at the End of Time tearing free in agonizing ruptures.

  ‘Yirella! Don’t let go.’

  The universe rushed to extinction, the vortex walls spinning past in a lethal whirl of nightmares and demons.

  ‘Please,’ he begged.

  Yirella tugged hard, crying out wordlessly at the terrible exertion. Slowly, with stringy alien goop clutching at every centimetre of his skin, she pulled him out of the quint body. He came free with an excruciating tear. The extinct universe vanished.

  Dellian juddered wildly. Bright light flared around him. Everything hurt – but nothing like as bad as it had mere instants before. He was waving his limbs around – proper human limbs – though they were wrapped in wires and fibres as if someone had scooped him up in a net. His short hair was on fire as something pulled every last follicle out of his scalp.

  His flailing stopped as he ran out of strength, and he flopped down onto the bed. There was no air in his lungs, and his chest heaved desperately, trying to get a breath down his throat. The surroundings swam dizzyingly in and out of view. People in medical robes clustered around, worried faces peering down, talking incoherently fast. There was a curving glass wall three metres away, with the whole squad pressed up against it – mouths open to shout, eyes wet with tears. Janc was pounding on the glass; Uret had sunk to his knees. Tilliana was weeping.

  ‘What the fuck?’ The words were a rasp. He turned his head.

  Yirella was on the couch next to his, propped up on her shoulders, her scalp invisible beneath a fur of silky white strands finer than any hair. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she stared at him.

  ‘Del?’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. Then the memories crashed back with the power of a tsunami, knocking him back down onto the mattress. ‘The Saints are dead,’ he told everyone and burst into tears.

  London

  8th December 2206

  The time icon flashed up in Ollie’s tarsus lens: the image of an old Seiko wristwatch with hands that clicked around in combination with Tye, his altme, supplying a tiny tick of clockwork in his audio peripheral. Ancient watches were popular these days – not that anyone went short of power for an altme processor peripheral; they all worked off body heat. But still, it was an understandable fad given London’s chronic shortage of electricity and how quirky solnet was nowadays. Trouble was, Ollie had spent his first twenty-four years immersed in purely digital displays, so analogue messed him up. It took him a second to work out that the way the hands were pointing meant it was six o’clock. Which was actually eighteen hundred hours, so it was officially evening. In the time before what every Londoner now called Blitz2, people would have known it was evening – the biggest clue being that the sun used to set every night. But now that clue was no more.

  Presumably it still did set – not that Ollie trusted the government to tell anyone if the Olyix had stopped that from happening as well. When he glanced up at the London shield, all he saw was the devil-sky, same as it had been for the last two years: an eerie violet glare seething kilometres overhead. Sometimes, if he squinted against the intensity, he thought he could make out patterns writhing against the thick barrier of artificially solidified air protecting the city – milk-clouds in coffee, but sped up to hypersonic velocity.

  The atmosphere outside was completely ruined now, decimated by the grotesque amount of energy the Olyix Deliverance ships were firing at thousands of city shields across the globe. They’d heated up the air to a point where ocean evaporation had reached a previously unknown peak. Climatologists on the remnant of solnet were talking about a ‘Venus tipping-point’, but all Ollie knew was that the air outside had degraded to a constant blast of hot fog. Plants simply couldn’t survive the hostile temperatures and humidity. As for animals, they were dying in a catastrophe that surpassed the Pacific Rim firestorms back in 2056.

  A few months ago, he and Lolo had travelled to the edge of the shield out at Epsom, just to see if it really was as bad as everyone said. There in the deserted suburbs, the overhead violet glare condensed into slender ribbons of lightning that crackled around the rim, allowing the foolhardy to glimpse what lay outside. They’d seen the Surrey hills through the short breaks in the turbulent mantle of smog. Lying beyond the vast dead marsh that now throttled London, silhouettes of the ragged slopes rose to a bleak hellscape of steaming ground matted with the slushy remnants of vegetation. Any evidence of human habitation – the ancient towns and elegant villages dating back to the time of mythical kings, the new carbon-sink forests triumphantly planted throughout the twenty-second century – had all been vanquished in the backlash of the invaders’ assault.

  What they’d witnessed left him depressed, yes, but it was the guilt that had inflamed his anger and determination. The Olyix have killed Earth, and I helped them. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. But that made no difference to the shame.

  He gave the devil-sky a last hateful glance and went back into the small industrial building that was now home – a fancy description for a brick-wall shed with a carbon-panel roof. They’d found it just off Bellenden Road, squeezed in between the nice houses of Holly Grove and the old railway line. He’d been reluctant to use it at first; the railway arches were too similar to the ones that his old gang, the Southwark Legion, had used. So not only were there painful memory triggers facing him every time he walked outside, there was also the danger of pattern recognition. He was still on Special Branch’s most-wanted list, so their G8Turings would have profiled him. What if they’d decided he was emotionally weak, needing to cling to familiarity? They would have him reading those shabby, ivy-smothered brick arches as a psychological crutch.

  Or . . . ‘You’re so paranoid about the police,’ as Lolo told him every time he mentioned the possibility.

  Ollie’s rational brain knew sie was right. From what he could gain from his cautious and intermittent access to the remnants of solnet, he was still high up on the authorities’ list of wanted suspects; they were never going to forgive and forget the Legion’s involvement in the C
roydon raid, nor the disaster that was Lichfield Road. Not that the Specials would mount surveillance along every stretch of London’s disused railway arches just in case he was so pathetic he needed a familiar landscape for reassurance. Besides, even two years into Blitz2, the government was providing the city’s residents with minimal support. Their whole effort was devoted to maintaining the shield and keeping the population fed. Everything else was secondary – or so they said. But Ollie wasn’t so sure. The authorities had been very keen to find him.

  Inside, the building’s long main section was basic, naked brick walls with misted-over windows that allowed a weak glimmer of the shield’s light to penetrate – a perfect setting for a small-scale industrial enterprise. The last one had been a bespoke ceramic crafts manufacturer that had shut down over a decade ago. But the kilns were still in place – five of them lined up along the middle of the floor, electricity-hungry brutes that fired artistically colourful glazes at temperatures well over a thousand degrees. Their doors were all shut tight, but Ollie smelt woodsmoke in the dank air as he walked past them and muttered a curse.

  He’d spent more than a month modifying the kilns, covering the internal firebricks with high-efficiency thermocouples to extract energy from anything burned inside. Any fire was now strictly illegal in London, as in all of Earth’s cities that remained under siege from the Olyix. Fire was the one thing that unified every citizen these days, consuming the precious limited oxygen that people needed to breathe. See it – report it – and more often than not give the arsonist a good kicking before the police and firefighters arrived. Ollie could still remember the first time he’d seen a fire engine race past in the street: a magnificent ground vehicle out of history with lights blazing and siren screaming. He and Lolo had been mesmerized at its appearance, then cheered it on, waving at the crew like a pair of awestruck schoolkids. Dozens of the big machines had been brought out of museums and renovated since Blitz2 began.

  So burning wood in the kilns was a precarious project that had to be well hidden from the neighbours. After fitting the thermocouples, Ollie had stripped the ancient air-conditioning ducts from the rafters and rerouted them. Fans sucked air through the kilns, maintaining a good flow over the logs they burned, before extracting it and sending it down into the old railway storm sewer where it could dissipate harmlessly among the fatbergs and rats.

  On a bench at the end of the kilns, a one-hundred-and-twenty-centimetre model of the Nightstar starship shone a weird silver from the devil-sky light coming through the windows. Ollie had never even heard of the sci-fi show until a couple of months back, but Hong Kong had released a hundred interactive episodes back in 2130, sponsored by a fashion house that had long since vanished. Before Blitz2, he would have accessed solnet for every fact about it, but solnet was a bad idea these days for anything other than basic comms. Too much self-adaptive darkware was loose in the network, left over from the Olyix sabotage.

  He’d heard about the model from a contact in the Rye Lane market not long after he’d started asking about collectibles. Adults paying ridiculous money for weird old trash fiction memorabilia was a whole genre he hadn’t ever known existed until he’d discovered Karno Larson – his golden link to Nikolaj and vengeance.

  He didn’t even need to steal the model. Nobody paid anything for hobby stuff like that these days, so the owner had been happy to hand it over in exchange for a fully charged domestic quantum cell. Once Ollie got it home, in a trailer behind a bicycle he pedalled all the way back from Pimlico, he’d had to admit it was superb. Nightstar looked as if it had been designed by an insect race tripping on heavy-duty nark, and this was a handcrafted one-off, which elevated it to a genuine piece of art. He half expected it to lift off and vanish into hyperspace with a blaze of twisted starlight.

  ‘Time to go,’ Ollie called.

  ‘I know,’ Lolo replied from the room at the far end; it had been the ceramic company’s office and now served as their bedroom and living room. For Ollie it was a place to crash and have sex, but for Lolo it was their home, their honeymoon suite, their fortress castle sheltering them from the horrors of Blitz2. Which was why Ollie put up with the strips of white gauzy linen sie’d strung up around the bed and the little candles with mock flames that sprayed out a sweet musky scent to add to the romance, as well as rugs and pearl-and-jade trinkets and the antique black-lacquer furniture they’d acquired from a deserted house further along the street.

  Lolo came out and smiled broadly. Sie was dressed as if they were going out to dinner in one of London’s restaurants from the time before. Given sie was in hir female cycle, sie’d chosen a purple-and-white flower-patterned dress with a plunging neckline. Hir face was expertly dusted with highlighter and rouge, with the devil-sky light shining on high-gloss cherry-red lipstick, hir hair in a peacock-blue Mohawk. Just looking at how gorgeous sie was, Ollie felt himself stiffening.

  ‘You look great,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  A quick kiss accompanied by strong perfume, and a smiling Lolo was holding up a basket with a gingham cloth draped across it. ‘Let’s go.’

  Ollie gave his fleshmask a quick check in the mirror. As faces went, it was okay. He wasn’t happy with the rounded chin, nor the longer nose, and he still wasn’t sure about having white skin, but the dimples were nice. And the fleshmask responded well when it came to showing his expressions, although the creams he’d been applying to his own skin did inhibit the subtler emotions. He was strict with himself about keeping the fleshmask on the whole time, avoiding G8Turings zeroing in on him with feature recognition. But that freedom came with the price of inflammation and dry skin and some horrific outbreaks of tinea. For Ollie, who had always taken superb care with his appearance in the time before, that was almost unbearable. Fortunately, moisturizer and other basic skin creams could solve the crises – for a price.

  He performed a few exaggerated grimaces as a final test. ‘Good to go,’ he announced.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to wear that thing all the time. You have a lovely face. I adore looking at you.’

  ‘I wish you didn’t wear a bra all the time, but hey, those are the breaks.’

  ‘Turds! Don’t you binaries ever think about anything else?’

  Laughing, Ollie put his arm around hir, and they went outside together. Sunglasses on in unison. Ollie’s were like ski goggles – hardly the kind of stylish image he wanted, but their thick rims didn’t allow the light from the devil-sky around the edges. Even with the additional protection afforded by his tarsus lenses, too much direct exposure always left him with a migraine.

  It wasn’t far to Reedham Street, where the government nutrition agency had set up a public kitchen in the community centre. Plenty of people were walking towards it. Ollie recognized most of them from the daily visit and nodded occasionally. Saying anything was pointless, thanks to the constant background buzz from the shield straining to hold back the perpetual energy bombardment from the Olyix ships as they attempted to overload the shield generators. Consequently, conversations these days tended to be up close and loud.

  ‘I saw Mark today,’ Lolo said.

  ‘Right,’ Ollie acknowledged as they passed the end of Chadwick Road. One of the big old plane trees halfway along had survived since the siege began, but in the last couple of months it too had succumbed to the absence of rain and the eternal devil-sky. Ollie was mildly sad to see it was finally shedding its yellowed leaves. ‘Who’s Mark?’

  ‘He’s the one who always brings the mushrooms.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  ‘Anyway, his friend Sharon has a sister who works at the defence ministry. She said one of the seismologist techs told someone in her office that the Olyix aren’t tunnelling under the shield any more. They’re playing the long game now. Their ships are heading for the settled star systems, and when they get there they’ll cut the power those planets are feeding back to Earth, and the interstellar portals will die. We won’t have any food pellets for t
he printers, or electricity to run them. So they’ll starve us out.’

  Ollie did his best not to sigh. For someone who had been educated in the supposedly excellent egalitarian school system of Delta Pavonis, Lolo could be fucking stupid at times. ‘That’s a load of bollocks. You’ve got to stop living off gossip. What you just said is a paradox. I’m sure the Olyix are heading for the settled worlds, but if they cut the power that’s coming to us from Delta Pavonis and New Washington and all the others, Earth’s city shields will fail.’ His finger pointed up at the devil-sky. ‘And that mothermonster will come crashing down, just like it did last month in Berlin. We’ll all die – which is exactly what they can’t afford. Not after the effort they’ve put in to beating us down.’

  ‘Berlin’s shield fail didn’t kill everyone.’ Lolo pouted. ‘Just the ones the storm hit when it burst down.’ Sie paused for a second. ‘And the ones who drowned when the river Spree flooded back in.’

  ‘Thankfully for everyone else, the Olyix flew in real fast and converted them into cocoons, so they got to live on, sort of,’ Ollie scoffed. ‘Lucky them. They get to see what the universe is like at the end of time.’

  ‘You can be such a downer.’

  ‘Most like, when the power does get cut from the settled worlds, the Olyix will just starve us out. We’ll walk meekly into the arkship two million by two million.’

  ‘We wouldn’t! People are better than that.’

  ‘Face it, if there’s a choice between dying in a tsunami of ruined supercharged toxic atmosphere or taking your chance as a mutated freak cocoon that’s on a trillion-year pilgrimage to meet an alien god, what do you do?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to give in. I’m going to make a stand.’

  That statement was a wide opening into a world of snark that Ollie wasn’t prepared to enter. Not tonight. ‘And I’ll be standing right there beside you.’

  Lolo gave him a happy hug.