Human bodies: such a flawed evolution pathway. No other species we’ve welcomed has such a high nutrient fluid circulation pressure.
I lost body two. Kandara had been crouched beside Alik Monday and reacted with a speed we weren’t expecting, returning fire with a pistol she was carrying. Bitch!
Body two was struck and its internal organs were abruptly shredded. I felt shock and the impossible intimation of supreme pain – dulled by knowing it wasn’t real. But I’m still infected by human autonomic routines from my time – too, too long – running missions on Earth, when I incorporated their gross bodies into my quint, and even grosser thoughts into my mind to help me blend into their culture.
Kandara shot body two with a wyst bullet. Its legs lost rigidity, and it fell to the hangar floor. The weight on impact ripped the damaged midsection skin apart, and it burst open, sending out a sticky wave of pulped tissue.
My remaining four bodies all froze in shock. That’s a fucking human reflex – again. No true Olyix should do that. I have got to purge myself properly once this is over.
Then I lost contact with the local nexus. The hangar light dropped to normal levels. I didn’t understand what had happened. Did the nexus fail? Or . . . hadthe onemind discovered my mis-direction? But its thoughtstream remained fixated on the approaching armada.
Bodies three, four and five laid out a continuous fire pattern, strafing the areas where the Saints had been. They’d scattered; Kandara and Yuri were returning fire from the cover of tunnel entrances. Body three was hit, a leg wound. I spun it around fast, galloping as best I could for the tunnel it’d just emerged from. So nearly made it –
Bullets penetrated the brain. I lost body three from unity.
Motherfuckers!
I was using body five to hammer the area around the hangar entrance with proton pellets. Callum and Jessika Mye, the Neána metahuman, had taken cover there. Long sections of the hangar’s biostructure erupted in static-blasted splinters and liquid. Lightning bolts snapped down from the ceiling as the pellets’ energy sought to equalize, gouging out smoking punctures in the rock floor. I shifted body five’s aim and shot one of the little dark drones. The machine’s power cell detonated instantly, its blastwave sending everyone – bodies four and five, and all the Saints – tumbling across the floor.
Unity ended.
I was alone in body five. Not possible. I knew body one was safe, away from the hangar; I could not be reduced to just one unless body four had been eliminated. Yet I only had this single body. I saw body four scramble upright fifty metres away from me. We looked at each other. In a crazy gesture, I extended my manipulator flesh towards it. And it was doing the same. Yet our thoughts could not connect.
Some of my manipulator flesh was still gripping the proton pellet gun. I struggled upright, hunting for a target. One of the little creeperdrone fakes was on the ground beside body four, its legs already bending to right itself. I brought the pistol around, target locks bracketing the device. But before I could fire and blast the thing apart, a small green flame flickered out of an anatomically incorrect orifice on its upper body.
Body four swayed around, juddering as if it was being physically assaulted by invisible foes. Its manipulator flesh formed a long tendril ending in an elongated sucker. I watched, helpless, as it began to clout the sucker against a small dripping wound on its upper body, as if trying to slap out a fire. No injury that small should conjure up such a frantic reaction. Body four’s legs began to jolt about, kicking wildly. Its manipulator flesh expanded in random surges, the tendril losing cohesion.
I knew it was experiencing the impossible: agony. But Olyix quint do not feel pain. Our bodies are too advanced. We do not suffer like basic animals, like . . . humans.
I shot the creeperdrone. The proton pellet demolished it in a blaze of scorched tatters. It must have been carrying an entanglement suppressor. The thoughts of body one and body four reunified with mine. Thank fuck for that. We became full Gox quint again. No . . . part of us was dying; we could feel our brain dissolve as the toxin bit deep into our cells, spreading like wildfire. Precious memories that only that body contained were lost, ripped away into darkness.
It was not pain but terror body four felt. Terror at the outrage, as every memory it had left fled into the brains of bodies one and five. That terrible jumble of chaotic routines and recollections that was Gox, all of us past – Gox-Li, Gox-Mandy, Gox-Esfir, Gox-Suzanne, Gox-Namono, Gox-Yua, Gox-Azucene, Gox-Renpa, Gox-Keerthi, Gox-Niomi, Gox-Myriana, Gox-Galina, Gox-Annukka, Gox-Ornella, Gox-Chailail – the behaviour routines, the very essence of the human females we had subsumed to act their role, transforming into the perfect quint human body: Cancer. We were all one, yet utterly discordant amid the turmoil of distress and fear. I felt no physical pain, but from our alien origin I knew true dread.
I tried to scream at the torturous death body four was suffering. Body four’s manipulator flesh sent up hands, human hands, shaking them in fury at the universe.
‘What is happening?’ the Salvation of Life onemind demanded, for I had let my mental guard down. ‘Why are you in that hangar? What are humans doing there? How did they get inside me?’
‘FUCK YOU!’ I retaliated amid my anguish. ‘You did this to us. You! I told you the humans were still here. I fucking told you.’
‘Gox quint, restrain yourself.’
I made a
