‘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 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 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
