I banished entanglement with the Salvation of Life. I renounced it as the useless failure it was.
I watched body four topple to the ground. Dead.
Movement amid the smoke and ruins of the hangar. Yuri was advancing cautiously, slinking between the irregular protrusions of biostructure. I blasted away in his direction with both weapons. Answering shots streaked through the smoke and static blasts. Rock chips and shards of biostructure whirled around body five. Several struck, causing insignificant damage.
I ducked body five back into the tunnel and ran fast, keeping low. But it is not body five any more. It is body two. I am no longer quint, quad or trio; I am duo now. And that will never change, not now the last day of the Olyix has arrived.
Do not laugh, humans. I hear you. I taste your bitter joy. Deep inside my mind where your contemptible remnants cower. I know you. But this is your end, too. For this is the time of my glory.
I killed one of those bastard Saints, injured others. She will never let that lie, not Kandara. Soon she will follow me into the lonely vastness of the arkship – my home for centuries. Fool that I was, I loved it for all that time, and so its schema is embedded in my mind. Now it will become my killing field.
Saints
Salvation of Life
Kandara skidded across the hangar floor, boots ploughing debris and sticky nutrient fluid away. She came to a stop, crouching over Alik. She stared aghast at his stump, the ruined leg beside it. Blood was pumping out of both in great gouts.
Oh, sweet Mother Mary, nobody has this much blood in them.
Deadened fingers clawed at the medipac on her thigh. It was so ridiculously small, and Alik’s godawful injuries would challenge an entire ER crash team.
‘Need help!’ she yelled. ‘Bring your medipacs. Now! Alik? Oh, Mary! Alik, can you hear me?’
Somewhere behind her, Yuri was still firing his pistol into the corridor where the last quint had vanished.
Alik’s body juddered weakly as he coughed. The seals on his collar clicked open and the helmet dropped off to one side, clattering onto the rock.
Kandara had seen death claim people before, seen the desperation and loss in their eyes. And here it was again.
Zapata used its field medic routines to analyse the damage and splashed up a triage sequence on her tarsus lens.
That’s not going to be enough.
‘Hey, you free tonight?’ Alik whispered. Blood dribbled out between his lips.
‘Don’t talk!’ She shoved the first emergency tourniquet clamp directly onto the tattered end of his femoral artery. It annealed to the artery and contracted, slowing the blood loss but not stanching it altogether. The second clamp was hard to pull out of the medipac. She shook it free angrily and slammed it into the gore of the horrific gash on his remaining leg, trying to manoeuvre it onto the source of the blood. Her suit gauntlets were never intended for a task this delicate; she was sure she was just causing more damage.
Medical diagnostics from Shango, his altme, splashed across her tarsus lens, turning her world disaster red. The tourniquets didn’t seem to have made any difference. Jessika arrived, her medipac already open. As Kandara attached another tourniquet to the leaking femoral artery, Jessika applied a bladder of bloodsub to Alik’s neck, a vampire jellyfish going for his jugular. ‘We need to keep his organs oxygenated,’ she said as the bladder started to contract. ‘This is going to take all the bloodsub we’ve got.’
Kandara read the combination of drugs Zapata wanted fed to Alik and plugged a pharma module directly into the plasma bladder. It was difficult; hot tears were distorting her tarsus lens, warping its displays. Alik’s icon splashed across the deepening red view.
‘Stick with the mission,’ his calm voice spoke directly into her head. ‘Get the message out where we are.’
‘I’m going to get you into the cave,’ Kandara told him. ‘It’ll be okay. The initiators can help. You’ll be fine, Alik.’
The medical display flashed critical alerts as Alik’s organs started to fail. His eyes rolled upwards.
‘Je-zus, Kandara,’ he sent over the interface, ‘grant a dying guy his wish. Blow the membrane, get the drones outside, then go kill that sonofabitch Odd Quint for me. Kill it good, all its motherfucking bodies. You got that?’
‘I’m on it, just as soon as we get you stable.’
‘No!’ His body shook feebly. ‘I fucking want this.’ A big glob of blood oozed out of his mouth, and the hard muscles his face had been remade with finally turned slack.
The medical splash from Shango went dark.
‘Fuck!’ Kandara screamed. She didn’t know if she did it straight away or if she’d been staring mindlessly at Alik’s corpse for an age. Her whole body was numb from raw fury.
‘Uh,’ Callum said, ‘I could do with some help.’
Kandara scanned around, ready to yell her filthiest insults at him. Alik was dead. Didn’t he understand that? Dead. Travelled fifty thousand lightyears to die in pain and blood and ignominy.
She saw Callum slumped against the wall amid a tangle of mangled pipe trunks, with their glutinous juices pulsing out in anomalous rhythms. His left arm was bent at a bad angle, the environment suit sleeve torn from shoulder to elbow. He was pushing a klingskin bandage onto the wound inside, a feeble rubbing motion that seemed to be having no effect. She thought she could see a sharp dagger of broken bone sticking out of the flesh, but everything was so red it was hard to tell.
‘Hell!’ Jessika yelped. She snatched up her medipac and ran for him.
Kandara glanced back at Alik. People
