Mac's jaw gets tight, and he looks away, but not before his eyes travel down my chest, lingering there for a second. 'Just...' Words trail off, and the emotion that rolls off of him... Confusion, the same nervous flutter in Mac's chest that I feel in mine when I look at him, and buried beneath it all, embarrassment. The embarrassment comes wrapped around a jumbled image of Grea and me, with my face on her curves.
It's… wrong. It's a betrayal, a slap in the face from my best friend.
It's enough to force me back a step, and then two. I slam shields in place, but the sticky pink of his emotion has its fingers in me, digs deep into the heart of me where the new, unsure feelings live. Turns them brown and putrid, makes my chest constrict and my heart lodge painfully in my throat.
Somewhere distant, Grea is a firestorm rising in the eter. Anger and outrage rush before her, and a little bit of it infects me. Shoves the putrid emotion away and covers it in flame.
On my shoulder, Dude growls.
Mac's still looking away, face still stone, but there's a line between his brows, a quiver to his lip that might be regret.
Silence rolls between us.
I need to go, need to—
The bulkheads explode, and there's only time to react. Viyusa fills the room, giant, angry vines, the heat of Grea's fury riding before them, turning the ends into spears.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We're crashing through bulkheads, pounding down corridors, skidding around corners. Throwing ourselves through walls of grey-green that snap shut on our heels. There's no rest, no reprieve, no time to breathe. There's just the viyusa hunting us, steaming through the Aeotu like a tide. We tried fighting it, tried slashing and ripping through the vines. It worked for a minute, we gained ground, cleared the room, and for handful of heartbeats, with our hands on our knees and our lungs working overtime, we thought we'd won.
No such luck.
The viyusa came back harder, the tips of it glowing, dripping heat like it was some kind of acid. Aeotu screamed. Screamed in my head, in pain, and the fug screamed with her, that piecing, brain-shredding sound it made. Only the fug-armour kept me on my feet and only Dude kept me moving. Mac wasn't so lucky. Without his xin, he crumbled, hitting the deck, a hundred kilos of muscle and bone.
Fug-armour gave me the strength to pick him, to throw him over my shoulder and run.
I'd stopped when Mac started to move on his own, propped him up against a half-eaten bulkhead when I thought it was safe, waited for him to get his feet back. That was the second time we fought the fug, the last one too. One moment I was trying to figure out what was happening, was trying to find Grea amongst the mess of anger, thought I was getting somewhere. And then the anger was on us, and so was the viyusa.
We didn't fight for as long, couldn't. The red just kept coming. Again and again and again, rolling on the tide of anger.
And so we ran again, and we're still running, and I'm pretty sure that soon enough we're going to run out of ship.
My breath's coming in pants. 'We have... to get out... of here.'
I know. Mac's voice sounds in my head, only a trace of breathlessness in his mind, even though he's sweating just as much as me, lungs working just as hard. The benefits of being a telepath, or maybe it's practise. Does Mac do a lot of running from viyusa? There's no panic coming off him, no emotion at all. Ahead. An image forms in my brain, of a bulkhead and a symbol I remember from the airlock.
'That's... vacuum.'
There's no answer to that, save perhaps a brief spike of acknowledgment.
I want to object, to tell Mac he can't survive vacuum with only half of his armour, but my muscles need the oxygen for running, and surely Mac knows... Surely.
Viyusa snapping on our heels, and there's the bulkhead, a great section of it already becoming translucent, snapping back, and then we're through and there's the airlock, and we're rushing through that too. And Mac... Mac's still shirtless and faceplateless, and my HUD's throwing up warnings, highlighting the final airlock in bright screaming red as his hand smashes against the release.
'Mac!' I'm yelling it, and he's looking at me with this scared expression in his eyes, but there's calm there too, a deep-seated exhaustion that drags at my bones just acknowledging it.
I'm across the airlock, hands on his shoulders, not sure what I'm doing but all-too-sure that I can't let my best friend die. That I won't let him die. I'm grabbing at his fug-armour, hands and mind, digging fingers in, pulling and yanking, twisting my psyche and slipping through the threads of the world, screaming.
I'm not sure who I'm screaming at. At Aeotu, at Grea, at the fug. Just screaming, fear and desperation giving my voice power, turning my thoughts into hooks. There's a tingle on the edge of my consciousness, something that feels like Aeotu, but not. More like a shadow of her, of the lightning in the fug. It hears me, turns in my direction and for a moment, for a moment there is hope, there is movement, fug-armour shifting under my physical hands, reaching for Mac's shoulders—
The HUD is blaring in my ears, filling my vision with red. Temperature not just dropping, but gone, sucked into space with the atmosphere. With us.
Mac is boiling. Moisture sucked from his eyes, his mouth opening on a breath that isn't there and—
Dude. Leaping from my shoulder, landing on Mac's. Talons extended, a flash of blood, frozen in the instant it breaks skin.
Fug flowing up my arms, over my hands, following Dude. Spreading outward from his paws, covering Mac's chest, his shoulders, encasing his face. Three heartbeats, and Mac is floating in my arms, safe from the vacuum, from the killing void. But was it fast enough? Is he—
His hands are on my arms, fingers gripping. Relief floods through me.
He's all right.
I'm all right, he says. His relief echoes mine, except... There's a small piece of darkness floating on the blue-green of his relief, a worm wriggling through the endorphin rush. It makes my heart cold, speaks of endings and endless sleep, speaks to the emotion in me, the one that took hold as I was floating in the stasis unit, waiting for the end.
I don't want to feel that, don't want to see it. Don't like the memories it stirs, of floating in the stasis unit, letting the cold take me.
I turn away.
We're in the void, floating outside Aeotu. Just us, and our fug.
The expulsion of atmosphere has pushed us away from the hull, and we're still moving. There's nothing out here to slow us down, nothing to stop us from floating forever, farther and farther from the only oxygen in a hundred parsecs.
The HUD is calculating distance and velocity, the time we have left to live. It's not much. All we have is the oxygen trapped in our armour. Minutes-worth. Maybe, if we're lucky. It might have been more, but Mac lost all of his and some of mine is now keeping Mac alive.
If we keep travelling like this, we're screwed. In a regular EVA suit there'd be a tether or a thrusters, or something to keep us from drifting forever. We might already be screwed, what with the lack of thrusters and—
A jolt, like my shoulder blades being ripped out of my back, spread open and—
Pain, ripping through my muscles. Liquid heat in my bones, digging into my spine. I can't scream. There's no breath, my lungs are frozen and every nerve in my body is too busy being fried for such a petty thing as screaming.
Mac's yelling in my head, but the words are drowned beneath pain and horror, 'cause I can see what's happening. Hunt is in my brain, has taken over the armour, and is showing me, in minute detail, what it's doing. Fug peeling away from my skin, driving spikes into my back, can see blood and bone. Frozen in the instant it spurts forth. It's over in nano-seconds. Barely long enough for the void to take my marrow and make it ice, but it feels like hours. And then it's done, the pain over, fug shifting over my back, still forming new protrusions, rearranging itself.
Hunt is still in my head, embedded in my brain, nestled next to a new perception, new muscles, new nerves, new bones that stretch and flex, that gather power. My HUD is go
ing dark, all the heat in my body drawing up from my toes to the spot between my shoulder blades. Gathering there, getting hot. Hunt is behind my eyes, seeing through them, taking over as the last of the HUD's glow fades, leaving me staring at the dark. Except it's not dark, not for Hunt. For Hunt, it's clear as day, another HUD printed on the back of my eyeballs.
Mac has stopped yelling, his mental voice no longer ringing in my head, but he's still talking to me. I have the vague sense of the words, of him asking me if I'm okay, what's happening. Worry and fear colour him a dirty brown, but there's no space to answer, no time. There's just Hunt and the new form on my back. Not quite a limb, not quite an organ, just... a small sun between my shoulder blades.
There's purpose in Hunt's presence, in the way the miniature sun keeps drawing all the energy from my body, concentrating it. There's a moment, a brief pause, a sense of accomplishment, a tightening of the connection between Mac and I, and I finally understand what the fug has done.
The sun explodes.
We're shooting across the void, the lines and whorls of Aeotu's hull getting bigger and bigger until they're the size of my head and then my torso and then they're dwarfing me and the rough texture of the metal-stone is all I can see.
I don't know how fast we're going, don't know how to stop, but it's got to be at least as fast as we were expelled into space. Faster maybe. Without the HUD there's no way to know, and I don't want to find out by going splat on Aeotu's skin.
Just as the texture of the hull is starting to look like dunes instead of pebbles, the supernova stops. Another, small explosion goes off behind my ribs. We spin, and now we're staring out at the void, except it's not a void anymore. I only notice the explosion on the other side of my body, another mini sun going off under my ribs, because we stop spinning, and I can stare at the not-void.
It's not a not-void, it's just space, space filled not with the dark emptiness of the cold between stars, but with the giant grey-black ball of a planet, the light of a sun blazing off a dozen tiny orbiting moons, and the smooth, cylindrical lines of the kind of satellite that isn't molten rock getting spewed into space. It's what's around the satellite though that stuns my brain, makes it difficult to think.
The supernova fires one last time, slowing us before we pancake on the hull. My brain is still ringing with the sight of the satellite, with the cold in my bones and the memory of my body being ripped apart. It's Mac who gets us across the hull, Hunt who whispers where to go. Mac's still in my head, I sense him following Hunt's directions, can sense the freaked-out wonder as the awareness reaches through me and into him. Can sense too, that there's not much time left, not much oxygen.
I'm still stuck on what I'm seeing.
There's an airlock. We're dropping into a hole in the hull, then the hull's snapping shut over us and Mac's twisting me about, pointing my feet at the deck before the gravity kicks in.
Fug peels back, flows down Mac's arms, back to me. Dude's on my shoulder and there's that wave of gold, pushing back the unreality.
'Kuma, come on.' Mac's yanking on my arm, pulling me to another hatch.
I stare at him, feet not moving. 'Did you see that?'
'We don't have time for this, Kuma. We have to get—' He yanks again.
I yank back, pulling him off his feet. 'Did you see that?' I'm pointing at the bulkhead, I'd point straight through if I could, would shoot a laser straight from my finger to the cluster of ships orbiting the satellite.
His face is pale, and there's a little too much white around the brown of his eyes. 'Kuma—'
'Did. You. See. It?'
There's a moment, a pause in which Mac turns to stone. Then he nods.
'Okay.' A deep breath in. Another one out. 'Okay,' I say again, and nod. So I wasn't crazy, all of that, all the floating husks that looked just like Aeotu... they were there. I hadn't been the only one to see them.
Dude's still swamping my psyche with gold, but it's a little more frantic now, and little more urgent. My HUD's still dark, and my bones cold. I figure my stomach is going to start gnawing at my backbone any minute, once it unfreezes enough to remember what hunger is.
There's no sound, but the raw anger of the viyusa is getting bigger in my mind.
We run, Mac following me, me following the not-so-gentle tug of Hunt in my gut. Somewhere along the way, things start to look familiar, and then we're pounding across the docking tube from Aeotu to Citlali.
A dark grey-green shape flies out of the shadows, whizzing past my face. I turn just enough to see a not-critter, a xin, attach itself to Mac's shoulder, to witness the armour flowing over his face before we burst through the airlock and into a battlefield.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I've only seen a battlefield in training memories, felt the heat of a Jøran desert, the rumble of shuttles flying overhead and the shredded remains of kin and humans staining the sand red.
This is different. Not because it's in the middle of the Attrium, with the broken remnants of the giant plassteel dome overhead and the trunk of one of Aeotu's grappling cables erupting through deck. And not because the combatants are encased in envirosuits, helmets jammed over round and triangular heads alike. No, it's got nothing to do with that.
In the training memory, guns spat lances of energy, searing the flesh they didn't blow away, filling the air with the smell of cooking meat. Here, there's fire, the sharp beam of Franken-lasers, but instead of smoking flesh, there's the high-pitched screaming of fug, the fine grey of dead nanites saturating the atmosphere in little puffs of dust.
Grey-green and red alike, fighting, tearing. Humans and kin standing shoulder-to-shoulder, qwan riding on rucnarts, swarms of plasform-wrapped critters arrayed before them, and in my brain... Shards of ice and fire, daggers and claws and teeth, ripping at the eter, flowing along lines of yellow-gold, following it through the threads of the universe and sinking into fug.
And above it all, hovering just on the edge of my consciousness, is Grea.
Kuma! The word is mental is much as physical. I have a split second to turn, to slip back into the real world and see Mac, arms outstretched, like he's throwing something, before a wall of force knocks me off my feet.
My head hits the deck, rattles my brain. Stars burst in my vision. It's hard to tell which is the eter and which is real. Time slows, is molasses. In the eter there are days in which to see the bomb exploding over Mac, the thin plassteel dome expanding, the fire burst from inside pushing sharp, shining fragments of shit into the atmosphere. Tiny volcanos of blood erupt on Mac's chest, embed themselves in the space where I was standing.
Fear. Pain. They spew from Mac as he flies backward, the bomb's shockwave rippling his flesh.
Hunt is there, not just in my gut, but with me in the eter. A flat-faced sentinel at my back. Solid. Calm. Relentless.
Fug-armour is flowing over my body, the thrusters on my back drawing the heat from my bones even as new protrusions form over my arms, an incandescent vein throbbing over my shoulders to my forearms. The fug-blades snick out over my knuckles, but instead of the sharp grey-green, they're glowing yellow-white, heat coming off them in waves.
And then I'm racing across the deck, throwing myself into the fray. Hacking and slashing, left and right, not even sure what I'm slashing at, who I'm slashing at. Hunt has hold of my brain. On my shoulder, the golden web of Dude's control thrums under my skin, but Hunt isn't listening.
Not to me at least. I can hear Aeotu behind Hunt, not actual words but a buzz, and the sickness of before… It fills her up, makes me want to puke just touching it.
There's a wall of muscle on my left, and I'm on the deck rolling backward, finding my feet and coming up and under the sweep of h'Lott's forearms, dancing out of her reach. Then I'm slashing, but not at h'Lott, or the viyu rising out of the floor, thick spiky tendrils coming to my defence, tangling in the rucnart's legs. No, I'm slashing at a fist-sized sphere hurtling through the vacuum, and then another and another. They shatter under my blades,
the spheres breaking apart, the contents a smoking ruin before it has a chance to bleed.
There are more traces of gold flying through the battle, critters in plasform bubbles defying gravity, hunting down the grey-green, smashing into it, kamikaze-style. Exploding on impact. The viyu seems to absorb it, the parts that do turning grey, crumbling to dust, the rest of it carrying on and then... Have you ever seen biopoison creep up a grow wall, seen the green leaves turn brown, watched them wither and die? That's what this is. Gold runs through the viyu like blood, traces of it gleaming in the light of Franken-throwers, and with every explosion, every new injection of poison Aeotu gets sicker.
I never thought of gold as a bad colour, you always think of red that way, or black or any of the hundred oozy, rotten shades of dank green and rank orange, but never gold. Now though... Now it makes my skin crawl, my stomach curdle. The viyu doesn't scream, not like it does when you hit it with flame, or when the viyusa digs in. Nope, it kind of whimpers as sickness rolls off it in waves of puke-yellow.
Hunt twists me out of the way as another critter bomb explodes at my feet. I'm leaping high, pulling fug-feet up to my chest, watching as some of that gold splatters against me.
Hunt keeps moving, keeps twisting and slashing, but there are warnings going off on the HUD, and that sickness? It's creeping up my toes, through my veins. My toes goes first, talons crumbling as I hit the deck, gold wrapping itself around my ankles, climbing higher— Dude's off my shoulder, scrambling down my body. All I can do is watch, heart in throat, wanting to scream "No".
Red is there before Dude, the viyusa erupting out of the deck, clamping me in place, jerking me off my feet. Hunt tries to keep fighting, blades swinging, but we're on the floor.
I'm expecting fire, expecting the viyusa to burn, to devour Dude. I'm not expecting it to chase the gold, to pass over the fuzzbutt like he's not there, even when the critter sinks teeth, talons and barbed tail into it. The gold is gone, eaten by the red, and my toes are rebuilding themselves, absorbing the red just like the inert fug.
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