While her android aspects handled tactical, her original body opened Dellian’s icon. ‘Hey, you. How are you doing?’
‘Yirella! Saints! What’s happening? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. The Olyix hit us with a weird time weapon. That’s why you’ve been ordered back to the Morgan. You’ll be safer inside.’
‘Right. Yeah. Listen, Ellici and Tilliana aren’t responding. Do you know if they’re okay?’
She steeled herself for the lie. A white lie, though. The squads cannot have distractions when they get into the arkship. ‘Yes, they’re okay. Tactical’s really busy right now, so I took this job.’
‘Thanks, Yi. So is FinalStrike over? Are we retreating? We can see the armada ships being destroyed.’
‘No, Del, we’re not retreating. The corpus humans are going to start fighting back. We know how to beat the Olyix weapon. Our ships will be liberated.’
‘Thank the Saints for that. After all this, we can’t back out now. We can’t.’
‘I know. I’ll call you back.’
‘Sure. Thanks for stepping up. I get how stressful this must be for you.’
‘No problem.’ She closed Del’s icon. The relief from hearing his voice was profound. She granted her original body a moment while her corpus personality finalized strategy. They really did need to liberate the armada fast. Otherwise this freedom wasn’t going to last long.
The Morgan’s generators were nearly all back online, providing close to a full power output – enough to power a whole continent back on old Earth. Her lips twisted into a smile. ‘Fire on those Saints-damned twinkles,’ she ordered the Morgan’s network. ‘Every graviton beam we’ve got.’ She needed to see what impact the weapons would have. The twinkles were just loci within the enclave’s slowtime continuum. There was nothing physical there to be blown up, but she was fairly confident they could be distorted, their temporal effect broken.
Graviton pulses swiped through shoals of twinkles, scattering them like a tornado hitting a pile of leaves. The troop carriers swept in through the scintillating lightstorm, returning to their hangars. As soon as the last one was back on board, Yirella accelerated the Morgan at eighty gees, streaking towards the closest battle cruiser. They came alongside fast, graviton pulses bombarding the dense throng of scintillating blemishes that surrounded the long copper-sheathed shape. ‘It’s working,’ she said gleefully, as fractured auroral curlicues scythed away from the battle cruiser’s hull.
Immanueel’s communication icon appeared, routed through the armada’s secure links. ‘What just happened?’ they asked. The battle cruiser was only a single aspect, but the contact was profoundly reassuring. She sent the file she’d composed. A second later the battle cruiser’s negative energy conduit fins were sliding up through the copper hull.
‘I’ll get Ainsley,’ she said. ‘You clear the rest of the armada.’
‘At once,’ Immanueel replied.
The battle cruiser speed-blurred in her sensor images as it shot away. The Morgan accelerated again, driving through the armada at three hundred gees, heading straight for Ainsley.
The Olyix had made a mistake, she thought, by not targeting Ainsley first. But as the Resolution ships coming through the gateway had caught up with the tail end of the armada, they’d started attacking the helpless ships there. Bad strategy.
By the time the Morgan reached Ainsley, Immanueel had lifted four more warships out of the disjointed time flows. They had each gone on to unshackle more; freedom was now growing geometrically. Judging by the rising intensity of the twinkles, the Olyix recognized the inevitable outcome.
At two kilometres long, Ainsley was shorter than the Morgan. That made Yirella extremely confident they could rip it clear of the distortions. But the Olyix had obviously realized the same thing. When they rendezvoused, the white hull was almost invisible behind a cloud of the diabolical sprites. The Morgan was firing gravitonic pulses almost continuously; Yirella’s corpus personality had assumed direct command of the ship’s systems from the genten arrays and diverted every watt from the generators into the negative energy conduits.
It wasn’t a battle many sensors could see, let alone interpret. But the counters the Morgan was deploying methodically peeled the clashing continuum disfigurements away from Ainsley, creating a dark zone around the pair of them.
Finally, Ainsley’s white icon appeared.
‘Motherfucker! Those sneaky little shits. Parts of me lived for a thousand years. Nothing worked. It was like being smothered for eternity. That . . . Goddamn. I’m having to delete entire memory clusters. It’s too painful. Fuck them! They crippled half of my mind, and the other half didn’t even know. I’m going to rip them a new one bigger than their star. I am going to neurovirus every quint and make them eat the onemind neuralstrata—’
‘Ainsley.’
‘—when I am finished with them they won’t even be a boogieman legend in this galaxy. I’m going to—’
‘Ainsley.’
‘Jesus fuck. What?’
‘Ainsley, we need you. Please.’ She watched negative energy fins telescope smoothly out of the white fuselage. The ship’s winglike structures were briefly sketched by a complex web of glaring scarlet and turquoise lines that swiftly softened to a subliminal tessellation.
‘Right. Yeah. Fine. I’m realigning my mentality. I’ve got most systems under control. Fuck! Even some of my units have time ablated. Hell, if that’d gone on much longer, they could’ve compromised the phasefolded systems. Performance is returning.’
‘Ainsley, the Olyix are going heavy on targeting the neutron star with this temporal distortion crap. I think they’re trying to slow it down. So I need you to take out the power rings. We have to kill the enclave. Now.’
‘Got it. Yirella?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I went corpus. It was the only way to overcome multiple time flows.’
‘Okay. Well . . . uh, thanks, kid.’
‘You’re welcome. Ainsley . . .?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Tilliana and Ellici got trapped in a fast time flow. It finished them. They’re alive, but they lived in it for ninety years.’
‘Oh, Jeez, no. What about the boyfriend?’
‘He’s good. He’s alive and back on board the Morgan.’
‘Okay. I’m going to take down the power rings. See you at the arkships.’
‘Yes.’ She watched Ainsley depart, scoring a long, dark line through the nebula. When she checked, the total elapsed time since she’d rendezvoused with him was two point eight seconds. So there are some benefits to elevation, then.
The tactical display showed her the rate armada ships were being recovered was increasing dramatically. Ten minutes later the liberation was complete, even though she felt sick at how much glowing wreckage was clotting this whole section of the nebula – a swirling radioactive monument to their hubris. So many ships destroyed, so many aspects lost. But now attack cruisers were beginning to engage the Resolution ships that were still pouring in through the gateway, creating a new maelstrom of wreckage among the energy-saturated plasma of the nebula.
‘We have to leave now,’ she told Immanueel. ‘We can accelerate harder than the Resolution ships. We’ll leave fifteen per cent of the armada to engage them while the rest of us get to the arkships.’
‘Agreed.’
The course was already plotted. The Morgan began to accelerate at five hundred gees.
Saints
Salvation of Life
Kandara slipped the light armour jacket over her environment suit and twisted the seal button, feeling it lock down the side of her ribcage. An initiator had fabricated it for her the first week they moved into the cavern, providing customized active firing apertures for the peripherals in her forearms. She glanced down at it and shook her head in dismay at the way it barely covered her hips. About as much use as that chain-mail bikini Sumiko used to wear in her Stella Knif
e series. The jacket would protect her vital organs from a kinetic impact or energy beam strike, but that was all. Ah, who needs limbs anyway? She clipped the heavy-duty magpulse pistol to the jacket’s belt, raising an eyebrow in challenge at Yuri’s look of exasperation.
‘Well, what were you going to kill the membrane generators with?’ she asked him.
He held up a powerblade machete. ‘I’m simply going to cut the power. The last thing we need is to get into a firefight with an Olyix huntsphere. It won’t end well. You of all people should appreciate that.’
She really didn’t want to think of that encounter on the McDivitt habitat. ‘Not a huntsphere, no. But Odd Quint is probably skulking somewhere along that corridor. It hasn’t come back yet.’
‘She’s right about that,’ Jessika said. ‘The hangar’s perception is still being neutralized, which means Odd Quint is still in the vicinity.’
‘You don’t have to come,’ Kandara told them. ‘I can handle this.’
‘I don’t know about you lot,’ Callum said, ‘but I think we should stick together now. We’ve come this far. I don’t want to . . . well, be left behind when the human warships arrive.’
To die alone, Kandara filled in for him. Which was fine; it was exactly what she was thinking.
‘I’m with you on that,’ Alik said and lifted his helmet on.
Yuri nodded crisply and handed him another of the machetes. ‘It’s for the best.’
‘Thanks, man.’
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Callum grumbled and held out a hand. A smiling Yuri gave him a machete.
‘Don’t I get one?’ Jessika asked wickedly.
‘I’d prefer you to monitor the onemind,’ Yuri said. ‘Any warning you can give us . . .’
Kandara grinned and put her arm around Jessika’s shoulders. ‘After they vaporize Yuri, you can always use his.’
‘Screw you,’ Yuri grunted.
Kandara swore she could see his shoulders sag in a gesture of reluctance as he opened a small case and took out a magpistol along with three spare projectile clips.
She chuckled. ‘Fucking typical. You should be a politician: don’t do as I do, do as I say.’
‘Last resort,’ Yuri said defensively.
‘Absolutely,’ Alik said and held up a maser carbine.
‘Jesus wept,’ Callum exclaimed.
‘Now I’m happy,’ Kandara said.
‘We go to the hangar together,’ Yuri said. ‘We do this together, we come straight back. Okay? Move out.’
Kandara said nothing as she slipped her helmet on, but . . . I’m clearly not the only one who’s accessed too many interactive combat dramas.
She made her way cautiously around the egg tanks in the outer portion of the rock chamber. The feed she was looking at through her tarsus lens came from two creeperdrones waiting in the tunnel outside. One carried an entanglement suppressor and a dart gun loaded with the biotoxin, while the other had an extra row of sensors that were showing her enhanced images of the tunnel. She inched her way forwards and took a quick look around the fissure’s jagged rim.
‘Clean.’
‘Something’s happening,’ Jessika said. ‘The fullmind’s attack on the human ships: It’s not going according to plan.’
‘Good!’
‘They’re breaking free of whatever it hit them with.’
‘Let’s just concentrate on the hangar, please,’ Yuri reprimanded.
‘The onemind’s perception is still neutralized.’
Kandara squeezed through the fissure and stepped out into the gloomy tunnel. The pair of creeperdrone spider creatures were five metres away. There was nothing else in sight. She glanced up at the pipe trunks suspiciously. The winding tubes of crinkled bark seemed so innocuous, almost a woodland scene, taking her right back to the long walks she used to have with her parents in the mountains above Tavernola when they visited head office.
Focus!
She took a couple of steps towards the hangar. Nothing else in the corridor was moving. She scanned around with her helmet opticals turned up to full sensitivity. The infrared patterns were benign – not even the glowing pinpricks of insects you’d get in a terrestrial landscape. She carried on, hearing the others emerge behind her. She held back on berating them for making such a racket.
‘Hey, Alik?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you think we should just send the creeperdrone we armed into the tunnel after Odd Quint and switch on the entanglement suppressor?’
‘Why would we do that? We want to get in and out fast, not chase some phantom threat. We’ll deal with Odd Quint if it gets in our way. Don’t complicate things.’
‘I’m not complicating anything. But Odd Quint is a threat. It needs eradicating.’
‘We’ve been through this,’ Yuri said. ‘We don’t understand Odd Quint. So leave it alone.’
‘That’s a dumb attitude. I do understand it. Odd Quint is tracking us. It’s . . . it’s like an Olyix version of a dark agent.’
‘Unlikely,’ Jessika said. ‘All Olyix quint act on orders from their oneminds.’
‘Then why is it blocking the onemind perception in the hangar?’ Callum asked.
‘Because it’s a dark agent,’ Kandara repeated stubbornly. ‘It’s independent, somehow.’
‘Maybe,’ Jessika said, but she sounded uncertain. ‘I’ll give you that it doesn’t behave like an ordinary Olyix.’
‘I wonder how it learned to act like this,’ Kandara mused. ‘What led it astray?’
‘The Olyix do possess a level of natural ambition,’ Jessika said. ‘Most sentient species have a variant. It’s a universal part of nature’s toolbox, acting as an evolutionary catalyst. And proving themselves is how a quint gets selected for onemind status. So maybe . . . it thinks hunting us down is its route to promotion?’
Kandara considered that. ‘Have any new quint come on board since we arrived here?’
‘No. The Salvation of Life is self-sufficient. Its systems simply grow new quint bodies whenever one ages out.’
‘So every quint on board was part of the Olyix’s Earth crusade. Mother Mary, I’ll bet Odd Quint was part of their saboteur teams, and now it’s got sort of their version of PTSD. It picked up some bad habits back on Earth, like secrecy and human-style greed, maybe a dash of our paranoia.’
‘Are you saying Odd Quint is Feriton?’ Yuri asked sharply.
‘Oh, bloody hell, yes,’ Callum said. ‘His mission for Connexion had him sneaking around the Salvation of Life just like this. He could be reliving it.’
‘That’s a bit of a stretch,’ Kandara said. ‘There were hundreds – thousands – of Olyix infiltrating us for decades. It could be any of them.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alik said. ‘We’re aware of the problem, that’s all that counts. If Odd Quint gets in the way, we kill it. If it doesn’t get in the way, we take out the membrane, and it’ll get blown out into vacuum. Either way, we don’t go looking for it. We keep our objective as simple as possible.’
Kandara knew he was right, but it didn’t make her feel any easier about having a quint lurking around somewhere.
The creeperdrones moved into the hangar and spread out. She paused again, ten metres back from the hangar. Images from the creeperdrones and the sensor clumps on the ceiling showed her the familiar scene of a deserted hangar.
Pistol drawn, peripherals armed, she walked up to the entrance. Everything she saw confirmed what the feed was showing her. ‘Area clear,’ she told the others.
Training took over, and she slipped around the rim, pistol in a double hand grip, tracking between potential threat points – and ending up aimed at the tunnel mouth where Odd Quint had last been seen. Target graphics splashed into her tarsus lens, locking onto hypothetical hostile locations. She could feel the peripherals in her arms poking at the jacket fabric, ready to fire in an instant.
The four transmitter drones were hovering over by the wide hangar entrance. She could see the slight stat
ic haze in the air of the membrane where the pipe trunks thinned out around the start of a two-hundred-metre passage of naked rock that angled down to the enclave. The shifting glow of the nebula beyond was just visible, casting wavering pastel streaks on the rock walls.
Ignoring the drones, she hurried across the floor to the tunnel where Odd Quint had gone. The others followed her out.
‘Alik,’ she said, ‘I could do with some cover here.’
‘I got you.’
While Callum, Yuri and Jessika ran towards the membrane-covered entrance, Alik sprinted after her. She stopped two metres short of the tunnel and flattened herself against the wall. Alik pressed himself into the weave of pipe trunks behind her.
‘The creeperdrone still can’t see any activity in there,’ she said.
‘Good. Listen, we need to secure ourselves to something solid, ready for when they kill the power to the membrane. Gonna be worse than a Kansas twister in here when decompression hits.’
‘Yeah.’ She studied the tunnel entrance, which didn’t seem to have any machinery even close to it, just more pipe trunks leading back into the gloom. ‘They’ve got to have some kind of emergency air lock door, right?’
‘I guess. We would.’
‘Yeah? So I can’t see anything that looks like a door.’
‘Maybe something fancy inside the trunks? It’ll just pop out.’
‘Mary, I don’t know. Hey, Jessika?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have they got emergency pressure doors in here?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Shit.’
‘They must have,’ Callum said. ‘Why would they not?’
‘Riiight. Have you found the generator power leads yet?’
‘No! Give us a bloody chance. Christ!’
Kandara zoomed her helmet opticals in on the other three, who were scuttling about near the membrane, waving sensors over the sinuous pipe trunks wrapped around the big entrance. She cursed silently. It put them in line of sight of the tunnel she was guarding. If Odd Quint was in there, it would have a clean shot at them.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 44