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 onwards through the deranged pirouetting prominences before splashing into the chromosphere. Gargantuan spumes of dense plasma flared up around the disc, 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 kilometres 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 kilometres. 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 kilometres long breaking off.
‘Trajectory?’ Yirella asked hurriedly as a second massive fragment joined the first, hurtling outwards. 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 spacetime. 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 haemorrhaged 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 vigour 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.
Body 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.
When body five was eventually swept out into the vacuum of the enclave it was wrecked, the brain barely functional. But the pain had gone. I swivelled around and around, seeing the elegant colours of the nebula clouds, then the vast curving shell of the Salvation of Life. Air streamed out of body five’s gills, forming a strange grey spiral as if someone were slowly wrapping a misty ribbon around me. Then the sight began to dim.
I lost body five.
There is only me left.
A containment sheet had already begun to close off the tunnel, emerging from its dehiscent pod in a mass of muscular crenulations dewed with viscous yellow fluid. Once free, its movements started to speed up. I made a frantic effort to reach it and clambered around its edge while there was still room. It was the first of three sheets in the tunnel, each a short distance apart, all squeezing shut. The air surge reduced to nothing around me.
I opened a tiny entanglement with the onemind, passively reading its thoughtstream. Alarm was dominating its consciousness – alarm at the incoming human fleet, alarm at the destruction of the power rings, alarm at the course of the neutron star, and alarm at events within its hangar. A company of reverent quint was on its way to embrace the surviving humans and inquire what they had been doing. It actually considered that they might hold information relevant to the situation outside; it even offered this option to the fullmind, who responded encouragingly.
These dumb assholes.
I prised my way through the second containment sheet and opened the reserve repository of spacesuits. The one I removed flowformed around me quickly. Its neurofibres imprinted on my nerves, making it one with my movements. I picked up the proton pistol and made my way back
through the containment sheets and into the vacuum. I wouldn’t have long. The company would be here quickly, and they would be heavily armed, ready to subdue the remaining Saints.
Several of the overhead biostructure’s luminescent strands had been damaged or simply ripped away by the frenzied depressurization, but there was enough light to see by. Nutrient fluids dripped from rips in the tubules, creating tacky puddles on the floor that were bubbling away in the vacuum. The corridor curved away ahead of me. I enhanced the spacesuit’s visual sensors into the far infrared and ultraviolet spectrum, then bundled in magnetic readers – the radiation monitor and radio detector. Without the perception points of my other bodies to accommodate, interpreting that many senses was profoundly easy. It was as if I had brought daylight into the tunnel, with a multitude of embellished colours painting every facet in distinctive tones.
That’s why I noticed the infrared traces from fifty metres away. They were patches on the floor, their heat radiating back to ambient, but definitely human footprints. One person had come this way and then returned.
I slowed. Up ahead, leading into the curve, the light from the strands was almost non-existent, as if they’d been ravaged by the depressurization gale. And yet it was the only section to suffer like that.
She was good, I’ll grant her that. I pushed myself against the wall and advanced carefully. There was a bright infrared glow coming from the gaps between a portion of the biostructure pipes. In there with it was a small, tight knot of magnetic flux lines – the kind a human weapon’s power source would emit.
An ambush. Crude, but a decent attempt, given the circumstances.
I moved fast, driving forwards and bringing the proton pellet gun up, firing three shots directly at the heat source. The energy flare of their detonation overloaded the spacesuit sensors momentarily. It didn’t matter; the whole section of wall and biostructure was pulverized, with glowing embers jouncing along the floor to sizzle away in the puddles. There was so much infrared emission I had to reduce the sensitivity.
I halted beside the new crater, with its lopsided rim surrounded by broken stems of biostructure gasping out puffs of vapour. On the floor was a tattered human armour jacket, missing an arm. A mangled laser carbine was attached to it by a strap. But there was no actual human, no shredded flesh nor burned bone, no boiling blood.
Shit!
I turned – tried to – but shock had numbed my legs.
I am an Olyix quint, for fuck’s sake. I DO NOT suffer shock – Oh.
Saints
Salvation of Life
It wasn’t the smartest thing Kandara had ever done, and she knew it, but by now she was past caring. Call it obsession, call it finishing the mission – no, call it what it was: straight-up vengeance. Humans were finally hitting back, just as the Strike plan had always envisaged.
Time for me to contribute to the active stage of the mission.
So she’d turned off the gland and let her mind run free.
And Mary, does it feel gooood.
Unrestricted for the first time in decades. All she worried about now was being too confident. Or maybe that was the paranoia rising to the same levels as every other unchained psychosis. Whatever.
As soon as she started up the corridor, she began to run through options. She didn’t have anything like the usual level of weapons systems that were her basic minimum for any sharp-edge op back in the day. Four peripherals: an upper-arm smart grenade launcher – good, but size constraints meant only three mid-energy grenades in the magazine; forearm kinetic barrel, with explosive bullets; forearm nerve-block emitter; and a wrist spool of monomolecule fibre. Even when the gland kept her calm and rational, she’d always had a deep distrust of the monomolecule – an invisible thread that could cut through a human body with the slightest pressure. Every dark-operative’s nightmare – especially if you didn’t have the correct sensors to warn you it was up ahead. Her tarsus lenses were ultra-grade; they should be able to see the Mary-cursed stuff if a strand got loose. But she was wearing her damned helmet, so that was no use. The kinetic was okay, but her magpistol with its wyst bullets packed a much bigger punch. The nerve block was an unknown. (Jessika always said it should work on an Olyix, but it was as yet untested.) The grenades were a definite plus – or minus; they gave off a strong power signal if you had the right sensors.
She ordered the launcher to eject all three grenades, wincing at the hiss of escaping air as the suit slit parted to let them out – a quick sting on the exposed skin. Once they were out, she placed them amid the pipe trunks. As a last resort, she could trigger them by remote and bring the whole place down on Odd Quint. Because it would come for her. She knew that. They might be different species, but it was easy enough to see your own kind in a mirror, however great the distortion. Her grin at the knowledge was feral. Somewhere up at the other end of the corridor, Odd Quint would be readying itself for their final encounter.
So here she was in an alien arkship in a time-skewed enclave, where she’d arrived by travelling down a wormhole for fifty thousand lightyears, ten thousand years after fleeing her home, battling a religious extremist alien with a grudge. Cool.
Around her, the pipe trunks with their sporadic fern leaves and matting of lianas were sagging from the walls and ceiling, splintered and broken. They leaked sludge onto the floor where the vacuum boiled it away, making walking treacherous. The corridor curved away ahead, but she and Odd Quint would see each other from fifty metres away. So it would come down to being the fastest draw, like a pair of old Wild West gunslingers. What she needed was the ultimate in sophisticated hardware that human and Neána technology could produce. She studied the mass of alien biotechnology smothering the rock, a displacement primordial jungle at dusk. Or I could just go full human primitive . . .
There were doubts – so many doubts – seething away in her brain. For the first thirty seconds, crammed upside down into a gap between pipe trunks in the ceiling, she’d felt elated. This was her true self – cunning and ready to unleash violence, heedless of risk. The state she was born to be in. But then flaws in the plan began to manifest, gnawing away at her confidence. Suppose Odd Quint didn’t have any infrared sensors? Because you really shouldn’t short out a maser carbine’s power cell just to produce a thermal signature, as its safeties struggled to contain the feedback. That was never going to end well. Wrapping it in the armoured jacket to contain the heat emission was also dumb. Suppose she needed the jacket for protection?
So many things that could go wrong.
Such a bad idea.
But if it worked . . .
Mary, this is why I needed the gland: clarity.
Her position meant she couldn’t look along the corridor; all she could see was a small section of sticky floor directly underneath. Any sliver of her helmet exposed outside the irregular surface of tattered bark would have given her location away to the most simplistic sensor. So she waited in growing physical discomfort as her thoughts churned and her body grew hotter and hotter. Her environment suit’s thermal regulator was turned off so the heat her body generated couldn’t escape and betray her.
Even though she was expecting something like it, the explosions caught her by surprise. Kandara yipped in shock – a sound that was alarmingly loud inside the helmet. Every muscle turned rigid as the nest of pipe trunks surrounding her rocked. Her whole body juddered downwards a few centimetres as the stems comprising her tangled nest slackened off.
She held her breath, knowing this was the crux. Below her was a quint in a grey spacesuit that looked as if it was made from fish scales, walking cautiously towards the pulverized wall – exactly where she’d wedged the jacket. She fired the nerve block. Her hands let go of the pipe trunks she was holding and she bent forwards, straining to push her head out of the nest. Brittle, smouldering strands snapped around her shoulders, and she wound up with her whole torso hanging down while her legs strained to anchor her. The sight that greeted her was upside down, revealing the quint
quaking as it stood over the shredded armour jacket.
She brought both arms up, target graphics splashing into her tarsus lenses. Peripheral kinetics shot the weapon Odd Quint was holding, smashing it apart. Simultaneously, her magpistol fired three times, sending a wyst bullet into three of its legs. They blew apart in gouts of flesh and spacesuit scales, sending Odd Quint toppling to the ground.
Kandara gripped the sturdiest pipe trunk with both hands and eased her legs out, allowing her to drop to the ground in a smooth dismount. In front of her, Odd Quint’s two remaining legs were skittering wildly, but all the motion did was spin it around. Her altme switched on her suit radio, even though she suspected Odd Quint’s suit didn’t even have radio. And to hell with any part of the arkship that could pick up the signal.
‘Bleeding out through your leg stumps, huh? That’s a bad way to go. I know. Let me help.’ She brought up the power machete and swung the blade. Her aim was true, severing one of Odd Quint’s remaining legs.
The crescent of manipulator flesh that was still intact rippled in torment, trying and failing to form appendages. Kandara swung the machete again, taking off its final leg. ‘I’ve spent my life taking down fanatics. Humans, Olyix; we’ve both got sick fucks like you ruining everything for the rest of us. And you all make the same mistake. You think our decency makes us weak, makes us easy targets. Do you still think that?’
She brought the machete around, ready to slice off some of the manipulator flesh. On the wall, the few surviving tatters of leaf fronds fluttered in the wind.
Wind?
A gust of atmosphere blew along the corridor. It was weak, lasting barely a couple of seconds, but it had to come from somewhere – like an emergency pressure door opening and closing.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 47
