“We have to leave now,” she told Immanueel. “We can accelerate harder than the Resolution ships. We’ll leave fifteen percent 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 armor jacket over her environment suit and twisted the seal button, feeling it lock down the side of her rib cage. 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 Knife 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 forward and took a quick look around the fissure’s jagged rim.
“Clear.”
“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 meters 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 the head office.
Focus!
She took a couple of steps toward 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.”
The creeperdrones moved into the hangar and spread out. She paused again, ten meters 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-handed 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 static haze in the air of the membrane where the pipe trunks thinned out around the start of a two-hundred-meter 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 toward the membrane-covered entrance, Alik sprinted after her. She stopped two meters short of the tunnel and flattened herself against the wall. Alik pressed himself against 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.
She took a slim harness cable from her belt and passed it around a thick pipe trunk. She pulled hard; it held. It’d probably take her weight, she decided.
“Got one,” Yuri said. “Organic conductor cable. Looks like a thick green vine, see? It leads to this unit here.”
“I’ll check the other side,” Callum said.
“They’ll have a backup cable,” Jessika said. “Probably more than one.”
“And a backup membrane generator, too,” Callum said. “Stands to reason. I would.”
Kandara wanted to shout at them to hurry. Get a grip. They know what they’re doing.
All across the hangar ceiling, the slim lighting strands began to get brighter. A lot brighter. Her suit helmet had to apply filters to block the glare.
“Oh, Mother Mary!” She brought the pistol up to cover the tunnel opening, squeezing so tight it was a miracle the grip didn’t shatter. Apertures along her jacket sleeves opened. The light was just as intense in the infrared spectrum, producing a uniform brilliance that jammed her sensors. Not a coincidence. “They’re coming!”
She concentrated hard on the feed from the creeperdrone sensors. The tunnel illumination was as bright as the hangar, but there was no movement in there.
“Alik.”
“What?”
“Kill the nexus.”
“What?”
“The neuralstrata nexus. Kill it. Now! We have to stop the onemind seeing what’s going on in here.”
Her tactical monitor routines detected movement in the hangar behind Alik. She spun around, crouching—
GOX-QUINT
SALVATION OF LIFE
I observed through the neuralstrata as the four little flying machines swooped across the hangar and struck the entrance membrane, stopping them in midair. With my gentle misdirection diverting the local nexus, the extraordinary sight didn’t reach the onemind. Even if it had, I don’t think the onemind would have paid any attention. The human armada was breaking out of the temporal distortions we’d ensnared them in. Now Resolution ships were being destroyed, as moments ago they had been the destroyers. That alone was profoundly worrying to the fullmind, absorbing every facet of its intellect. To me the arrival of the humans in such appalling force was indicative of its betrayal. How could our leadership have been so ignorant, so complacent, so fucking stupid?
Our sacrosanct wormhole routes into the galaxy were lost. Our pious fleets decimated by terrible human weapons. Our hallowed enclave—the sacred core of our purpose, the reason we exist—invaded. Violated by animals who barely qualify as sentient. They brought a neutron star to kill our sun, for fuck’s sake.
All because the fullmind would not deign to think the unthinkable: that we were not secure against the Neána and Katos and others whose ships had escaped being welcomed into our glorious pilgrimage.
The truly pitiful fullmind orthodoxy: How could we have been chosen by the God at the End of Time if it did not believe us to be supreme? And how would our God not know, up there in the future, about any dangerous challenges that we would face? If we, its chosen ones, were placed under a genuine threat, it would warn us with another message, allowing us to eradicate that threat before it developed.
Our fullmind believes it understood the divine. What bullshit arrogance! An arrogance that has condemned us. We have to prove ourselves to our God, not the other way around. Any fuckwit knows this.
So now the exquisite history of the Olyix will be extinguished along with our existence. By humans. Humans! The dumbest species in the galaxy—subverted, manipulated, and nurtured for millennia by the bastard Neána.
That might be the fate that awaits my fellow quint, but I’m not going quietly into the darkness and barbarism of a galaxy denied our benevolence. I will not fail our God. I see another path for myself now.
The Saints’ little flying drones can’t be an anti-arkship weapon; they’re too small. Besides, they would never dare damage the Salvation of Life, not with all the humans on board. So they must be some kind of communicator. There are thousands of arkships and welcome ships here in limbo; the humans will not know which one is the Salvation of Life. The sneaky little shits hiding in here must be trying to call to their own kind for help, just as they did outside the gateway. Doing the same thing over and over again, because their inferior brains have no imagination.
But they didn’t understand about the membrane and how it is strengthened to seal the atmosphere in now that the Salvation of Life rests in limbo. It stopped their drones. So they’ll have to come into the hangar themselves to cut the membrane power, or—given their basic mind—shoot the generator.
The remaining four of my bodies abandoned their assigned tasks and headed for the hangar.
If the fullmind cannot stop the neutron st
ar—and it doesn’t believe it can—it will impact the enclave sun. The power rings and exotic matter rings will be destroyed, and ultimately the sun will nova, along with the sun outside. Everyone will have to leave—or die. In such a situation, the human fleet will no doubt devote themselves to saving our limbo ships. Their emotion-driven devotion to those who have not yet converted to our God’s grace is a profound strategic weakness—yet another of their failings.
They don’t deserve the life this universe bestowed.
And I am clearly the one our God at the End of Time has chosen to deliver divine retribution upon those who have enabled this catastrophe. If I am to maintain my purpose here and now, it will be to fight the profane invaders until the end. Every one of them killed now will be one less who lives to contaminate the time of our God.
The Saints must have some kind of surveillance devices in the hangar.
I couldn’t be sure they hadn’t seen me, even though I’d done nothing to betray my objective. So I planned for that. They’d watch the tunnel I was in to see if I came back. The schema of routes through the Salvation of Life is easy enough to follow. The hangar had twelve different entrances. I excluded the one the flying machines came out of and picked four others.
The quartet of my bodies arrived and made their way along them, watching keenly for any sign of the despicable intruders. It didn’t take long. My perception inside the neuralstrata revealed the five Saints—awkward, badly evolved beasts scuttling out of a crack in a tunnel wall, wearing primitive pressure suits. They had a couple of fake server creatures with them, not Olyix in manufacture. I recognized the technology: creeperdrones. The criminal filth I utilized on Earth deployed similar machines in raids and petty fights.
My quartet of bodies moved gingerly down the tunnels I selected, edging close to the hangar. Only three of the humans were carrying real weapons: two pistols and a maser carbine. There were also some long powerblades, which would be useless in a fight against me. The weapons my bodies were carrying were considerably more powerful, but I knew from our last encounter that Kandara was extremely dangerous. I’ll have to be cautious around that one.
The Saints of Salvation Page 45
