The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  My quartet approached the hangar. Ahead of me, two of the Saints guarded the tunnel I was searching when the armada arrived; the other three were examining the area around the membrane generators. I activated my weapons and prepared to shoot. The Saints weren’t aware my quartet was almost on them, which gave me an advantage. But first I wanted to give myself an even better advantage. I extended my influence within the local nexus, no longer just passively misdirecting its perception filters but adapting the autonomic routines.

  I ordered the hangar’s light level to rise to its maximum. My quartet raced forward into the glare while the humans were still confused. Body two emerged first, firing a multi-blade kinetic at Alik Monday, who was crouched beside the tunnel entrance. One of the FBI agent’s legs was severed above the knee; the other was badly flayed by the cloud of spinning blades. He toppled over, spraying blood.

  Human bodies: such a flawed evolution pathway. No other species we’ve welcomed has such a high nutrient fluid circulation pressure.

  I lost body two. Kandara had been crouched beside Alik Monday and reacted with a speed we weren’t expecting, returning fire with a pistol she was carrying. Bitch!

  Body two was struck and its internal organs were abruptly shredded. I felt shock and the impossible intimation of supreme pain—dulled by knowing it wasn’t real. But I’m still infected by human autonomic routines from my time—too, too long—running missions on Earth, when I incorporated their gross bodies into my quint and even grosser thoughts into my mind to help me blend into their culture.

  Kandara shot body two with a wyst bullet. Its legs lost rigidity, and it fell to the hangar floor. The weight on impact ripped the damaged midsection skin apart, and it burst open, sending out a sticky wave of pulped tissue.

  My remaining four bodies all froze in shock. That’s a fucking human reflex—again. No true Olyix should do that. I have got to purge myself properly once this is over.

  Then I lost contact with the local nexus. The hangar light dropped to normal levels. I didn’t understand what had happened. Did the nexus fail? Or…had the onemind discovered my misdirection? But its thoughtstream remained fixated on the approaching armada.

  Bodies three, four, and five laid out a continuous fire pattern, strafing the areas where the Saints had been. They’d scattered; Kandara and Yuri were returning fire from the cover of tunnel entrances. Body three was hit, a leg wound. I spun it around fast, galloping as best I could for the tunnel it’d just emerged from. So nearly made it—

  Bullets penetrated the brain. I lost body three from unity.

  Motherfuckers!

  I was using body five to hammer the area around the hangar entrance with proton pellets. Callum and Jessika Mye, the Neána metahuman, had taken cover there. Long sections of the hangar’s biostructure erupted in static-blasted splinters and liquid. Lightning bolts snapped down from the ceiling as the pellets’ energy sought to equalize, gouging out smoking punctures in the rock floor. I shifted body five’s aim and shot one of the little dark drones. The machine’s power cell detonated instantly, its blast wave sending everyone—bodies four and five, and all the Saints—tumbling across the floor.

  Unity ended.

  I was alone in body five. Not possible. I knew body one was safe, away from the hangar; I could not be reduced to just one unless body four had been eliminated. Yet I only had this single body. I saw body four scramble upright fifty meters away from me. We looked at each other. In a crazy gesture, I extended my manipulator flesh toward it. And it was doing the same. Yet our thoughts could not connect.

  Some of my manipulator flesh was still gripping the proton pellet gun. I struggled upright, hunting for a target. One of the little creeperdrone fakes was on the ground beside body four, its legs already bending to right itself. I brought the pistol around, target locks bracketing the device. But before I could fire and blast the thing apart, a small green flame flickered out of an anatomically incorrect orifice on its upper body.

  Body four swayed around, juddering as if it were being physically assaulted by invisible foes. Its manipulator flesh formed a long tendril ending in an elongated sucker. I watched, helpless, as it began to clout the sucker against a small dripping wound on its upper body, as if trying to slap out a fire. No injury that small should conjure up such a frantic reaction. Body four’s legs began to jolt about, kicking wildly. Its manipulator flesh expanded in random surges, the tendril losing cohesion.

  I knew it was experiencing the impossible: agony. But Olyix quint do not feel pain. Our bodies are too advanced. We do not suffer like basic animals, like…humans.

  I shot the creeperdrone. The proton pellet demolished it in a blaze of scorched tatters. It must have been carrying an entanglement suppressor. The thoughts of body one and body four reunified with mine. Thank fuck for that. We became full Gox-quint again. No…part of us was dying; we could feel our brain dissolve as the toxin bit deep into our cells, spreading like wildfire. Precious memories that only that body contained were lost, ripped away into darkness.

  It was not pain but terror body four felt. Terror at the outrage, as every memory it had left fled into the brains of bodies one and five. That terrible jumble of chaotic routines and recollections that was Gox, all of us past—Gox-Li, Gox-Mandy, Gox-Esfir, Gox-Suzanne, Gox-Namono, Gox-Yua, Gox-Azucene, Gox-Renpa, Gox-Keerthi, Gox-Niomi, Gox-Myriana, Gox-Galina, Gox-Annukka, Gox-Ornella, Gox-Chailail—the behavior routines, the very essence of the human females we had subsumed to act their role, transforming into the perfect quint human body: Cancer. We were all one, yet utterly discordant amid the turmoil of distress and fear. I felt no physical pain, but from our alien origin I knew true dread.

  I tried to scream at the torturous death body four was suffering. Body four’s manipulator flesh sent up hands, human hands, shaking them in fury at the universe.

  “What is happening?” the Salvation of Life onemind demanded, for I had let my mental guard down. “Why are you in that hangar? What are humans doing there? How did they get inside me?”

  “FUCK YOU!” I retaliated amid my anguish. “You did this to us. You! I told you the humans were still here. I fucking told you.”

  “Gox-quint, restrain yourself.”

  I made a supreme effort to regain equilibrium, squeezing the alien demons back into their correct place, deep, deep in my beautiful, perfect Olyix mind. They are nothing to me—instructions on subterfuge, an open book I once let fall, glimpsing pages fluttering in the dying light, a few meaningless phrases. Nothing more. Not real. Not me.

  I banished entanglement with the Salvation of Life. I renounced it as the useless failure it was.

  I watched body four topple to the ground. Dead.

  Movement amid the smoke and ruins of the hangar. Yuri was advancing cautiously, slinking between the irregular protrusions of biostructure. I blasted away in his direction with both weapons. Answering shots streaked through the smoke and static blasts. Rock chips and shards of biostructure whirled around body five. Several struck, causing insignificant damage.

  I ducked body five back into the tunnel and ran fast, keeping low. But it is not body five anymore. It is body two. I am no longer quint, quad, or trio; I am duo now. And that will never change, not now the last day of the Olyix has arrived.

  Do not laugh, humans. I hear you. I taste your bitter joy. Deep inside my mind where your contemptible remnants cower. I know you. But this is your end, too. For this is the time of my glory.

  I killed one of those bastard Saints, injured others. She will never let that lie, not Kandara. Soon she will follow me into the lonely vastness of the arkship—my home for centuries. Fool that I was, I loved it for all that time, and so its schema is embedded in my mind. Now it will become my killing field.

  SAINTS

  SALVATION OF LIFE

  Kandara skidded across the hangar floor, boots plowing debris and sticky nutrient fl
uid away. She came to a stop, crouching over Alik. She stared aghast at his stump, the ruined leg beside it. Blood was pumping out of both in great gouts.

  Oh, sweet Mother Mary, nobody has this much blood in them.

  Deadened fingers clawed at the medipac on her thigh. It was so ridiculously small, and Alik’s godawful injuries would challenge an entire ER crash team.

  “Need help!” she yelled. “Bring your medipacs. Now! Alik? Oh, Mary! Alik, can you hear me?”

  Somewhere behind her, Yuri was still firing his pistol into the corridor where the last quint had vanished.

  Alik’s body juddered weakly as he coughed. The seals on his collar clicked open and the helmet dropped off to one side, clattering onto the rock.

  Kandara had seen death claim people before, seen the desperation and loss in their eyes. And here it was again.

  Zapata used its field medic routines to analyze the damage and splashed up a triage sequence on her tarsus lens.

  That’s not going to be enough.

  “Hey, you free tonight?” Alik whispered. Blood dribbled out between his lips.

  “Don’t talk!” She shoved the first emergency tourniquet clamp directly onto the tattered end of his femoral artery. It annealed to the artery and contracted, slowing the blood loss but not stanching it altogether. The second clamp was hard to pull out of the medipac. She shook it free angrily and slammed it into the gore of the horrific gash on his remaining leg, trying to maneuver it onto the source of the blood. Her suit gauntlets were never intended for a task this delicate; she was sure she was just causing more damage.

  Medical diagnostics from Shango, his altme, splashed across her tarsus lens, turning her world disaster red. The tourniquets didn’t seem to have made any difference. Jessika arrived, her medipac already open. As Kandara attached another tourniquet to the leaking femoral artery, Jessika applied a bladder of bloodsub to Alik’s neck, a vampire jellyfish going for his jugular. “We need to keep his organs oxygenated,” she said as the bladder started to contract. “This is going to take all the bloodsub we’ve got.”

  Kandara read the combination of drugs Zapata wanted fed to Alik and plugged a pharma module directly into the plasma bladder. It was difficult; hot tears were distorting her tarsus lens, warping its displays. Alik’s icon splashed across the deepening red view.

  “Stick with the mission,” his calm voice spoke directly into her head. “Get the message out where we are.”

  “I’m going to get you into the cave,” Kandara told him. “It’ll be okay. The initiators can help. You’ll be fine, Alik.”

  The medical display flashed critical alerts as Alik’s organs started to fail. His eyes rolled upward.

  “Jez-us, Kandara,” he sent over the interface, “grant a dying guy his wish. Blow the membrane, get the drones outside, then go kill that sonofabitch Odd Quint for me. Kill it good, all its motherfucking bodies. You got that?”

  “I’m on it, just as soon as we get you stable.”

  “No!” His body shook feebly. “I fucking want this.” A big glob of blood oozed out of his mouth, and the hard muscles his face had been remade with finally turned slack.

  The medical splash from Shango went dark.

  “Fuck!” Kandara screamed. She didn’t know if she did it straight away or if she’d been staring mindlessly at Alik’s corpse for an age. Her whole body was numb from raw fury.

  “Uh,” Callum said, “I could do with some help.”

  Kandara scanned around, ready to yell her filthiest insults at him. Alik was dead. Didn’t he understand that? Dead. Traveled fifty thousand light-years to die in pain and blood and ignominy.

  She saw Callum slumped against the wall amid a tangle of mangled pipe trunks, with their glutinous juices pulsing out in anomalous rhythms. His left arm was bent at a bad angle, the environment suit sleeve torn from shoulder to elbow. He was pushing a klingskin bandage onto the wound inside, a feeble rubbing motion that seemed to be having no effect. She thought she could see a sharp dagger of broken bone sticking out of the flesh, but everything was so red it was hard to tell.

  “Hell!” Jessika yelped. She snatched up her medipac and ran for him.

  Kandara glanced back at Alik. People were supposed to look peaceful when they passed. Alik didn’t.

  Good.

  She picked up Alik’s carbine and hung the strap over her shoulder. Then she stood up and started walking toward one of the three dead quint bodies—the one that had blown up a great swathe of pipe trunks and rock wall with its gun. “Yuri, did you get that last quint?”

  “I don’t think so. I can see about a hundred meters along the corridor. There’s no body.”

  Kandara told Zapata to run a check on the remaining three transmitter drones. “Keep watching. I’m going to try and flush it out.”

  “Kandara—”

  “Keep watching,” she insisted. “And everyone, tie yourself down. This is going to be fierce.”

  She picked up the Olyix gun. It was about the size of her forearm and must have weighed ten kilos. Instead of a handgrip, one end forked apart into prongs that ended in two large scalloped bulbs, which she’d seen the quint’s manipulator flesh envelop. No trigger, but there was a circle of five rubbery buttons. She hefted it up, using a knee to support the barrel.

  “No,” Yuri warned. “Don’t.”

  Kandara ordered the drones to hover right in front of the membrane. They slid obediently through the thin strands of grimy smoke that now layered the hangar’s air.

  “Oh, shit,” Jessika grunted. She quickly finished sealing a pressure patch over Callum’s torn sleeve, then grabbed at his harness cable, attaching it to her belt.

  Yuri was running across the floor to the end of his cable. “Wait—”

  Kandara aimed the big gun’s muzzle at the wall around the membrane and pressed one of the buttons. Nothing. Second one. Third time lucky.

  It fired. A small white flare at the end of the muzzle, then a lightning ball was exploding out of the pipe trunks, sending electron tendrils crackling across the disintegrating bark. The membrane glared violet.

  “Wait, for fuck’s sake,” Yuri shouted; he was doubled over, fumbling with his belt or something.

  Kandara pressed button three again. Again. Again!

  Inside the helmet, her yell was louder than the roar of detonations. She marched the strikes around the side of the big entrance, destroying every chunk of Olyix biotechnology on the wall, and a good portion of the rock underneath. The hit on the membrane generator’s last power cable came without warning. One second the membrane was there, glimmering like a window framing a clear sunset sky, then it vanished.

  Atmosphere howled out into the vacuum, creating an instant blizzard from the debris clutter across the floor. The dead quint bodies started to roll and slither, picking up speed before finally sailing out of the hangar entrance amid the rushing gas streamers. Kandara hadn’t quite expected the force of the wind to be so powerful. She flung herself down on all fours—not that traction counted for much, certainly not given the puddles of brown goop rippling across the floor. She had to use the harness cable, pulling herself along hand over hand to reach the rock, where she could get a decent grip in the gnarled pipe trunks. She prayed to sweet Mary that the cable would hold.

  Quick check around, and there was Yuri, doing the same thing as she was, still at the end of the tunnel where the last quint had gone. He’d managed to hang on to his pistol, which was more than she’d done with the Olyix gun. That’d gone twirling away to oblivion along with its previous user. By the side of the entrance, Jessika and Callum were clinging to the knotty strands of bioware, her arm around his waist as his feet kept lifting off the ground.

  “Yuri?” Kandara called. “Anything?”

  “Not yet,” he replied. “Did the transmitter drones make it?”

  Z
apata reported it had a signal from the three drones, though it was weak. The image from their sensors splashed across her vision, and she was looking at a jumble of vivid nebula billows and worn-gray rock as they careered around one another. Ion rockets were firing at full thrust to try to stabilize the drones. Tiny ice crystals and chunks of bark spun around them, spewing from the dark slit in the curving cliff of rock, swinging chaotically in and out of view. A lot of the image was taken up by sweeps of the gas giant’s heat-enraged cloudscape, and the golden glow of the bow wave wings that embraced it. The drones’ inertial guidance systems calculated the section of the nebula where the human fleet ought to be and focused their antennae on it.

  Kandara ordered them to start sending, and added her own channel to the prerecorded message. “Calling the invasion fleet. This is Kandara from the Avenging Heretic—if any of you even still remember us. We made it. We’re on board the Salvation of Life, along with all the cocoons—everyone they took from Earth before S-Day. They’re alive. Mary, am I glad to see you. But you coming here has kicked off the mother of all shitstorms. We’re cornered and could really do with your help. Now, please. We’re in the hangar that—”

  A dark, curving shape slid into the feed’s image, silhouetted against the planet’s beautiful bow wave, and every drone icon vanished from her tarsus lens, along with their image feeds and telemetry.

  “Ahh, Mary,” she complained. “Well, the drones worked. Let’s just hope humans still use quaint old radio.”

  The hangar’s atmospheric pressure had dropped severely. All twelve of the corridors and tunnels that led off into the arkship were now acting like rocket exhausts, with powerful fountains of white gas firing out across the wide hangar, only to be sucked away through the big entrance. At least it meant the force that was tugging at her had reduced to a mere gale. She could almost stand upright, but the slippery floor was treacherous, and now the slick pools of fluid were bubbling off into the violent thinning atmosphere.