Good.
She picked up Alik’s carbine and hung the strap over her shoulder. Then she stood up and started walking towards one of the three dead quint bodies – the one that had blown up a great swathe of pipe trunks and rock wall with its gun. ‘Yuri, did you get that last quint?’
‘I don’t think so. I can see about a hundred metres along the corridor. There’s no body.’
Kandara told Zapata to run a check on the remaining three transmitter drones. ‘Keep watching. I’m going to try and flush it out.’
‘Kandara—’
‘Keep watching,’ she insisted. ‘And everyone, tie yourself down. This is going to be fierce.’
She picked up the Olyix gun. It was about the size of her forearm and must have weighed ten kilos. Instead of a handgrip, one end forked apart into prongs that ended in two large scalloped bulbs, which she’d seen the quint’s manipulator flesh envelop. No trigger, but there was a circle of five rubbery buttons. She hefted it up, using a knee to support the barrel.
‘No,’ Yuri warned. ‘Don’t.’
Kandara ordered the drones to hover right in front of the membrane. They slid obediently through the thin strands of grimy smoke that now layered the hangar’s air.
‘Oh, shit,’ Jessika grunted. She quickly finished sealing a pressure patch over Callum’s torn sleeve, then grabbed at his harness cable, attaching it to her belt.
Yuri was running across the floor to the end of his cable. ‘Wait—’
Kandara aimed the big gun’s muzzle at the wall around the membrane and pressed one of the buttons. Nothing. Second one. Third time lucky.
It fired. A small white flare at the end of the muzzle, then a lightning ball was exploding out of the pipe trunks, sending electron tendrils crackling across the disintegrating bark. The membrane glared violet.
‘Wait, for fuck’s sake,’ Yuri shouted; he was doubled over, fumbling with his belt or something.
Kandara pressed button three again. Again. Again!
Inside the helmet, her yell was louder than the roar of detonations. She marched the strikes around the side of the big entrance, destroying every chunk of Olyix biotechnology on the wall, and a good portion of the rock underneath. The hit on the membrane generator’s last power cable came without warning. One second the membrane was there, glimmering like a window framing a clear sunset sky, then it vanished.
Atmosphere howled out into the vacuum, creating an instant blizzard from the debris clutter across the floor. The dead quint bodies started to roll and slither, picking up speed before finally sailing out of the hangar entrance amid the rushing gas streamers. Kandara hadn’t quite expected the force of the wind to be so powerful. She flung herself down on all fours – not that traction counted for much, certainly not given the puddles of brown goop rippling across the floor. She had to use the harness cable, pulling herself along hand over hand to reach the rock, where she could get a decent grip in the gnarled pipe trunks. She prayed to sweet Mary that the cable would hold.
Quick check around, and there was Yuri, doing the same thing as she was, still at the end of the tunnel where the last quint had gone. He’d managed to hang on to his pistol, which was more than she’d done with the Olyix gun. That’d gone twirling away to oblivion along with its previous user. By the side of the entrance, Jessika and Callum were clinging to the knotty strands of bioware, her arm around his waist as his feet kept lifting off the ground.
‘Yuri?’ Kandara called. ‘Anything?’
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘Did the transmitter drones make it?’
Zapata reported it had a signal from the three drones, though it was weak. The image from their sensors splashed across her vision, and she was looking at a jumble of vivid nebula billows and worn-grey rock as they careered around one another. Ion rockets were firing at full thrust to try to stabilize the drones. Tiny ice crystals and chunks of bark spun around them, spewing from the dark slit in the curving cliff of rock, swinging chaotically in and out of view. A lot of the image was taken up by sweeps of the gas giant’s heat-enraged cloudscape, and the golden glow of the bow wave wings that embraced it. The drones’ inertial guidance system calculated the section of the nebula where the human fleet ought to be and focused their antennae on it.
Kandara ordered them to start sending, and added her own channel to the pre-recorded message. ‘Calling the invasion fleet. This is Kandara from the Avenging Heretic – if any of you even still remember us. We made it. We’re on board the Salvation of Life, along with all the cocoons – everyone they took from Earth before S-Day. They’re alive. Mary, am I glad to see you. But you coming here has kicked off the mother of all shitstorms. We’re cornered and could really do with your help. Now, please. We’re in the hangar that—’
A dark, curving shape slid into the feed’s image, silhouetted against the planet’s beautiful bow wave, and every drone icon vanished from her tarsus lens, along with their image feeds and telemetry.
‘Ahh, Mary,’ she complained. ‘Well, the drones worked. Let’s just hope humans still use quaint old radio.’
The hangar’s atmospheric pressure had dropped severely. All twelve of the corridors and tunnels that led off into the arkship were now acting like rocket exhausts, with powerful fountains of white gas firing out across the wide hangar, only to be sucked away through the big entrance. At least it meant the force that was tugging at her had reduced to a mere gale. She could almost stand upright, but the slippery floor was treacherous, and now the slick pools of fluid were bubbling off into the violent thinning atmosphere.
‘Mary, their starships have flown across the entire galaxy and they haven’t got health and safety protocols? Where the hell are the emergency doors?’
‘Kandara!’ Yuri barked.
