“They couldn’t fake that, could they?” he asked.
“Theoretically yes,” Yirella said. “But they had no reason.”
“Other than that they’ve been expecting us.”
“Do you want to abort?”
“No.”
The troop carrier swooped around the arkship and eased its way into one of the craters circling the midsection. The crater floor had a rectangular entrance cut into it, with a tunnel that curved up into the interior. It was barely wide enough for the troop carrier to fit in.
Twenty seconds later they emerged into a hangar.
“What the Saints happened here?” Falar asked.
“Explosive decompression,” Xante said. “That’s probably why the message got cut off.”
“The emergency seals activated,” Mallot said. “It’s a hard vacuum now.”
“Egress, pattern three,” Dellian ordered. “Assume hostiles.”
“Don’t you mean hostages?” Falar said.
“Pattern three.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eighteen different hatches opened in the troop ship’s fuselage. The cohort leaped out, speeding into the big empty hangar. Several of them nuzzled up at the sites of the most violent damage, where there’d clearly been a lot of gunfire.
“Proton pellets,” Dellian read off his optik display. Which was almost a relief. Their armor’s mirrorfabrik carapace could withstand those quite easily. You’d get shaken up inside, but the cohort would take care of the attacker swiftly enough.
“Let’s get a picture of what’s up those corridors,” Dellian said. “Falar, Janc, Uret, take the left-hand side of the hangar. The rest of us: right.”
The cohorts began to scamper into position, splitting into duos at the start of each gap that led out of the hangar. There was nothing in the immediately visible parts. Small airborne drones floated along the hangar roof and hovered by each tunnel entrance. They drifted in.
“I got a burst of air here,” Xante said. “The emergency seal up there may be failing.”
“Okay,” Dellian said. “Whatever happened in here was recent, so let’s be—”
An explosion registered up the tunnel.
“Delta cover,” Dellian declared. It was all he could do not to smile. His cohort might be able to read his every intention, but his friends were equally empathic. They were already deploying as he gave the order.
Xante and Uret jumped and clung on to the ceiling. Clawing up into the battered pipe trunks, they were joined by a dozen of the cohort. Dellian himself leaped back under the troop ship, where one of the landing struts acted as a barrier. The rest of the cohorts fanned out, some sinking onto their haunches ready to lunge at whatever came out of the tunnel.
“Visual,” Xante yelled. “It’s a…Saints! Human.”
“Confirm,” Dellian told him.
“Human shape. Mass and thermal authentic. Crude suit design, not armor. Small weapons.”
Dellian studied the image in his optik, feeling his heart rate climb. Either this was an astonishingly detailed lure that even Yirella could only dream of, or— “Okay, back away. Let them come.” Two shoulder-mounted cannons slid up and aligned on the tunnel entrance.
“You getting this?” he asked Yirella.
“Yes.”
The space-suited figure charged into the hangar and immediately saw the exoarmor hellhounds that were the cohort, hunched down poised to jump. Its reaction verged on comical—limbs flailing, desperately trying to slow. Boots slipped on the floor slicked by juices, and it fell on its ass, skidding along.
Dellian’s suit detected a radio signal.
“Shit shit shit,” a woman yelled. “Jessika, I got made. They’re everywhere.”
“Hold fire,” Dellian commanded. His suit genten was flashing up a voice pattern match. For a moment his throat wouldn’t actually work. “Saint Kandara?” he gasped. “Is that you?”
“What?” The suit shifted around fast, pistol swinging in a wide arc, switching between the two closest cohort exoskeletons. “Who’s that?”
That’s military training, was all Dellian could think. “I’m squad leader Dellian,” he said. “I’m under the troop carrier. I’m going to stand up. Just…let’s take this easy.”
The pistol swung in his direction. He held his arms above his head and stood.
“Are you things actually human?” Kandara asked.
“Well, yeah!”
“Mary, limbs got strange since we left. And you’re big, too.”
“No, this is just my suit.”
The rest of the squad was emerging from cover.
Kandara rolled around abruptly, pointing her pistol along the corridor she’d come from. “I hope it’s a combat suit!”
“Are you really Saint Kandara?” Xante asked breathlessly.
“Fuck,” she yelled. “Here they come.”
Sensor alarms from the aerial drones went off. A dark tide slithered out of the tunnel. Dellian stared in shock at capturesnakes right out of the history files. The squad and their cohorts opened fire.
SAINTS
SALVATION OF LIFE
Callum was trying to keep his cool. Not easy. He’d been tense for so long now that he was frightened any attempt to relax and go with the flow would make him cry. Not that it mattered, because no one would see it. Nothing human. Or nothing he recognized as human, anyway.
Kandara had led a squad of invasion soldiers to the cave—two types in frankly terrifying exoskeleton armor. The first were human-ish, with limbs that had too many joints, while the second were a pack of demonic robot warriors arisen from nightmares. Both were too big to get in through the gap in the tunnel wall unless they ripped the rock apart. By the look of their suit limbs, they probably didn’t even need weapons to do that.
His arm was throbbing badly by then—the kind of drug-dulled pain that was frightening because the sedative couldn’t eliminate it. And the ridiculous balloon Jessika had fabricated in the initiator made it look like he’d got his arm stuck inside a beach ball.
The squad escorted them to the hangar, where a ship from the human armada was waiting. Their leader was called Dellian, whose voice over the radio came across as a strange mix of teenage excitement and religious reverence. And why the bloody hell does he keep calling us Saints?
That question died on Callum’s lips when he saw the hangar. The firefight had left it strewn with the wreckage of busted capturesnakes and huntspheres that’d been cracked open like metallic eggs—eggs whose insides were a churn of molten metal and plastic…and charred quint flesh.
It was a vivid contrast going into the troop carrier, which was like being inside a machine where every surface had been coated in black chrome. But when the airlock sealed and the atmosphere came up to pressure, Dellian sank to his first set of knees, and the top of his armor hinged up.
Callum studied the young man intently; there was something not quite right about the features that he couldn’t define. Head too…wide? Or maybe the thick neck was too short? He gave up trying to work it out and unlocked his own helmet.
“It’s really you,” Dellian said. “Saint Callum.”
Yuri and the others took their helmets off, and Dellian stared around with a dazed expression, then started crying.
“Come on,” an embarrassed Callum said. “We’re not that bad looking.”
“You don’t understand,” Dellian said, grimacing as if he were in pain. “I saw the Avenging Heretic explode. We thought you were all dead.”
“You saw it?” a frowning Jessika asked.
“Yeah. I kind of got neurovirused by a onemind. That image was part of breaking me.”
“Well, fuck,” Yuri grunted. “So you’ve been fighting the Olyix for a while, then?”
“All my life. All of us have. And you were our in
spiration, the five of you—our Saints. What you did, sacrificing everything to challenge the Olyix, it has been our guidance since our ancestors fled Earth. I’m so sorry we didn’t get here in time to save Saint Alik.”
“Saint Alik,” Kandara said with a wry smirk. “How about that?”
“You know what he’d say about it, don’t you?” Yuri said.
“What?” Dellian asked.
“He’d be very honored,” Callum said quickly, before Yuri could reveal Alik’s true opinion.
“Uh, we need to get you to the Morgan now,” Dellian said. “It’ll be safer for you, and Saint Callum can get his arm treated in one of our clinics. I have to go and lead my squad into the Salvation of Life. We’re part of the clean-out phase.”
“Clean-out?”
Dellian’s guileless face hardened. “Yirella is dealing with the onemind, but we’re going to exterminate the quint on board.”
Callum shrugged, which made him wince. “Okay then.”
A portal expanded at the far end of the cluttered chamber. “I’d like to talk to you,” Dellian said. “Afterward. If you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
So they went through the portal. It was like walking back into a corporate headquarters, though perhaps the walls were whiter than any Connexion office block, the air filtering not so sterile. And the people…who weren’t people, in the biological sense. They were greeted by epicene androids with black skin, a good half meter taller than even Yuri. The androids were all called Yirella, which didn’t help clarify anything. But they showed Callum and the others to a clinic. That at least was reassuringly normal, though the medical equipment was a lot smaller and sleeker than anything he’d seen before.
Several other bays were occupied. Callum was sitting on a bed opposite a pair of amazingly old women. Even back on Earth in his time, only the poorest people had ever looked that old.
“What happened to them?” he asked the two androids helping to remove his space suit.
“Victims of war,” one of the androids replied. “Fighting the Olyix meant a lot of sacrifices. I wasn’t expecting it to be so…brutal. It has been very personal for me.”
“Yeah. I’m starting to realize just how much I’ve left behind. We really are time travelers, aren’t we?”
The Yirella android who had just removed the protective balloon from his arm nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose so. Though it is a one-way trip, I’m afraid,” she said.
Callum couldn’t actually look at his arm; the damage and protruding bone made him feel sick. Another android appeared, white, and smaller than the black ones, with an anatomy that was definitely male. It even wore a pair of green shorts. It was holding a long blue sleeve that looked as if it had been knitted out of fat silk.
“What’s that?” he asked, then looked at the android’s face. “Ainsley?”
“Not anymore,” the white android said. “Sorry, I’m also Yirella. I just thought it would be more reassuring for you to have a familiar-looking aspect in a medical environment. This must all be very disorienting.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not wrong there. This—none of this—is how I expected our mission to end.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Not to get this far, frankly. I’m still suspicious that this is a dream, and my brain is really in an Olyix cocoon.”
“Trust me, you’re not.”
He lay back as the android with Ainsley’s face gently slipped the blue sleeve over his arm, plugging its tubes and cables into a silver pillar at the top of the bed. His phantom pain finally vanished as the sleeve inflated; he sighed in relief. The tubes began to sway as fluids flowed along them. One was a horrible brown color. He looked away again.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
“My other aspects are dealing with the Salvation of Life onemind.”
“Dealing with?”
“Killing it. I need to take control of the Salvation’s main systems so we can maintain the cocoons.”
“There are other arkships carrying human cocoons. Five, I think.”
“I know. The armada is already engaging them, as it is all the Olyix ships here. There are thousands of different species imprisoned in cocoons or their equivalent. We have to save them all. It is our duty and honor to do so. We’re going to take them all with us, back across the galaxy to the expansion wavefront.”
That took Callum a moment to process. “Do you have that kind of…capacity?”
“Just. We have taken more losses than expected. But the corpus armada prevails. An aspect will replace each onemind.”
“Er, aspect?”
“Corpus humans are people who have divided their minds into many aspects, each of which resides in a different vessel—biological bodies, quantum arrays, machines, warships…”
“Androids.” He was having trouble accepting what she was saying. Too much strangeness.
“Some, yes. Now their aspects are starting to occupy the arkships as their oneminds are eliminated. And very soon we will have to leave.”
“I know; you brought a neutron star with you. It’s going to hit this star, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And it will soon turn nova, which in turn will trigger its twin. There is an eighty-two percent chance the two combined will produce a supernova. It is our moral obligation to ensure none of the Olyix’s victims are left behind.”
“I’m bloody glad to hear that. You’re frighteningly advanced, so it’s comforting to know you put so much emphasis on ethics. They are so easy to abandon in times of war.”
“I am pleased I can reassure you. We owe you so much.”
“Not really. The Signal we sent won’t reach Earth for another forty thousand years. So many people sacrificed so much to get us here. The gamble we took…And in the end, you found your way here without us.” Callum found his throat was all hot and tight; tears were building in his eyes. Stupid, but…This life he was now living was not something he’d ever expected. In so many ways it was an afterlife now, forever separated from those people he’d loved and lived with. He began to laugh, which turned into sobs.
The white android’s hand touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I think reality is catching up with me. I’ve just realized the only contemporaries I’ve got left in this brave new world are Yuri, Kandara, and Jessika. Bloody hell: the relic squad.”
“The living are not relics. And you will soon be joined by billions from your own time. You are going home, Saint Callum. And when you do, you and the other Saints will be revered on the Earth rebuilt, along with every human world we settle.”
“For what?” It came out with more bitterness than he expected—or wanted.
“You guided us here, Callum, you and your fellow Saints. You are the star we followed into the night. You are the heroes from our deepest legends. We—me, the squad you met, all the other squads who have traveled across half the galaxy to be here—we were all born for this one moment. How do you think we felt when we heard Saint Kandara’s voice and followed her broadcast here to the Salvation of Life itself, the greatest evil humans have known? The legend of you gave my generation the most precious gift ever, as it gave all the exodus generations before us. You gave us hope, Saint Callum. And we were right to believe in you, for none of you gave up, did you? You did your duty right to the end. Can you imagine how profound that is to those of us living through what has become the end of days?”
“I didn’t ask for any of this, you know,” he said meekly.
“I know. None of us did. And possibly for the first time in my life, I am glad I exist. Because of you, Saint Callum. You are the reason I live. You are my life’s validation. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. But I’ve got to warn you, we do not deserve your admiration.”
“We’ll see. Even wi
th a wormhole that’ll take us to within ten thousand light-years of Sol and the old settled worlds, it’s going to be a long voyage.”
“Back to Earth,” he said in wonder. “Do you think we’ll make it?”
“Yes. Effectively, this part of the war is over. We’ve won. Humans now possess the only wormhole leading away from this star system. It’s the one that brought us here, and it’s currently accelerating away faster than any of the Olyix ships pursuing it. They can’t catch it now.”
“But we can?”
“Oh, yes. A lot of very smart people put this campaign together.”
“I look forward to meeting them.” He hesitated as his arm began to itch under the blue medical sleeve. “We’re really going to go home?”
“Yes.”
YIRELLA
MORGAN
Yirella didn’t quite trust herself to meet the Saints in the actual flesh. She was pretty sure her original body wouldn’t be able to stop gushing with admiration and she’d make a total fool of herself. Even her android-housed aspects were thrilled to be in their presence.
She helped them out of their space suits in the clinic and ran basic scans to make sure they were all right, marveling at how accurate all the stories were about them. Callum so world-weary, yet still with a core of optimism—a good man at heart, numb from their incredible mission. Yuri, all gruff and professional, working hard to keep his relief from showing—but no reticence about being suspicious. Jessika, so cool and enigmatic; human with a classy hint of Neána. Perfectly composed at where she found herself. But no, she said sadly, she didn’t know if the end of the enclave would mean the Neána abodes finally emerging from hiding. And Kandara, one tough dark-ops mercenary, a genuine professional killer, her lethal qualities only held at bay with neurological chemicals. Having aspects standing next to her, talking normally about the Morgan and what was happening with the armada, was a situation Yirella found darkly exciting. She’s killed people. Bad guys, terrorists, but still other humans.
The Saints of Salvation Page 49
