“Mary, their starships have flown across the entire galaxy and they haven’t got health and safety protocols? Where the hell are the emergency doors?”
“Kandara!” Yuri barked. “It’s coming.”
She fought her way across the hangar floor, keeping as low as she could. There were still dark flakes zinging through the thinning air, twigs and leaves and small fibrous tubules torn from the arkship biotechnology, each one with a punch like a cage fighter when it struck her.
Yuri started firing his pistol along the corridor when she was still thirty meters away.
The edge of the entrance next to him blew apart in a cascade of rock shards as it was hit by energetic gunfire from somewhere within. Yuri went sprawling, then rolled smoothly back into a crouch, pistol held steady on the corridor.
Like he’s done it before, Kandara thought admiringly. She lurched for cover amid a tangle of broken pipe tubes that were swaying alarmingly, bringing the carbine around ready. The jet of mist roaring out of the corridor started to fluctuate, its subtle fluorescence dimming. A quint was bumping along the corridor wall, legs skittering frantically on the rock floor while its manipulator flesh surged out in thick pseudopods, trying to grapple onto the wall’s undulating pipe trunks and fluttering creeper fronds, but the malleable translucent flesh wasn’t strong enough to hold the quint’s weight against the tremendous force of the atmospheric tsunami howling into the hungry vacuum beyond. One protuberance still held a weapon, which it was trying to aim at the still smoldering corridor entrance close to Yuri.
“Mine,” she bellowed. The carbine’s slender orange target graphics splashed into her tarsus lens, and she brought the weapon around carefully, tracking…She fired straight into the quint’s manipulator flesh, searing it deep. In response the flesh cratered as it tried to avoid the burn. She moved the carbine a fraction, scorching again, each time ruining more of the manipulator flesh.
“What the hell are you doing?” Yuri demanded. “Go headshot. Kill the bastard!”
“I am killing it,” she growled. “But not the nice way.”
Another salvo of accurate maser shots, and the crippled, smoldering manipulator flesh lost its grip. The quint body was ripped off the wall by the torrent of air, tumbling crazily, legs still kicking.
Kandara stood up, bracing herself against the wind, and gave it an almighty forearm jerk. Yeah, you saw that. You know. I did this. I finished you, fucker. Me!
The quint body slammed through the hangar entrance, smacking into the rock several times as it went. Kandara never even flinched at the brutal impacts.
“Happy now?” Jessika asked.
“Oh, Mother Mary, yes. I truly am.” She saw Jessika and Callum still clinging together and started crawling over to them. Three of the unruly atmosphere jets were between them.
“Don’t move,” Jessika said. “We’re okay.”
“Right.” She started to look for a safer route. But they all involved climbing up the wall and crabbing her way over the tunnel entrances mere centimeters from the jets. Crap.
“They’re fading,” Yuri said.
“What?”
“Look. The pressure’s dropping.”
Sure enough, the jets started to shrink, losing their vigor. Within a minute they had finished. The hangar was in a vacuum.
“Finally,” Jessika said. “Some health and safety protocols.”
Kandara started toward them. She only got a few paces before realization hit and she stopped, scanning around. “Aww, Mary! No.” Alik’s body was nowhere to be seen. He’d been blasted out into space.
She thought she might cry again, but there was nothing. No emotion. Either her gland reigned supreme, or the sheer intensity of everything that had happened had scoured her clean of feelings forever.
When she finally got over to Jessika and Callum, Yuri was already there. Everyone was examining Callum’s arm.
“It’s okay,” he insisted. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you will be,” Yuri said. “It’s not serious.”
“What?”
Kandara chuckled dryly at the indignation in the old man’s voice. She suspected he wanted to argue with Yuri, make the universe right again.
“But—” Yuri said. “I am concerned about maintaining the suit integrity. That patch is medical. It’s not supposed to repair a rip like that in a vacuum. So keep as still as possible. I’m going to wrap another patch on top, then we need to get back to the cavern. The initiators can extrude something better for you until the human invasion fleet arrives.”
“Not arguing,” Callum said. He didn’t even object to Jessika helping him slowly to his feet as he held his arm out stiffly.
Kandara slung the maser back over her shoulder and loaded one of the spare clips of wyst bullets into her magpistol. Only one clip left now. Callum’s powerblade machete was hanging off his belt. She unclipped it and fastened it to her own.
“What are you doing?” Yuri asked.
“Haven’t you been counting?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Odd Quint. Quint. There’s five of it. We only took out four bodies.” She pointed at the tunnel the first quint had gone into. “That one never came back.”
“We’re in a vacuum,” Jessika said. “They’re tough, but they still need to breathe.”
“And yet here we are,” she snapped. “I’d be worried if maybe we were in a spaceship, you know—the kind of vehicle that would carry some piece of equipment that allows quint to survive in a vacuum. Sort of a: Space? Suit?”
“You know what’s on the other side of whatever emergency door is up there, don’t you?” Yuri said. “Every quint on the Salvation of Life—and all of them are going to be very keen to find out if we survived.”
“Yeah?” Kandara patted the carbine. “Well, they’re about to discover the hard way.”
“Please,” Jessika said. “Don’t do this. We’ve won. I can see it in the onemind’s thoughtstream; the human ships are so close now. And you know Alik wouldn’t want you to do this.”
“Cheap shot.”
“But true,” Callum said.
Kandara stood completely still. The vacuum around her had taken away all the subtle noises that she normally never noticed, making the sound of her heart implausibly loud inside her helmet. It was a fast beat. She desperately wanted to eliminate the last of Odd Quint’s bodies. So I do still have feelings, even if they are only vengeance and anger. “I’ll just check the tunnel. Okay? That’s all. I won’t go past whatever emergency door is sealing the far end.”
“Kandara…” Jessika said wearily.
“On Mother Mary’s life, I swear I’ll stay in the vacuum. But I have to know if the last Odd Quint body is there. And if the onemind is sending a battalion of quint down here after us, you won’t believe how fast I can run away.”
“Be careful,” Yuri said. “Please.”
She grinned at the concern in his voice. “Middle name.”
MORGAN
Yirella couldn’t bring herself to go back into the Morgan’s main council room. The memory of everyone sitting there—talking, arguing, making impassioned suggestions for FinalStrike—was too vivid. So she was sitting in the deck thirty-three café yet again, with the Ainsley android on the other side of the table. None of her other android aspects was present. She wondered why that was. Some kind of subconscious insecurity? My own androids are too much of me to reassure me? I need outside validation?
Oh, stop it.
The tactical situation wasn’t all bad. The Morgan was still plagued by twinkles, but they were only minutes out from the gas giant now. Even decelerating, its tremendous velocity was ripping through the nebula plasma, leaving a long contrail of emptiness roiling in its wake. The rest of the armada formation was expanding, ships heading for rendezvous with individual arkships. And
Ainsley was approaching the power rings at a speed that was chilling her skin. He wasn’t decelerating at all. The residual plumes of nine Resolution ships were still dissolving behind him, while the white ship was all but invisible at the center of an impenetrable cluster of fluctuating twinkles brighter than the corona it was approaching.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “That vector you’re taking is dangerous.”
“Making sure.”
“Ainsley…”
“The Olyix know what I’m going to do. They’re trying to suffocate me with time flows, kid—really trying. I’m at maximum power output deflecting them. And, face it, my maximum can punch a hole through Jupiter. If I fire a q-v missile, the flow variances in this twinkle clusterfuck would cripple it as soon as it gets outside my hull.”
Even now, her corpus personality—the most rational mind she’d thought possible—just didn’t want to process what she knew was inevitable. “So how are you going to kill the power rings?”
“Up close and personal. Only way. Deliver the q-v myself.”
“You can’t. We need you. There are thousands of arkships here. We have to save them.”
“You got this. The technology the corpus retro-engineered out of my mentalic subsections works well on oneminds. Remember what I did to the welcome ship at Vayan? You can fly those big mothers out of here without me easily enough. That’s what this is about, it’s why we’re here: to save those poor bastards who’ve been cocooned.”
“I need you.”
“And I need you to survive. To do that, I have to kill the enclave; you’re not going to get home otherwise. Resisting this time flow shit is too big a strain; it’s going to kick our asses eventually. Without it, you’ve got a decent chance.”
“Oh, Saints, Ainsley. What about the shield? Can’t you use that? If it hits the inner ring at your current velocity, the inertia will destabilize its precession. It’ll start to drop into the chromosphere, and that’ll be catastrophic.”
“The shield is backup, kid—because I cannot afford to fuck this up. When I hit the ring, the shield will be on board; it still has the same mass, remember. So either the q-v warhead will get it, or the shield mass will. Either way, we win.”
“You won’t.” But she knew it was no good; she could see Ainsley wasn’t altering course. There was no emotional appeal that would make him reconsider. He had reached a healthy fraction of light speed now and was starting to redshift.
“Call it job satisfaction. That’s always been my motivation. You should have seen how we partied back in the day every time we pulled off a deal. Man, we could’ve shown the Romans a thing or two about decadence.”
“Ainsley?”
“Get the Salvation of Life home, Yirella. But before you do, find out where the Olyix God is hiding. Say hello to the bastard from me, okay?”
“Oh, Saints.”
The tactical display showed her Ainsley approaching the innermost power ring. She watched in dread. Given his phenomenal velocity, the margin for error was minute. If Ainsley hadn’t got the course completely right there was no time now to correct. Saints, that means I want the ship to hit.
It did.
Ainsley got the timing perfectly, triggering the q-v warhead nanoseconds before any impact obliterated them, but close enough to affect the ring fabric: an impact like a bullet hitting an ice sculpture. The ring shattered, flinging out a massive halo of destruction that swarmed out across the ecliptic. As it disintegrated, the three outermost rings of exotic matter flickered, then vanished. At the same time, the iridescent sparks blockading the armada ships were abruptly extinguished.
Where Ainsley hit, the shield expanded—an unnatural black circle against the coronal glare. It began a slow tumble, flipping over and over as it flew onward through the deranged pirouetting prominences before splashing into the chromosphere. Gargantuan spumes of dense plasma flared up around the disk, folding over to engulf the intruder, dragging it down into the unknown depths.
Then the radial blast of fragments hit the second ring at the two points their orbits crossed. One of the collision areas retained its integrity, while the other broke apart, leaving an unstable mega-loop spinning half a million kilometers above the corona. The first fluctuation took what seemed like an age to build, but then the ring did have a circumference of over eight million kilometers. In reality, the deformation was astonishingly fast, and kept building. In less than five minutes the first fissures began to appear, swiftly followed by a chunk a quarter of a million kilometers long breaking off.
“Trajectory?” Yirella asked hurriedly as a second massive fragment joined the first, hurtling outward. Vectors appeared in the tactical display, showing their trajectories. With the second ring orbiting in a twenty-two-degree inclination, any debris from its disintegration wasn’t going to pass anywhere close to the gas giant. More fissures split open in the tormented second ring, sending another group of fragments peeling off into space.
“The enclave’s exotic continuum has dissolved,” Immanueel said. “We’re back in real space-time. I am entangled with my aspects that are accompanying the wormhole.”
Yirella looked across the table at the Ainsley android. It was so difficult having his face right there in front of her. The aspect simply smiled meekly and mouthed: “Sorry. No.”
Some stupidly juvenile part of her mind had expected him to have backed up, and voilà, his mind would decompress into the white android’s neural array. She had to accept it; Ainsley was gone.
But not forgotten.
Outside the Morgan, the nebula clouds glimmered unchanged. Yirella magnified the visual sensors to their maximum resolution. “I can’t see any stars.”
“The enclave was ninety AUs across,” Immanueel said. “Light from the outside will take hours to reach us.”
“So we have no idea where the gateway star is?”
“Well, thankfully it didn’t materialize in the middle of us. We should be grateful for that.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” She realigned the sensors on the arkships in their polar orbit. “The neutron star’s going to reach this star in another eight hours. We need to find the Salvation of Life and get those arkships out of here and into the wormhole.”
“My aspects at the wormhole can now observe the enclave nebula.”
“What?”
“It is visible to them; the outer edge is intersecting the debris ring in the gateway star system.”
“Saints, that’s closer than we expected.”
“Yes. Which has advantages and disadvantages. There are still tens of thousands of Resolution ships in the gateway system. They can reach us easily now.”
“But the wormhole’s close as well. We can—”
Then the Morgan’s sensors detected a radio signal emanating from the gas giant’s polar orbit. And everything changed.
GOX-QUINT
SALVATION OF LIFE
I just made it to the secondary atmosphere containment sheet as it began to unfurl across the tunnel. The pressure that the air jet was exerting against body one was extreme. My manipulator flesh extrusions could barely maintain a grip on the tangle of biostructure that webbed the tunnel’s ceiling and walls. By digging my feet into the crannies between individual tubes for extra stability, I managed to haul myself along in fitful increments as the Salvation of Life’s air hemorrhaged out past me. If I slipped, I would tumble down the tunnel like a kinetic projectile in a rifle barrel, just as body five was doing in its corridor. The vigor of the air stream—clotted with dangerous slivers of broken biostructure—was already overcoming body five’s grip. I just couldn’t get a decent hold on the biostructure, and my Goddamn feet were slipping on the floor. The proton pellet gun was making my predicament worse. I had to keep hold of it, which was impairing my balance and the amount of manipulator flesh I could apply to the wall.
Bod
y five was getting close to the end of the tunnel when kinetic projectiles struck the wall beside it. I returned fire, blasting the end of the tunnel with proton pellets.
I experienced the first burst of damage to body five. Its nervous system registered the attack as a section of cells in my manipulator flesh dying from a massive thermal input, as was correct. But my mind…My mind somehow interpreted it as pain. Pain from a fierce, stabbing burn. It was all I could do to maintain my manipulator flesh in its composed shape. What I wanted to do was flinch.
“Shit!”
“Gox-quint,” the Salvation of Life onemind demanded. “What is transpiring?”
“Fuck off!”
The pain had made me lose concentration, allowing the entanglement to resume. I slammed my mind closed to that useless turd.
More burns punctured body five. I started to tremble in shock as I forced myself to hang on. The beam weapon, which had to be a fucking maser, continued its assault. More and more manipulator flesh was ruined until I could hold on no longer.
Body five took flight, buffeted by the unrelenting blast of escaping air to tumble helplessly down the tunnel and out into the hangar. I was expecting a kill shot to body five’s brain. Two Saints were in full view as I plummeted past, both holding weapons. I braced myself, compelling my mind that there was no pain. Quint do not feel pain, only humans.
There was no kill shot.
As I spun haphazardly, I saw one of the humans leaning into the storm. It gave me a forearm jerk.
You motherfucking bitch-whore! I’ll kill you. I’ll kill the whole fucking lot of you. I’m going to blow the Salvation of Life to shit with nukes and take every single one of your devil-spawned species on board with me. You’re dead! Fucking dead!
Body five struck the wall of the hangar entrance. Hard. I was so dazed, body one almost lost its grip. It took everything I had, but I held on. I had to. I was going to finish Kandara if it was the last thing I did. There were more impacts as the venting atmosphere slammed me against the rock, again and again.
The Saints of Salvation Page 47