Salvation (Salvation Sequence, #1)

by Peter F. Hamilton

We might need something that goes beyond our guys’ pay grade.” “Sounds interesting, Feriton.” “My boss wants protection, serious protection. We’re dealing with the unknown here. This expedition…it’s different. The artifact we’ve found is alien.”

“The Olyix turned out okay. And they had a shitload of antimatter on board the Salvation of Life. There isn’t another conventional power source powerful enough to accelerate a vessel that size up to a decent fraction of light speed.” “We were fortunate with them,” I said carefully. “Their religion gives them a whole different set of priorities to us. All they want to do is travel across space in their arkship to the end of time, where they believe their God will be waiting for them. They don’t want to expand into new star systems and bioform planets to live on; it’s a whole different imperative to ours.

“Our investigation has two priorities,” Yuri pronounced. “First priority is to assess the artifact’s threat potential. Is it hostile, and if so, to what extent? Secondly, based on that, we’re required to formulate a response recommendation. So that’s going to take as long as it takes.

When you can connect two separate physical locations via a quantum entanglement portal, so many problems cease to exist.

Before Rindstrom, that would have required carrying vast amounts of energy and reaction mass on board. Now, all you do is drop a perfectly spherical portal into the sun. Meta-hot plasma slams into that hole at near-relativistic speed. At the same time, the portal’s exit is fixed at the apex of a magnetic cone, which channels the plasma into a rocket exhaust. There is no limit on how much plasma from the sun you can send through, and the starship masses very little—just the portal and its nozzle, guidance units, and a smaller portal communication link to mission control. It can accelerate fast.

Connexion Corp has been one of the major players when it comes to sending starships out from Earth, building and flying them for more than a hundred years. Every new Universal settled star system is another huge income source for the company. Beta Eridani is the farthest star humans have reached. Eighty-nine light-years from Earth.

The actuators inside the threader mechanism split the slab apart into identical rectangles whose quantum spatial entanglement transformed them into linked doors. No matter how great the physical distance between the twinned segments, the entanglement provided an open gap that was no length at all: the portal.

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.”

“The Olyix are a single arkship colony who care only about continuing their voyage to the end of the universe, where they will meet their God at the End of Time. Anything else is secondary to that doctrine, so by necessity they adapt to local conditions. In the Sol system, trade with Earth and the habitats is the method by which they can acquire the energy to build up their supply of antimatter and continue that voyage. Therefore, they trade. The argument being, had they arrived at Delta Pavonis instead, they would now be following Utopial doctrine in their contact with Akitha.” “Doesn’t that kind of blow the shit out of the pan-galactic Utopial theory, that every species will embrace post-scarcity benevolence?” “In the case of the Olyix, yes. Which is why Callum is hoping for a more favorable outcome this time.”

We’ve got close to twenty terraformed planets now, every one of which cost us the biggest financial and political effort our species has ever known. If we’d spent half that much fixing Earth, we’d have us a genuine paradise. But no, getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.”

You don’t cross interstellar space for conquest. You do it for politics and wanderlust, like we have; and you do it for science, like we also have. But most interesting motive of all: as art. Because you can.”

Trust is at the core of human nature, one of our greatest curses—and blessings.”

Ideology is a sick-soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause.”