Salvation полностью

We pushed, wiggled, and knocked elbows along the corridor to airlock 17B, where our passenger ferry was docked. The cabin was a small cylinder, with thin padding on the walls, and twenty-four simple metal seats in a couple of rows, with a lone seat at the front for our “pilot,” who did nothing but monitor the G7Turing that actually flew us. Apparently that dates back to the days when autopilots were taking over more and more aircraft functions, but people still wanted a human in the control loop. Personally I’d trust the G7 over a human pilot any day.

I hauled myself along the cabin and claimed a seat beside one of the small windows. The dock grid stretched away out to the stars, its structure cluttered with tanks and cables that were covered in silver-white thermal blankets. Like everything in space, it was either sharply lit by sunlight or sheltering in the utter darkness of shadows. The contrast between sections was immediate and striking.

We left the dock with a soft motion and loud knocking sounds that reverberated down the cabin as the vessel’s tiny rockets fired in short fast bursts. I saw the dock fall away behind us. The flight was due to take twelve minutes. At three minutes, the reaction control rockets began to fire again, rotating the craft.

The Salvation of Life slid into my line of sight. I’d seen enough images and diagrams of it, but even so, looking out at the real thing was a hell of a moment. I stared at it the same way jet pilots used to gaze at airships, with a twinge of envy and false nostalgia for a still-birthed alternate history where those giant, serene craft were kings of the world. To travel among the stars in an artificial planetoid would have been an awesome existence.

The Olyix had started with an asteroid drifting in some distant orbit around their home star. Humans, with their molecular bonding technology, would have simply mined the ores and minerals and used the refined mass to construct a habitat-sized arkship. But the Olyix used a cruder method, cutting away the rock’s rumpled, crater-scarred outer layers until they were left with a smooth cylinder forty-five kilometers long and twelve in diameter. Further mining excavated the three main biochambers and a huge honeycomb of compartments that formed the engineering and propulsion section at the rear.

After so many millennia traveling between stars, the arkship’s exterior was in remarkably good condition, shimmering like polished coal under the sun’s unremitting glare. That unblemished sheen was all thanks to the impact defense screen, of course. When traveling across the interstellar gulf, the Salvation of Life generated a massive plasma cloud ahead of it to ablate and absorb any particles it ran into at twenty percent light speed. The arkship’s forward section was studded with generators, fashioned like golden barnacles, to create the magnetic field that held the tenuous ionized gas in place.

Halfway through the passenger ferry’s turn, we were sideways on to the arkship’s counter-rotating axis dock, giving me a panoramic view. The dock was a disk, only slightly wider than the Lobby’s toroid we’d left behind. But its apparent rotation was actually holding it motionless as the Salvation spun around its axis. Strangely, it looked like the most human part of the arkship, but then most engineering requirements have a common design solution no matter what kind of neurons create them. As well as possessing a number of airlocks, the dock was used to connect the power utilities. Free-flying human-built stations containing small portal doors, like geometric footballs a dozen meters across, hovered a few meters away from the dock. Their equators glowed with the intense turquoise shimmer of ion thrusters, holding them in position; while thick superconducting cables flexed in extreme slow motion across the gap between the two.

And they were the whole reason for the trade deals between the Olyix and the Sol Senate. Our solar system was just another stop on the Olyix’s incredible journey to the end of the universe; they’d visited hundreds of stars already, and would visit thousands—millions—more in the future before finally coming face-to-face with their God at the End of Time. Each solar system they came across was a replenishment stop between flights, a time when they used (or traded) local resources to refurbish the Salvation of Life and generated enough new antimatter to accelerate them onward again.

Accelerating something that huge took energy. A lot of energy. All the various processes that human physicists had ever come up with to create antimatter were horrendously inefficient, converting maybe one or two percent of the energy input into actual antimatter. As the Olyix openly admitted, their procedures weren’t a whole lot better.