‘Guess who’s turned up again?’ Jessika exclaimed.
Kandara didn’t bother to look up. She and Callum were running tests on the latest transmitter drone before they knitted up the casing. The initiators had produced all the components, but without an assembly bay they had to be put together by hand. Precision work – which was difficult even with the small manipulator rigs the initiators had provided first. On the plus side, she reflected, it kept Callum busy, so that was less moaning they all had to listen to.
After a couple of false starts, they’d refined the design of the transmitters to the shape of a streamlined manta ray, a metre long with a sharp intake grid on the front instead of a mouth, and twin ion drives at the rear. With its flexible-camber wings it was designed to manoeuvre fast once it reached the passage outside, then flip into some elusive acrobatics in the hangar in case anything hostile was waiting there, before streaking out to freedom through the main hangar entrance. Once outside, the drones would call the invading human armada, revealing the location of the Salvation of Life in its storage orbit.
Except time outside had stretched and stretched until it had become an abstract. As far as they could make out, close to ten thousand years had passed. That figure didn’t connect with her at all. She’d begun to wonder if her glands were malfunctioning and she was living in some kind of dream state.
When Zapata, her altme, did shift the test data to one side, Kandara accessed the hangar’s remaining sensor feeds. Jessika was right; Odd Quint had returned. It began its lumbering walk around the hangar, a black stonelike orb held upright in a protuberance of its manipulator flesh, like a priest with an offering. Or maybe an Olyix with a hard-on.
‘What the fuck is it doing this time?’ Alik asked.
‘Same as it always does – nothing,’ Callum replied.
‘No,’ Kandara corrected him. ‘This is the second time it’s brought that orb. That has to be significant.’ Over the last couple of weeks, a quint (or the many bodies of a quint) had returned eight times to perform its strange examination of the hangar, its behaviour singling it out and earning it the nickname. Every time, Odd Quint had neutralized the neuralstratum’s receptors so it remained unseen by the arkship’s onemind. If they’d been on Earth, she would have said it was engaged in some type of criminal activity. Smuggling human artefacts, maybe? Or could it be an alien nark dealer? But despite knowing ridiculously little about Olyix culture, she didn’t believe that. There was a purpose behind its constant appearances. And a covert one at that, which made her very uneasy.
‘The orb has to be some kind of sensor, or recording gadget,’ Yuri said.
‘But Odd Quint doesn’t apply it to anything to analyse,’ Callum complained. ‘It can’t be a Geiger counter, can it?’
Kandara studied the way the quint was holding the orb up, the manipulator flesh shifting it from side to side, a motion that was partly obscured by its tilting walk. ‘It’s waving it,’ she said. ‘Mary, you might have been right about the food smell, Cal. I bet that gadget takes air samples.’
‘Shit.’ Alik gave the cavern’s jagged entranceway a guilty glance. ‘How sensitive can it be? I mean, like, bloodhound good? If it is, we are royally screwed.’
‘Anything we can do, so can they – and then some,’ Yuri said.
‘If that sensor was as good as a bloodhound, Odd Quint would be here already, along with the rest of its bodies,’ Kandara said. ‘So maybe we’ve got some time.’
‘Oh, here it goes,’ Jessika said.
Kandara watched as Odd Quint started to walk along one of the smaller tunnels leading away from the hangar. They didn’t have any sensor clusters hidden in the tunnel’s trunk pipes, so all they could see was the quint slowly enveloped by the thickening shadows, the orb still upheld.
‘Definitely smelling for us,’ Kandara said.
‘I can buy that,’ Alik said. ‘But why doesn’t it want the onemind to know?’
She gave him a troubled glance. ‘I don’t know.’
‘There are eleven tunnels and corridors out of that hangar,’ Yuri said. ‘So it’s only a matter of time till it passes the entrance to our cavern. If that orb has any decent level of sensitivity, it’ll smell us.’
‘We should kill it,’ Kandara said.
‘That’s a real dumbass idea,’ Alik said. ‘You step out here and shoot that mother, the rest of us’ll have ten minutes max.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Kandara said. ‘There’s still no neuralstratum coverage of the hangar, right?’
‘No,’ Jessika agreed reluctantly.
‘So?’
‘So? It’s a fucking quint. One of five,’ Alik snapped. ‘You shoot it, the other four are sure as shit going to know about it.’
‘Yeah, but are they going to tell?’ She gave him a grin that was pure taunt – very superior. It was a mean tease – especially if you knew all Alik’s buttons, which she did. But being cooped up in this rock jail was driving her loco.
Alik’s mouth opened then shut; he looked at Yuri for help. ‘We’re not doing this, right? Tell me we’re not.’
‘We don’t know if whatever Odd Quint is doing is illegal,’ Yuri said slowly, ‘or heretical, or whatever brings down the local gestapo. But it’s obviously not totally above board.’
‘You cannot gamble our lives on that. Je-zus! We still got us the mission.’ Alik gestured at the four completed transmitter drones, their sleek stealth-grey shapes soaking up the cavern’s low light. ‘Getting these outside is our priority, right?’
‘I wasn’t planning on going mano a mano, asshole,’ Kandara said. ‘We rig up a creeperdrone and use a stinger. The biotoxin Alpha Defence worked up from Soćko’s formula will kill a
